Operation Metro Surge is still going on in the Twin Cities. Since the full-scale immigration crackdown began in December 2025, federal agents have killed two American citizens in separate incidents, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. A Nicaraguan man named Victor Manuel Diaz, also died in an ICE camp in Texas after he was detained in Minneapolis in January.
Demonstrators have filled the streets, ICE raids have netted over 4,000 arrests and the crackdowns have dragged down everything from Minneapolis’s housing market to school attendance and even quality of life for restaurant workers.
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan announced last week that the number of immigration officers will be cut by 25 percent, a number that still leaves more than 2,000 federal agents present in the area. Today it’s unclear when or if that number will ever return to the normal level of 150.
With all this happening, I texted an old friend, who I’ll call Avery because he asked not to be identified by his real name for fear of reprisal. He played in bands that I’d see from time to time when we both lived in Norman and we struck up a friendship that was mostly online. Over the years I watched on Facebook as Avery, a longtime Oklahoman, got married, had a kid and more recently moved with his family up to Minneapolis.
I reached out asking what he’d seen up there. I was more or less curious what it felt like to live through an occupation. The following interview is a series of texts and emails that we exchanged over the last few weeks, which I compiled and edited for clarity.
Matt Carney: What have you seen since the feds stepped up their presence in your new hometown? Are there a lot of ICE and border patrol agents roving around?
Avery: It felt like a slow burn at first. ICE has been active for a year throughout the country, and in December it was more of a hushed notion that they were targeting Minnesota. It all jumped off quickly right around the holidays. There was an uneasy sense they were here, and then suddenly they were everywhere. We left town for five days and came back to the beginning of a siege.
Yeah, you see them. We are in south Minneapolis, maybe seven or eight blocks from where Renee Good was murdered. Very close to where George Floyd was murdered. The living memory of that resonates in the community, you see activists occupying George Floyd Square every morning even now, almost six years later. It’s a messy and yet sanctified space, made more surreal by the presence of large SUVs rumbling through.