The Trump administration’s border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that Operation Metro Surge, the huge deployment of federal immigrant agents across Minnesota that began in December, is coming to an end. He heralded the operation as a “great success” and he said that the Twin Cities and Minnesota will “continue to be much safer for the communities here because of what we have accomplished.”
Homan is an immigration enforcement veteran who has worked under presidents of both parties and is sometimes seen as one of the rare competent operators in Trump’s second administration. But what he said during his announcement was a classic example of Trumpian “alternative facts.” The reality is Metro Surge was a total failure — and achieved the opposite of its purported goal of making Minnesota “safer.”
Trump has caused himself long-term damage on an issue he was considered unbeatable on.
It’s unclear, as of now, how much progress the Trump administration will have made in achieving its alleged goal of capturing the “worst of the worst” in Minnesota by the time the operation ends. But in a review of Department of Homeland Security data in mid-January, a local Fox affiliate found that out of 2,000 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, just 5.2% were violent convicted criminals. That tracks broadly with other assessments of national data that finds that only a small fraction of the people swept up in ICE raids have violent records, and that the “worst of the worst” narrative is a fig leaf for far broader mass deportations.
Along the way, Operation Metro Surge wreaked havoc on Minneapolis.
Minnesota politicians repeatedly likened Metro Surge to a military occupation that was terrorizing the local population. The Minnesota Reformer has a summary of how that went:
Since the beginning of the year, immigration agents have shot three people, killing two; racially profiled people, asking them to produce proof of legal residency; detained legal immigrants and shipped them across state lines, including young children; caused numerous car crashes; deployed chemical irritants on public school property; smashed the car windows of observers and arrested them before releasing them without charges; charged journalists and activists while stymieing investigations of federal agents, leading to an exodus of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, among other high-profile incidents.
In a statement on the conclusion of the operation, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said, “Businesses are reeling from the economic devastation. Families are shattered. Children will carry the trauma of federal agents descending on their neighborhoods for the rest of their lives. The pain inflicted on this community will not fade — it will remain etched in their memory as the moment their own government turned against them.”
Immigration agents could one day come to your town. Do you feel “safer” yet?
Now to the extent that ICE operations in Minneapolis served as a potential test drive for Trump to morph the agency into a secret police force, one could argue that causing chaos, fear and pain was part of the point. So in a perverse way, if the terror was by design, then did Trump succeed at his goal of wrestling a city into submission?
Not really.
Anti-ICE activists in Minneapolis were extraordinarily organized, creative, peaceful and resilient. By setting up community patrols, monitoring immigration raids and constantly protesting in the streets against the presence of ICE, residents of Minneapolis proved effective at exposing to the nation how the agency was acting as a militarized, racially profiling force that often treated the law as an afterthought. The pushback after immigration agents killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in late January was so fierce that Trump was forced on his back foot. Trump extracted bombastic Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino from Minneapolis and distanced himself from remarks made by his own officials describing Pretti as a “terrorist.” Trump also came under fire from lawmakers in his own party, and Republican committee chairs in both the House and the Senate called top administration officials to hearings, in a rare show of attempting to hold the Trump administration to account. Now Trump appears to be slinking out of Minneapolis (although Homan has said a “small footprint of personnel” will remain for “a period of time”). Moreover, Trump has caused himself long-term damage on an issue he was considered unbeatable on. Polls show that Trump’s approval on immigration has plunged in recent months, and support for abolishing ICE has surged. These developments likely help explain why Trump’s overall approval ratings have sunk low. Now any time Trump tries to pull off another Minneapolis-type operation, he will face far greater scrutiny and likely have a lot less political capital to burn. Moreover, activists in the city that faces occupation will have a playbook for how to fight back. The only thing Trump succeeded at with Operation Metro Surge was revealing to us more of his darkest intentions — and how they can be resisted.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
