Approaching midnight Sunday, Rep. Samantha Vang acknowledged that lawmakers wanted to go home.
But the Brooklyn Center DFLer reminded her fellow House members of the people who are still separated from their families, and unable to go home, as they wait in federal immigration detention facilities.
“Minnesota has seen enough violence. Enough violence from guns, enough violence from masked federal agents invading our cities. It is upon us, as duly electeds, to meet this moment, to restore the safety of Minnesotans,” Vang said.
Related: Hennepin County charges an ICE officer in a nonfatal shooting during Trump’s immigration crackdown
Vang’s appeal came during an end-of-session attempt by DFLers to push through any legislation in response to Operation Metro Surge, the aggressive immigration enforcement that put Minnesota in the national spotlight. And when that didn’t happen, Minnesota diverged from other blue states that experienced similar operations.
That’s because Democratic-leaning states like California, Illinois and Oregon have all passed laws in direct response to federal agents’ tactics in those states in the past year. The difference in Minnesota is its closely divided state Legislature and a lack of agreement by Republicans who had different ideas on how to respond to the unprecedented federal operation.
The lack of legislative action did accomplish at least one thing for DFLers: it handed them a talking point for next fall’s elections, which will decide the makeup of a Legislature that is currently nearly evenly split.
Two dozen proposals
Although their laws differ and have triggered legal challenges, California, Illinois and Oregon have all passed bills that target the ability of federal immigration agents to enter “sensitive locations,” such as schools, hospitals, courthouses and child care centers.
Moreover, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington have each passed laws related to federal agents’ ability to conceal their identities in public, the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently found. And as of May 2026, lawmakers in at least 33 states had attempted to pass legislation on that topic.
Just in December, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a law simplifying the process for suing federal employees over alleged Constitutional violations.
Minnesota lawmakers attempted to pass bills on all of those topics, and others. In total, the state’s lawmakers introduced over two dozen unique proposals responding directly to Operation Metro Surge, mostly by DFLers.
Unique to Minnesota’s approach was an attempt by the Senate DFL to create a $100 million loan program for businesses that could prove they lost over 30% of their income as a result of Operation Metro Surge.
The bill also would have funded a study to quantify the overall economic impact of the federal operation. The dollar amount is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars across lost wages and business revenue, as well as expenses to local police departments and city governments.
That bill passed in the DFL-controlled Senate but never got a House vote. During the Senate debate, some GOP lawmakers dismissed the suggestion that businesses lost revenue at all.
Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, DFL-Minneapolis, issued a statement in response to the lack of action on the legislation, saying “so many businesses across our state are going to close because of this.”
“They need to be held accountable for their inaction on this,” Mohamed said of GOP lawmakers.
Mohamed had authored a bill that attempted to name the impacts of Operation Metro Surge — another legislative approach that appears to set Minnesota apart.
Her bill, which never got a committee hearing, said the federal operation caused thousands of Minnesotans to become “victims of violent attacks and unlawful detention, harassment and abuse, sudden abduction and secretive relocation, mass imprisonment and inhumane conditions, undue investigation, and prosecution and deportation actions.”
A campaign theme
GOP lawmakers introduced bills of their own in response to Operation Metro Surge. The party’s main platform focused on attempts to expand local law enforcement cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though other bills were more targeted, like one that would make it illegal to enter and disrupt a religious institution after anti-ICE protestors did so at Cities Church in January.
None of the GOP-sponsored bills responding to ICE passed, either.
In the immediate aftermath of the session, lawmakers on both sides praised the bipartisan work they accomplished on other topics. But the DFL made clear it won’t forget about ICE, while the GOP was largely silent on the issue.
Speaking on Monday morning, Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said she believes ICE acted recklessly and lawlessly. And she thinks that was apparent to people across Minnesota, the nation and the world.
“They came here and they killed people, they took people’s constitutional rights away. Nobody should stand for that,” she said.
House DFL Caucus leader Zack Stephenson praised lawmakers accomplishments this session but criticized the “failure to take actions to curb the abuses of ICE.”
“House DFLers will take that message on the campaign trail this summer and fall. We will win a majority and we will pass those bills into law in 2027,” he said in a press conference directly following the Sunday evening session.
But Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey and House GOP floor leader, captured the party’s position on ICE in his comments on the second-to-last floor vote Sunday night.
That’s when, with about 30 minutes left before the midnight deadline, DFL lawmakers raised an emergency vote on a copycat bill of the main Senate package on ICE. It included a ban on agents’ ability to wear masks and access to sensitive spaces, among other things.
Niska said the bill misdiagnosed the problem, which he said had been created by “Minnesota Democrats rolling out a welcome mat of benefits for illegal immigrants.”
Related: The ICE surge in Minnesota triggered a wave of lawsuits. What happened to them?
“If local law enforcement cooperated with federal law enforcement, we would never have seen many of the problems that Minnesota has gone through,” Niska said.
That’s after DFL lawmakers referenced the racial profiling, detentions of U.S. citizens, racist comments against Somali people by President Donald Trump, the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, fear among school children and other impacts of the surge.
“We must make sure that what happened in Minnesota never happens again, here or anywhere else in this country,” said Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura, DFL-Minneapolis.
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