WASHINGTON — Operation Metro Surge ended about two months ago, but Minnesota’s response to the massive immigration crackdown has had a lasting effect on U.S. politics — turning an issue that President Donald Trump considered a political asset into a liability — and on the views Americans have of the nation’s newcomers.
And it may have reshaped the way the state’s immigrants view their community.
Humberto Flores, who owns a residential and commercial cleaning company in the Twin Cities and came to the United States from Mexico in 2005, said that after the outpouring of help from Minnesotans, many of his immigrant neighbors looked at their adopted communities with clear eyes for the first time.
Related: Gauging the cost of Operation Metro Surge is a work in progress, but some numbers are emerging
He said he laughed when one of them told him he had never really noticed a beautiful park in the neighborhood before. Flores said his neighbor hadn’t noticed the park because he had lacked a full sense of belonging.
“We came to fully appreciate Minnesota and the neighborhoods we live in,” Flores said. “It was beautiful. Perspectives really changed.”
Like many immigrants, Flores’ life was upended by Operation Metro Surge. His employees were afraid to come to work. His children feared going to school. And his office became a staging area for food donated by churches and others for immigrants in need.
“Everyone looked out for everyone,” he said.
Flores said he was furious that he could not provide something basic — the protection of his children. But he said he was also touched when his U.S.-born customers and neighbors checked in on his family’s wellbeing.
“They called to ask, ‘Do you need anything?’” he said.
Flores also said that outpouring of support has engendered gratitude in the immigrant community for Minnesotans who stubbornly demonstrated in glacial temperatures against the 3,000 federal agents who poured into the state, using their cell phones to document their activities.
“It was marvelous,” he said, as was the help offered by thousands of others who took immigrant children to school and watched over them at bus stops, brought food to immigrant households and offered rental assistance and other types of aid.
“Everything changed in our community in a split second,” said Liliana Letran-Garcia, president of Communidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES), a nonprofit that provides immigrant aid.
Letran-Garcia, who emigrated from Guatemala to Minnesota 21 years ago, teared up when discussing the state’s response to the surge. “We showed the entire country and the world that Minnesota is a place of care, dignity and collective responsibility,” Letran-Garcia said.
The Minnesota effect
Even before the surge, Minnesota’s immigrants were under stress. Most immigrants have to learn a new language as well as reestablish themselves in a new land and learn about new cultural norms. Many immigrants start at the lower end of the socio-economic scale and work jobs where they are often exploited.
But now they were also vilified as criminals by Trump and his administration, which was stripping legal protections from asylum seekers and others who lived and worked in the country under the Temporary Protected Status program, and which was threatening mass deportations.
Why did Minnesotans reject the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants, so much so that it resulted in financial pain for many, the arrests of about 4,000 people and the deaths of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti?
Largely because of the videos of the deaths of Good and Pretti by Minnesotans who had taken to the streets, the state’s response to the surge was noted around the globe. It also had an impact on American attitudes on immigration as polls showed plummeting support for mass deportations and Trump’s immigration policy, a cornerstone of the president’s domestic policy.
The change in American attitude appears long-lasting. An Emerson College survey released last week determined that 53% of the respondents approved of Trump’s immigration policies and 43% disapproved.
Related: Bill seeks $10 million for Minnesota cities to help with costs incurred during Operation Metro Surge
Those poll numbers shifted immigration policy. Tough-talking Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official in charge of Operation Metro Surge who said protesters like Good and Pretti “had a choice” to put themselves in danger, was replaced by Tom Homan, who promptly wound down the operation.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was tossed, replaced with Markwayne Mullin, who has said his goal is to keep DHS from being the lead story in the news every day.
During his confirmation hearing, Mullin expressed regret for calling Pretti “a deranged individual” and said he supports requiring immigration officers to obtain judicial warrants signed by a judge before entering a private home. DHS guidance had been that federal agents would enter a home with an administrative warrant approved by ICE officials.
Meanwhile, fearful of midterm election results, Republican congressional leaders advised GOP lawmakers to avoid the issue, and, in particular, not mention mass deportations.
Congressional Democrats seized on the impact the videos Minnesotans took of federal immigration officers had on public opinion, insisting on reforms of ICE and the Border Patrol and fighting to cut back money for immigration enforcement.
Christopher Uggen, a McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, said there were probably many reasons that converged to create that response.
One was the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, which Uggen said created “muscle memory” that “left folks quite vigilant regarding law enforcement behavior.”
“But this sort of movement or response was not limited to the activists in the state,” Uggen added.
So other factors were also at play to create a unique “Minnesota effect” that forced the Trump administration to retreat somewhat when it comes to immigration enforcement and sparked congressional Democrats to successfully block new funding for ICE and the Border Patrol.
The disruption to normal life by the mass deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents and other federal law enforcement officers angered Minnesotans of all political persuasions, Uggen said. And Minnesota’s unique civic culture also played a role.
“Minnesota is unusually high in some measures of civic life, like voting and volunteering,” he said.
Related: Latino-led nonprofit CLUES is ready to be part of the solution to post-Metro Surge housing crisis
Letran-Garcia, of CLUES, said the immigrant enforcement surge also created a surge in her organization, which has provided a behavioral health clinic, employment assistance and other resources to the immigrant community.
“Our needs grew over 150 percent,” she said.” We realized really quickly that (Operation Metro Surge) was nothing that we had ever seen before.”
Letran-Garcia said a priority for CLUES was to provide what she said was accurate information about what was going on, “making sure it was based on facts” and informing immigrants about what documents they needed to have and “what to say and what not to say” to federal agents.
She said Minnesotans’ generosity during the surge, which included an influx of donations to CLUES that allowed the organization to provide $1.5 million in rental assistance to immigrants who had quit their jobs out of fear, “moved us to the core.”
Scaling up quickly
Lucy Olson, a psychologist who works as a consultant and lives in Minneapolis, is not an immigrant advocate or activist but became one of thousands of Minnesotans who helped create the Minnesota effect.
Olson said she met a woman named Nohemy from El Salvador about three years ago who had been trafficked and was homeless with two small children.
She offered Nohemy and her children lodging in her home for the weekend. But Nohemy and her children ended up living with Olson for about a year since establishing the Salvadoran family in a new life took a lot longer than Olson had estimated.
“I became very aware of the challenges that newcomers faced,” Olson said.
When the surge occurred last winter, Nohemy sought to help her neighbors. Learning of the need, Olson and a growing group of volunteers did, too, raising about $700,000, partly through a GoFundMe page, to help pay the rent and provide groceries for about 500 families who were sheltering in their homes.
After the first month, the volunteers realized they needed help and reached out to CLUES.
“We were able to scale up very quickly,” Olson said. Eventually, Olson’s group of volunteers reached about 2,000 members.
Olson said the federal immigration enforcement surge forged new community ties. “Thousands and thousands of Minneapolis residents have gotten to know their Hispanic neighbors in a new way,” she said.
Uggen, as a sociologist, said it is perhaps too early to tell “how replicable or scalable” the pushback in Minnesota to aggressive immigration enforcement is and whether other cities or states would mobilize to protect immigrants in a similar way.
“Those questions are not yet answered,” he said.
Related
