At around minus fourteen degrees Celsius, a Minneapolis winter is the kind of cold that empties streets quickly. For a man who goes by Hanad, that emptiness has become a kind of shelter. According to SBS Dateline, he stands each morning at a living room window watching the snow fall, closes the blinds whenever a stranger passes, and has not set foot outside the house in two months. Nobody beyond himself and the home's owner knows he is there.
Hanad is not his real name, but his situation is real enough. He was born in Somalia and says he was forced to leave in 2024 after his father and brother were killed by militants from the terrorist group al-Shabaab. He passed through twelve countries, sometimes going more than ten days without food. He applied for asylum in the United States and, as an interim measure, was granted Temporary Protected Status, a designation available to people from countries experiencing civil conflict or environmental disaster that prevents removal and allows recipients to work. It was, he told SBS Dateline, his lifeline.
That lifeline is now under direct threat. In November 2025, President Donald Trump announced he was terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somali immigrants in Minnesota. The move affected a relatively small group: the number of Somalis holding TPS stood at just 705 nationwide, according to a congressional report. But the consequences for individuals like Hanad have been profound, and the operation that followed has affected a far larger circle of people.
Operation Metro Surge
On 4 December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Metro Surge, and by January 2026 it had expanded the effort into what DHS called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, deploying 2,000 agents to the Minneapolis-St Paul metropolitan area. The operation has involved the detention of US citizens and the arrest of 3,000 people. The stated purpose was to remove undocumented immigrants and those with outstanding deportation orders, with officials pointing to a major fraud scandal involving misappropriated pandemic-era welfare funds.
In 2022, federal prosecutors uncovered an enormous scheme to defraud a pandemic meals programme in Minnesota's Somali community, leading to charges against dozens of defendants and a growing number of convictions. The ringleader of the so-called Feeding Our Future scheme was not Somali. Thirty-seven defendants pleaded guilty, according to the Associated Press, though it is unclear how many of them are Somali. Trump has repeatedly used the fraud cases to justify the broader crackdown, despite no evidence linking the wider community to wrongdoing.
The scale of the operation has collided badly with the demographics of the community it targets. There are 83,445 people of Somali ancestry in Minnesota, though only about 5,793, roughly five per cent, are non-citizens, according to 2024 estimates from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Of the more than 80,000 people of Somali descent in the Minneapolis-St Paul area, the vast majority are citizens or legal residents; just a few hundred have Temporary Protected Status.
The practical result has been enforcement actions that have ensnared people with every right to be where they are. One masked federal agent tackled a twenty-year-old American citizen of Somali descent and held him in a chokehold before detaining him in early December. Minneapolis councillor Jamal Osman described speaking with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, taken to an ICE detention centre, fingerprinted, and then released without being offered a way home, some six miles away in snowy conditions. Community organisers and healthcare workers have also reported that ICE agents entered a Minneapolis hospital for more than twenty-four hours and handcuffed a patient to their bed without a judicial warrant.
The Rule-of-Law Problem
The excesses of the operation have generated serious pushback from the judiciary. Politico reported that judges of the Minneapolis US District Court have consistently ruled that the Trump administration violated the law, ruling in favour of the administration in only a handful of cases. In January 2026, Minnesota US District Court Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz ordered ICE acting director Todd Lyons to appear in court over the agency's failure to comply with dozens of court orders in wrongful detention lawsuits, threatening to hold Lyons in contempt.
Those who believe tighter immigration enforcement is both necessary and legitimate have a reasonable argument at the macro level. The Trump administration has pointed to more than 527,000 formal deportations since taking office, alongside a dramatic reduction in illegal border crossings. Among detainees arrested by ICE, however, a shrinking share had a criminal conviction despite the administration's pledge to target dangerous criminals and the "worst of the worst." The promise of precision enforcement and the reality of what is happening in Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighbourhood are not easy to reconcile.
Community members in Minnesota have created informal traffic patrols to monitor for ICE vehicles. Pockets and purses in Somali shopping precincts hang heavier with immigration documents and passports as people fear being stopped. A legal scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School told The Intercept that US citizens of Somali descent were calling to ask whether a traffic ticket could cost them their citizenship, and how they might prove they belonged in the country of their birth.
Fraud, Rhetoric and Context
The administration's justification for targeting this specific community rests partly on real wrongdoing and partly on claims that have not held up to scrutiny. In the weeks before the DHS deployment, conservative commentators elevated the years-old fraud scandal, suggesting it was a reason to target East African migrants in Minneapolis more broadly. A viral social media video in late December 2025, claiming Somali-run childcare centres were committing fraud, drew hundreds of millions of views. State officials subsequently said investigators visited each of the centres featured in the video and found them all operating as expected.
Federal prosecutors have secured convictions for the ringleader of the Feeding Our Future scheme, Aimee Bock, who is white, and several Somali-Americans. Prosecuting that fraud is unambiguously proper. The question that courts, civil liberties groups, and a growing proportion of the American public are asking is whether a targeted enforcement operation against a specific ethnic and religious community, in a city where the overwhelming majority of that community is legally present, is a legitimate exercise of state power or something more troubling.
For Hanad, the question is more immediate. "Sometimes I have scary dreams of getting caught by the authorities and deported back to where I came from," he told SBS Dateline. "The problems that existed in Somalia when I left still exist." He cannot return to a country where, by his account, the violence that killed his father and tortured him has not abated.
Governments everywhere have both the right and the obligation to control who crosses their borders and to enforce immigration law with consistency. That principle is not in serious dispute. What is in dispute, and what the courts in Minneapolis are increasingly finding, is whether enforcement must still operate within constitutional bounds: with warrants, with due process, and without detaining citizens for the colour of their skin or the community they belong to. Legal academics at the University of Minnesota Law School have argued the operation will yield little in terms of actual removals, given the community's predominantly lawful status. If that assessment is correct, the disruption, fear, and judicial costs are being borne by a community largely without immigration violations to answer for. That is an outcome no serious advocate for the rule of law, left or right, should find comfortable.