Friday, February 20, 2026

The Surge That Didn’t End: Witnesses to an Unfinished Occupation

 

A month ago in Minneapolis, a children’s performer named Stella Carlson stayed when others ran. She filmed federal agents firing ten shots into the body of a 37‑year‑old U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, who was not suspected of any crime and was never charged with anything.

In a later CNN interview, Carlson’s voice shook as she described feeling utterly abandoned: “nobody’s here for us… nobody’s going to help us… so it broke down to: then it’s us. We only have each other.” Yet she still insisted she believed Minnesota officials “want to protect us” and were trying to help, even if their hands were tied by the Trump administration.

Those are the people Democrats now celebrate as “brave protesters” who, in Sen. Klobuchar’s words, “stood up” and “stared down” ICE. The problem is that the version of reality being told about them is no longer compatible with what is still happening on the ground.

The day the surge “ended”

On February 12, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan stepped to a podium in Minneapolis and announced that Operation Metro Surge was ending. In the same breath, he warned that “forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating or interfering with a federal law enforcement officer is a crime,” and said the administration would not tolerate “agitators who are just causing havoc.”

Democratic leaders immediately accepted his premise. Senator Amy Klobuchar declared that “ICE is getting out of Minnesota,” crediting “Minnesotans who stood strong and stared them down.” Attorney General Keith Ellison issued an official statement: “Make no mistake: the people of Minnesota ended Operation Metro Surge… this is a win for Minnesota,” praising “voices, dedication to peaceful protest, documenting abuses, and commitment to providing for each other” as the decisive force. Governor Tim Walz, who days earlier had warned of a potential “Fort Sumter moment” and called the surge an “armed force” attacking his constituents, shifted into talk of “drawdown in days” and “healing” without demanding publicly verifiable proof that thousands of agents had actually left.

In theory this is the moment when an opposition insists on receipts: How many agents are still here? Which hotels have emptied out? How many flights have departed and where? Instead, both the administration and the state’s top Democrats agreed to treat “ending” as a story beat, not a claim to be tested.

What small outlets kept seeing

If you want to know whether ICE actually left, you have to leave the headline outlets and follow the people who never stopped watching.

Bring Me The News, a small Minnesota site, ran a February 16 live blog whose headline and lede kept the surge in the present tense: “we’re following Monday’s developments from the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota.” It explicitly promised to “continue to provide daily updates until the change is confirmed on the ground,” and then logged fresh raids and arrests in Burnsville, Chaska, Rochester, and Columbia Heights after Homan’s announcement. ICEOut and allied volunteers kept posting maps and alerts: people grabbed at bus stops, construction sites, and workplaces, a climate of fear local farmers described as ongoing rather than resolved.

Protesters’ own language matched that reality. Minnesota AFL‑CIO and Indivisible’s “Day Out for Democracy” march on February 16 did not sound like a victory lap; their call was for “ICE out of Minnesota immediately” and “an end to ICE’s occupation.” ICE OUT and MIRAC organizers were blunt: “Operation Metro Surge is NOT over!! We continue to stand…,” “ICE OUT NOW,” “no compromise.” In one reel from that day, Marcia Howard faces a crowd and says, “DAY OUT FOR DEMOCRACY / ICE OUT NOW… You ever hear of a Minnesota goodbye?… It might be a long while… We demand ICE OUT NOW with NO COMPROMISE. We call on our leaders from City Hall to the Governor’s Office to stand with the people.”

None of this is the language of people who believe the surge has ended. It is the language of people who believe they are living under an ongoing occupation that their own side refuses to acknowledge.

Sahan Journal, a nonprofit focused on immigrant communities, put the contradiction into a headline: “Operation Metro Surge hasn’t ended. It’s expanded to the suburbs.” Its February 19 report describes what happened after the cameras left downtown. Observers in Columbia Heights and Fridley say convoys and “abductions” continued “those first couple days” after the announcement; what changed was that agents shifted into “really old, beat up garbage cars,” unmarked minivans, plain clothes, and smaller teams. In Eden Prairie, one volunteer says, “they’re there every single day”—unmarked vehicles angle themselves around children’s bus stops for hours, stage outside apartments, parks, and small businesses. Union hotel workers and community monitors report ICE still lodged in multiple hotels around the metro, with 20 or more ICE vehicles routinely parked in suburban hotel lots.

State lawmakers from those districts describe the same thing: drones and helicopters, unmarked cars tailing them and local observers, residents still too afraid to leave their homes. Representative Alex Falconer recounts an unmarked vehicle flashing lights and following him toward the Capitol; Senator Erin Maye Quade calls the damage “generational” and says “Operation Metro Surge has morphed into something else,” not ended.

None of this appears in the politicians’ victory posts. None of it has forced them to revise their story.

Elsewhere: the same operation, different zip codes

Minnesota is not unique. In Los Angeles, LAist reports that immigration raids and mass arrests have continued for months, with DHS itself boasting that more than 10,000 people have been detained in the region since June. A Koreatown church that used to serve 500–600 people in a weekly food distribution now sees maybe 350; some weeks they cut the line early “because the ICE agents were around here,” as families stay home rather than risk groceries or school.

On Long Island, the East End Beacon describes federal agents in camouflage labeled “Police,” “HSI,” and “ERO” detaining a man in the parking lot of a family courthouse in Riverhead, while one agent stands with pepper spray out and residents film in fear. Locals describe people “abducted” off streets and coffee shops, and a woman in Patchogue arrested simply for filming a raid and released only because local police recognized her. An immigrant‑rights group, OLA (Organización Latino Americana of Eastern Long Island), begs the town board for a basic resolution requiring masked agents to identify themselves and to coordinate with local police; the board sits through three hours of other business and says nothing.

In Chatham County, Georgia, The Current GA documents roving patrols on a one‑mile stretch of road near a K‑8 school, beginning months before a teacher’s death. Unmarked SUVs with grille lights box in drivers “who appear to be Latino,” masked agents surround the car, demand ID without identifying themselves, issue no citations, and leave. A U.S. citizen and two Central American legal residents recount being stopped this way multiple times—“driving while Hispanic”—long before February 16, when ICE tried to stop an undocumented man with a prior deportation order, he fled, and his truck struck and killed special‑education teacher Linda Davis on her way to school. National outlets cover Davis as a discrete tragedy—a “man fleeing ICE” killed a beloved educator—without integrating the months of local reporting on roving patrols and racial profiling that made such an outcome likely.

The pattern is the same: small, often precarious outlets document an ongoing interior operation and its abuses; large platforms treat what they see as isolated accidents, backstory for polls, or remnants of a crisis that is already over.

Local journalists and observers under fire

None of this is without cost. LA Public Press’s editor would later describe covering immigration enforcement in her city under Trump as work where “your local reporter needs the same protection as a war correspondent.” Freelancers were hit by rubber bullets; one was struck in the face. A reporter’s immigrant mother was followed from her hospital job and stopped by immigration agents near her home. The International Women’s Media Foundation and Committee to Protect Journalists report that in 2025 at least 32 journalist detentions and arrests in the United States occurred while covering immigration actions or protests, most ending without charges but not without damage: assaults, kettling, weapons drawn, cameras broken.

When local reporters in Denver and San Jose did what local reporters are supposed to do—follow unmarked vehicles and report on raids—Homan and other officials went on Fox News to blame “media leaks” for low arrest numbers and threatened to restrict access. The new FCC chair opened an investigation into a California radio station that described undercover ICE operations on air, raising the prospect that “reporting in the public interest” could itself be treated as a regulatory violation. As one war correspondent put it, this is “an agency trying to silence unembedded reporting.”

So the information we do have exists because local journalists, volunteers, and faith leaders have accepted real personal risk to collect it. The hard part—evidence gathering—is not what’s missing.

The blink—and what it reveals

In theory, this is exactly what opposition parties, the “fourth estate,” and adversarial outlets are for: to take those fragments of dangerous, high‑value local reporting and stitch them into a binding national reality. In practice, the opposite has happened.

Within days of warning about “Fort Sumter” and describing Metro Surge as an occupation, Walz was talking about drawdown and “healing.” Klobuchar rushed to proclaim that “ICE is getting out of Minnesota,” invited people to refill hotel rooms, and appeared on national shows in pure victory and autopsy mode. Frey praised “brave protesters” and talked about recovery, while admitting he had no data on flights, hotel departures, or agent counts. Protesters kept chanting “ICE OUT NOW” and insisting “Operation Metro Surge is not over,” but their own leaders chose to narrate a win instead.

Litigation continues. The ACLU and ACLU of Minnesota filed Tincher v. Noem in January to challenge suspicionless stops, racial profiling, and retaliation against observers, amended their complaint in mid‑February to add journalists and more than 80 new incidents, and have brought cases elsewhere against NSPM‑7 and related tactics. Yet when Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden appointee, ruled on Minnesota’s bid to rein in Metro Surge, she described “racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions,” called the harms “profound and even heartbreaking,” and still declined to halt the operation invoking deference to federal authority and the likelihood of appellate reversal. The ACLU’s own February statements on Homan’s announcement warn of “hollow words” and vow to monitor, but also adopt “ending” as the operative frame, focusing on rebuilding and accountability rather than insisting on public, real‑time verification of drawdown.

Adversarial media have followed a similar arc. In January, outlets like The Intercept and WIRED did genuine work: exposing a secret “domestic terrorist” list that sweeps in antifascist and climate activists, mapping more than 150 new ICE offices and $38.3 billion in detention warehouses and “mega‑facilities,” documenting Track‑2 build‑out and database tie‑ins. By mid‑February, those same brands had turned back to structural essays, polls, and election coverage. With a few exceptions, they are not integrating the new Sahan, LAist, East End Beacon, Current GA, ICEOut, or Bring Me The News evidence into a live national narrative about ongoing enforcement.

Even NPR’s February 18 story on Minneapolis observers—detailing how ICE now pulls guns on people like “Jess,” smashes car windows, and detains observers for eight hours for following at a distance—quietly contradicts the “protesters won / surge ended” story it previously took for granted, but never pulls those threads together. It shows that abuses in Minnesota are “increasing,” not fading, and that the people credited with “ending the surge” are now being told their mere presence is a crime. The narrative does not adjust. At that point the United States looks less like a democracy “under threat” and more like a competitive authoritarian, personalist regime where elections continue but meaningful opposition and truthful narration have largely been absorbed.

At the same time, Trump’s second term has moved rapidly toward open personalism. His name and face now hang over the Department of Justice, the U.S. Institute of Peace, national park passes, and even proposed coins and stadiums; scholars like Steven Levitsky and Barbara Walter now openly describe the United States as a competitive authoritarian or electoral autocracy rather than a full democracy. Bondi’s January 24 letter to Walz explicitly tied any “ending” of Metro Surge to turning over Minnesota’s voter rolls and welfare data, scrapping sanctuary policies, and opening local jails to ICE—a fusion of immigration enforcement, election control, and retributive justice that DOJ then sealed with a literal Trump banner on its headquarters.

Against that backdrop, what happened in Minnesota this month is not just a local failure. When a regime can kill citizens on camera, call them “terrorists” without evidence, refuse to share the evidence it does have, expand the agencies involved, and then offer an “ending” story that both parties and much of the press gratefully adopt while the operations continue elsewhere, it is hard to see how “still a democracy under threat” remains the right description.

That is why I find myself writing this not as an advocate but as a witness. In principle, institutions could still change course, but my considered judgment—as a social theorist and as a person trying to tell the truth in real time—is that the opposition we have has already buckled and chosen the “protesters won” story over the people it claims to represent. The information exists. Local journalists, volunteers, and ordinary people like Stella Carlson have done their part, at real personal cost. What is missing is any institutional opposition with sufficient reach and will to treat that information as binding reality once it conflicts with a comforting story. I hope I am wrong about how far gone the system already is. But given the record, silence feels less like caution and more like complicity.

                              ***

Postscript: 

 

In the week since Tom Homan first declared the surge “over,” the official numbers have only gotten more surreal. On February 19, he told CNN there are “probably…2,000” agents still in Minnesota but insisted the “immigration surge” is over and that the state will be back to a “regular footprint” of 150 within a week. The anchor did not ask how 2,000 counts as anything but surge‑level presence, or how this squares with his own claim five days earlier that “well over a thousand” of 3,000 had already left and “hundreds more” were leaving in the next few days. On February 18—between those two sets of numbers—NPR reported that intimidation and detention of legal observers in Minneapolis are increasing, not fading, with windows smashed, guns drawn, and observers held for eight hours at the Whipple building. On February 20, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Angie Craig, forced by a Noem‑imposed seven‑day rule to book their oversight visit more than a week in advance, were shown an emptied and freshly scrubbed Whipple facility and told there are now “fewer than 500” agents in Minnesota, that only about 20 people a day are being picked up, and that no observers have been held there in recent days. They called the emptiness “convenient,” but publicly accepted the 500‑agent figure and did not press the obvious questions about who had been moved out hours before, or how any of this fits with the continuing reports of harassment and suburban raids. Taken together, those three days capture the new normal: incompatible numbers and narratives offered in rapid succession, and a political and media class—including Democrats—willing to accept each in turn without forcing them to add up, while the largest interior ICE deployment in the country quietly continues in Minnesota and other cities slip under the same gun out of frame. 

Selected sources (with links)

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