On February 12, 2026, U.S. Border Czar Tom Homan announced an end to Operation Metro Surge (OMS), the largest immigration enforcement operation since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was founded in 2002. The announcement came just under three weeks after former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was reassigned and Homan assumed oversight of the massive immigration operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Homan offered no precise end date, stating only that agents would be gradually drawing down over the following week.
After ten weeks of sustained occupation and the terrorizing of our communities, the reaction to the “end” of Operation Metro Surge (OMS) has been mixed. While some have experienced a sense of relief and perhaps even victory, the overwhelming feeling shared by organizers on the ground in the Twin Cities has been caution, distrust, numbness, or a combination of all three. We continue to track abductions of our neighbors daily, especially in the suburbs and exurbs of the Twin Cities and in rural areas across the state. We have seen more covert tactics to evade legal observation, including incidents such as ICE agents going door to door pretending to be environmental canvassers and a female agent posing as a stranded motorist in a northern suburb, only to detain a good samaritan who stopped to offer help.
In early February the government announced that OMS had surpassed 4,000 arrests of “illegal aliens,” and the ACLU reports that numerous U.S. citizens have been arrested for legal observation or due to racial profiling. It is unknown how many people have been deported during OMS and countless detainees have been transferred to other detention centers such as Camp East Montana in El Paso, TX and the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. On February 25, the ACLU reported that the 970 federal agents deployed in OMS remain in Minnesota and that 470 will remain for the month of March. The Twin Cities Metro population is less than half a million people—nearly 1,000 agents present is still very much an ongoing occupation. That figure is 2,000 less than at the height of OMS but still 850 more than the baseline before December 2025. Does this mean the operation is truly over? “We will believe it when we see it” has been a common refrain amongst organizers. In practice, “seeing it” means continuing neighborhood patrols despite Homan’s announcement and a perceived decline in federal activity.
In other words, our work is far from over. The history of resistance to U.S. imperialism is ongoing, as has always been the case.
U.S. Imperialism Eats Itself in the Belly of the Beast
When folks ask what it has felt like to be organizing on the ground in Minneapolis over the past several months, I immediately feel the answer in my body: in my tight shoulders and lack of an appetite for weeks on end. Neocolonialism and imperialism are not abstractions—they are lived physically, and occupation takes a toll on the body.
The weekend before Christmas, 500 additional agents were deployed to the Twin Cities, joining the roughly 150 HSI and DHS personnel already based out of the Whipple Federal Building. Within weeks, another 2,000 arrived. By mid-January, it was estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 federal agents were on our streets. This presence was felt while trying to do basic things like walk my dog or go to the grocery store.
At the height of this surge—from just before Christmas until the murder of Alex Pretti—it was nearly impossible to drive around South Minneapolis without seeing ICE or other federal agents.
The Twin Cities metro area, including the southern suburbs, is the 22nd largest metropolitan area in the United States. We are not your Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. Yet at the height of this surge—from just before Christmas until the murder of Alex Pretti—it was nearly impossible to drive around South Minneapolis without seeing ICE or other federal agents. The experience reminded me of navigating military occupation elsewhere: moving through blockades in El Alto, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, or living along the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico and Texas, where students of color I worked with were routinely targeted by the overlapping arms of the border industrial complex.
So many arms, it was hard to keep up with the acronyms: Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), local sheriffs, the National Guard, state troopers, and local police. During OMS, my neighborhood in South Minneapolis began to feel like a border zone. The agents looked ridiculous standing awkwardly in snowbanks in subzero temperatures, underdressed, shivering, and visibly uncomfortable during prolonged stand-offs following the murders of Renée Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24. Only in the past two weeks have I stopped seeing ICE agents daily.
Living in occupied Minneapolis meant cycling between adrenaline and exhaustion. I crashed hard after being detained by ICE on December 10 and held for 8 hours at the Whipple Building without a phone call. As a U.S. citizen, I was stunned by how quickly constitutional rights seemed to disappear. I had no idea of the horror and grief on the horizon.
But even as I continue to feel rage and sorrow over the kidnappings and killing of friends and neighbors—many of whom are still being held in detention centers along the southern border—I am also proud of my comrades, my neighbors, and my city. We resisted, and we will continue to resist.
Hyper-Local Organizing Is The Only Way
When I say we won, I mean that DHS and HSI have been forced to respond to us—to the people—at every stage of the operation. That dynamic was visible from the very beginning of the surge, in Tom Homan’s recent drawdown statement, and in the organizing that continues today. The clearest example is the evolution of the rapid response infrastructure.
The first signs that our community was under occupation came the night of December 1, when neighbors were kidnapped from their cars and homes faster than observers could arrive through existing non-profit-led rapid response systems. This marked a shift from federal activity in the preceding weeks, including actions at Bro-Tex Manufacturing and in the Payne-Phaylen neighborhood of St. Paul. In both of these instances, protestors showed up en masse thanks to call-outs organized by Monarca (Unidos), MIRAC, COPAL, and the Immigrant Defense Network. These actions were effectively showdowns between the community and federal agents and/or local police, and ICE would have certainly kidnapped more people if residents had not responded in large numbers. These victories were powerful and encouraging, but also foreshadowed much worse to come.
With the onset of OMS on December 1, federal agents quickly changed their tactics to avoid large confrontations. Organizers realized that the existing rapid response model was too slow: by the time observers arrived, agents were already gone. In those first few days, experiential knowledge emerged—if you could not be on site in six minutes or less, it was too late. At the height of the occupation in January, that window shrank to two minutes.
The response was a pivot to hyper-local organizing. Neighborhood Signal chats—many left over from the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020—became decentralized rapid response hubs. The goal shifted towards organizing these chats so that every block in the Twin Cities could be mobilized immediately when someone was being targeted. As organizers experimented and adapted, a web of autonomous neighborhood groups emerged across the metro area and into the outer-ring suburbs.
We also learned from comrades in other cities. Throughout December, Chicago’s Protect Rogers Park (PRP) hosted a series of webinars to share tactics from their own rapid response organizing. The core message was simple: overlapping, hyper-local organizing is the only way. No one needs to understand everything, but everyone needs to understand something. Twin Cities dispatchers started running multiple virtual trainings each week to an ever-growing pool of new observers. Demand grew so quickly that waiting lists formed, limited by Signal’s 50-person call capacity. By late December, a vast network of decentralized rapid response networks were operating in all four cardinal directions. It was satisfying to see how much this pissed off the agents, who truly did not seem to understand concepts such as community, grassroots organizing, and knowing your neighbors.
The success of this organizing came from the merging of grassroots and institutional resources.
At the same time, nonprofit infrastructure adapted as well. The Monarca Rapid Response line evolved into a key component of the broader rapid response system. Monarca dispatchers coordinated directly with hyperlocal chats, allowing witnesses not already connected to Signal groups—such as the elderly or a vulnerable immigrant neighbor—to trigger immediate site-specific responses. I have witnessed this chain of communication prevent detentions multiple times within blocks of my house, and the integration extended a key link to vulnerable communities that the Signal chats alone were largely missing.
The success of this organizing came from the merging of grassroots and institutional resources. Minneapolis was able to resist because resistance became a mass movement: suburban moms, South Minneapolis anarchist crustpunks, mutual aid networks, and nonprofit leaders working side by side. These unlikely comrades put aside differences to truly build something together, weaving an intricate web of overlapping yet distinct networks of care. The complexity of the parts makes the whole stronger, and redundancy is an asset. The basket we wove together is strong enough to hold us all, and will continue to do so as the struggle goes on.
This is Far From Over
There are many reasons this work is far from over, some immediately material. Over the past three months, thousands of working class people—immigrants and citizens alike—have lost income, had to shelter at home, and endured intense state violence. The resulting economic fallout represents a public health crisis. A February 17 report by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) estimates that Operation Metro Surge generated between $27.4 and $51.3 million in excess rent debt in immigrant households alone. We know that the real number is much higher when accounting for all low-wage workers regardless of immigration status in targeted sectors such as restaurants, hospitality, and construction. The negative effects help explain why anti-ICE organizing became a mass movement, with labor organizing, rent strike organizing, and general strikes playing key roles in the movement fabric.
On January 23, a coalition of over 90 faith groups, unions, worker centers and NGOs coordinated the largest general strike in Minnesota history and the largest in the United States in nearly 80 years. That’s when it became evident, not only in the Twin Cities but across the country, that anti-ICE organizing is a labor issue. One in four Minnesotans participated in the strike in some way, with over 80,000 people taking part in the Day of Truth and Freedom march in Downtown Minneapolis. The following morning, CBP agents murdered Alex Pretti on Eat Street in the Whittier neighborhood. Reminiscent of leftist mass movements in Latin America, students and teachers played a central role in sustaining and escalating the movement. On January 30 several University of Minnesota student unions and youth socialist organizations mobilized tens of thousands of people to the streets yet again.
As January ended and those who had been organizing on the ground for weeks began to hit fatigue, students tirelessly kept up the fight by chaining themselves to Morrill Hall at the University of Minnesota, organizing repeated noise demonstrations at the Graduate Hotel, and facing mass arrests. Across Minneapolis and St. Paul, anarchist pop-up filter blockades also began to bloom, echoing forms of militant bloqueo protest familiar to resistance movements across Latin America. Young organizers refused to accept a return to business as usual while masked federal agents terrorized our neighborhoods. The kids are alright.
Housing quickly became a central front in the struggle. On January 30, community groups, labor unions, neighborhood associations, and elected leaders—including State Senator Omar Fateh and Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai—announced the formation of Twin Cities Tenants, a cities-wide tenant union. On February 17, the union called for a March 1 rent strike with four demands: an eviction moratorium, state-subsidized rental relief, extended eviction timelines, and the removal of ICE from Minnesota. The union has until Feb 28 for at least 10,000 renters to pledge to strike, and if successful it will be the largest rent strike in Minnesota history. The campaign reflects a broader understanding that recovery from the surge requires more than a reduction in federal presence; it requires material protections for those who bore the brunt of the operation. Housing security, organizers argue, is both a public safety issue and a human right, and folks are ready to win.
The “Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE” Week of Action, held from February 25 to March 1 by a coalition of left organizations across the Twin Cities, aimed to share tactics and build long-term capacity beyond the surge. According to their “Love Letter To The People Of The Twin Cities,” the goal was to “bring together people from near and far to learn, practice, and grow in the skills and commitments that will be required to not just force ICE out of our home, but to abolish ICE altogether.” For many on the ground, the next phase means sharing the skills we have learned with movements elsewhere and sustaining abolitionist horizons—we must follow ICE wherever it goes and not stop until the entire damn institution is abolished.
We refuse to go back to the way things were before OMS. Even outside moments of escalation, approximately 150 DHS personnel work year-round in Minnesota, and they are a constant threat to our communities. We don’t just want ICE out of Minnesota, we want ICE out of everywhere. We demand an end to the Border Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex, and the return of our detained neighbors and community members. The work ahead also includes addressing the emotional and economic toll of the occupation of our city, and sustaining the mass networks that emerged over the past two months.
Operation Metro Surge may be drawing down, but the conditions that produced mass resistance remain. Now is not the time to slow down, but to push onwards with determined resolve and new imaginations of collective struggle, until all of us are free.
Jac Kovarik is a writer and communications professional with years of experience writing about Latin American politics and left-wing movements, including serving as an editor at NACLA. They currently work as the Communications Coordinator for El Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), a worker center in South Minneapolis.