What We Learn—and Who We See—As Minnesota Recovers from Operation Metro Surge

Thousands of Minnesotans gather to mourn the loss of Renee Good in Minneapolis. — Thousands of Minnesotans peacefully protest in Minneapolis on January 23, 2026.

Principles for Documenting Lessons Learned with Integrity

In the weeks since the downgrade of Operation Metro Surge (note: ICE is still here in Minnesota!), we have seen a range of early analyses emerge. Some are careful and grounded. Others oversimplify what happened, jump to conclusions, or center narratives that don’t match what people saw and felt on the ground.

How this moment is recorded will shape more than memory. It will affect funding decisions, how people prepare and respond next time, and whose experiences are treated as central rather than incidental. From where we sit, it feels important to name a few things clearly before the story solidifies into templates, toolkits, or tidy takeaways.

Principle 1: Stay Anchored in Lived Impact

Minnesota’s response to Operation Metro Surge unfolded in real time in the daily lives of immigrants and refugees who were directly targeted. The scale and visibility of Operation Metro Surge also changed daily routines for many people beyond those directly targeted, disrupting work, community life, and public trust.

The reality of this broader impact should not be mistaken for equal exposure. Immigrants and refugees bore the most direct and devastating consequences.

Any honest assessment has to start here. When lessons are not grounded in lived experience, they risk becoming technical summaries that overlook the human cost that shaped every decision.

Principle 2: Contextualize Tactics Within Unequal Harm

Field analyses point to key parts of the collective response—rapid information sharing, legal observation, mutual aid, cross-network coordination, and broad participation. These insights can inform preparedness elsewhere, but they make the most sense when centered on the people who faced immediate and unequal consequences.

Immigrants and refugees faced the greatest risks: detention, family separation, lost income, and displacement. They were forced to make constant high-stakes choices under pressure: whether to leave home, send children to school, keep businesses open, seek legal help, or remain visible at all.

Lessons learned should reflect this imbalance, not flatten it.

Principle 3: Give Credit Broadly and Specifically

Reflection should give credit where credit is due—but in ways that are specific, proportional, and accountable to those most impacted. Credit should illuminate the web of actions that made response possible, without letting visibility stand in for leadership.

Immigrant- and refugee-led networks carried core leadership in a moment of unequal risk—and long before it, through sustained preparation. They made rapid decisions, set priorities, and guided how others could show up without causing further harm. Black organizers contributed hard-won experience, relationships, and infrastructure built through longstanding resistance to state violence, including sustained organizing and response after the murder of George Floyd. That history shaped how networks mobilized and how safety was understood and practiced. Mutual aid efforts—often informal and neighbor-to-neighbor—moved money, food, rides, and care quickly when formal systems could not.

We should resist stories that center any single organization or group, especially in a landscape that rewards visibility, branding, and simple hero narratives. It’s right to name real contributions. It’s not right to rewrite collective work as the story of one lead actor.

We can hold the reality that many people acted at once, while still keeping immigrants and refugees—and the immigrant-led leadership that shaped the response—visible and at the center.

Principle 4: Tell Everyday Stories, Not Just Institutional Ones

The headline stories tied to the violence of Operation Metro Surge matter and must not be minimized. As lessons are recorded, we should also tell the everyday stories that show how collective effort played out on the ground—people acting without titles, press strategies, or claims of ownership.

In nearly every neighborhood across the region, neighbors showed up in quiet but critical ways. One kept an extra phone charged overnight so families had a reliable way to call for help if they saw ICE activity nearby—offering both reassurance and a lifeline. In another case, a landlord delayed rent and checked in daily with tenants, not as a policy, but as a simple act of care.

This depth of action—across backgrounds, roles, and identities—made a real difference. Grassroots, neighbor‑to‑neighbor support and mutual aid are essential to any honest analysis.

Principle 5: Keep Immigrants Centered as Those Most Impacted

While people across different backgrounds played important roles, immigrants and refugees must remain centered as those most directly affected. That means naming immigrants and refugees clearly and intentionally, not speaking around them or treating their experiences as implied.

Precision about who relief is for matters. Without that clarity, targeted support spreads thin and loses impact. When emergency funds meant for immigrant-owned small businesses are described only as help for “small businesses,” or when rent relief is announced without naming immigrants and refugees as primary recipients, the people most harmed by enforcement are less likely to be adequately served.

Without this specificity, the story may sound more inclusive, but it becomes less true. Precision is not divisive. It is a form of accountability.

What Minnesota's Collective Response Looked Like

To ground these principles in practice, it’s important to name parts of the ecosystem that carried the response—without turning a shared effort into a single story. On the ground, Minnesota’s collective response to Operation Metro Surge took many forms:

Legal services, rights protection, and documentation

The Immigration Hub, a coalition of five pro bono legal services organizations, provided statewide immigration legal services for Minnesotans directly impacted by Operation Metro Surge through trainings, legal clinics, and direct support. The Immigrant Defense Network (IDN), a collaborative effort of 90+ organizations initiated and sustained with significant backbone support from COPAL, trained tens of thousands of constitutional observers who are everyday people, documented enforcement activity and civil rights concerns, and shared Know Your Rights information. Monarca, a coalition of thousands of workers, students, people of faith, parents, clergy, business owners, teachers, caregivers, and young people, trained over 50,000 Minnesotans as neighborhood observers to help protect people’s rights. CAIR-Minnesota supported advocacy and legal action, organized documentation of civil rights violations, and worked with media to surface what was happening on the ground.

Mutual aid, targeted relief, and rapid funding

Many nonprofits across the state—including Unidos Minnesota and Fe y Justicia—joined faith communities and dozens, if not hundreds, of hyper-local mutual aid hubs to help families pay bills, buy groceries, and stay housed. The Immigrant Rapid Response Fund, housed at the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, was created by the founders of the MN Latine Fund and was expanded to include African, Asian, and Native American communities. Guided by 33 philanthropic leaders from these respective communities, the fund raised $14.8 million from more than 65,000 donors and made grants to over 140 Minnesota organizations. In addition to financial relief, many funders throughout the state leveraged capacity, convening power, and their public voice to support front-line groups and impacted families. At McKnight, our Best of Minnesota hub compiled direct support resources, mutual aid opportunities, and sharable content to amplify partner efforts. Minnesota-born Ashley Fairbanks created StandWithMinnesota.com, a decentralized mutual aid site, from her current home in Texas—raising $20 million in direct support for impacted families statewide.

Worker support, organizing, and coalition capacity

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL) supported workers facing sudden income loss and workplace safety concerns, particularly in high‑vulnerability industries such as construction and restaurants, while connecting impacted workers and families to emergency assistance. Tending the Soil, ISAIAH, TakeAction Minnesota, and many others organized community response, economic actions, press, and coalition‑building across faith, labor, and civic networks. On January 23, 2026, these groups joined labor unions and dozens of community‑led organizations to organize the Day of Truth and Freedom, which brought tens of thousands of people to Minneapolis to peacefully protest federal enforcement activity in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good.

Community-specific support and protection

The Center for African Immigrants (CAIRO) provided advocacy, public affairs, and direct support for African immigrant and refugee communities across the metro area and Greater Minnesota. Minnesota 8 and the Southeast Asian Freedom Network’s Southeast Asian Defense Response Project supported Southeast Asian communities through legal resources, direct assistance, and coordinated community safety efforts.

In Central Minnesota, Fe y Justicia served as a critical mutual aid hub for Latine families, providing food and basic necessities for those unable to leave their homes. In Worthington, Minnesota Seeds of Justice offered rapid response and mental health support in a community where the 2006 immigration raids remain a living collective memory. In the Moorhead area, Community Connect Center and the Immigrant Development Center provided legal support, Know Your Rights trainings, and mutual aid amid deep hostility and physical attacks on their building. In South Minneapolis, NACDI and the Indigenous Protectors Movement supported Indigenous communities misidentified as Latine immigrants through community protection and mutual aid.

Everyday people and immigrant small businesses

Everyday people were a critical part of Minnesota’s collective response. Neighbors shared information, watched for enforcement activity, accompanied one another to work or appointments, and quietly redistributed food, childcare, rides, and cash—often acting faster than formal systems could. Immigrant-owned small businesses similarly played a dual role: absorbing significant economic losses while also serving as informal safety hubs, information centers, and sources of material support for workers and families.

Together, these actions underscore that the response was not only organized through institutions, but sustained through daily acts of care, risk‑taking, and solidarity. The collective response was dense and interconnected—legal, financial, organizing, and community‑based—even if not fully coordinated. It was shaped by unequal risk, immigrant‑led leadership, and shared infrastructure across networks. And it still represents only part of the story.

Closing: Treat Visibility as Responsibility

As lessons are shared, the task is not just to name what worked. It is to be clear about who it worked for, under what conditions, and at what cost. Visibility is not about recognition. It is about responsibility—making sure those most impacted, and the many people who acted alongside them, are not erased or oversimplified once the moment passes.

Staying grounded in lived impact, shared effort, and honest complexity helps ensure that what we carry forward strengthens, rather than distorts, what comes next.