Having trouble keeping up with the fascist Trump administration's "largest ever" wave of immigration stormtroopers that continues to terrorize Minnesota? You're not alone. The rolling updates below will provide nugget-sized intel/links/embeds amid this dizzyingly depressing news cycle, hopefully making you feel a little better-informed and/or connected to your community. As always, feel free to contribute in the comments.
FRIDAY 2.13
With Operation Metro Surge “over,” the predictable Jacob Frey victory tour is underway. Yesterday the Minneapolis mayor did the lefty news circuit in New York, speaking with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes and appearing on The Daily Show. And as a cheerleader for the city, he did… fine.
“You saw a federal government and an administration that thought that they were going to break the people of Minneapolis down. They thought that we were going to back down,” Frey told Hayes. “And here's the thing, we didn't. The people of Minneapolis stood up. They stood up for their neighbors.” Let’s just say that his “they” was more convincing than his “we.”
Frey also spoke to Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show, who asked much better questions than the somewhat fawning Hayes, such as “Are there things that you can do as a mayor? Can you stop evictions from happening? Can you freeze rent?”
Frey also did a photo op with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Maybe he went to the top of the Empire State Building too.
The cynical among us might say Frey is auditioning for his next gig. The optimistic among us might hope that someone out East can find a use for him. Take our mayor—please!
Jacob Frey on TV: “We just approved rental assistance that is targeted towards the people who hopefully need it most.”
Jacob Frey to Minneapolis City Council:
You ever stop to think how much more smoothly Minneapolis politics would function if Frey could be just like 15% less of a dick?
Yes, Frey did approve the appropriation of $1 million in emergency rental assistance that City Council had made. But he couldn’t pass up a chance to lecture his colleagues about budgetary thrift in the process. And in doing so, he smarmily quoted Council Member Aisha Chughtai’s words against her.
Today, the council set aside $500,000 for legal services for immigrants. Think Frey can sign off on that without excessive tut-tutting before taking credit for it on television?
Anyway, just something to bring up the next time your MS NOW-pilled family members wonder why many folks in Minneapolis find Frey so much less endearing than, say, Jen Psaki does.
Slate has a roundup of some of the shittiest things ICE agents had to say during their visit to Minnesota. In “A Running List of Horrific Things ICE Agents Have Said to My Neighbors,” Brandon Sigüenza includes not just familiar quotes like Jonathan Ross calling Renee Good a “fuckin’ bitch,” but also everyday claims and demands like “We don’t need a warrant” and “You got papers?” The fact that these people have been hired to do unconscionable things should never make us overlook the fact that they’re also just terrible people to begin with.
And while we’re talking about Slate, don’t overlook this story from Laura Jadeed that asks why Minnesotans have stood strong. As one observer says:
Like maybe all we do is frustrate. You know, give someone one more day with their daughter or their dad. But if you lost your dad, or you lost your daughter, you would give anything to have one more day with them. And that’s what we can do.
One of the more bizarre moments of “border czar” (oh, fuck off) Tom Homan’s press conference yesterday was when he claimed that federal agents found “3,364 missing, unaccompanied alien children” in Minnesota. What a good deed! This claim has since been parrotted by this stooge and this creep, who believe there’s a vast liberal conspiracy keeping it off the front page.
Jeff Wagner of CBS News investigated and discovered that no, that’s not really what happened at all. “Immigration experts said it's not a missing kids problem—it is a missing paperwork problem,” he says. These kids weren’t showing up on milk cartons; they simply hadn’t shown up for immigration court appearances or received notices to appear. Probably because they are children, and children don’t belong in court. Anyway, the people caring for them know exactly where they are.
A popular argument with the Trump administration these days is: “We can’t give everyone due process. It would take too long.” A Trump-appointed federal judge slapped down that argument yesterday, insisting that there is in fact no inconvenience exception to the Constitution.
“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” writes District Judge Nancy E. Brasel.
Judge Brasel found that the administration had denied detainees at the Whipple Federal Building adequate access to lawyers, and issued an order requiring the government to allow access to phones within one hour of detention and barring the government from shipping anyone to another state less than four days after they were detained. Pretty basic stuff!
Gov. Tim Walz (remember him?) has proposed a $10 million relief package for small businesses who suffered from the ICE occupation. Predictably, Republicans are crying that this will result in more fraud. Just as predictably, bleeding hearts like your pals at Racket think that seems like a relatively small amount considering the economic devastation involved.
While the TV coverage focuses unduly on Minneapolis, the suburbs and outstate Minnesota have been hit hard as well. The Verge looks at ICE action out in Lakeville on the day Tom Homan announced OMS was ending. At the Reformer, Alex Baumhardt visits Worthington and surveys the damage to its community. And Elizabeth Shockman, who like all of her MPR News colleagues has been doing excellent work, focuses on the particularly beleaguered city of Columbia Heights.
Have you been following LitHub’s “Letters from Minnesota” series? If not, you’re missing out on perhaps the most thorough documentation of the ICE occupation by a non-Minnesotan publication. Of course, the voices being shared are those of your neighbors, and we can never hear too many of those voices or receive too broad a perspective.
While most of us here are a little wary (to say the least) of Tom Homan’s pledge to pull the feds out of Minnesota, people in the rest of the country are celebrating for us. In Salon, Russell Payne says “Minneapolis showed how to fight ICE and win,” while the New York Times celebrates “the power of public anger.”
Even if most of the DHS goons do pull out, we’re just gonna keep hearing about the terrible things they did for months, if not years. On Thursday The Intercept covered the case of arine Steven Saari, who was detained after the killing of Alex Pretti. He claims the feds illegally seized and cloned his cell phone. This isn’t a one-time occurrence: Max Nesterak at the Minnesota Reformer also takes a look at cell phone seizures taking place at Whipple. These ICE guys are not big on the Fourth Amendment, are they?
THURSDAY 2.12
Well, it looks like the headline of this (final?) Operation Metro Surge mega blog tempted fate in the best possible way.
White House border czar Tom Homan—who it must be said looks and speaks like an oaf from the Archie Comics universe—addressed reporters Thursday morning to announce “a significant [Operation Metro Surge] drawdown has already been underway this week, and will continue to the next week.”
"I have proposed and President Trump has concurred that this surge operation conclude," Homan said, adding that “a small footprint of personnel will remain for a period of time” to suppress “agitator activity.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne tells the New York Times.
If true, this means an immigration crackdown that saw 3,000 federal officers terrorize and, in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, kill Minnesotans since December will soon end. Homan bragged Thursday that 4,000 arrests were made, though as the Star Tribune notes, "that number is nearly impossible to independently verify." The following paragraph from recent RacketCast guest Max Nesterak of the Minnesota Reformer sums up Operation Metro Surge in appropriate terms. (Homan, meanwhile, described it as a “great success.”)
Over the past month, immigration agents have shot three people, killing two; racially profiled people, asking them to produce proof of legal residency; detained legal immigrants and shipped them across state lines, including young children; caused numerous car crashes; deployed chemical irritants on public school property; smashed the car windows of observers and arrested them before releasing them without charges; and threatened journalists who were filming them from a distance in a public space, among other high-profile incidents.
And not to keep yielding to the Reformer, but we really liked what top editor J. Patrick Coolican just wrote via newsletter...
Tip of the cap, Minnesota. The winter of 2026 will go down in state history as among our finest hours. What happened here will be studied by social scientists and historians as one of the great victories of nonviolent resistance. Minnesotans showed that brutality and sheer numbers could not overcome communities that were united in their opposition to the usurpers.
You might be asking yourself (but we pray you're not…): How is Tom Homan's disgraced predecessor, ex-Operation Metro Surge leader Greg Bovino, holding up? Well, he spent last night on Twitter, where he fantasized about a woman reporter making him pie and wondered aloud what beaver meat tastes like. PSA: Liquor hits tiny bodies harder, commander!
WEDNESDAY 2.11
As we wait for Gov. Tim Walz’s promised drawdown, ICE is still abducting the fuck out of people across Minnesota and endangering people in the process. There was a nasty incident this morning in which federal agents pursued someone in a vehicle, leading to a multi-car crash at the intersection of Western Avenue North and Selby Avenue in St. Paul. MPR News reports that the person fleeing was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Elsewhere in ICE causing public mayhem, the Strib’s Jeff Day takes us inside the “chaotic” scene at Hennepin County Government Center on Tuesday, where plain clothes federal officers chased and then tackled and arrested a young man who was making a 9 a.m. court appearance.
Michael and Susan Pretti, parents of Alex Pretti, conducted their first sit-down interview since federal agents killed their son last month. Speaking with the New York Times, the Prettis say they’ve gotten hundreds of letters since Alex was killed on January 24, many of them from other health-care workers. They share their memories of Alex’s childhood, and they discuss the conversations they had with their son in the weeks after Operation Metro Surge began.
They last spoke to Alex a day before his death. His garage door had broken in the subzero cold, and Michael Pretti said he had helped arrange a repair from afar. He said Alex had called on Friday to report that the door was fixed and that he had tipped the repairman $100.
When they saw the video of their son’s death, the Prettis said they saw their son’s character showing through.
“His last act on this earth, his last thought, was to help this woman,” his father said.
“It’s who he was, every day,” his mother said. “He’s the same Alex he always was.”
Extra! Extra! Federal campaign of death and terror unpopular, per new polling!
In “we shouldn’t have to do this but it still feels pretty good that we’re able to do this” news, MinnPost reports on the Minnesotans who are crowdfunding rent to help keep their immigrant neighbors housed. Of course, the need is massive, more massive than individuals can possibly keep up with. As Minneapolis City Council Member Robin Wonsley has said, “This is not something that we will GoFundMe our way out of.”
TUESDAY 2.10
At a press conference Tuesday morning, Gov. Tim Walz predicted that the surge in federal agents is nearing its end. "We're very much in a trust but verify mode,” he told reporters. “But it’s my expectation… that we are talking days—not weeks and months—of this occupation.” Hey, we’ll believe it when we see it.
An ICE background checker has been arrested by Bloomington Police in an underage sex trafficking sting—and if you’re getting déjà vu, that’s because a Twin Cities-based ICE employee was nabbed in a Bloomington child sex trafficking sting back in November. Starting to think these aren’t great guys!
Richard Ruohonen, a curler from Brooklyn Park who’s currently representing Team USA at the Winter Olympics in Milan, spoke out against ICE at a press conference today. “What's happening is wrong,” he said, showing more courage than many sitting members of Congress. (Fun fact: The Pioneer Press reports that Ruohonen, age 54, is the oldest U.S. Winter Olympian ever.)
Incredible work by Northern News Now’s Nikki Davidson, who mapped every single confirmed ICE arrest in Minnesota since Operation Metro Surge began in December. Among Davidson’s findings:
- While Department of Homeland Security officials say they’ve made over 3,000 arrests over the last six weeks, she could only identify 335 names via the public registry and press releases.
- While the operation has been dubbed “Metro Surge,” communities in outstate Minnesota have a disproportionately high number of arrests. Sandstone and Rochester, for example, account for 71 arrests; Davidson hypothesizes that’s because they host major federal prisons, and “ICE appears to be taking credit for administrative transfers of inmates who were already in custody.”
It’s well worth taking a look at the mapped data yourself, which raises lots of other questions, especially regarding the thousands of detainees we don’t know about.
For Autostraddle, Em Cassel—hey, that’s me!—spoke with Minnesota’s queer-owned businesses to learn how the LGBTQ+ community is leading the fight against ICE. I have a lot of favorite quotes from my time reporting this one, but I think Beck Gilbert, co-owner of Beck’s Books, explains it nicely:
“As a rapid responder, most of the individuals that I encounter on patrol are also queer folks, many with intersectional identities—queer folks who are also people of color or disabled or neurodivergent or low-income. The same goes for many of the people I meet while doing supply runs or at protests. They’re the people sending me ten bucks on Venmo when I post a rent support request for an immigrant neighbor, even though they themselves are struggling.”
ICE is cracking down on the folks who tail them in their cars, according to Reuters. The story opens on Becky Ringstrom, who was arrested for following federal immigration officers in the suburbs of Minneapolis and transported to the Whipple Federal Building, then given a citation “charging her under a federal law that criminalizes impeding law enforcement.” The charges refer to Title 18, Section 111 of the U.S. Code, which can be applied to anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes” with a federal officer conducting official duties. “A Reuters review of federal court records found that the Trump administration has prosecuted at least 655 people under that charge across the U.S. since a series of city-focused immigration crackdowns began last summer.”
In The New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole writes masterfully about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and “the crime of witness.” You’ll have to register for a free account to read it, but maybe this opening passage will convince you to:
Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.
Real heartbreaker of a headline here from MPR News: “'He’s not the same’: Father of Liam Conejo Ramos says 5-year-old continues to suffer.” Adrian Conejo Arias tells MPR’s Regina Medina that the family is still in hiding; over recent weeks, a bomb threat targeted his son’s former elementary school in Columbia Heights, and ICE agents continue to patrol around the house that the family no longer lives in.
Here’s a headline that’s a little bit less of a bummer… “Keith Ellison: Trump Hates Minnesotans Because We Love Each Other.” Can’t argue with it!
MONDAY 2.9
Not that we need to tell you, a person who lives here and likely sees federal agents patrolling their area on a daily basis, but ICE is still very much active in Minnesota, despite Border Czar Tom Homan’s supposed “drawdown.” In fact, per The Intercept, they’re ramping up the targeting of legal observers; on Friday, at least three observers were abducted by agents in the span of 30 minutes. The deportations aren’t slowing either: “66 shackled passengers [were] loaded onto a plane the night of Homan’s address—the highest total in nearly two weeks—according to evidence collected at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport,” writes Ryan Devereaux.
While we’re talkin’ deportation flights, meet Nick Benson, the local man who’s been tracking their daily departures from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. People aren’t just observing ICE in the streets; Benson, a “professional airplane enthusiast” as NPR describes him, observes ICE on the tarmac, along with others in the local activist group MN50501. There were 42 such flights out of MSP in January alone.
The New York Times reports from Minneapolis about the secret grocery networks, made up of nonprofits, schools, and lots of volunteers, that are keeping families fed, especially those whose access to free school breakfast and lunches has been cut off.
Welcome to the resistance… Glamour? Over the weekend the fashion and beauty mag published a tremendous feature about “the women holding Minneapolis together,” the ones patrolling and defending schools from ICE agents or coordinating donation drives in their neighborhoods. As Christine Harb, a physician with a network of providers who are caring for patients sheltering in place, tells Glamour’s Anna Moeslein, “Women play an instrumental role in every movement. The vast majority of the people I work with are women and queer people.”
If you don’t care about the moms of the movement, perhaps you’d rather read about the punks? For Rolling Stone, Evan Minsker caught up with members of the local music scene, including Matt Jones of Rubberman and Buio Omega, to hear how DIY is fighting ICE. Minnesotans tell the mag you’d be hard-pressed to find a member of the music scene who’s not somehow involved in the resistance.
Minneapolis-based New York Times reporter Ernesto Londoño has the latest on the Trump administration’s shenanigans as it attempts to cover up the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The upshot? Prosecutors started investigating Renee Good’s killing; FBI director Kash Patel told them to stop. Now several top prosecutors have resigned in protest, leaving Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office “severely understaffed and in crisis.”
“Minneapolis VA hospital employees by the hundreds filled a chapel, crowded into spillover space, and peered at a livestream feed this week to mourn the loss of one of their own to gunfire from federal agents on a city street,” writes the Star Tribune’s Paul Walsh in this moving report from the early February VA memorial service honoring Alex Pretti.
During this ongoing federal invasion, it has been inspiring to watch folks use their existing platforms to fundraise or protest, seeing wild success in the process. Case in point: Ben Hanson from MinnMax teamed up with the gaming company Giant Bomb to host a late January livestream that raised $250K (!) for rent aid, reports MPR’s Harshawn Ratanpal.
You’ve simply gotta check out the #Comics4Liam hashtag on Instagram, where comics creators around the world are sharing art inspired by 5-year-old Minnesotan Liam Conejo Ramos and other children in ICE detention.
Hope you enjoyed that brief feel-good story! Now for a heartwrenchingly feel-bad story: Propublica has collected letters from the children detained at ICE’s facility in Dilley, Texas. “I miss my school and my friends I feel bad since when I came here to this Place, because I have been here too long,” writes 9-year-old Susej F. Other children drew pictures of their families, and you can even hear 14-year-old Ariana V. V. read her letter.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein tells The Majority Report that ICE is demoralized and lying about arrest totals to meet quotas. What won’t these fuckin’ goons lie about?
Speaking of which: Legal observers and officials tell the AP they’re seeing more federal agents “impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers, and in some cases anti-ICE activists.” Here’s reporter Jake Offenhartz:
For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he’d seen outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.
They wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noticed, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for the Wisconsin-based electrician advertised on the car’s doors returned no results.
On Tuesday, when their Nissan returned to the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his confrontation with the two men, who hide their faces as he approaches and appear to be wearing heavy tactical gear beneath their yellow vests.
“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to come sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.
Aliya Rahman, the U.S. citizen who was photographed being violently dragged from her car on a way to a doctor’s appointment last month, appeared on the Democracy Now! podcast to talk about her traumatizing arrest and subsequent detainment at Minneapolis’s Whipple Federal Building. “I was taken out of that place unconscious,” Rahman says. “What I saw in that detention center was truly horrific.”
Is watching videos of ICE violence good for your mental health? Hell no, report Larissa Hjorth and Katrin Gerber for The Conversation. But they do so thoughtfully, discussing how the rise of body cam footage, surveillance tech, and social media are all leading to an increase in phenomena like “affective witnessing,” wherein the distance between participant and the observer collapses, and “political grief,” or the collective loss felt by communities facing systemic injustice.
