Front Burner - ICE, and lessons from Minnesota

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Last week, Donald Trump’s border Czar Tom Homan announced a drawdown of ICE personnel in Minnesota, following weeks of chaos and two deadly incidents in the state. Homan insisted that ICE was not surrendering, and this departure was instead evidence of ICE’s success in Minnesota. Beginning in December 2025, ICE announced ‘Operation Metro Surge’ — an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota described as “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” The operation incited weeks of protest, direct action and civil disobedience across the Twin Cities.Today, we take a step back to assess how this operation unfolded, why Minneapolis became the stage for it, and what the unified response across so much of Minnesota says about the state of immigration enforcement in the U.S. today. We’re joined by Robert Worth, a contributing writer with The Atlantic who spent time in Minneapolis last month to report on the protests.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Plesson. So late last week, despite the announced drawdown of personnel, Trump's border czar Tom Homan insisted ICE was not being chased out of Minneapolis. We're not surrendering the president's mission on a mass deportation operation. If you're in the country legally, if we find it, we'll deport you. The drawdown came amid relentless protests in the city and blowback from local officials. And it came with a plea from Homan to stop what he called the resistance.

As for calm in the community and to end the resistance, the impediment, the interference. Again, protest. But stop impeding. Stop interfering. Stop and violating the law. Because we will arrest you. Today on the show, we wanted to take a step back and look at the response that we witnessed from regular Americans and local officials to thousands of ICE agents flooding Minneapolis.

Did civic protest affect change? And if so, what can the rest of the country learn? Robert Worth is here today. He is a contributing writer for the Atlantic, and he spent some time in Minneapolis last month to report on the protests. Robert, hey, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for being here. So historically speaking, the state of Minnesota has not necessarily been central to the American history of civil rights or protests like Alabama or Mississippi have been. But in the last decade or so, it has been home to some of the most nationally defining incidents related to policing and urban protests in the U.S. I'm thinking of the police killing of Falando Castile, of course, the police killing of George Floyd.

Diamond Reynolds, filming the aftermath of a shooting involving her boyfriend, Philando Castile, hit several times by a police officer in Minnesota. So he's licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID in his wallet, out his, um, pocket and he let the officer know. At this hour, fires are still burning on the south side of Minneapolis after protesters took to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd, the unarmed, handcuffed black man who pleaded with a police officer to let him breathe as the officer pinned him to the pavement with a knee to his neck. And now ICE's immigration enforcement operation and the killing of two civilians.

The culture war fracturing America. captured in three gunshots. What did you do? An ice agent shoots dead, a 37-year-old woman in her car. Shame! Tonight, despite the brutal cold, a massive crowd of anti-ice protesters flooding downtown Minneapolis. Mourners left tributes on a frozen snowbag, the site where Alex Pready was shot and killed

by federal agents. I don't know what to do. So we're here. This guy was a hero. And I don't care what anybody else says. He's a Minnesota hero. When thinking specifically about the ICE operation and these most recent killings and the resistance and protests we've seen from people in response,

what has it been like to watch this all unfold? Well, I think, you know, part of what's going on here, I think, is that you have a city that is very progressive politically in a state that is really a of, you know, Democrats and Republicans. And there's a real patchwork of policies there. But there's no question that there's also a long tradition of small D democracy throughout the state of Minnesota, maybe especially in Minneapolis. Certainly, I think, since the George Floyd protests after the killing of,

police killing of George Floyd in 2020, you saw a kind of bolstering of community networks. And I think that contributed to a strong feeling that they wanted to, protect themselves that they were organizing, you know, against what they saw as an intrusive, aggressive federal government, especially after the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. And so I think people there were really prepared in advance, you know, soon after Trump's re-election, but especially, I think, starting last spring and last summer, when there were already some immigration raids in Minneapolis. And so I think people were prepared, maybe not prepared for how ugly things would get, but they were ready.

Trump has sent federal forces into a number of American cities, almost all of them run by Democrats, Washington, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles. Minneapolis provides maybe the clearest example of the administration's law enforcement and immigration policy to date. How would you characterize Trump's relationship towards Minneapolis and what his interest is ultimately about here? There's no question that it's political in the sense that, you know, Waltz obviously was. you know, his vice presidential opponent in the 2024 election, that's part of what's going on. There was obviously indistated reason for them doing this metro surge, the operation was called, was the fraud scandal in Minnesota. It attracted a lot of attention, particularly among Republicans.

A viral video claims to expose misuse of taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on social services. Federal agents say they're now going door to door in Minnesota, investigating what officials. officials describe as rampant fraud that could total more than $1 billion in taxpayer money. Now, it's never been clear to me, you know, I don't think there's really any justification. The fraud scandal was real. It was uncovered by people in Minnesota. You know, it was being prosecuted. It's, there's no real reason to go from a scandal like that to an operation that is about finding illegal immigrants, of which there are really not that many, as far as we know, in, in Minnesota. is certainly not compared with some of the bigger states in Florida, for instance, Texas, California. You know, the fraud scandal itself, you heard the Trump administration talk a lot about the Somali community when it came to that raison d'etra for going in.

That's called the Great Big Minnesota scam with one of the dumbest governors ever in history. Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions, every year. billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. This was a group of people that Trump has used just about every schoolyard insult to describe and whose people he has talked about in similar terms. Their country stakes. We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Elon Omar is garbage.

She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from. Is it clear whether there have been any large-scale deportations of Somalis from Minneapolis in recent weeks? We don't really have clear numbers on who has been deported. We have very limited numbers of the numbers that we have. I think, many of those people are people who actually had already served time for whatever crimes. And some of them actually weren't originally processed in Minnesota. So it's really hard to say exactly who we're talking about when we talk about when we talk. about these these these prosecutions the truth is you know it does as as you were saying that there's there's there's a very important political aspect to this and I think a kind of

signaling to his base you know we're not going to tolerate illegal immigrants especially when there's there's some kind of crime involved yeah I saw Jacob Frye the mayor of Minneapolis say I think that the initial impetus to come to Minnesota was go to Minnesota arrested deport a bunch of Somali people. And then they get here and they realize that the Somali people that would be arrested or deported are all legal. They're American citizens. You can't do that. And so there's not like some meat packing plant or factory where you can go and get a bunch of Somalis. And then they turned their ire towards our Latino community and other immigrants.

Is that an assessment that you're compelled to agree with? I think there's definitely something to it. Absolutely. You know, I think there was a, there was a political case there. They thought the Trump administration, I assume they thought this would win them some popularity with their base. And I think it was clumsy. I think they didn't really know what they were doing. When it, you know, if the goal is, as they've repeatedly said, to to arrest the maximum number of illegal immigrants and especially focusing on those who have committed crimes, they're simply not in the right place to send, you know, 2,500. ICE agents to this city doesn't really make any sense. And it's interesting, you know, I think we'll see soon, we'll get a better sense soon of how this plays with the electorate and specifically with Republicans. But I think it's possible the whole thing is going to look, you know, in six months and a year, like a real misstep, like a real backfire of what he wanted to do.

It's going to end up maybe making look, making immigration enforcement writ large look like it, you know, inevitably turns into some kind of kind of a gestal. Apple operation, which does their ends, really. I want to talk with you more about the response. So you mentioned that there were people who had been getting ready for this

months ago. It seemed to me just watching this from Canada that there was this pretty ad hoc resistance movement that began to grow on the ground in Minneapolis. Protests, of course, but also like really more sophisticated,

organized forms of resistance. The enforcement actions have been disrupted by activists who've launched an organized resistance movement. They shadow officers through the city, blowing whistles to alert neighbors and slowing their movements. U.S. citizens putting their bodies between ICE agents and immigrants, obstructing ICE agents in all kinds of ways, setting up roadblocks and more. And I just, would you describe the civilian response to Trump's campaign in Minneapolis for me? What kind of things did you see? Well, part of it is that there was a spectrum. of politics here.

There are people who were committed, leftists and progressives, who are opposed to deporting any illegal immigrants, I suppose. I know that that's part of what's going on. And some of those were probably the most engaged people. But I think what you have really is that I think the organized response you saw was based on the fact that you have very, very organized neighborhoods,

people who are not only in touch with other, you know, on a personal basis, but also on signal groups. They, much of this began after the 2020 chaos that followed the killing of George Floyd. When it wasn't just a question of these people organizing because they were progressives, you know, there were right-wing provocateurs who were coming into Minneapolis. There was opportunistic crime. And I spoke to a number of people who said, you know, we just, we felt we needed to protect our houses to protect our neighborhoods because we didn't. what was happening. And I think that created a groundwork that made it easier for them to start preparing for what they saw as an inevitable, you know, federal onslaughts, what they would call it. But there were also, you know, things got much more specific. There were NGOs that would do

trainings. And they did trainings of thousands of people, just letting them know mostly sort of, you know, what are your rights? What has ICE been doing so far? How can you protest while remaining within the law, that kind of thing. And then there were more advanced protests that are called direct action, and those have a legacy going back to the 1960s, of training people in confronting, knowing how far you can push things. I witnessed one of these trainings, and it was about, you know, they would do multiple scenarios. You know, let's imagine there's a sudden ice rate on a house near yours. You know, how do you make your voice heard? How do you get out there and form a line and block the federal agents? Another one involved protesting.

an airport that ICE was using for deportations. And that, in fact, happened shortly after I witnessed the training. What kind of people did you meet at these trainings? There's definitely some who looked like your typical protester. If one can say that, I mean, you know, younger people who look visibly progressive, nose rings, that kind of thing. But then I think most of them were not that. I think they're, because, you know, I was there in January.

You know, this was after the killing of Renee Good, which is a huge. hinge point, I think. But I think a lot of people felt, you know, this enforcement is, is really targeting the city in a broadway. There are men with guns. This is, you know, heavily armed men who are harassing people, endangering people. We don't like this. We want our maker voices heard and we're frightened. I mean, you're describing a real contrast with the administration's portrayal of them as extremist or insurrectionist. Yeah, I think there's there's been a lot of misrepresentation going on. As I said, there was definitely a progressive core. And when you go, I mean, I saw some of the confrontations that happened between ICE convoys that were to arrest somebody. One of them, for instance, was at a health center where they had gone presumably to arrest, you know, presumptive illegal migrants. But there was a large crowd of people who had some of them had followed them, some of them happened to be nearby, who began to protest. And again, you see people who are, you are, you know, sort of typical protest types. You see others who are not, who simply feel, you know, this is wrong. But they've all been prepared, you know, you see identical whistles that everybody use to draw attention to it. Screeching whistles have become a defining feature of anti-ice actions.

They first drew national attention during large-scale immigration crackdowns in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles last year. Activists here in Minnesota say the sound these whistles make travels faster than a tech. message, alerting neighbors of when immigration agents are nearby. Supporters say they buy people time. You see almost everyone there using their cell phones to record what's going on. And again, that was very much a part of the trainings that I witnessed. The idea is you are legal observers. You want to make sure that whatever happens is documented for use in any potential legal proceeding. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. and you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. Why BDC for my business? The timing's right. Everything's in motion. Economy's changing. It's all about automation, AI. So I said to myself, take the plunge. Yes, I need a loan, but I also need a hand from a partner who's truly working with me,

helping me no matter what comes next. Not later. Now. Get ready for what's next. With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at BDC.ca.ca.com financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. I wonder if we could go through just a few more examples of some of the stuff that you saw residents of Minneapolis doing. Like, I'm thinking about, like, noise demonstrations or stuff that I've seen some people do outside schools. You mentioned tracking ICE's movements, just if you could just elaborate a little bit more. So in terms of the ICE convoys themselves, there are, ICE is based at a building, called the Whipple Federal Building in the Twin Cities.

And there are people protesting there pretty much all day long. A growing group of protesters, many of which held signs, blue whistles, and yelled at federal agents leaving and arriving at the Whipple Building. Despite the incredible cold temperatures, there are also people who are nearby in cars watching for the ice convoys to come out, and then they chase them to wherever they're going. And sometimes it's pretty hair-raising. I mean, you know, I didn't participate in.

that kind of chase, but I know people who did. And, you know, sometimes the ice convoys wishing to get rid of these people would blow through many red lights. And people chasing them would do the same. And the idea is because they want to be there, because these ice raids were often very brief. They arrive at a house or at a health center or whatever it might be. And they jump out, they want to get their business done to arrest someone, get them into the cars and get out of there. So the observers want to get there as quickly as possible. That is one thing that's going on. I should make clear it's not just about ICE doing enforcement. Because of the anxiety about this, the whole city of Minneapolis is elaborately organized, again, to monitor, to protect

and observe. And for instance, very often you'll be near a school and you'll see someone standing across this looks like an ordinary observer. In fact, these are people who, they have whistles, they have a cell phone. They are checking in with each other. I mean, one, One morning I was outside a school saga like this began talking to him almost immediately another observer came up and said, hi, what's going on, you know, checked in just in case I was an ice agent because they told me that they were, they had heard about ice agents posing as journalists. So the whole city is activated in some way. Again, not just to chant and scream and, you know, protest. but to monitor everything that's going on.

And that's particularly true when you're talking about children. I think everybody, one of the things that helped to broaden these protests from their progressive core was the recognition that with ICE agents are doing arrests outside of school. All the children see that, not just the one whose parents are being targeted. And so I think there's a feeling that we don't want our kids to be exposed to that kind of thing. Right. I think you write about these raids that were happening in the apartment buildings across from the school and how one child actually saw his own home get raided and obviously burst into tears. And, you know, the teachers had to shut the blinds. I mean, it's really heart-wrenching. It is. And I've spoke to a number of teachers there and school administrators. And they felt that, you know, this has reached a point where it's sort of traumatizing to the whole community.

in the case you mentioned, that that school had ICE agents sort of circling it starting in December. And everybody was highly aware of what was going on. They were kind of waiting with dread for when the crackdown and the arrests would take place. And then when they did, what did they do in the school? They were trying to block anyone from potentially coming in, right? Any agents from potentially coming in? That's right. I think, you know, I'm not aware of ICE having actually targeted a school building.

But what happened here was, again, for weeks that the cars had been circling. Nobody knew what they were going to do. They actually had arrested some parents, I think, after school. But when the big, you know, whatever you want to call it, operation near the school happened, the parents thought and the teachers thought that it was the school itself that was being targeted. They locked the school down before the parents formed a line, you know, linking arms to block the school entrance. And as it happened, in fact, that, you know, the raid was on an apartment building across from the school. But from what I could tell, it was extremely upsetting to everybody involved.

This is clear and present here. That's Fridley Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Lewis describing what she says she's seeing from federal immigration agents on or around school property, including elementary schools. Attendance in the district has dropped nearly one-third since the surge began. It's worth, I think, us talking about the fact that this resistance campaign on the ground of Minneapolis wasn't just civilians. I mean, we're talking about school officials. But it also included state officials, city leaders, churches, unions, even local police all pushing in the same direction. I mean, the chief of police called the death of Renee Good. Predictable.

And it's also entirely preventable. How rare is it that that kind of alignment, would happen when thinking about the history of urban protests. I think that's a big part of what made Minneapolis so distinctive. You know, you'd had certainly protests in other cities. But in, you know, Minneapolis does have this progressive political tradition. And so you had that the city officials really line up. And this is a city where there was quite a bit of tension between the mayor, Jacob Frye, and the city council previously.

But there was no daylight between them once things, once ICE was in town. And also, you know, there are city ordinances that prevent, you know, government employees from working with ICE. That's not true necessarily in the rest of the state. You know, Minnesota is kind of a patchwork of different policies. But so to some extent, you know, these city officials are simply following their city's policies, whatever their personal politics might have been. But there's no question. And, you know, everybody saw Jacob Fry in those press conferences, public statements, very emotionally saying, we all feel that this is absolutely an assault on us. And Governor Waltz said

similar things. Donald Trump, I call on you once again, remove this force from Minnesota. They are showing chaos and violence. There's little, I can say, again, that'll make this situation better. But I do have a message for our community, for our city. And I have a message for ICE. Get the f*** out of Minneapolis. Was there a point to you where it became clear that the federal government had made a miscalculation about the city, that this was not playing out in the way that they had hoped that it would or intended it to? Yes, absolutely. I think the killing of Renee Good was such a turning point.

You know, the whole country pretty much saw that. And then they saw it again with Alex Preti. people saw not only what looked like someone just being without justification just murdered, but they also saw the lack of training on the part of a lot of these ICE agents, not just with those killings, although that's where obviously it was most extreme. But even in some of the smaller nonviolent encounters, these people kind of looked clumsy.

And I think, you know, there was a feeling that this is not a well-organized operation. And then at a certain point, you saw, you know, Republicans pushing back. There was Chris Meadle, a guy who was running, a lawyer who was running for governor as a Republican. And he stopped his campaign. He recorded a video that was widely shared on which he said, you know, as a Republican. And this is a guy, by the way, a lawyer who's represented cops a lot as part of his work. And he said, as a Republican, I cannot be associated with this. United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear.

United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That's wrong. ISIS authorizes agents to raid homes using a civil warrant that need only be signed by a border patrol agent that's unconstitutional and it's wrong. That to me was a real threshold where it just seemed clear that this was not what the Trump administration had expected. And that's when you started to see Trump, you know, changing his tune a bit. Well, the administration, I think, was trying hard to signal to both camps, right? They were saying to their own followers, they were saying, we're not backing down. You know, those guys are the bad guys. But they were also saying, okay, you know, we'll try to soften this a bit. Yeah, I mean, it was really fascinating to watch just the pretty immediate rebuke of some of the language that the administration was using to describe Renee Good, but also Alex Prattie, that they were terrorists. This is classic terrorism. This individual who came,

with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. Stephen Miller labeled Preti a domestic terrorist. Does the president agree with them? Look, as I've said, I have not heard the president characterize Mr. Prety in that way. However, I have the public polling on this across the country has also been pretty astounding. I mean, you have fans at wrestling matches chanting F. ICE. It does not seem popular at all with the American people at at the moment. Despite this, Tom Holman did this presser in Minnesota last week. He says that... We will draw down 700 people defective today. 700 law enforcement personnel. And let me be clear,

President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration. And immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country. My goal with the support of President Trump is to achieve a complete... draw down and then this surge as soon as we can. Do you see it as a retreat or not, right? There are still 2,000 agents that remain. It is at a minimum a change of tone and to some extent a change of the way that they're doing these operations.

There are fewer of the large operations going on, according to what I'm told. And they're trying to do more targeted stuff like, you know, showing up in a house with a smaller group of agents to arrest a single person. that's my understanding. And that makes it a little bit harder for the monitors to chase them every time. What they hope for, I think, is to have fewer scenes, fewer confrontations. You know, the longer term political fallout is a little bit harder to guess at. But I think what you're saying about the political, the popular pushback is real. And my sense is that this is ultimately going to look like a real miscalculation. There's an interesting moment coming up,

actually on Tuesday, there was going to be a congressional hearing led by a Republican who has been, you know, willing to break with his party. And it's about ICE. And I think that'll be an interesting signal, which way things are going. You know, Minnesota will not be the last city to undergo this kind of deportation operation. A judge blocked the Trump administration from ending temporary protected status for Haitians last week. but that hasn't eased concerns that ICE will target Springfield, Ohio next or soon. The New Yorker is reporting that Haitians in Miami are preparing for mass deportations.

At the same time, Trump said last week that there are lessons to be taken away from all that has happened in Minneapolis. I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough. We're dealing with really hard criminal. But as you were just saying, perhaps there's kind of a bit of a change in tactics and how ICE goes about doing its job. But if we look at Minnesota as a sort of test case for both the administration's immigration enforcement and effective resistance, what are the lessons here? What are the takeaways here? I think a lot of the people in Minneapolis, the people who were protesting ICE and monitoring ICE are hoping that their tactics, will spread. You know, I spoke to one woman who works from NGO who was involved with some of the

trainings that I mentioned earlier. And she said, I'm so proud that Minneapolis gets detained the federal beast. That might be a little bit wishful thinking the federal beast is pretty powerful. But there's a, there's a real hope that some of that will will spread. You know, other states, other cities don't necessarily have the background of small D democracy and mutual aid that that Minneapolis does, but I think there's no question if there were activists who elsewhere who would like to emulate that. On the government side, I think to the extent that what they really want to do is just maximize the number of illegal immigrants they detain, I think they will have learned something here that it doesn't help to have this kind of

ugly violent conflict going on in the streets. But I think we also have to ask, you know, what are their real goals? You know, do they want, in fact, to intimidate people? You know, is there some performative cruelty here? I don't think we can count that out. And I think we need to take into account that immigration enforcement, the large-scale deportations, remain very popular among Republicans and broadly, you know, fairly popular among Americans. It's just a question of how it's done.

So I think there are a lot of questions about, you know, how they're a lot of questions about, you know, how this is going to go forward. Robert, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. Sure. Happy to be here. All right. That's all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca. com.