‘There’s Still Fear’: The Enduring Trauma Of The ICE Surge In Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS – While Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drawn down its presence in the Twin Cities, the trauma, fear and distrust caused by federal agents endures, immigration advocates and organizers say.

“There’s still fear,” said Hodan Hassan, a board member for the Somali American Coalition Action Fund and former Minnesota state representative. “People are still afraid… and, like we said, we haven’t had a chance to process as a community to sit down and talk about what happened to us.”

Members of immigrant communities are still warily resuming basic activities like leaving their homes, going to local businesses and visiting friends and family members. Others are scrambling to recover financially: Some stayed home during the height of the ICE raids, losing out on work and pay. And many people are continuing to carry their passports due to lingering worries that they’ll be stopped and profiled.

“The long-term damage, I think, has been done where there’s a lot more mistrust in the government,” said Kang Vang, a citizenship teacher at the Hmong Cultural Center. “People are still very cautious, you know. I still carry my passport around.”

Community efforts that began during the ICE surge, including mutual aid and grocery deliveries, have also continued. Neighborhood patrols of religious spaces and schools are ongoing, too.

Organizers note that these efforts highlighted how people in Minneapolis and St. Paul looked out for one another — and continue to do so.

“We just knew people were going to be afraid of going to the grocery store, and we offered help,” Sergio Amezcua, a pastor at DHH Church, said during a panel coordinated by the Asian American Unity Coalition. “We thought it was going to be 10 to 20 families for a couple weeks, and at the end of the day it was 50,000 families, and… we still do it, actually.”

This past winter, more than 3,000 federal agents descended upon Minnesota as part of a campaign the administration dubbed Operation Metro Surge. During their deployment, agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti while the two were observing and filming ICE actions. They also brutally detained immigrants and people of color, dragging Aliya Rahman out of her car, tackling Mubashir Hussen on his lunch break and forcing ChongLy “Scott” Thao from his home in his underwear in the freezing cold. Families were separated as parents and children, including Adrian Conejo Arias and Liam Conejo Ramos, were apprehended while they were heading into work or en route home from school.

Indiscriminate racial profiling was prevalent throughout the operation, residents and local officials have said.

“There was nowhere that felt safe, or that ICE was not there. We saw them driving around, we saw them everywhere all the time,” said Hanne Sandison, the immigration and legal services director for The Advocates for Human Rights.

ICE’s presence prompted small businesses to suspend operations, even shutter. It also had people fearful of venturing outside, effectively forcing them into hiding. Roads were strewn with abandoned cars marking where people had been detained, said Malika Dahir, the executive director of Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment, while speaking on an AAUC panel.

“We would just lock our doors and shut our shades and hope that neighbors don’t rat on us and go, ‘Oh, there’s a immigrant family that lives over there,’” said Vang.

For people who came to the U.S. to flee authoritarian regimes, the scenes were eerily familiar.

“Some of our elders… when we had conversations, talked about living through dictatorship, you know, government, and people coming to their houses in the middle of the night, masked men taking people away, and they were reliving that trauma,” said Hassan.

Efforts to process the violence that took place are still very much in their infancy, organizers say. SEWA-AIFW, a nonprofit dedicated to serving the South Asian community in the Twin Cities, has been hosting Story Circles, which are group conversations where people can speak out on their experiences, while The Advocates for Human Rights is among the organizations working on a Truth Council to document the events that occurred.

“All of that trauma cannot be resolved just with the absence of a large-scale immigration enforcement effort,” said Anjuli Cameron, the CEO of SEWA-AIFW. “It’s not as if officers left, and then there was an immediate everything’s fine.”

Immigration enforcement is also still happening in the region, advocates and organizers say, further undercutting people’s tenuous sense of safety.

“There was an advertised end to Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS, but ICE hasn’t left, and we still see them around,” says Sandison.

As evidenced by recent actions, the Trump administration is continuing to ramp up arrests and deportations across the country, but it’s trying to do so in a quieter, less visible way after its prior surges drew significant public backlash.

According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, federal lawmakers said that fewer than 500 ICE agents remained in Minnesota as of the end of February following the conclusion of Operation Metro Surge.

A DHS spokesperson did not elaborate on the size of the current ICE presence in the state, but claimed that the arrests during Metro Surge were a “HUGE victory for public safety” and that allegations of racial profiling were “categorically FALSE.” The spokesperson also said that “Homeland Security Investigators are on the ground in Minneapolis” to look into claims of fraud, which Trump has frequently elevated and used to baselessly target members of the Somali community.

“ICE agents uphold our nation’s immigration laws in all 50 states, seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” a spokesperson said when asked whether detentions were ongoing in the state.

Sandison’s organization continues to hear reports of detentions and of ICE presence in other parts of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities, where there are fewer observers to document their activity, she said.

“There is an active ICE operation. It’s just that they’re not super physical because of what happened in Minnesota, because of the blood that has been spilled, because of the negative media attention. They’re not super visible, but ICE is still here,” said Hassan.

As a result, many Minnesotans still have their guard up amid concerns about novel tactics — and worries that sweeping enforcement efforts could recur.

“I think, you know, people came back very cautiously, knowing that this could pop up again anytime,” said Vang.