Operation Metro Surge ‘Brought Terror and Human Rights Violations to Minnesota Communities’
Minneapolis, MN — The federal government’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota earlier this year left in its wake human rights violations, widespread terror and laid bare the United States immigration enforcement’s volatile and abusive behavior, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published June 18.
During a press conference held at the University of Minnesota (UMN) Law School the same day, HRW Crisis and Conflict Director Ida Sawyer introduced the report with the story of a Minneapolis family that immigrated from Honduras whose “experiences reflected the terror and abuse we heard about from so many people we interviewed.”
One day in December, 15 armed and masked federal agents broke down their front door unprompted and without any judicial warrant. Agents detained the father and left as abruptly as they appeared. The federal government shipped the father to a detention center in Texas where he was held for three weeks, after which he was released and left to find his own way back to his family in Minnesota. After the arrest, his pregnant wife and two young children were traumatized and too afraid to leave the house, remaining trapped there indefinitely.
“Across the Twin Cities, we found the same story,” Sawyer said. “People stopped, detained and swept into an abusive system, often simply because of how they looked. Often, even, when they were citizens or permanent residents.”
Operation Metro Surge, declared the largest immigration enforcement effort in the country’s history by the Department of Homeland Security, deployed 4,000 federal agents across the state, though mostly focused in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Over the course of three months, those agents killed two U.S. citizens, racially profiled the state’s Latin American and Somali communities.
Unicorn Riot coverage of ICE In Minnesota 2025-2026
“There is no amount of press coverage that could ever fully document the scale of the ripple effect of trauma that this has on the city of Minneapolis,” a Minnesota resident told HRW in the report. “And when these cameras go away, we’re still going to be here grieving and traumatized.”
The report, titled ‘A Manufactured Crisis’: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government, identifies a standard consistent with previous immigration enforcement surges elsewhere in the country, spotlighting “deeply abusive patterns in US immigration enforcement.” The remedy proposed by HRW requires top-down, national action to ensure it never happens again and ameliorate past injustices.
Despite repeated guarantees from the government that the immigrants detained were the “worst of the worst,” HRW found that – of the roughly 4,000 immigrants federal agents detained from December 2025 to February 2026 – over 75% had no criminal history.
A Jan. 6 X post from the Department of Homeland Security – two days into the heightened surge that followed right-wing influencer Nick Shirley’s thoroughly-debunked YouTube video published on Dec. 26, 2025, purporting to show evidence of wide-spread fraud in Somali-run business in the Twin Cities – stated plainly the intent to pursue criminals.
“2,000 DHS law enforcement officers have been deployed to the Twin Cities to arrest fraudsters, murders, rapists, and gang members.”
The report lists some of the most notorious moments of the surge – the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis – as well as the deeper patterns ingrained in federal immigration agencies that are paralleled in other immigration enforcement surges elsewhere in the country.
In its report, HRW found that Minnesota residents of Somali and Latin American descent were disproportionately targeted even though the vast majority of these residents are U.S. citizens or have green cards.
In one example provided by the report, federal agents stopped a Minnesota resident named Pedro Moreno at his worksite. When Moreno showed the agents his green card, an agent told him it was fake before putting him in handcuffs and bringing him to the Whipple Federal Building. The judge overseeing the case found his detainment to be racially biased, stating he “was stopped because he looks Hispanic.”
In another example, federal agents boxed in the car of a U.S. citizen of Somali descent while she was on her way to work. Ten agents approached her vehicle, some with guns drawn, and asked to see her ID and whether she was a citizen. In court, the judge agreed with her that she was stopped solely because of the color of her skin and the hijab she wore.
The intense focus drawn on Minnesota’s Somali community set it apart from other federal immigration surges, such as those in Illinois and Louisiana.
President Donald Trump began attacking Somali Minnesotans in November 2025, when he made a late night post on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, announcing he would end the temporary protected status of Somali immigrants in the state. The post was quickly corroborated by an official White House press release on Dec. 1 that went a step further to include pausing all “migration from third-world countries.”
In response to the rampant racial and ethnic profiling carried out by federal agents, many people chose to constantly carry their U.S. passports or reduce the amount of trips they make leaving their homes.
The report goes into detail on the ripple effects of the federal occupation, including mental health harms from sheltering in place indefinitely and living in fear that may contribute to symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
It also states that federal agents responded to grassroots resistance by regularly using excessive force on residents, journalists and activists, which “highlighted the US government’s abusive and expanding surveillance practices, harassment and intimidation techniques, blatant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, and pervasive impunity and barriers to accountability.”
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The report includes several instances of federal agents punishing U.S. citizens for following and documenting them, including one instance where ICE agents smashed the window of a man who was seen filming an arrest and detaining him at the Whipple Federal Building for four hours where he saw a number of noncitizens being processed through the facility.
“It was really emotional seeing people there,” he told HRW. “It was like, they’re not going to be able to leave here like I am. That’s one of the heavier emotional [things] that still impacts me.”
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To begin the report, HRW offers a litany of recommendations based around oversight and accountability for the US Congress, the US Executive branch, DHS, the Department of Justice, Minnesota government and prosecutors, and to law enforcement in Minnesota.
HRW ends the report offering a path forward which details how the federal government can stop abuse and provide immediate relief; investigate and prosecute abuse with federal investigations, congressional action, and state efforts; create structural reform with legal, policy, and institutional transformation; and engage with international institutions to help protect human rights.
During the UMN press conference on June 18, Unidos MN Executive Director Emilia Gonzalez Avalos made a direct comparison between the report and the federal indictment unsealed on June 16 charging 15 Minnesotans with an felony conspiracy for their activism during the immigration enforcement surge.
“The same week that we gathered to tell the truth, the government handed down its version,” she said. “Ninety-four pages, 15 names and two words they could not stop using. One was conspiracy, the other one was propaganda.”
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In the indictment, which Gonzalez Avalos quoted, the federal government admits that the amount of deportations dropped when the community organized to resist.
“You do not write 94 pages about people who lost,” she said. “You write 94 pages about people you fear. They are not prosecuting them because organizing failed, they’re prosecuting them because organizing worked.”
The “manufacturing” referenced in the title refers to the numerous actions taken by the government during Operation Metro Surge, such as the largest deployment of federal immigration agents in history and the baseless slander against the state’s Somali community used to justify it. The effects and accompanying grief, Gonzalez Avalos added, were real and not manufactured.
“This report is the record,” she said. “We must guard it.”
Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson.
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