Shelter in Place

The battle for Minnesota’s public.

By Kristin CollierMarch 1, 2026

• Politics

• Memoir & Essay

MARISOL HAS NOT SEEN her three children in over three years. Since she left them with her mother in her home in rural Chiapas, Mexico, she’s traversed more than 5,000 miles, mostly alone, in search of consistent, safe employment. When we speak in early February, two months into Operation Metro Surge—conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—Marisol, like thousands of people in Minnesota, has been confining herself to her home, reorienting the routines of her life to a single dwelling.*

She sits across from me on Zoom, in a room that appears empty, except for a folded wheelchair behind her. The blinds are drawn, the light thick and muted. Marisol had decided to live in Canada and paid a lot of money to work with what she believed was a dependable agency. “They promised us work, stability, many things. We trusted them,” she emphasizes, reminding me that the decision to leave had been arrived at collectively with her family. They promised her she’d be able to return home every six months to see her children. “My plan was not to be far from them,” she says.

Marisol’s youngest daughter was two-and-a-half years old when she left. My own daughter is the same age, part baby, part kid. Probably her daughter’s cheeks and belly were rounded but have thinned as she’s grown. She likely had a wild, developing interior world and could conjure entire universes with a single toy.

But when Marisol arrived in Toronto, the job and the other promises turned out to be a lie, the first of many she’d be told along a harrowing journey that eventually brought her to Minneapolis. “They took us to a house where there were more than 30 people. It was horrifying, and we were afraid. In a country we didn’t know, where they speak a language we didn’t understand,” she says. Her handlers kept her at the house in Toronto for a month, until all the money she had carefully saved for her journey was spent on rent. Understanding that they were not going to be given jobs, Marisol and a few others made a plan to leave for the United States.

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Luz’s decision to leave her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with her husband and four sons was not singular but gradual, even erosive. They were fearful of “la recluta,” the mandatory draft they heard would be instituted soon. Their teenage sons might be conscripted. Luz’s husband, Pedro, was a manager at a company that sold industrial batteries. When representatives from the government asked him to hand over some of his inventory and keep it off the books, he resigned. She worried he’d be detained soon for refusing to participate in the corruption. She and Pedro had been attending protests against the Chavez regime, and “government supporters would literally throw stones” at them. “My son,” she explains, “was once beaten up by one of them and had his phone stolen.” In 2014 and 2018, there were so many protests against the administration of Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, that the police closed the streets in Maracaibo, and drivers needed to bribe them or risked having their windows smashed or getting shot.

I sit across from Luz and Pedro at their dining room table in a bright apartment in a large complex outside of Minneapolis. From the table, I can see tall spruces covered with snow outside their living room window. Pedro has started baking regularly now that it’s no longer safe to go to work, and he offers me salty, warm tequeños. He’s had to make adjustments, he tells me, because of elevation and the dry, winter weather. This batch took three tries.

In Venezuela, their eldest son was almost killed once, caught up in a protest near his university, chased into a neighborhood where a family hid him until his parents could pick him up. “There were armed groups,” Luz tells me. “They were criminals, like hitmen, that the government hired to kill people in the middle of protests.” Luz, who has two degrees, was unable to work after she was blacklisted for her criticism of the government. They wanted to go to Chile, but a cousin who had lived there told them that it was going to be too expensive, that they should emigrate to Minneapolis instead. They came through Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande, and asked to apply for asylum as soon as the Border Patrol picked them up. Their application is pending now. Like many immigrants living in the United States, they are not undocumented, though they are categorized as “unauthorized.” They have valid work permits.

When Luz imagined Minneapolis from her cousin’s descriptions, she saw a giant lake, with homes fanning outward far and wide: rural, big, and open. What she found wasn’t that, but it was somehow perfect—“beautiful and peaceful.”

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From early December 2025 through mid-February 2026, Minneapolis and Saint Paul served as ground zero for ICE and CBP’s Operation Metro Surge, which brought 3,000 agents to the Twin Cities. According to the Migration Policy Institute, as of 2023, there were 100,000 “unauthorized” immigrants living in Minnesota, a category which includes those with pending asylum applications, people who have overstayed visas, those with Temporary Protected Status, participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and anyone who entered the country without authorization. At the height of the surge, there was one ICE agent for every 33 of these immigrants, 4,000 of whom are children, 9,000 of whom are retirement age or older. There were more agents than family physicians in Minnesota—a reminder that this administration, like many previous ones, values surveillance and enforcement over care. On February 12, at a White House press conference, “border czar” Tom Homan announced that ICE would begin a drawdown in Minneapolis, but ICE’s departure has been slow. On February 25, Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez shared in a statement that 970 agents remained in the Twin Cities, with plans to keep more than 400 there into March. Local reporting finds that the operation has expanded to the suburbs.

Each of these migrants’ stories starts somewhere: with hunger, a lost home, a lost job, a threat, a gun, or a thirst, and these origins are out of sight, hidden by borders and sometimes language, lost to many—probably most—US citizens, who primarily encounter migrants, if at all, through the workforce: when these migrants are roofing or cleaning their homes, caring for their children, fixing their cars, or cooking their food. But recently in Minnesota, that’s been changing, as social, racial, and class spheres collide, overlap, and blend in new ways, with thousands of Minnesotans plugging into a dynamic and expansive network of caregiving and defense that stretches across the Twin Cities and beyond. According to polling done by the May Day Strong Coalition, “one in four Minnesota voters took part in [the] January 23 day of action, or had a loved one who did.” The day included a general strike, an economic boycott, a protest that mobilized between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and planned arrests by faith leaders at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who are taking steps to maintain their neighborhoods’ safety, some of them understanding for the first time that their neighbors’ safety is theirs to maintain.

Alexandria Gomez, co-founder of the Phillips Community Free Store—a mutual aid project that began in 2020 and is based in Phillips, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood heavily targeted by ICE—shared with me that they are currently serving over 270 households. In February, they received $358,254, all of which went directly to families. “It’s just neighbors helping neighbors. Community helping community. I think the city of Minneapolis is doing something remarkable and, honestly, unseen before in this country,” she says. “The entire city is stepping up and doing everything. If you need something, it is taken care of. People’s rents are being paid. Bills are being paid, groceries are being delivered. People are escorting people to appointments safely.”

Another organizer, who wished to remain anonymous for the safety of the people she’s working with, is part of an effort to care for 36 families connected to a Spanish-immersion day care in Minneapolis, delivering biweekly groceries and raising funds to pay rent. Last month, the group raised over $40,000. “I’m scared of how changed I am by this experience,” she tells me. “There is no going back.” Powderhorn, Central, Longfellow, Bancroft, Whittier, Phillips—they all have their own neighborhood rent funds. There are hundreds of GoFundMes that impacted families have started to cover their own expenses after loved ones have been deported, or in order to bring home family members from detention centers in Texas where they’d been sent to await deportation before being freed through judicial intervention. Millions of dollars have flowed from across the state and the country to the Twin Cities—often given directly to local organizers with trust that they will give it to the people who need it most.

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After spending two days on the streets of Toronto in winter, sleeping at bus shelters, always without heat, Marisol and the migrants she was traveling with found someone who would guide their passage into the United States. She paid him with funds gathered by family and friends in Mexico, and he drove them somewhere outside the city—she doesn’t remember where—and late at night dropped them off in the woods. “We went into the forest around 7:00 p.m.,” she tells me, and “we came out around 4:00 or 5:00 a.m.” They walked the entire time in the dark and cold.

They eventually emerged in New York, where they were picked up by either Border Patrol or ICE but were let go for reasons Marisol is unsure of. She spent a few nights alone, again, in New York City. “I just had my little backpack,” she says. “People can tell that you are afraid and don’t know where to go.” Marisol cries when she remembers this, and I imagine the confusing rush of Port Authority or Penn Station in a language you can’t understand, unsure of where to go, who might help you, and who might harm you.

Marisol stayed with an acquaintance in Florida for a while, before finding another man, someone she met on social media, who promised her work and housing in Atlanta. It felt like a risk, but she needed money. That was why she had come to the United States; her eldest daughter loved school, and Marisol wanted her to go to college. When Marisol arrived in Atlanta, it was night. She entered a darkened house, into a room secured with a padlock, and there were so many people in there that “you could hardly put your feet down.” A group of armed men kept watch over the house. They told her they would find her work, but until then, she was to remain in the room with the others. “Find yourself a little corner,” the men told her. “And that’s where you are going to sleep. If you can lie down, lie down. And if not, then sit.’’ She was given one package of instant soup and one bottle of water each day.

Marisol heard the men discussing her and the rest of the migrants in the following days, and she wasn’t sure if they were talking about finding them work or selling them. When the men on duty one day got drunk and forgot to padlock the door, Marisol and another woman managed to escape. She found her way to the Twin Cities—someone knew someone who knew someone—and for the first time in almost a year, she had a place to live and a job, working at a childcare center.

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“One of the reasons we decided to leave,” Pedro tells me, “was the insecurity we had with our family when the kids were little.” They started their new life, he says, “with one hand in front and one hand behind.” Like many immigrants, they were pulled between two worlds: their past, their home; and their future, the new home they hoped to make. They first lived in a neighborhood north of Minneapolis. For money, Luz cleaned homes and cared for people’s children. Pedro delivered groceries for Instacart.

In the United States, their children have felt freedom for the first time. As we speak, Pedro retrieves a photo from the wall in the family room. In it, their son, tall, thin, smiling, with glasses, stands with two friends, holding a trophy, beneath a sign that says NASA. They couldn’t afford to send him to that student space conference, but their new friends here helped them. “It’s like a boomerang. What you give comes back. The universe responds,” Luz explains, while Pedro looks at the photo again and then gently returns it to the wall.

Pedro has dark hair and the start of a beard. He’s muscular in the way you imagine someone who has spent most of his life working with giant machine parts would be. While his wife sits across from me, taking notes and drawing a map to illustrate a point about the neighborhood, he moves busily between scrolling on his phone and refilling mugs of coffee and glasses of water. When I ask him what he wishes people in the United States understood, especially people who are hostile to immigrants, he tells me a story from his childhood in Venezuela. I imagine him aging backward until he is young again, unbearded, slight. He used to take a wooden pole to create an antenna out of two metal fan blades. He’d climb with his homemade antenna to the top of a tree in his yard until he could pick up the signals from his rich neighbors’ satellite dishes.

“My dream was to watch an NBA game, to watch an American football game, to be in this country,” he says. “I wanted to be like you.” Luz watches him warmly. Behind her, down the hallway, are the cracked doors of her children’s bedrooms; one of them is attending high school online.

When Luz came to the United States, she was amazed that houses could be made of wood, because in Venezuela they are only made of concrete. The first house she had here, the one before this apartment, was made of wood. “I feel like God has understood me and indulged me,” she says. “Like he says to me, ‘You deserve this, but it’s going to cost you.’ It has cost me a lot.”

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For Marisol, Luz, Pedro, and their children, the entire city of Minneapolis, at first, was a kind of shelter, affording jobs that sustained them and their families. With the arrival of ICE, that shelter grew smaller and smaller. When ICE first came to Minneapolis, Pedro and Luz were still going to work. Pedro tells me about one of his last days, standing in the checkout line at Target with a basket of items for delivery. When he approached, the cashier whispered to him, “Leave your order and get out because they are ICE,” indicating two plainclothes agents. He encountered agents again inside a grocery store and quickly fled. “That was January 5, my last day of work.”

An initial sense of caution—a reduced footprint, sharing rides to work—has morphed into immobility, and now Pedro and his wife and most undocumented immigrants, along with thousands of others whose legal status makes them vulnerable, are staying home. Their entire worlds have been reduced to one floor, one apartment, sometimes one room. Their ability to stay safe depends on their ability to stay there.

Eric Hauge, the co–executive director of HOME Line, a nonprofit that provides free legal advice to tenants through their hotline manned by lawyers and law students, told me that 2,286 evictions were filed in January between Hennepin and Ramsey counties, just slightly below the previous year’s numbers during the same window. Last year had the most eviction filings they had ever seen, over 25,000, and while the early numbers for 2026 appear comparable, Hauge said that there had also been an 85 percent increase in renters asking about financial aid, something HOME Line cannot provide. Normally, the majority of calls are about getting landlords to make repairs.

Many tenants have not yet faced an eviction filing but know that it’s coming. “They’re fearful that they haven’t been able to pay in January or February, and now people are starting to worry about March,” he tells me. Many predatory landlords working with low-income renters structure their leases as month-to-month, making it easy to remove tenants or increase rents, and some of these landlords, worried their immigrant tenants cannot pay, have opted not to renew their monthly leases.

It’s not just that renters are choosing not to work out of fear, Hauge reminds me. “We have people who have reduced hours, or their employer has temporarily or permanently closed because of ICE enforcement. We have folks whose employer shut down, and they didn’t pay the tenant the last paycheck they earned.” Or for those still managing, at great risk, to go to work, they might have family members or roommates who can no longer contribute toward the rent because they have been abducted, detained, or deported. The Department of Homeland Security reported to NPR that 3,500 arrests had been made during the operation as of early February. Some tenants are living in unsafe situations, lacking heat, electricity, or plumbing, because “they are fearful of calling the city or their landlord to enforce their rights.”

Still, evictions have not eclipsed 2025, and Hauge offers a few explanations. Tenant protections mean that there is a longer timeline for evictions, which are typically more frequent in summer. Some landlords “may actually be holding off,” he says, because of the situation, and at the same time, “mutual aid efforts are working.”

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I thought of this often in the early days of the occupation, when I put out a call on my own platforms to generate rental assistance for two of my kids’ teachers, who I knew were sheltering in place. “They taught my daughter to walk,” I wrote, with some discomfort. They didn’t deserve this money just because they were good teachers.

But they were good, and they had taught her to walk, though it happened much later than it’s supposed to. A specialist at the Mayo Clinic wondered if she might have brain damage and ordered an MRI. My husband and I, first-time parents living far away from our families, were scared. Whatever we learned from the many tests would not change our love for her or our belief that she would live a complete and interesting life, but if she had a disability, that meant she couldn’t walk, that we’d need support. There’d be a lot to learn.

Her teachers weren’t convinced by the doctors’ predictions. “Little by little,” one of them said, “she’s going to get there.” They built a sandbox outside the classroom: they thought the sand would provide traction and might give her confidence as well as break her fall. They were right: she walked, and they sent us a video of her first extended steps, breaking their no-phone policy to capture it. “Me creo,” one of them narrated in the video, imagining what my young daughter must have been thinking, “I believe in myself,” as she slowly locked each leg, walking uneasily.

Friends, family, old colleagues and classmates, people I had never met, and their friends and family sent $12,000 to my Venmo. An artist friend in New York City sent me $6,000 that she’d raised, and my husband and I opened a new bank so that I could pay sheltering families more efficiently. The aid extended past these two teachers to other teachers, their friends and neighbors, anyone who was sent my way.

People are remaining housed because we have decided as a community that housing is all of our responsibility, and many Minnesotans have come to understand that people deserve housing without means testing or applications, without credit checks, without reason, simply because they exist, because they are human. They are ours, all of ours, to care for.

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At the start of Metro Surge, Marisol had already been staying home for several months. She had injured her ACL in the fall, had undergone surgery, and was still in physical therapy, not yet able to perform the physically demanding work of teaching young kids, when ICE arrived. She had no family here, and a friend of hers cared for her. She misses the children she worked with. “They have been my medicine,” she says. “They’ve helped me manage some of the pain of having left my children, because that was never my plan.” I have no doubt that Marisol was a terrific teacher, patient and gentle. However, the cruel conclusion of global wealth inequality—much of it fueled by US foreign and economic policy—is that some parents must leave their own children to care for other people’s children. “We don’t come here because we are trying to get more,” she says, dabbing her eye with a tissue. “We leave our entire lives and families to come here. You live with a broken soul. You are alive, but only in body, because your soul is at home.”

Since the arrival of ICE, she has not only been cut off from her students but also hasn’t been able to see her friends in the Twin Cities. “It’s horrible to be shut in, with the curtains down,” she says. Her days are pulled between boredom and terror. She is worried that if agents glimpse her face through the window, they can break down her door, and she is right to fear that. Despite official protocol requiring a judicial warrant to entire a private residence, ICE agents have forcibly entered homes in the Twin Cities, dragging out residents in their underwear, barefoot through the snow.

Immigrants’ safety depends on their total and complete retreat from public life, making it impossible for sheltering families to perform the normal tasks that animate their lives. “People are helping us with food, making sure we don’t get evicted from our apartments, but even then, this is not a life,” Marisol says, “living like this.”

Pedro and Luz agree. “We can’t even go to the parking lot or put gas in the car,” Luz says. “Just the other day, they took someone from the gas station near us.” There is freedom in domestic rituality: getting gas, shoveling your sidewalk, dropping off mail, walking your dog. We are fortified by love and connection, of course, but also by our daily decisions, hundreds of micro-movements that propel us throughout our home and the world beyond it. Without them, our sense of self changes.

Pedro and Luz’s 19-year-old son, who is in college, had a toothache in his molar recently. “One of the nights, I had to watch him and Pedro sit over there on the couch while he cried. I never see him like that,” Luz says. Like them, he had applied for asylum but is considered unauthorized; if they sent him to the dentist, he could be detained, the nightmare that haunts them more than all the others.

They have a court date in September but, Luz says, “We are afraid to go.”

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In the United States, we tolerate murder when it happens due to policy—in hospitals, prisons, detention centers, even homes—slow, gradual murders, and sometimes fast ones, murders that happen to some people, often Black and Brown people, and often out of sight. The murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti are unbearable and devastating, not just because they represent startling, undeserved, state-enacted cruelty against white people, but also because they happened in public.

In the days following those murders, grieving people across the Twin Cities situated their horror in familiarity and proximity. “They killed her a mile from my first apartment.” “ICE officers beat him and shot him near where I bought boba tea.” “My son played at the park a few miles from where Renée was shot in the head.” Their deaths are not more important because they happened somewhere familiar, but they are more palpable. A public murder has a million connection points—overlapping histories, relationships, memories.

Pretti was killed in a bustling economic center known as Eat Street, where young, hip people go out to eat, drink, sell their clothes, and attend art school. It’s down the street from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He was beaten and shot across the street from a doughnut shop and a used clothing store. People were pouring coffee when they looked up suddenly to see someone die. Public, state-sanctioned executions, a global hallmark of authoritarian rule, are not new to the United States—Good and Pretti were killed only miles from where a police officer murdered George Floyd outside a convenience store—but in recent years, video capture has made these deaths public in new ways.

It was cold and overcast the day I visited their memorials for the first time. Flowers were piled so thickly that you could not see the ground. Near a hand-painted sign that read “Nurses are heroes” at Pretti’s memorial, a woman crouched beside a young boy in a Spider-Man costume, whispering, before standing up and releasing a loud sob. At Good’s memorial, there were gifts from people across Minnesota and the world. A box of a dozen roses was affixed with the flag of the People’s Republic of China, along with a typed note: “Representing the Chinese people. With love for peace, friendship for all humanity.”

I was thankful for the chance to be in communion with other people hurting for Good and Pretti, for our city and country, for all the immigrants who populate it, and for ourselves. I knew that Luz, Pedro, and Marisol would be there if they could. Luz tells me she didn’t sleep for the entire night after Good was shot: “She didn’t do anything wrong,” she says. “I feel like she died because of us here.”

Metro Surge’s aims were not just to remove people that the administration has decided don’t belong here, some immigrants and some not, but also to create a new public, one that’s filled with white people, able-bodied, thin, patriotic, and obedient.

“Minnesota feels like home,” Luz tells me, because it’s filled with people resisting authoritarian rule, people in active struggle to create the world they want. It’s a battle for the public—who gets to be in public, how the public is imagined and narrativized, and how they are cared for or punished with public money.

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Mutual aid is not one directional or even bidirectional; it flows everywhere all at once, back and forth and around. It’s intentional and contagious. Right now, in the Twin Cities, it’s extending beyond food drives and rides, grocery shopping, and neighborhood watches—though these are significant, life-saving acts. With a growing sense that we are all responsible for one another, we’ve tapped into something older than this occupation or even the state.

A few weeks ago, after ICE agents detained and released observers who worked at a restaurant near my home, the restaurant opened its doors and asked the neighborhood to come in. I worked from a booth in the back, and 25 or so people showed up and started talking with one another, as a server kept refilling our coffee. Another neighbor opened her shop, a kind of maker space, the day after Pretti was killed, so that we could come in to make signs or buttons or just have tea and talk to one another, be near one another. Again, people showed up. A tiny family-owned sandwich shop has made itself available for organizing, and so have a brewery and a church and another coffee shop, and the list goes on.

Care for one another can only take us so far under current political and economic conditions. We deserve this care to be reflected in the people we’ve elected. Eric Hauge reminds me of this, saying, “This type of mutual aid community work cannot replace the responsibility of the government to keep people housed.” Governor Tim Walz needs to declare a peacetime emergency, as he did during the pandemic, and instate an eviction moratorium, says Hauge. The Minneapolis City Council has already allocated a million dollars in rental assistance, but that won’t be enough alone. The current rental crisis is also a symptom of a larger, ongoing housing crisis. HOME Line’s Tenant Bill of Rights lays out a path forward, ensuring that everyone is entitled to a fair rental application process, a habitable home, a fair lease, and reasonable rent.

“Allowing evictions of vulnerable families to proceed is likely to increase racial disparities in housing in the coming years,” Council Member Robin Wonsley tells me. She’s one of several council members pushing the city and the state for a more aggressive and comprehensive response to ICE. And she drafted an eviction moratorium that was unanimously passed by the council, and which Mayor Jacob Frey declined to sign.

On February 17, Twin Cities Tenants, a local tenants union representing more than 25,000 members, announced plans to organize a rent strike beginning in March to compel Walz to declare an eviction moratorium and the state legislature to establish a $50 million rent relief fund. “If thousands of us who can pay our rent decide not to,” the union declared, “we create a protective buffer around those who cannot pay—mucking up eviction courts and landlords’ financials until we win real relief.” At the time of writing, the group is collecting pledges: if they secure 10,000, they’ll call for a mass strike authorization vote from their members. If authorized, it would be the largest rent strike in the United States in the last 100 years.

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Recently, shopping for one of my daughter’s teachers, Ana, I struggled to pick out mozzarella. In the list Ana sent me, she had not clarified if the cheese should be shredded, sliced, or fresh. I knew she was probably worried she’d seem picky about the shopping and purchasing someone else was doing for her. There’s dignity in being able to buy your own groceries. There’s dignity in being able to choose the right cheese or bread or tomato for the exact thing that you know you want to make.

The drawdown has begun, but the occupation isn’t over. Before Metro Surge, there were already 150 ICE agents here in Minneapolis, and presumably they will stay on and maintain the recent violence, in shrunken form. The others will direct their terror elsewhere, driving other families inside. But in the near future, those who have been sheltering will finally be able to emerge. Marisol, when she’s healed, will return to work, and before then, she will have physical therapy appointments. Pedro will start accepting deliveries, and Luz will drive to clients’ homes to clean. But like the organizer said to me, we’ve been changed. We can’t go back.

When I drop off the groceries to Ana, accompanied by my husband, our daughter, and our son, whom she also cared for, she invites us inside. She cries as she holds my son, whom she last saw in early December, when he was six months old. She laughs when my husband calls him “gordito.” I remember her perfume, which used to linger on my son’s clothes when I’d pick him up—cedar and floral. Every time I smelled it, I knew he’d been held that day.

We gather in her small living room, in her small apartment, which sits below ground level. She shares it with her niece, but there are others there she doesn’t introduce. “ICE drives around here constantly,” Ana tells us, using her hand to mimic the laps that ICE takes through her neighborhood each day.

When Ana grabs a stuffed animal of hers that my daughter asked to hold, a fuzzy lion clutching a cherry-red heart, I see that it had been blocking a hole in her shuttered blinds. Before we leave, Ana shares that after her “rest,” the term she uses to capture her time sheltering in place, which has certainly been anything but restful, she is feeling ready to emerge from hiding into the public, into the light.

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* For their safety, pseudonyms were used for the interview subjects Luz, Marisol, Pedro, and Ana. Interviews were conducted in Spanish with aid of an interpreter.

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Featured image: ICE Out flyers on bus shelter in Minneapolis. Photo by Chad Davis.