MINNEAPOLIS — On February 12, Trump-appointed “border czar” Tom Homan announced the “end” of Operation Metro Surge, during which more than 4,000 federal agents aggressively targeted immigrant communities in the Twin Cities, causing massive chaos throughout the area and killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It seemed meaningful that the same day as Homan’s announcement, Minnesota-based interdisciplinary artist Rosy Simas opened A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind) at the Walker Art Center. The contemplative installation slows the viewer down, inviting a soft sense of communion with objects such as salt bottles made from woven corn husks, each hung from a grid on the ceiling in honor of one of Simas’s relatives, and offering a site of peace amid fear and confusion.

The exhibition is inspired by her fifth great-grandfather’s half-brother Handsome Lake (Ganyodaiyo’), who experienced a vision after years of war and began teaching his people about working from the Seneca notion of a “good mind” in the early 1800s. The aforementioned sensory work, on view through July 5, is part of a two-part project, which also includes performances on May 13–16. Simas is most known for her choreography, but she has long explored visual art in tandem with dance, at times mounting installation exhibitions and performances concurrently, as she does with this project. She’s also been gaining national recognition as a visual artist, recently earning a Creative Capital Award for that side of her practice. Here, she discusses her latest endeavor.

Hyperallergic: How has the work changed since January?

Rosy Simas: The installation became more subtle. It was always intended to be a space that didn’t provoke, but maybe evoked. It is a space for people to rest their nervous systems, but also to inhabit a space made by a Haudenosaunee artist reflecting on what it means to try to create from a place of generating peace. I am interested in response, as opposed to reaction.

H: What is your experience of opening an exhibition in the midst of a federal occupation?

RS: When we knew that it was becoming more difficult for people to just exist around here, asking people to gather, that was sort of a no-brainer — that is not something that we can do. This isn’t a “just push through” moment. At the same time, I think having these kinds of spaces is really important during what feels like an oppressive occupation. It’s not even about a safe space. It’s a space where people can be with themselves.

Making work for a museum gallery is really difficult for me, because I like to think of the work as iterative, even within the time that it’s being shared. So for me, it’s difficult to put something up and let it be there until July, because things change.

H: You tend to want to go in there and shift things around?

RS: Yeah, the static nature of exhibitions is really challenging for me. That is part of why we’re doing so many community engagement activities around it, and also why there are two shows. The performance has more of a presentational aspect to it, where there is something being shared that has more dynamic ebb and flow, and it is also intended to draw an audience’s focus into what’s happening with the performers themselves — what they are expressing and what they are sharing.

That’s different from creating an environment for people to be inside of, where they can be with their own individual experience. There’s still something relational being asked of the people who go into the gallery. They’re asked to contemplate what I’ve put forward in terms of materials and what those materials mean. But it’s a little different than performance, where they’re being asked to exist in relationship to the performers.

H: One of the things that I experienced with the exhibition was the different spaces that you move through. You’re being invited to sit or to visit each station in an active way. It seemed almost like it’s choreography for the participant who’s viewing the work.

RS: In Haudenosaunee world, we do everything counterclockwise. There is an invitation to come in, turn to your right, and see the embroidery and the first set of treaty cloth panels. And then to see the salt bottles, the deerskin lace, the treaty panels with the corn husk, and end up back where the language pillar is, where you can feel the vibration of the language — how it feels through a sense of touch, and not just a sense of hearing. Nobody’s telling people to come in and move counterclockwise, but people are invited in that way.  

My work as a body-based moving artist here is an important reference. The corn husk panels are hanging from a grid, and that’s intentional. The grid is made to reflect the way that I think as someone who primarily makes work in a theater setting: The way that the panels hang references how I think about stage design and how we experience performance in space. 

H: On social media, you commented about the need for visibility for Native, BIPOC, and queer voices. Why is creating a space for that presence so important right now? 

RS: Those voices are the ones that are being suppressed in all of this. We have to keep making work. There are people who haven’t been leaving their houses. There were people who became paralyzed and were unable to do their work. I have had serious moments of paralysis, for six to eight hours at a time, and that has been going on since January. And it’s not just because of this recent occupation, but it’s cumulative in many ways. 

H: The space feels sacred. Was that something that you were going for? 

RS: I don’t know that I would use that term, but what your experience of the space and how it feels to you is probably the most important thing to me. 

It’s the same as making the dance work. From the first residency until now, the ideas around the dance work — not the meaning behind it, but the way that it’s presented and the space around it — shift depending on what environment we’re currently living in. And in Minneapolis since January, we’ve been experiencing a very particular environment, and my work happened to be made in that timeframe. I’ve put a lot of thought into creating a space that I think people need right now, in this very time. 

MINNEAPOLIS — Three months ago, masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles descended on the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s largest and most aggressive crackdown yet of immigrants.

The agents arrested thousands of undocumented immigrants, in what the Border Patrol commander then in charge there, Gregory Bovino, called a “turn and burn” strategy. Agents also threatened journalists and activists documenting the arrests, and shot and killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Back then, community members, fed up with the presence of ICE agents in their city, took to street corners across the city with whistles around their necks, ready to alert their neighbors of the presence of federal immigration agents. Neighborhoods created a network of volunteers who drove migrants to work, doctors’ appointments and brought people food who were too afraid to leave their homes.

Today Minneapolis looks different. The crackdown has receded, and arrests of immigrants have dropped 12%. Commander Bovino was forced to retire, and the neighborhood watches that tracked ICE SUVs are no longer as active. But the surge left a mark that enforcement statistics can’t capture, including a hollowed-out local economy that immigrants and their neighbors say they are struggling to rebuild.

A sign reading “A person was stolen from us by ICE here” hangs from a utility pole at Powderhorn Park in the wake of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, Minn. on April 10, 2026.

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Mourners visit the memorial site for Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by federal agents in January during Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, Minn. on April 24, 2026.

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“We were left traumatized,” said Y, a woman who asked NPR to identify her by her middle initial because she worries speaking out will affect her ongoing immigration case.

NPR talked to nine immigrants about how Operation Metro Surge upended their lives and how they’re adapting today.

Together, their stories map what the crackdown left behind: shuttered restaurants, households rationing groceries, mounting debt, mental health woes, and and, for some, a serious reckoning with whether to leave the United States to return to their home countries.

The seamstress

On the evening of January 13th, Y was headed home from one of her two jobs as a seamstress.

Life was going well and the prospects were bright: she had recently bought a house, and talked to her daughter about the prospect of sending her to college.

In the blink of an eye everything changed. Y said she was surrounded by unmarked vehicles while driving home from work. This was in the height of Operation Metro Surge, when streets were empty and masked ICE agents would drive around the city in unmarked cars and make random stops in the streets.

The immigration officers, she said, arrested her despite her showing them her work permit and documentation showing she had applied for a U visa, one given to victims of specific crimes.

The Ecuadoran spent a month being shuffled around multiple detention centers in the U.S. She said before being detained, she barely had debt.

But after being released from detention with an ankle monitor while her immigration case plays out, Y said things got bad.

Y, an Ecuadorean seamstress who was detained during Operation Metro Surge and sent to a detention facility in Texas despite having a work permit, sits for a portrait beside her daughter in Minneapolis, MN on April 23, 2026. Y’s month-long detention led to her losing one of her two jobs as well as amassing around $13,000 in debts related to legal fees, lost income, and travel costs, as she had to pay her own return expenses from Texas after being released.

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Y, an Ecuadorean seamstress who was detained during Operation Metro Surge and sent to a detention facility in Texas despite having a work permit, shows the ankle monitor she is required to wear at her home in Minneapolis, Minn. on April 23, 2026. Y’s month-long detention led to her losing one of her two jobs as well as amassing around $13,000 in debts related to legal fees, lost income, and travel costs, as she had to pay her own return expenses from Texas after being released.

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With no weekly paycheck, and with mounting legal fees, her debt skyrocketed.

“It was hard to come out of detention and find so much debt,” Y said.

Y’s 18-year-old daughter asked friends and family to borrow $7,500 to post bond for her mom. The daughter also asked for help to pay for the mortgage of the house, and to pay for utilities. Y now owes more than $13,000 to friends and family members who pooled their money.

Y recently started working again, and is looking for a second job, or even a third one.

Before detention, Y was hoping to save enough money to help send her 18-year-old daughter to college. The daughter wants to be a veterinarian.

But now she worries college may be out of reach.

“My dream was to see my daughter in college — I used to tell her, ‘don’t worry, I have two jobs and I will figure a way for you to graduate from the university,’” Y said. “Now we have to find scholarships. It’s been hard.”

The day laborers

During Operation Metro Surge, the areas where day laborers used to gather to get jobs — including the Home Depot or the empty lot on Lake Street — were completely emptied.

People enter and exit a Home Depot in the Twin Cities, MN on April 22, 2026. Day laborers often seek work opportunities outside of home improvement retail outlets, with such locations becoming a common target of immigration enforcement operations.

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V, a day laborer from Ecuador who went into hiding and lost employment for weeks during Operation Metro Surge, waits for work along East Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minn. on April 22, 2026.

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But months after the operation ended, migrant workers have started to return for work.

V, an Ecuadorian man who asked NPR to identify him by the initial of his first name because he’s undocumented, said “everything changed” for day laborers.

He’s now behind on his rent, he said. Work has been slow and his hourly wage is down.

49-year-old R, another worker, used to get hired every day for work by camping out at the Home Depot lot. She told NPR she’d get paid anywhere from $20 to $25 per hour for cleaning offices and homes.

R, a day laborer from Ecuador who cleans houses for a living, waits for work outside a Home Depot in the Twin Cities, Minn. on April 22, 2026. Although she has returned to work following Operation Metro Surge, R has seen both a decline in work opportunities as well as a decrease in hourly wages being offered.

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A week ago she went back to work. These days when she gets hired, she’s getting offered $15 to $17 per hour.

“It’s like starting again from zero,” R said. She asked NPR to use her first initial because she’s undocumented.

“ICE destroyed our lives psychologically and physically,” she said.

The restaurant owners in the brink of closing 

The Hernandez family have owned the Mexican restaurant El Tejabal in Richfield, Minn., for nearly two decades. It is a staple in the community.

Owners Miguel Hernandez, Sr., and Rosa Zambrano said the surge in immigration agents created chaos in their restaurant: employees stopped coming, customers stopped eating in. They lost about 60% in sales.

“We won’t recover because those sales are not going to come back, and we still have to pay rent, and the cost of food has increased,” Zambrano said in Spanish.

Miguel Hernandez preps food at El Tejaban Mexican Grill, the family-run restaurant that he has owned with his wife Rosa Zambrano for nearly two decades, in Richfield, Minn. on April 22, 2026. The couple fears that they will need to close their restaurant when their current lease ends, as the business suffered dramatic revenue losses during Operation Metro Surge and has struggled to recover in the months since.

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Miguel Hernandez reads an order slip at El Tejaban Mexican Grill, the family-run restaurant that he has owned with his wife Rosa Zambrano for nearly two decades, in Richfield, Minn. on April 22, 2026;

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Rosa Zambrano discusses administrative details with her daughter Diana and an employee in the office at El Tejaban Mexican Grill, the family-run restaurant that she has owned with her husband Miguel Hernandez for nearly two decades, in Richfield, Minn. on April 22, 2026.

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The couple said they’ve decided to close in about two years, when their lease is up. They said they’ve crunched the numbers and realized there’s no chance for them to fully recover.

Both Zambrano and Hernandez Sr. are 60 years old and they were hoping to save some money for their retirement. That’s not possible anymore.

“We are not saving money to continue the business,” Zambrano said. “We are saving to pay rent.”

Daughter Dianna Hernandez, 27, works at the restaurant and during the surge she said she had to lock its doors because of the presence of ICE agents in the parking lot.

Rosa Zambrano, Dianna Hernandez, and Miguel Hernandez at El Tejaban Mexican Grill, in Richfield, Minn. Dianna’s parents have owned the restaurant for nearly two decades.

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She doesn’t want to see the restaurant close — but she acknowledges Operation Metro Surge changed their lives, even though she and the rest of the family are U.S. citizens.

“This is where I grew up, this is all I know and to just think and hear them say we are going to close in two to three years, and the way it’s ending, I hate it for them,” she said.

The family who lost it all

Many people who talked to NPR have relied on their children, their community and their savings to continue to live. But others are facing economic ruin.

“The economic, emotional, traumatic impact of everything that we went through here in Minneapolis is going to be felt for years,” Myrka Zambrano, with the advocacy group Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, said.

A bill making its way through the Minnesota Legislature would create a $100 million relief program for small businesses impacted by the crackdown. But Zambrano said that’s not enough, especially when so many immigrants are struggling with other issues like food security and housing.

Pablo Alcaraz and María Peñalosa, a couple that has been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, are struggling, too.

Husband and wife Pablo Alcaraz and Maria Peñalosa pose for a portrait outside their home in Inver Grove Heights, Minn. on April 22, 2026. The couple, who had to close their business Garibaldi Mexican Restaurant in West St. Paul after suffering dramatic revenue losses during Operation Metro Surge, have lost their only source of income.

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The commercial space that was previously home to Garibaldi Mexican Restaurant sits empty in West St. Paul, Minn. on April 28, 2026. The restaurant, which was owned by Pablo Alcaraz and his wife Maria Peñalosa, had to close after suffering dramatic revenue losses during Operation Metro Surge.

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The couple have work permits and a U visa — a type of visa given to victims of specific crimes.

Their whole life they had worked towards one dream — to open a restaurant.

But now the nonstop hum of the industrial fridge inside their cluttered trailer is a reminder of what could have been.

“It’s so unfair that in a few months the government has ended the work of 20 years,” Peñalosa said. “They ended our dreams.”

Their restaurant, Garibaldi Mexican Restaurant, went out of business as a direct result of Operation Metro Surge.

Before Operation Metro Surge, the couple said they would make about $15,000 in monthly profit, on average.

During Operation Metro Surge, sales evaporated. There were many days, he says, when they made almost nothing in profit.

Now they are living on the frozen meat and other food from the restaurant, but Alcaraz said they are likely to run out in a month.

“Once we run out of it, that’s when the problems will start,” he said.

Pablo Alcaraz becomes emotional as he and his wife Maria Peñalosa discuss the closure of their restaurant at their home in Inver Grove Heights, MN on April 22, 2026. The couple, who had to close Garibaldi Mexican Restaurant in West St. Paul after suffering dramatic revenue losses during Operation Metro Surge, have lost their only source of income.

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Peñalosa, the wife, said she worries about her husband’s mental health. He doesn’t want to leave his bed, and is depressed, she said.

Alcaraz recognizes he’s desperate. He said that because he had to close the restaurant and has some debt, he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to open a new restaurant or another business.

“How am I going to move forward? I’m practically dead,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “I need a credit line to open a restaurant, to pay rent, to reopen. I don’t have it. They killed me.”

This story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.