The Standoff That Has Turned Minnesota Into a Tinderbox
ICE agents with arrest quotas are colliding with angry residents, a compact city and a relatively small proportion of immigrants here illegally
Jan. 16, 2026 The Wall Street Journal
MINNEAPOLIS—The collision of the Trump administration’s huge immigration operation and the enormous pushback from residents is leading to a tinderbox in Minneapolis.
For locals, much of the anger stems from the clash between the administration’s stated rationale for being in the area and the reality on the ground.
They are here, federal officials say, to find “criminal illegal aliens hurting Americans” after a sprawling welfare-fraud scandal involving dozens of Minnesotans of Somali descent gained national attention.
But residents see massive federal overreach in a place with a relatively small proportion of immigrants in the country illegally compared with other states.
Minnesota’s population of immigrants here illegally stands at an estimated 2.2%, about half the national average, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 90% of the state’s Somali population, the group highlighted in the fraud investigation, have some sort of permanent legal status, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
“They are taking people that are working within the system, that are asylum seekers, that are green-card holders,” said Dan Engelhart, a northeast Minneapolis resident and a commissioner on the city’s park board. “It’s really terrifying to see our neighbors terrorized in this way.”
In a statement Friday, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said allegations that ICE engages in racial profiling were false, and that “obstructing federal law enforcement officers during the performance of their duties is not only dangerous but also a federal crime and a felony.”
“Law enforcement uses ‘reasonable suspicion’ to make arrests, as allowed under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” she said.
Pressure to make arrests
Over the past 12 months, DHS has surged personnel into one liberal city at a time with high-profile immigration actions, but the Minneapolis operation feels different on the ground. Some 3,000 federal officers are operating in and around a city of just 430,000, compared with a few hundred sent to Chicago—population of 2.7 million—this past fall.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers here and elsewhere are under pressure from daily arrest quotas that leadership has set at 3,000 a day across the country—the number it would take to reach one million arrests in a year, according to ICE officials familiar with the matter. Though ICE has never come close to meeting that daily goal, officers are rewarded for making arrests, even if the immigrants they take in are later released.
In Minneapolis, those officers are walking and driving through the largely residential city looking for people to arrest—and coming into close quarters with angry and organized residents. That proximity helps explain why federal agents are clashing more with locals here than anywhere else.
“Unfortunately, in Minneapolis, I call this a contrast in operations, a vast, conspicuous contrast in operations,” U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino told a local TV station this week. “A lot of unfriendly individuals out there, a lot of violence against ICE and Border Patrol.”
Inside ICE, some officials have grown frustrated with their lack of control over the Minneapolis operation, but at the same time don’t want to back down in the face of pushback from protesters, the people familiar with the matter added.
And the situation is growing more combustible. President Trump has floated bringing in the military, and a far-right influencer is organizing a “March Against Minnesota Fraud” for Saturday, while more locals mobilize to confront ICE.
That growing contingent of thousands of federal officers dwarfs the roughly 600 police officers in Minneapolis, leading some locals to believe they must protect themselves. Some City Council members now carry gas masks everywhere they go, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial board described the city as being “under siege” by the federal government. Late Friday, a judge overseeing a suit brought by protesters imposed new limits on how immigration-enforcement officials can interact with demonstrators, including blocking agents from pepper-spraying or arresting peaceful protesters.
‘Hard to understand’
Critics contend Minnesota doesn’t deserve to be the staging ground for what the DHS has billed as the largest operation in the department’s history.
Out of about six million residents, Minnesota has roughly 130,000 who are in America illegally, a number on par with Utah, Wisconsin and Indiana, and far fewer than New York, Texas and Florida, which haven’t seen comparable enforcement surges. Mexico is the most common country of origin for Minnesota’s unauthorized immigrants.
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“It’s a massive effort on the part of ICE, and when you look at the numbers it’s hard to understand the logic,” said Ryan Allen, associate dean for research at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
That federal ground force in Minnesota has arrested more than 2,000 people since late November, according to McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, although it couldn’t be determined how many arrestees were later released.
Part of the government’s strategy in Minneapolis has been to arrest refugees whose legal status officials are re-examining and, in some cases, revoking. Not all of those arrested were in the country illegally, according to lawyers and advocates. McLaughlin didn’t specify how many arrests were of refugees.
In recent days, there have been reports of blockades at shopping areas where “roving groups of DHS agents block all traffic and demand the citizenship of riders in every car,” according to a lawsuit Minnesota filed against the Trump administration earlier this week.
In response to the lawsuit, DHS said the administration was acting lawfully. The Justice Department is now investigating Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over whether they’re impeding federal law enforcement. Walz suggested the administration is “weaponizing law enforcement,” while Frey called it “an attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis.”
One video verified by The Wall Street Journal and posted to social media this week appears to show border patrol agents surrounding a Somali resident on a street, asking for identification for what one officer called a “citizen check.” The footage shows the agent repeatedly asking where she was born, despite her saying she is a U.S. citizen. He warned that if she didn’t provide ID, “we’re going to put you in the vehicle”—and motioned to a black SUV. After passersby blew whistles and honked horns, the agents left.
Ryan Wood, who formerly served as an ICE prosecutor and an assistant chief immigration judge overseeing deportation cases, said the pace of detentions and failure to maintain information about detainees’ locations are unprecedented.
“I’ve prosecuted the worst of the worst of noncitizens committing crimes in Minnesota and don’t have a problem with enforcing the law,” said Wood, who now heads an immigration law consulting firm. “ICE seems to be taking many people into custody and asking questions later.”
Federal authorities have publicized lists of serious alleged criminals they arrested in the Minnesota surge. They also point out Minneapolis protesters vandalized and broke into government vehicles Wednesday evening, after an immigration agent shot and injured a Venezuelan man in what the DHS said was self defense.
Rep. Tom Emmer (R., Minn.), the House Republicans’ whip, publicly called on Walz to resign. “This violence cannot be tolerated,” he said.
Throughout the past year, federal officials have focused immigration enforcement on blue cities one at a time, both to manage resources and maximize media attention. But ICE leadership, traditionally charged with leading the nation’s immigration enforcement, have played a relatively small role in selecting which cities to target and why, according to the officials familiar with the matter.
The Minnesota operation was conceived by officials at the White House and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who viewed targeting Minnesota as a fitting response to the welfare scandal, according to current and former ICE officials.
The government has sent officers to Minneapolis on four- and six-week deployments, the officials said.
Ruth Buffalo, chief executive of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, said her office building locked down Wednesday because of ICE activity in the neighborhood. Its doors remained locked Friday, and it posted a guard at its parking lot to prevent ICE from coming on the property.
“Things are getting tense, and it’s taking a toll on people’s well-being because it’s constant fight or flight,” she said. “We’re being told to brace for the worst.”
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Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com, Kris Maher at Kris.Maher@wsj.com and Brenna T. Smith at brenna.smith@wsj.com
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Appeared in the January 17, 2026, print edition as 'ICE Surge, Protesters Turn Minneapolis Into a Tinderbox'.