It’s been two months since Donald Trump’s White House announced an end to Operation Metro Surge, during which militarized ICE agents and federal officers tore through Minnesota, terrorizing communities and killing two US citizens. After months of public backlash and sustained political resistance from Minnesotans, the Trump-Vance administration was forced to curtail their own clampdown.
But in the weeks since then, what has changed on the ground, really?
In January, at the height of Metro Surge, Zeteo traveled to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to document the federal crackdown. In the video above, Zeteo’s senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng returned to the Twin Cities in late March. What we saw was clear: President Trump’s occupation of Minnesota never ended. It merely changed. What once felt like a high-intensity conflict has evolved into a low-intensity conflict.
And in the months since the national media mostly moved on, the Trump administration’s reign of terror hasn’t stopped. Hundreds of ICE agents remain deployed to the state. Minnesota’s Somali-Americans are still a prime target for the federal government’s hate. A sprawling rent crisis and economic emergency created by Operation Metro Surge has no end in sight. The Twin Cities’ residents and politicians talk about the collective trauma and rebuilding after the Trump administration’s onslaught in a language that sounds indistinguishable from the way people talk about surviving a literal war. Law-abiding families and immigrants are still afraid to step outside, fearing ICE could be around the corner. Parents who organized “school patrols” and “ICE watches” to protect their kids are on patrol to this day. And Donald Trump’s secret police have gotten better at being, well, secret.
“The way that you can’t go between your house and your car; you’re looking over your shoulder – you have the level of fear that we lived in,” one immigrant, who has been in the United States for about two decades, tells us. “We never imagined that this is the life that we would have here.”
Zeteo spoke with local activists, politicians, immigrants, and ordinary Minnesotans who continue to live everyday with the effects of President Trump’s violent crackdown and economic warfare. (Some of the identities and faces have been obscured out of privacy and security concerns.) To them and their communities, Minnesota remains occupied territory – and they are pleading with the rest of the nation not to forget about them.
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Zeteo’s Liam Mann contributed to this post and video.
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