Fifteen Below Zero
- Genocide Watch
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
Fifteen Below Zero
The New York Review of Books
January 30, 2026
Up against the delirious scale of Operation Metro Surge, ordinary people juggle daily life with looking out for each other however they can.
Driving to St. Paul from the airport you pass under Fort Snelling, an enormous limestone structure from the early nineteenth century. In November 1862, following the bloody conclusion of the US–Dakota War, 1,700 people from the Dakota tribe were forced to march to Fort Snelling and kept in a concentration camp on the river flats below. The next month thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota—the largest mass execution in US history. Between one hundred and three hundred people died in the camp. When I was a kid, growing up in St. Paul, we didn’t learn about any of this, but we did regularly go to Fort Snelling on field trips to see historical reenactors light fake cannons. The rock candy in the general store was a big draw.
Today Fort Snelling is across the highway from a new detention operation, at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, which serves as the local headquarters for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the past St. Paul, across the river, has largely been immune to the sorts of civilian unrest that Minneapolis has experienced over the decades; even during the 2020 uprisings things stayed fairly low-key there.
But when I started calling people back home in the Twin Cities in early January, everyone was on edge. One person sent me a Minnesota Public Radio article about a man beaten unconscious by ICE agents and detained at a gas station just blocks from her house, in a sleepy neighborhood of St. Paul. Another told me that ICE had been patrolling the city’s central arteries, driving up and down University and Snelling.
By then it was clear that ICE is not in Minnesota primarily to detain and deport people. The agents have come, above all, to terrorize Minnesotans. Why else would they have shown up dressed for war in tactical gear?
The Obama administration deported millions of people across the country without so much fanfare.
Operation Metro Surge was not well thought-out, as videos of ICE vehicles stuck in snow and agents slipping on frozen streets emphasize. But this realization brings no comfort whatsoever; even before they started killing people, it was obvious that the agents’ incompetence only made them more dangerous. The bitter cold obstructs the operation but also seems to collude with it: ICE is driving around looking for targets in weather that keeps all but those who have no choice hunkered down indoors.
As the surge has ramped up, the agents haven’t seemed to fear cameras. In fact, they participate in broadcasting their own brutality, often using colored smoke canisters to yield theatrical visuals. On Reddit I watched an agent in the passenger seat of a van point his handgun at unarmed civilians on the street; I saw others violently ransacking apartments; yet another casually pepper sprayed a protester who was walking away from him; a few others dragged a young man out of a Target and then dropped him off crying soon after.
One video showed a squad of agents ripping a disabled woman from her car as she tried to get to a doctor’s appointment and carrying her by her limbs like an animal.
Terrorized and terrified people are still resisting the surge however they can. Seemingly overnight, churches have created warehouse-like operations to deliver food to those who have gone into hiding; Iglesia Dios Habla Hoy in South Minneapolis dropped off more than 12,000 boxes of groceries in six weeks. Food banks have been flooded with both donations and volunteers.
Somali women in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood patrol the streets in safety vests and take shifts in lobbies of housing complexes, informing people of their rights and serving tea; squads of neighbors stand guard outside a Somali mall in Minneapolis and a Mexican supermarket in St. Paul, both which have been targeted by raids. In one case people linked arms to prevent ICE from entering a grocery store without a warrant.
Shuttles drive people to jobs and doctors’ appointments. Volunteers travel around the city as notaries, signing Delegation of Parental Authority (DOPA) forms for separated families. Local tow-truck companies respond free of charge to calls about vehicles found on the street with their doors open, suddenly a common occurrence.
Neighbors walk dogs for families in hiding. People organize to provide breast milk to babies whose parents have been taken by ICE. As has become standard in all forms of American crisis, people circulate online fundraisers for those struggling to pay rent or support their kids.
Rapid response chats form on Signal and WhatsApp to alert residents when ICE shows up and to turn out crowds of observers, who blow whistles and car horns. Some people follow ICE vehicles while others record the license plates of cars leaving the Whipple building. Still others track helicopters to try to figure out where ICE is going next. Crowds play horns and bang pots outside hotels housing ICE agents. In mid-January the DoubleTree in St. Paul notified DHS employees staying there that their reservations had been canceled and the hotel was closing due to “public safety concerns.”
The sheer scale of the mutual aid effort is hard to comprehend, as is the speed with which it has come together and the bravery of those responsible. At the same time, what they’re doing is largely triage, responding to emergency after emergency. Neighbors juggling jobs, kids, and their own fears are up against three thousand federal agents. (For comparison, three hundred were deployed to Chicago.) The size of Operation Metro Surge is delirious, outlandish. As state and local officials grandstand at press conferences and file lawsuits, people do what they can to protect each other and hang on.
When I arrived in Minneapolis on Wednesday of last week the temperature was warmer than normal, about 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and a light crystal snow was whipping around. After days of watching videos of ICE arrests, I had unconsciously expected total pandemonium, but the pick-up area at the airport was the calmest I’d ever seen it. I drove past the gas station in St. Paul where agents beat a man unconscious; there was no sign of the abduction.
At a grocery store in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, I heard one cashier ask another, “But is that illegal?” As I bagged my groceries, I asked if they were talking about ICE. “They knocked on her family’s door, but no one was home. So, they broke the camera,” one said with a shrug.
On the streets of South Minneapolis, a center of ICE’s hunting operation, two days later, I found none of this surreal semi-normality. Quiet blocks are busy with volunteers driving around on patrol or standing on corners with whistles, and with ICE vehicles speeding recklessly on slick roads; agents appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly.
Once a car passed in front of me and I saw a man adjusting his flak jacket behind a tinted window, flashing the tell-tale embroidered POLICE patch. Another time I spotted an SUV with no front plates and two other vehicles trailing close behind. The three cars made a U-turn and then an immediate left into a side street, moving as a single, sinuous unit, like a snake. I pulled into the side street behind them and saw that they’d parked in an alleyway, and roughly a dozen agents had popped out. I circled the block to try to see where they went on foot, but there was no sign of them, and by the time I looped back they were gone.
People who lived through 2020 in Minneapolis are already familiar with the sight of armed federal troops prowling their streets. During the uprisings, National Guard members patrolled neighborhoods and fired rubber bullets at civilians to enforce a curfew. Contributing to the sense of déjà vu is the fact that many of the city’s residents are again stuck at home, too afraid to go outside.
As was the case during the pandemic, for some people simply running an errand or going to see friends requires a degree of planning and a certain tolerance for risk. School districts across the Twin Cities have begun offering remote learning options for students. Even some non-white citizen friends of mine are sheltering in place.
The pandemic and uprising spurred people in Minneapolis to organize block by block. Neighborhood Signal and WhatsApp chats coordinated food and rent aid, then marshaled local crime watches, filling a void when police seemed to pull back on enforcement. Today these text chats once again appear to be the basic unit of organizing in Minneapolis. The resistance to ICE is driven by neighbors looking out for neighbors more than by affinity groups or any specific left-wing ideological project.
Federal agents advancing on protesters after firing tear gas, Minneapolis, January 24, 2026
Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu/Getty Images
Of course, one difference between this moment and the pandemic is that the majority of people are not out of work. Whether they’re immigrants living in fear of ICE, mutual aid volunteers, or both, most are still going to their jobs, in addition to possibly caring for kids and getting dinner on the table. Many told me with a laugh that, when you add it all up, they were working eighteen- to twenty-hour days.
Other than this upsurge of activity, many people are experiencing the invasion primarily by way of the videos, often filmed by citizen-observers, that spread on social media and play on the news. (“It’s like Call of Duty!” a camo-clad agent shouts in one clip, pointing his weapon at protesters. “Pretty cool, huh?”) This footage projects power far beyond the parts of the city where ICE is most active. Even the regular updates about ICE sightings in the neighborhood chats can heighten the sense that the agents are omnipresent. It’s a fine line: the networks that stoke resistance can also feed the thrum of fear.
Something new about this moment: it was hard to tell how safe it was for anyone to talk to me. During my time back home, as I interviewed people directly impacted by Operation Metro Surge and tagged along with mutual aid volunteers, I kept hearing about the lengths to which ICE is going to ensnare people who criticize the agency or obstruct its terror campaign.
After a local toy store was featured on ABC News for distributing 3D-printed whistles, it was visited by ICE agents who demanded employees’ work authorization documents. On January 26, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed in an interview that he had launched an investigation into private Signal chats after a right-wing podcaster infiltrated multiple patrol threads. Protesters and observers are increasingly being detained for little reason; I was told midway through my visit that if I went to the Whipple building, I should prepare to be held for up to three days.
ICE’s tactics change constantly. I heard a rumor that agents are putting “Vegan” and “Coexist” bumper stickers on their cars in order to evade detection. They might be posing as delivery drivers. I heard about volunteers who followed ICE vehicles only to be led directly back to their own homes—the agents’ way of letting them know that they’d been identified.
A school warned families that ICE was distributing flyers offering food, turning the food insecurity the agency had created into a trap. Volunteers delivering groceries to people in hiding have been tracked by agents looking for targets. ICE is holding three members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in detention and has refused to release information beyond their first names unless the tribe enters an “immigration agreement” with the government.
School bus pick-up and drop-off monitors report ICE agents posing as observers to surveil kids. Ninety-five miles west of Minneapolis, in Willmar, ICE agents dined at a Mexican restaurant for lunch, then returned five hours later and detained three employees as they left work.
They pulled a grandfather, wearing only his underwear and draped in a blanket, out of his home in 10-degree weather. They arrest observers, nearly all of whom are citizens, and drop them in woods or random parking lots. They have abducted kids as young as two; one afternoon they made a five-year-old who was captured upon his arrival home from preschool knock on the door of his house while family members hid inside.
Friday, January 23, was the day of a well-publicized general strike, a call by Twin Cities labor unions for no work, no shopping, and no school. The Minnesota labor movement, among others, planned an enormous public march in downtown Minneapolis to protest ICE. I could tell that word was circulating widely online by the number of people outside the Twin Cities who texted me to ask if I was attending. Instead, I ended up interviewing people affected by ICE and shadowing mutual aid organizers, who were keeping at their work.
I met with Vi in a cozy, chaotic South Minneapolis home.
Vi lives in the suburbs, but because of the strike’s prohibition on shopping, she was dropping off homemade pork and chicken egg rolls to friends on her way to the rally downtown.
Vi, who is Hmong, is worried about Stephen Miller’s expressed desire to denaturalize naturalized citizens like her. She has three children, and her husband has a chronic illness; she handles the bills and a lot of the family’s paperwork, on top of cooking, sewing, and everything else. She recently found it necessary to show her kids where to hide in the house if agents come to take her.
Her eleven-year-old has been having nightmares about getting abducted by ICE. The five-year-old asks if there are “soldiers” outside before he opens the door. The toddler has not gone to preschool all week. “Kids cannot be kids right now,” Vi said. Meanwhile, she’s still going to work every day, even though she feels numb and disconnected from her body, and she isn’t sleeping well.
“The part that scares me the most is that the rules keep changing,” she told me. “It used to be very clear.” You knew what could get you deported, what could move your case forward, and how far the government would go to enforce the law. Now it’s unclear whether laws even matter. Still, Vi told me, she was planning to join the general strike march downtown. When she hugged and kissed her kids that morning she explained why she needed to go. She doesn’t believe in waiting for a higher authority to come to her rescue. The sign she made for the protest read: “History tells us it was never government that will save us, it was the people.”
A crowd of protesters marching in downtown Minneapolis, January 25, 2026
Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu/Getty Images
I met another mutual aid volunteer, Lucia, in the basement of a community center in St. Paul, where she worked on her computer while we talked. (That’s to say that, like most mutual aid workers, she was still doing her day job.) Her phone never stopped lighting up with messages from her volunteer chat during our interview; she told me she has had to start carrying around an extra-large backup battery because the constant updates quickly drain her cell.
Lucia is a citizen, but she was born in Mexico. A few months ago she formed a mutual aid organization using the text chat from her weekly dance group; this was in late November, after ICE broke into a home in east St. Paul without a warrant and detained an unarmed Latino man. Neighbors had come out to observe and record, but as ICE was finishing their operation, a squad from the St. Paul Police Department showed up in riot gear and tear-gassed the crowd. Lucia thought: “Nobody’s safe.”
People in Lucia’s community started to go into hiding. She and her mutual aid group delivered food, gave rides, and helped with rent, among much else. Then things got scarier. For three days in a row she noticed a black Jeep parked across from her home. On the third day it was parked directly behind her car. The previous day Lucia had been organizing a supplies drive for families who might need to go into hiding, telling contacts to bring backpacks and essentials like toothbrushes, ChapStick, and feminine products. Now she packed a bag for herself and went to stay with friends for three days.
The killing of Renee Good was another turning point for Lucia. As she explained to me: if ICE was ready to shoot a white woman in the head, who knew what they would do to brown people? Who knew what they would do to anyone? After that, she doubled down on her mutual aid efforts.
Lucia and her husband, Harold, like her Latino and an American citizen, now carry their passports everywhere. (So do many people in the Twin Cities, including the mayor of St. Paul, who is Hmong.) They also wear tracking devices hidden under their clothes in case they end up in an out-of-state detention center. They write and rewrite the numbers for lawyers on their arms. They’ve established plans with people who will know what it means if they send a text reading only “911.”
When I asked Harold about the fear that comes with knowing he might be racially profiled as an immigrant, his answer echoed Vi’s. “The fear has always been there,” he said, “but the fear has changed because the rules have changed.” When he patrols his neighborhood with the mutual aid group or attends peaceful protests, he told me, “I’m expecting to get arrested. You’re just trying to mentally prepare.”
I was set to leave on Saturday, January 24, catching a noon flight to avoid an oncoming storm on the east coast. On my last morning, I met up with a childhood friend who lives in South Minneapolis, and we trudged through the winter glare and gnarled snow to a local diner. It was 15 degrees below zero, and steam poured from the sewer vents.
My friend’s life, like everyone’s, has been greatly altered by the surge; he sees ICE agents every day. Still, over breakfast, we talked about our old friends, our lives, and my kid. As we ate, the diner filled up with a typical weekend brunch crowd, choosing between medium and dark roast, pancakes and French toast, sunny-side up and scrambled.
He wanted to show me his house, which he had recently purchased, so we walked the couple of blocks there. It’s a small bungalow with beautiful wood details—knotty pine paneled stairwell, battered oak floors—that are typical of the neighborhood. His partner greeted us at the door. After a quick tour, I started shuffling back into my winter gear. His partner took a phone call and drifted into the next room.
All of a sudden, she was back. “I’m putting you on speaker,” she said. The person on the other end was audibly shaking. “We think he has been shot,” they said.
We stood in the dim entryway, dust sparkling in the air, frozen in silence. The caller had seen a video circulated online, in which ICE agents appeared to shoot a man in the street. They thought the man in the video was their friend.
My friend told me that he had just been hanging out the night before with the person in question, a sweet, gentle guy who had nonetheless been incensed by the situation. Nothing was clear yet, but they decided to go to the ICU.
As my mom dropped me off at the airport, I heard from them that it was their friend, Alex Pretti, who had been shot. Just before the plane took off, I learned he was dead.
This story was copublished and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein is a freelance journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Tyranny at Work: Unfreedom and the American Workplace. (January 2026)
Copyright 2026 The New York Review of Books
Provided for public education by Genocide Watch. Do not republish.
