WASHINGTON – When border czar Tom Homan announced last week that the Trump administration’s surge of immigration agents in Minnesota was over, he said the drawdown would begin immediately and carry through this week.
But while there’s anecdotal evidence of fewer Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions around Minneapolis, federal agents are still very present — and residents are still terrified.
“It certainly hasn’t stopped,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a Thursday interview. “I fully understand why people are very much on edge.”
Frey said he gets daily reports on ICE activity in the city, but it’s not objective data because ICE doesn’t share its information with his office. Instead, his team tracks the number of residents calling into 9-1-1 with reports of a “family member getting kidnapped” by federal agents, for example, or ICE “slamming somebody on a car.” When police respond to these calls and confirm ICE is on the scene, they file a report and the mayor’s office flags it.
This anecdotal information used to show between 10 to 30 ICE actions every day, said Frey, and over the last couple of days, those numbers have dropped to one or zero. It’s a good sign, he said, but it doesn’t mean much has changed materially for Minneapolis immigrants who have been so traumatized by ICE’s monthslong campaign of terror against them that they haven’t stepped outside of their homes, in some cases, for eight or nine weeks.
“The report-out numbers we’ve gotten in the last few days have been in line with [a decrease], but again, that doesn’t mean that’s what the people feel,” Frey said. “People are still scared.”
Some residents aren’t seeing much difference on the ground, either.
“Absolutely not,” said Mary Granlund, chair of the school board for Columbia Heights public schools. ICE has been aggressively targeting this suburb for months, including posting agents in elementary school parking lots and outside of Grunland’s own house.
Nick Benson, a plane enthusiast in Minneapolis who has been tracking ICE deportation flights out of the city, said he’s seen fewer shackled passengers being boarded onto planes. He’s also observed more children returning to school after relying on virtual learning for weeks because their immigrant parents were too scared to go outside.
But what’s stood out to him is that ICE agents seem to have changed their focus from immigrants to legal observers, or residents who volunteer to keep eyes on and film federal agents during their operations. He said local clergy and observers have noticed ICE agents camping out in front of their churches and homes, something they hadn’t seen before.
“Still real problems occurring here,” said Benson. “I feel like we’ve switched from the adrenaline-fueled phase of ICE in Minnesota to the caffeine-sustained slog.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson declined to comment on how many federal immigration enforcement agents are still in Minneapolis. They also declined to say when DHS expects to get that number back down to the roughly 150 ICE agents who were in the state prior to the Trump administration’s surge in December.
“For the safety of our law enforcement, we do not disclose operational details while they are underway,” said the spokesperson.
Stephen Maturen via Getty Images
Frey said he hasn’t spoken to Homan since the day before he announced the drawdown. He hasn’t talked to President Donald Trump, either, apart from one phone call they had after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, in late January.
Some Minneapolis residents have speculated that the administration agreed to reduce ICE’s presence because local and state officials cut some kind of deal with Homan involving police working with federal agents to help deport people. That’s false, said Frey.
“No deal,” he said. “Literally, there was no deal.”
Local officials have always worked with federal agencies “when it’s about keeping people safe and reducing crime,” he said, but city officials don’t enforce federal immigration law and that’s the way it will continue to be.
Minneapolis leaders have been so determined to make this point clear that there’s a “fact check” prominently featured on the city government’s website that spells out that the city “did not make any deals or concessions with the federal government or ICE.”
“There was no capitulation,” insisted Frey.
Looking ahead, the mayor said he plans to keep doing what he can to protect immigrants from aggressive, unlawful federal immigration enforcement operations. He pointed to city initiatives like “know your rights” campaigns, food delivery services, mental health supports and rental assistance for immigrants who have struggled amid the ICE surge.
The city has also set up a task force specifically focused on how to exchange information between community organizations that help immigrants. But local officials know to “be careful” about the data they collect for this, he said, because they don’t want to collect data on residents that could later be subject to a data reqest by federal officials.
Frey said he hasn’t had much time to reflect on the past few months of chaos in his city, but a couple of moments stand out.
One was a recent Saturday morning, when he took his 5-year-old to dance class, the first time he “came up for air” after weeks of being intensely focused on ICE — only to get a call 10 minutes into class about Pretti being killed. Another was when he stopped by a local coffee shop to buy a scone, and five Latino staffers came out from the back of the house in tears, desperate to tell him how terrified they were of ICE and begging for his help.
That same scenario played out dozens of other times, too, he said, at various Minneapolis stores and restaurants.
“That hits you,” said Frey. “It stays with you.”