Minneapolis: People’s Metro Surge

Randy Furst

Chicago, January 25, after the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti. (Linda Loew)

THE DECISION BY the Trump administration to invade Minnesota with 3,000 immigration and border patrol agents in late 2025 and 2026 has provoked one of the most extraordinary resistance movements in recent U.S. history.

The murders of two American citizens by masked agents, attacks on peaceful protesters, along with the cruel seizure of thousands of immigrants, including children, many with legal status, most with no criminal records, has shocked the conscience of Twin Cities residents, fueling an opposition movement that was still running strong in mid-February when this article was written.

The horror unleashed on Minnesota, along with the mass fightback by ordinary citizens, has been reported widely in the national media and on social media, causing Trump’s poll numbers to nosedive and leading to an announcement of a largescale drawdown of ICE forces in the state.

The end of Operation Metro Surge has been hailed as a huge victory by activists. However, whether the drawdown will actually happen remains unclear, given the Trump administration’s propensity to lie.

Resistance to Occupation

After applauding the federal government’s seeming retreat, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, which has played a significant role in organizing opposition forces, announced another protest rally and march on President’s Day, Feb. 16, sponsored by a labor and religious coalition. “Minnesota remains under occupation,” the labor federation said in a statement. “Armed and masked federal agents continue tearing through our communities—both in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota. They continue to detain immigrants and peaceful observers regardless of citizenship or immigration status.”

Mass protest has been at the core of the resistance movement against the paramilitary invasion. Fifty thousand-plus demonstrators marched peacefully through the streets of Minneapolis on Jan. 22 with temperatures below zero. As many as a thousand businesses closed and tens of thousands of workers stayed home for the day in what had elements of a general strike.

Fueling the protest was the murder of Renee Good who was shot and killed January 7 in her vehicle by an ICE agent, when she stopped to observe an ICE raid. Homeland Secretary Kristi Noehm claimed Good was trying to run over the agent and declared her a domestic terrorist, but videos showed Good was trying to drive away from the scene, turning her wheels away from the agent. The videos showed the agent standing next to the vehicle, firing at her head through her side window.

On Jan. 23, ICE and border patrol agents gunned down Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked at the local Veterans Administration hospital. Pretti was objecting to the manhandling of a woman ICE observer at a Minneapolis intersection when he was shot. He too was labeled a terrorist by Trump officials after it was reported that he had a handgun. But a careful analysis of the video by the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media, showed that the gun was holstered and agents had removed it as they wrestled him to the ground, and he was unarmed and defenseless when they shot him 10 times.

Protests multiplied after that. Big rallies and demonstrations popped up almost overnight. The movement to protect immigrants spread to the suburbs, involving soccer moms, local shops, community organizations. “ICE Out” signs appeared in the windows of stores and restaurants. Churches set out bowls with whistles in them that parishioners could use to alert their neighbors that ICE agents were on the street.

A photograph taken by an ICE observer of a five-year-old boy named Liam, who was arrested by ICE, went viral. The boy and his father, who was also arrested, were flown to a detention facility in Texas. It touched the hearts of many and deepened the anger of Minnesotans and Americans towards Trump’s immigration policies. A federal judge ordered Liam and his father released and returned to Minnesota.

Grassroots Organizing

The crackdown led to a large grassroots effort in the Twin Cities to protect immigrants, many of whom were fearful of leaving their apartments to go to work or to the grocery store as ICE patrolled inner city neighborhoods. Citizens in large numbers began collecting food to deliver to immigrants’ homes. After ICE agents tackled a teacher and searched for immigrant students outside a local school, parent support groups developed metro wide, and began patrolling before and after school, watching for possible ICE incursions. School districts switched to on-line learning.

Networks of neighborhood ICE watch activists developed, coordinated over the Signal network. One St. Paul neighborhood had more than 1,000 members on its Signal chat, when activists spotted possible ICE agent vehicles, they notified a central coordinator who ran the vehicle plates through an open-source computer site to determine if it was an ICE vehicle. If it was, the word was spread through the Signal chat and activists would speed to the scene to take video of any actions by ICE agents.

While Gov. Tim Walz encouraged the public to take videos, which many did, such actions took extraordinary courage, considering the risks. ICE agents reacted with vengeance, Tasing and teargassing peaceful protestors, busting the vehicle windows of ICE observers, sometimes wrenching them out of their vehicles to detain them. One video that went viral showed Aliyah Nassan screaming as she was dragged out of her vehicle and detained. She would testify a few days later at a U.S. Senate hearing that she suffers from a brain injury and was driving her car, on her way to a hospital appointment, when she accidentally found herself in an intersection controlled by ICE. Agents broke her car window, manhandling her.

She told an agent she had a brain injury, and his response was, “too late.” They took her to the Whipple Federal Building where ICE agents held detainees. She received no medical care and lost consciousness, waking up later in a Minneapolis hospital. The Star Tribune detailed numerous cases of mistreatment of detainees at the Whipple building with large numbers squeezed into small rooms and left in squalid conditions.

Why was Minnesota and the Twin Cities targeted by the Trump administration? Compared to other states, it has a much smaller population of undocumented people. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump has selected states and cities with Democratic Party governors and mayors, having previously singled out Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon. as part of his retribution strategy: Terrorize a state and a community; make them do their bidding. Trump also saw Minnesota as an easy target after federal authorities uncovered a scandal last year involving a number of people, largely Somali-Americans, although the scam was headed by a white woman.

Those indicted were accused of taking federal money during the Covid pandemic, falsely claiming they were feeding large numbers of children in the Twin Cities, then pocketing millions of dollars. Somalis have settled in Minnesota by the tens of thousands and those accused of the fraud represent a tiny fraction of the population. Trump nevertheless zeroed in on the Somali involvement last fall, launching into racist rants, declaring them “garbage” who should all be deported.

Sending in federal forces, Trump claimed, would help clean up the fraud. Most Somalis in Minnesota, however, are citizens, many of them born here, or have green cards, and Operation Metro Surge had nothing to do with stopping fraud.

Ironically, many of the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office, including some who have been working on the fraud cases, have resigned in protest over the way Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, has turned her office into a revenge machine. Indeed, eight prosecutors who have headed the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota over the last 45 years, issued a scathing letter a few days before this article was written, blasting Operation Metro Surge.

“In the space of a year, the Attorney General has destroyed the culture of our former office,” they wrote. “Many lawyers have resigned…They have seen their colleagues start, and then forced to stop, a joint federal-state civil rights investigation into a killing by a federal agent [a reference to the Good murder]. They have seen applicants forced to explain which of the President’s orders and policies they admire most.

Who Has Been Charged?

While the agents who killed Good and Pretti have not been charged, Bondi has had no hesitation in supporting the filing of federal charges against a group of activists, mostly Black, including Nekima Levy Armstrong, former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, for the audacity of interrupting a service at a church in St. Paul to protest one of the ministers, who is an ICE agent. The U.S. attorney’s office also charged two journalists, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, who entered the church to cover the protest, in what is a clear-cut attack on the First Amendment.

Minneapolis is a city where nearly half its City Council are members or often aligned with the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The ICE assault appears to have further eroded public confidence in capitalist institutions. There have been a series of local demonstrations against Target, whose national headquarters is based in the Twin Cities, after the discount store chain failed to denounce ICE’s detention of Target employees near the doors of one store and did not speak out against ICE staging operations in its parking lots.

Sixty prominent corporate and non-profit leaders issued a joint statement after Pretti’s killing, but failed to mention the murders of Good and Pretti or press for the removal of ICE. They wrote, “We call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state, and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future.”

Liz Fedor, a senior editor at Twin Cities Business, an online publication, wrote in an opinion piece, “Many Minnesotans posted on social media that they viewed this letter as too little, too late…. Citizens need business leaders who aren’t afraid to take on public issues and challenges.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, was re-elected last year after facing an array of opposition candidates, some of them to the left of Frey. But Frey has not minced words about Operation Metro Surge. Shortly after Renee Good was murdered, he said at a news conference that he had watched videos of her shooting and the federal government’s self-defense claim was “bullshit.” He said ICE should “Get the F— out of Minneapolis.” Frey flew to New York in early February and appeared on a television broadcast of Comedy Central. The studio audience gave him a standing ovation. Frey correctly pointed out that it was the people of Minneapolis who deserved the ovation but their reaction, I believe, is one more indicator that Trump’s savagery is out of step with the American people.

The mass resistance in the Twin Cities has got me thinking about another era of mass mobilization, and a Teamster named Harry DeBoer, who was one of the leaders of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters truck strike, a labor battle that spanned seven months and ended in an historic victory, one of the most significant strikes of the 1930s. Harry is credited with developing the use of cruising pickets, a tactic that would become widely used in the labor movement. On July 20, 1934, on what became known as Bloody Friday, Harry was shot in the leg, one of 60 workers shot by Minneapolis police that day. Two workers, Henry Ness and John Belor, were killed. Harry spent several months in the hospital. Sometime after the strike was won, he was elected president of the bakery driver’s local union.

Harry died in 1992. My late wife, Gillian and I had gotten to know him well. We were friends. From time to time, things might not be going right, and there could be a tendency for folks, myself included, to get a little down. Harry had an answer to that. “Don’t give up on the workers,” he would say. It was his motto. Harry would have been horrified at what the Trump administration has been doing. But he would be very pleased at the way the people of Minneapolis and the Twin Cities have responded. I think he would have predicted it.

Randy Furst was a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune and a member of the NewsGuild for 52 years. He retired in 2025.