Operation Metro Surge Wasn’t the End

Operation Metro Surge Wasn’t the End Operation Metro Surge Wasn’t the End The Minnesota movement still holds important lessons for those working to defend democracy in the Trump era. A motion filed in a U.S. district court on August 13 revealed that the Department of Homeland Security investigated the labor unions, immigrant rights groups, community organizations, and individuals who protested the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota this past winter. Agents infiltrated and recorded meetings, scoured government databases, and secured years of financial records. The disclosure illustrated the lengths to which Donald Trump’s White House will go to weaponize law enforcement and subvert the rule of law to silence its opposition, but it also highlighted the rich network of organizations that resisted Operation Metro Surge, forcing the administration to dramatically alter its approach. The primary goal of the Trump administration’s surges of federal officers to the Twin Cities and across the country in 2025 and 2026 has not been to enforce immigration law; in fact they have often targeted legal residents and U.S. citizens based on their perceived race, language, or religion rather than their immigration status or criminal records. The federal operation in Minnesota was distinguished by blatant lawlessness, racial profiling, and reckless disregard for human rights. Despite the administration’s claim to be focused on criminals and undocumented immigrants, surveys and reviews of arrest records show that agents stopped residents based on language and perceived racial or national background, forced their way into homes and businesses without proper warrants, and detained citizens and legal residents even after they produced identification. Rather than enforcing immigration law, these operations served as “a blueprint for expanding authoritarian rule in the United States,” according to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union. The administration has attempted to suppress opposition and delegitimize checks on its power by using force, intimidation, and retaliation against protesters and observers. It has also retaliated against elected officials who oppose Trump, launched unfounded investigations against attorneys and organizations that provide legal support to immigrants and protesters, and challenged the legitimacy of judges that intervene to prevent abuse. The federal occupation of Minnesota must be understood as an assault not only on the people of the state but also on fundamental democratic principles of due process, equal protection, and rule of law. In response, Operation Metro Surge was confronted by a remarkable mass mobilization. Ordinary people took it upon themselves to protest, monitor their communities, aid neighbors who were targeted, as well as document and publicize the intimidation and violence inflicted by federal officers throughout the Twin Cities and across the state. That peaceful, nonviolent mobilization saved many from detainment and deportation, and allowed others to retain jobs, homes, and family members in the face of tremendous disruption. Yet hidden behind scenes of protest, observation, and mutual aid was a more coordinated effort to end the federal occupation. Indeed, while stopping Operation Metro Surge did not halt federal assaults on immigrants and Black and brown people in the state, it signaled an important setback to authoritarianism under the second Trump administration. Trump seems hesitant to resume the aggressively violent and unlawful approach seen during Operation Metro Surge. But other threats to democratic rule are certain to emerge in the remaining years of his second term, including in the lead-up to the midterms, where voter suppression, misinformation, and election denialism threaten efforts to change the political balance in Congress. Given the authoritarian threat posed by Trump still present, there is much to learn from the successful mobilization in Minnesota. The attack on democracy in the Twin Cities was met with grassroots protests, lawsuits and resistance from local officials. A major setback for Operation Metro Surge, however, came with the massive nonviolent protests on January 23, 2026, when nearly a hundred religious leaders were arrested outside the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and up to 100,000 people marched through downtown Minneapolis behind the slogan “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” Federal authorities redoubled their attacks by shooting Alex Pretti, a peaceful observer, the next morning, just weeks after an agent shot and killed another protester, Renée Good. But their determination faded quickly after the CEOs of some of Minnesota’s largest corporations—under pressure from faith leaders, immigrant rights organizations, and labor unions—issued a public letter calling for a deescalation of tensions in the state. The next day the Trump administration announced the removal of Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, and later ordered a drawdown of federal agents in the state using the same deescalation language that the corporate letter had urged. (The DHS investigation into the protests began just days after Pretti was killed.) There were a number of groups, institutions, collectives, and organic entities that led the nonviolent massive response. The many centers of gravity in the broad and diverse resistance to the occupation in the Twin Cities was in part what made it so effective: Some provided mutual aid, others rapid response and mass mobilization; others created open flows of information between local and national activists, and between activists and politicians. Resistance ranged from institutional—coming from traditional organizations and power structures—to decentralized, with autonomous, informal structures taking the initiative. Some were anchored in social groups that were primarily white and middle class, while other formations moved within communities of color and the broader working class. There were, as always, conflicting turfs, egos, crossed lines of communication, and competition for resources. Some voices were held up, others suppressed. This was not some other country or a magical place of automatic unity; this was a midsized U.S. city, with deep fractures reflecting the limitations of racial capitalism. Here, we focus on just one key area of this resistance: an alignment of community and labor organizations, anchored by the multifaith organization ISAIAH, the multiracial immigrant led organization Unidos MN, and the labor union SEIU Local 26. (The alignment also included the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia, teachers unions in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the union UNITE HERE, and others.) Leaders of those organizations saw this alignment as a long-term, intimate relationship forged by overlapping constituencies and objectives—in this case, shared commitments to building organizational power in multiracial working-class communities. They contrasted this approach to a coalition, which unites as many participants as possible around a specific action or objective. While a coalition is large and often short-lived, an alignment is small enough and long-lasting enough to allow organizations to share strategies and tactics and test each other’s capacity for mobilization. The Twin Cities alignment parallels other successful historical models of deeper integration between separate social movement organizations in pursuit of a common goal, such as those fighting apartheid in South Africa and authoritarian rule in Serbia under Slobodan Milošević. In particular, it resembles the relationships formed between African American trade unionists, women’s organizations, and civil rights groups that coalesced around a plan to March on Washington in the 1940s and persisted in the movement that toppled Jim Crow in the 1960s. The movement that defeated Operation Metro Surge should not be understood as a model: It developed out of conditions that are particular to the state and cannot be applied to another situation in a top-down manner. But it does hold valuable lessons for other movements. One characteristic that cannot be easily replicated is the remarkable grassroots mobilization that drove the response to Operation Metro Surge, grounded in networks and strategies of organization and mutual aid that stretch back decades, and were most recently developed to respond to the social crisis and unrest sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. As sociologist Michelle Phelps observed, in addition to the comparisons that some drew between police violence and the actions of ICE and DHS agents, efforts to monitor and disrupt immigration enforcement in 2026 often drew on community networks established in 2020. While grassroots mobilizations respond to local histories and local conditions, one element of the Minnesota movement that can be more readily reapplied in other contexts is the alignment of organizations that helped to shape the local response to Operation Metro Surge. Collaboration between these organizations was key to mass mobilizations, and to working with and pressuring both small businesses and large corporations. Each of those contributions proved critical to the defeat of Operation Metro Surge. Like the grassroots mobilization, the alignment had deep roots in Minnesota, stretching back to the economic crisis of 2009 and efforts to pass federal immigration reform in 2010. ISAIAH was founded in 2000 through a merger of longstanding faith-based organizations in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Saint Cloud and has mobilized consistently around increasing revenue for essential public services and access to affordable healthcare, childcare, transportation, and housing. Unidos MN grew out of Navigate, an organization founded by immigrant “Dreamer” students fighting for legal status in 2007 that expanded in 2013 to fight for immigrant rights, education, health, economic and environmental justice, and democracy. SEIU Local 26 was founded in the 1930s, but it was reinvigorated by the Justice for Janitors Campaign—through which SEIU organized mostly immigrant janitors in Los Angeles and other cities in the 1990s—and by the Occupy movement against economic inequality in the 2010s. Having coalesced over the previous decade, leaders of the three organizations were spurred to formalize their alignment by the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette on June 14, 2025—acts of political violence viewed as a stark sign of the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism. Alignment leaders met biweekly in the following months to study and prepare for a broader movement to defend democracy. Leaders read and discussed the work of Hardy Merriman and Freedom Trainers, and studied histories of democratic struggles in South Africa, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Under a shared analysis and objective, the alignment shifted in the fall of 2025 toward deepening leadership development, mobilizing their members, and testing their organizational strength. These goals looked different for each group, but they were united around the objective of responding to a democratic crisis by being ready to use nonviolent tactics to shut down business as usual. SEIU Local 26 committed to educate its members about their right to withhold their labor. ISAIAH hosted a statewide meeting where 5,000 activists shared analysis and arranged to build local teams for nonviolent direct action. Five hundred clergy members and imams committed to being part of a rapid response team in anticipation of federal immigration actions. Meanwhile, Unidos MN applied and expanded lessons learned from 2016, equipping its membership to defend their rights in the face of unlawful enforcement while expanding its base to include everyone else willing to stand with them. The organization built Monarca to spread the basic lessons of the National Lawyers Guild’s Legal Observer program, and create onramps into a distributed leadership structure. Nearly 2,000 people attended its first meeting on February 7, 2025 at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. The model was scaled up across farms, churches, and small businesses across Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin to provide training on how to document immigration enforcement, disrupt it, and uphold the constitutional rights of everyone in its path. According to Monarca, the training reached 28,000 people by September 2025 and 50,000 by the end of Operation Metro Surge in April 2026. Monarca’s hotline dispatch operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the duration of the surge. The first test of the infrastructure being built by Monarca took place in June 2025 when the Department of Justice weaponized a criminal investigation involving the restaurant chain Las Cuatro Milpas. The DOJ sent heavily armed federal agents and military vehicles to serve a search warrant at a branch conveniently located at the corner of East Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue, a corner representing the heart of the Latino community in South Minneapolis, and also the Unidos MN office. Hundreds of observers, neighbors, and small businesses responded with discipline, centering constitutional rights and deescalation. By October 2025, members of the alignment had prepared themselves to respond to an assault on democracy. Three hundred leaders of the three organizations gathered at a popular mall in the Somali community to plan unified actions and develop strategies through role-playing. When Minneapolis joined the No Kings protests that national organizations had called for on October 18, the MN AFL-CIO organized a peacekeeping structure to direct traffic and defuse conflict. They were ready for a large-scale peaceful defense of democracy in the Twin Cities. The need for preparation became clear on December 2, when Trump spewed a racist diatribe against Somali residents of the Twin Cities and ordered roughly one hundred federal officers to the area, who focused on the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. While federal authorities claimed to target people not for “their race or ethnicity, but the fact that they are in the country illegally,” masked agents grabbed people who appeared to be East African and hauled them to a federal detention center even after being shown evidence of citizenship or legal residence. As the surge began in earnest, large groups of local residents gathered in Cedar-Riverside to observe federal agents roving through the neighborhood and to interrupt unlawful actions where they could. Monarca developed a small business and workplace network and grew rapidly, and others followed. Decentralized rapid responder networks scaled to the tens of thousands using digital and in-person trainings held across neighborhoods, in multiple languages. Membership organizations and service and advocacy nonprofits built their own versions of trainings and responses. Among them were CTUL, which specialized in construction workers, MIRAC, and other nonprofit-based coalitions that included the ACLU-MN, MN8 and the Immigrant Defense Network and Democracy Defense, to name just a few. Churches, hospital workers, and school staff developed large mutual aid and defense operations, and organizations like TakeAction MN organized parents across Minneapolis Public Schools in preparing for enforcement and mutual aid at drop off and dismissal. What emerged was an ecosystem with different analyses, different constituencies, and a shared refusal to look away. That ecosystem became essential as reports of racial profiling and disregard for legal protections expanded from Cedar-Riverside to the rest of the Twin Cities and beyond. On December 3, a U.S. citizen was arrested while running errands in downtown Minneapolis and was detained for over twenty-four hours before her husband came and showed proof of citizenship. She reported that immigration agents taunted her and accused her of hiding something under her hijab. The same day, agents entered a restaurant in South Minneapolis and demanded to search the building without a required judicial warrant. On December 9, a man who used only his first name, Mubashir, out of fear of persecution, was on his lunch break in Cedar-Riverside when a masked federal agent tackled him, put him in a headlock, and forced him into a vehicle despite him offering to show proof that he was a U.S. citizen. Only after being held at a federal building for several hours was he allowed to show his passport, and he was released with no transportation over six miles from his home on a snowy and very cold day. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey described the event as a U.S. citizen being “taken into custody for no reason at all, in clear violation of law and the Constitution of the United States for simply walking down the street and looking like he’s Somali,” while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz declared, “The forcefulness, lack of communication, and unlawful practices displayed by your agents will not be tolerated in Minnesota.” On December 17, the ACLU and three Minnesota-based law firms sued the Trump administration on behalf of six residents who had been threatened with violence or arrests while observing enforcement actions. Unions also moved to protect their members and others from federal agents. “Workers of every industry are being indiscriminately arrested; teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, cooks, cleaners, and servers, all across our city,” recalled Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, president of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation. The Amalgamated Transit Union advised members that they had the right not to open doors for armed or masked agents who posed a safety risk to drivers or passengers on public buses. After a few weeks, however, it was clear that more overt political actions were needed to challenge the federal occupation. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has noted that anti-authoritarian resistance has become less effective since 2010, due in part to governments learning to undermine protest strategies, but also because movements have relied more heavily on social media and mass demonstrations rather than long-term organizing and economic disruption such as strikes and boycotts. Some have fixated on Chenoweth’s observation that few revolutions have failed after 3.5 percent of the population participated in a “peak event” such as a mass demonstration; overlooking her clarification that the 3.5 percent rule may no longer apply to movements that can stage large protests without building the organizational infrastructure necessary to “plan, negotiate, establish shared goals, build on past victories, and sustain their ability to disrupt a regime.” In Minnesota, thousands of neighbors self-organized into Signal chats for rapid response, growing to over 7 percent of the adult population in Minneapolis by early January. It was remarkable that grassroots activists could mobilize double the requirement of Chenoweth’s 3.5 percent rule, and yet federal authorities showed no sign of conceding. Mutual aid was moving huge amounts of supplies to neighbors sheltering at home via community organizations, churches, and parent teacher associations at schools. But despite these successes, the strain of the mutual aid also exhausted many of the very organizations best positioned to fight back against the ICE occupation at a political level. Constitutional observers, known as “upstanders,” played a key role in cracking the legitimacy of ICE enforcement. Enforcement operations depend on the appearance of lawful routine on the perception that they acted on legal authority rather than violence. That appearance survived quick targeted arrests on sidewalks or at traffic stops but failed in front of thousands of trained neighbors with phones. Across the surge, upstanders arrived in numbers at gas stations, apartment entrances, school parking lots, and courthouse steps. They modeled a role that untrained neighbors could hold on their own block, at school drop off, or while running errands. They recorded badge numbers. They read people’s rights out loud. They stood close enough that every person watching could see the difference between a legal process and a violent seizure. These upstanders moved isolated acts of heroism into collective participation and named the thing for what it was: political retribution in broad daylight, in front of the whole country. Under ordinary conditions, a union or a base organization absorbs nearly all of the risk that protest escalation generates. During Operation Metro Surge, organizer networks moved the risk beyond the institutions and into the population, distributed across the very community the operation was built to isolate. Escalation demanded more risk from more actors, but it also became an active option for more people. The emergency infrastructure established in Minnesota faced an opponent with incredible access to resources, agents, surveillance technology, and weaponry. Frustration among activists grew as abductions continued to increase and grow more violent and blatant, and rapid responders often arrived too late to meaningfully engage ICE agents from harassing neighbors. These conditions primed the ground for the decisive move: to lift the pressure off our immigrant neighbors and direct it back to the administration that authored the chaos. This move led to two tactics. The first was a focus on corporate decision-makers. Alignment leaders knew that authoritarian regimes historically depend on support from key pillars of society to exercise their power, including the business community, the army, and the legal system. If these pillars withdrew their support, the regime was forced to retreat. Out of this understanding, organizers researched which corporations in Minnesota were actively supporting the regime or the ICE-deportation-industrial complex. This orientation resulted in a focus on Hilton (where ICE agents were staying), Enterprise (where ICE agents were renting their cars), Target (in whose parking lots ICE was staging their operations at times), and Signature and Delta (which transported detainees to ICE facilities in other states), to name a few. While some research on the connections between these corporations and ICE activity was made public as early as that fall, peaceful actions directed at these corporations were generally smaller until mid-December, when activists started being more assertive by peacefully taking over lobbies of Target stores and rallying outside the Signature terminal at MSP to demand a halt to deportation flights. By the second month of the occupation, the silence of the major corporations in Minnesota, whether they had a direct business tie to ICE or not, was gaining public attention. The second tactic was to break through the isolation and fear, especially in immigrant communities, by assembling a large coalition of organizations to march through the business district on Lake Street in South Minneapolis on December 20. The largely immigrant community along Lake Street had been severely damaged by the surge as many residents avoided work and shopping for fear of deportation, leaving normally thriving restaurants and grocery stores empty. To prevent marchers from having to stand in extremely cold weather, and to facilitate maximum participation to show the broadest support possible when fear and isolation was still very high, organizers set up microphones on several trucks that travelled alongside the march with a rotation of speakers from each of the participating organizations. Rather than fighting over limited speaking slots on a single stage, each organization in the large coalition would have a chance to represent its constituency on one of three trucks along an hour-long ride from start to finish. The march provided a first step to rebuilding confidence that the movement could take back control of the streets from the occupying army. With the “ice broken,” marches became normalized and rapidly grew in size in the weeks that followed. On January 6, then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem signaled the Trump administration’s desire to up the ante by accompanying federal officers on an arrest in Saint Paul as part of what she boasted was the “largest DHS operation ever,” with roughly 2,000 additional agents involved and 150 people detained in Minneapolis alone. The following morning DHS agents killed Renée Good, a peaceful protester monitoring ICE activity in South Minneapolis. While the response to Good’s murder demonstrated the strength of grassroots organizations, the escalation signaled the need for more focused tactics. On January 8, hundreds of protesters descended on the Whipple Federal Building, which had been used as a detention center and staging base for deportations though the nearby airport. Attempts to block traffic entering the facility led to confrontations between protesters and both federal agents and local police, threatening to spiral out of control. Meeting the Friday following Good’s death, alignment leaders resolved to find a new tactic that went beyond the escalating marches and nonviolent confrontations at the federal building that were now happening every other day in response to the violence. They settled on a day of nonviolent disruption set for January 23. Due to months of preparation and years of collaboration with other organizations, the alignment was able to build support for the protest quickly. By the following Tuesday they had support from ten large unions and immigrant rights groups, and launched a press conference and public call. By the end of the week, they were backed by over one hundred organizations—including the Minneapolis Central Labor Council and the Minnesota AFL-CIO—and a growing number of small businesses. The coalition came together around the idea of a Day of Truth and Freedom: No Work, No School, No Shopping. Recognizing that many of their members and supporters were restricted by “no strike” clauses in union contracts or labor laws, the unions were careful to clarify that this was not a general strike. Instead, they informed employers that their members would respect a broader community call to stay home from work and encouraged employers to either allow workers to take the day off or close the business in recognition of the protest. The teachers’ unions placed similar demands on ICE for school districts in both of the Twin Cities, as did unions at the University of Minnesota and other large institutions in the state. Combined with the energy of the grassroots mobilization, the preparations of the alignment produced a truly remarkable mobilization. On the morning of January 23 at 10 a.m., hundreds of people took over the traffic lanes in front of MSP Airport on the departures level, and one hundred clergy were arrested for blocking the street. At that same time more than one hundred clergy gathered at the entry of the headquarters of Target Corporation in Downtown Minneapolis. This was a call for Delta Airlines, Signature Aviation, and Target to issue a public call to end Operation Metro Surge, demand accountability for the shooting of Renée Good, block federal agents from entering their businesses for immigration enforcement, and call on Congress to defund ICE. The airport protest that morning was just the beginning. There were peaceful direct actions throughout the city, including pickets at local clinics, and peaceful direct actions at other corporate locations, culminating later that afternoon when between 50,000 and 100,000 people joined a march through downtown Minneapolis with the wind chill estimated at thirty below zero. The coalition had to rent the Timberwolves basketball stadium for the Minnesota Timberwolves to provide a warm place for marchers, and the protest was so big that only a fraction of the marchers were able to fit. Local 26 estimated that over 1,100 of their members stayed home from their jobs; overall, an estimated 15,000 union workers didn’t go to work. More than 1,000 businesses signed onto the pledge to close that day. The full impact of the economic blackout was not clear until later, when an independent survey found an estimated 340,000 people in Minnesota self-reported that they observed the call to not work. One in four likely voters in Minnesota participated or knew a loved one who participated by not shopping or not attending work or school, and a remarkable 83 percent of polled state voters said they had heard of the protests. These demonstrations culminating had a decisive impact, increasing pressure on both the federal administration and the corporations that were trying so hard to stay silent. The final straw was when federal authorities shot peaceful observer Alex Pretti in South Minneapolis the morning after the protest. By the end of the day on January 25, Target, General Mills, and other large corporations issued a public letter calling for an immediate deescalation. Vice President J.D. Vance and White House advisor Stephen Miller sought to escalate tensions by deploying military troops to Minneapolis, but White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who had been fielding anxious calls from politicians and business leaders about the situation in Minneapolis, cautioned that Operation Metro Surge had verged “so far off” its initial mission. On January 26, Trump ordered the removal of Bovino. The following day, he announced, “We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” which the New York Times interpreted as “the latest indication that the mounting backlash to the fatal shooting of a protester Saturday had prompted him to try to shift perceptions of the administration’s approach.” Protests repeating the “day of no work, no school, no shop” slogan expanded to many cities nationwide the following week. Deportation flights were massively reduced over the next month. Secretary Noem was also relieved of her post, completing the turnover of top leadership on Operation Metro Surge; and continuing financing for DHS was successfully blocked for months at the congressional level. The experience in Minnesota suggests that organizations seeking to take a stand against authoritarian efforts by the Trump administration can start by identifying potential alignments with organizations with similar contingencies and objectives, decide what actions they are best prepared to take in defense of democracy, and “get under the hood” with their alignment partners to test and strengthen their capacity for action. This means building levels of trust among organizations, so that activists and leaders can share tactics and strategies and discuss their strengths and limitations honestly and without fear of appearing vulnerable or confused. These alignments and actions will take very different forms based on the nature of the organizations and their bases of support; but the key is to identify objectives that reflect both the needs and the abilities of the communities they organize. Joining an alignment involves risk for any organization, as it requires harmonizing the interests of its members and immediate constituents with those of the broader community. This approach requires unions, immigrant rights organizations, and interfaith coalitions to give some influence over their agendas to unpredictable and often unruly grassroots movements, and to find ways to use resources to further the interests of both their members and the broader community. These are often difficult decisions, but they can allow those organizations to play a role in defending democracy. William P. Jones is Professor of History and President of the AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights. Greg Nammacher is President of SEIU Local 26, a union of 8000 janitorial, security, airport and other property services workers in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.