This piece was originally published on The Conversationand has been lightly edited to reflect the latest news.
In December 2025, the U.S. government sent more than 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge. They joined more than 700 agents already present in the state—their mission to find and deport people the Trump administration calls “worst of the worst illegal alien criminals.”
The residents of the metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities—Minneapolis and Saint Paul—quickly came together to try to prevent their neighbors being caught up in ICE raids.
- Monitoring ICE activities: Whenever U.S. federal immigration agents pulled up to a location in Minneapolis, people would take their whistles out, start blowing them and start filming.
- Community support: People organized mutual aid for neighbors fearful of going out in case of immigration raids.
The Trump administration claims ICE agents arrested more than 4,000 people in Minnesota. They also killed two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
While ICE has not fully left Minneapolis, their numbers are dropping sharply. It is undeniable that sustained protests, legal action and local pressure raised the political costs of the Trump administration’s surge and helped force a drawdown.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, reporter Gemma Ware speaks to Daniel Cueto-Villalobos, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, who lives in southern Minneapolis and studies race, religion and social movements. He tracks the neighborhood groups that sprung into action in response to the ICE presence, back to mutual networks set up during the 2020 COVID pandemic, and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
“What it did was force us to talk to each other in the most basic sense, and get together as a community to develop these networks that we see really playing out today,” says Cueto-Villalobos.
Listen on The Conversation Weekly podcast and on Spotify.
