Minneapolis, MN
For Minneapolis reporters, Operation Metro Surge was a reckoning – Poynter
For weeks, reporters at The Minnesota Star Tribune were covering scattered immigration enforcement actions around Minneapolis and St. Paul. Tom Scheck, the paper’s investigative editor, had assigned his small team of about four journalists to the story.
“We were trying to cover events, but they were not like 30, 40 people who were being detained. It was like more one-offs,” Scheck said.
Then, on Jan. 7, Renee Good was shot and killed by immigration enforcement officers as she tried to drive away from them.
“Our executive editor looked at me and said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘I have four people.’ And that was a moment where she said, “Everyone in our newsroom will cover this story.”’
It marked a turning point in news coverage of Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration crackdown that brought thousands of immigration officers to Minneapolis and St. Paul last winter.
During a community conversation hosted by Poynter on Wednesday night, Scheck and MPR News senior photojournalist Kerem Yücel reflected on what it was like to cover the operation as local journalists — and, in Yücel’s case, as an immigrant.
Both described a city transformed by the scale of the federal response, as well as an unusual sense of camaraderie among competing newsrooms. Everyone was dedicated to the story. The Minnesota Star Tribune hosted safety trainings that were open to other newsroom reporters. While out in the field, Yücel said reporters from other newsrooms stuck together to protect one another. They’d extend safety gear if he lost some of his, and they all kept a Signal chat or WhatsApp group to communicate.
Any of the typical competition between newsrooms was erased by an understanding that they needed to work together and protect each other.
For Yücel, documenting the impact on ordinary residents — the teachers and mothers, the doctors and clergy, and how they protected their fellow community members — became the focus of his work. Yücel, who immigrated from Turkey seven years ago, has covered the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath in Minneapolis in 2020 and spent five years covering the conflict in Syria.
“In the city (Minneapolis), I never imagined facing this reality,” he said as he flipped through photos he’d taken during the operation.
Kerem Yücel, senior visual journalist at MPR News, speaks with Tampa Bay Times photo director Martha Ascencio-Rhine during a VIP reception and visual presentation on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, at Poynter’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. The image displayed behind Yücel was taken during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. (Chris Kozlowski/Poynter)
Scheck said he realized he needed to start paying attention to ICE presence in the Twin Cities in October — well before President Trump deployed waves of immigration enforcement to the city.
He was sitting at a bar in Washington, D.C., where he was attending a conference, when a Chicago reporter told him his newsroom needed to be ready.
Scheck asked his editor if there was a plan in case Minneapolis saw the kind of immigration crackdown that overtook Chicago. “Like any good manager, they said ‘congratulations, you’ve volunteered.’”
He dug into how other immigration enforcement crackdowns had transpired.
“I looked at the coverage in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Portland, in Charlotte, and I made a timeline of the things that happened.”
Within a month, the first ICE raid took place in Minneapolis.
“They raided a facility called Bro-Tex … and I think they detained about 10 or 12 people at that event.”
US Border Patrol agents detain a person near Roosevelt High School during dismissal time as federal immigration enforcement actions sparked protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, 2026. (Kerem Yücel/MPR News)
About two weeks later, a conservative outlet in the city ran an article alleging that members of the Somali community were engaging in fraud, which the Trump administration latched onto and used as its reason to deploy thousands of immigration agents to Minneapolis.
As the operation expanded, both journalists found themselves reporting on a major story unfolding in their own communities.
Yücel’s citizenship status was questioned by immigration officers routinely. There were many times out in the field when he feared what might happen.
“Well if something’s happened to me, I only know I have my wife and my kids, and there is no other person to call in for the emergency,” he said.
For him, the severity of the situation became clear the day after Good was shot and killed. He went out to the scene, but found himself at the nearby Roosevelt High School where Greg Bovino, then-commander of Border Patrol, was holding a canister of gas and running into crowds of teachers, parents and students.
“Everywhere was covered with the tear gas and smoke and they detained a person just in front of me.”
After he photographed the moment, Yücel had to pick up his children, twin boys. That night, they asked him hard questions. Were they considered white or brown? Could they be detained? They were scared, having witnessed a classmate being taken away, and knowing that they weren’t American.
It was the next day, sitting in his therapist’s office, that the reality of his experience as a photojournalist documenting an immigration crackdown as an immigrant himself really came into view.
“That day I was start(ing) thinking, ‘Oh, this story is also becoming my story.’”
From left, Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network; Tom Scheck, investigative editor at The Minnesota Star Tribune; Kerem Yücel, senior visual journalist at MPR News; and Amy Sherman, senior correspondent at PolitiFact, participate in a community conversation about Operation Metro Surge on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, at Poynter’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Chris Kozlowski/Poynter)
In Minneapolis, no community or person was left untouched by the scale and force of Operation Metro Surge, not even the journalists. Yücel went out and reported despite the fear that he might be detained or arrested. During protests following a Nov. 25 immigration enforcement operation, he was injured by tear gas and rubber bullets fired by local police and was hospitalized. He kept reporting.
Scheck said that by day, at the office, he focused on getting the story right — what needed to be covered and where to send reporters.
But, at home, the reality that he was living through Operation Metro Surge rather than just reporting on it was unavoidable.
“You see all these people who are like out either protesting or out on the streets just watching the school because they want to make sure that kids feel safe … it was just a little bit jarring.”
Portraits of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti and other people killed by law enforcement in Minnesota are displayed on a wooden fence beside a memorial along Portland Avenue South on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Kerem Yücel/MPR News)
For both journalists, Operation Metro Surge wasn’t just a story. It was something unfolding in their own neighborhoods, among their friends, families and neighbors.
Yücel said the experience changed how he felt as a resident of Minneapolis and an immigrant in the United States.
“It wasn’t my home, but when I saw the people outside just standing, I found that I started feeling like I was growing some roots. My home is Istanbul, Turkey. But those people had an impact on my life. My roots are starting to reach down in the soil. I’m starting to call Minneapolis my second home.”
For Yücel, that connection to the community was essential to the work. Had he not been there to witness its pain, resilience and solidarity, he said, he would not have been able to tell the story in the same way.
Update (June 4, 2026, 2:40 p.m.): An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of MPR News senior visual journalist Karem Yücel and incorrectly linked an injury he sustained while covering immigration enforcement protests to the Bro-Tex raid. The injury occurred during a separate operation later that month.
Minneapolis, MN
Walking All the Streets of Western Northeast Park
Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published July 4, 2026.
The Northeast Park neighborhood is arguably the northeasternmost in Minneapolis. Those that extend somewhat further east are nowhere near as far north, and those that are further north don’t extend as far to the east. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. I’m not trying to pick a fight with Waite Park, for example.
What’s inarguable is that the neighborhood divides into two quite distinct areas. West of Johnson Street, there’s a nearly square portion, bounded on its other three sides by Broadway Street, Central Avenue, and 18th Avenue. (I’ll omit the direction indicator NE, which applies to all streets and avenues in this area.) This western portion was the focus for this first walk in the neighborhood. Unlike the irregularly shaped area east of Johnson, it has a grid-based layout, albeit with substantial gaps.
The main loop of my walk began and ended at the southwest corner, the intersection of Broadway and Central. The building on that corner, The Broadway, presents a low-profile facade toward Broadway, which is the uphill side of a sloping lot. The main tenant on this side is Spyhouse Coffee, which makes the most of the timber and brick interior. I chose to wait until the end of the walk to see other parts of the building.
Heading east on Broadway, the next building I passed was the National Guard armory, described more fully by the sign out front as the “Minnesota Army National Guard N.E. Minneapolis Training and Community Center.” A sprawling one-story structure built in 1992, it has none of the romance of the earlier castle-like armories or the vaulted art deco structure in downtown Minneapolis. Together with its parking lot, it occupies the entire triple-sized block from Tyler to Fillmore, with Polk and Taylor being absent in this area.
East of Fillmore, I continued in a forward-and-back spur two blocks to Buchanan, with a side spur north on Pierce. This reflects the fact that Pierce doesn’t cross the diagonal railroad tracks, one of the many ways in which the street grid of this area gives way to the realities of land use.
I rather like how commercial, residential and recreational uses are mixed together, leading to buildings of widely varying age, style, and size. Some of them have also gained a new look and new purpose over time. For example, a concrete-block building on the corner of Broadway and Pierce, which looks like it started life as an automotive business in the 1970s, now has a sharp paint job and signage announcing its repurposing as Abra Kadabra Environmental Services: “When nature creeps in, call us.”

An even more striking example lies in the first block north of Broadway on Fillmore, a house now prominently exhibiting mural art by Yuya Negishi, but upon closer examination showing signs of its origins as the Samuel Moyer Gospel Lighthouse.

Take another look again at that mural-adorned former chapel, this time with an eye toward how its form fits that of its neighbors. To its right and further to its left, there are houses with similarly pitched roofs. But this appearance of consistency is somewhat illusory. The neighbor immediately to the left (or north) only came into view as I walked a bit further.
That immediate neighbor, a flat-roofed two-story structure, was built in 1901 as an apartment building. Today its four rental units are guarded by three metal roosters.

All of these residence are directly across Fillmore from the United States Postal Service’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, just north of the armory. At the time of my walk, its lot was packed full of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which I assume were being readied for their initial deployment.
I walked 13th Avenue east from Fillmore to its dead end just beyond Lincoln Street, where Interstate 35W cuts through. So far as getting anywhere goes, I was wasting my time to go that extra half block beyond Lincoln. But the whole point of this project isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to see what there is to see. And you never know when you’re going to see a giraffe in someone’s back yard.

A few roosters or a giraffe are nothing compared to the lawn ornaments on one of the Lincoln Street houses just south of 12th Avenue. The horizontal lines of flower boxes and whatnot balance out the vertical totem-pole-like collection of cartoon characters (Minnie Mouse, a pig chef, baby Yoda, a cow and I don’t know what else).

With that behind me, you’ll understand why, after wrapping around to Buchanan Street, I was unsure about the turkey resting on a loading dock. Was it like the metal roosters, the giraffe, the pig? I waited. Eventually it swiveled its head, answering my question in the negative.

The very presence of a loading dock amidst residences is not something one would see in more rigidly zoned neighborhoods. The residences vary in age, with my eye particularly drawn to one a couple blocks further north that turns out to be from 1902.

The street grid is interrupted again at 14th Avenue, this time by Northeast Athletic Field Park, the defining feature of the neighborhood. I walked a spur east along 14th Avenue as far as Johnson Street, then turned west to continue my main loop. The athletic fields themselves are just athletic fields, nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary. (I’m notably non-athletic.) But the restroom building in the block between Buchanan and Pierce is a standout for its Creatives after Curfew mural celebrating “the heart of Northeast Park.” It was painted in 2021 by Leslie Barlow, Maiya Lea Hartman, Thomasina Topbear, Maria Robinson and Claudia Valentino, sponsored by the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association.

Once I was headed back northbound on Fillmore, I detoured off to the west on the entrance driveway leading to Sociable Cider Werks. For a pedestrian, it’s actually easier to access this business from the north, but I wasn’t sure yet whether that was blocked off or not, so I took the driveway. I enjoyed a brief rest stop on their patio, consuming a Freewheeler cider and an oil-stained paper bag of seasoned french fries from the resident food trailer, Smashed Patty’s.

The All of Minneapolis project has been an on-and-off part of my life for a decade now, and though there has been change over that time, there have also been constants. One of those constants has been my struggle with how to balance the interesting and the beautiful in my choice of photo subjects.
North of the park on Fillmore, there are two quite similar buildings, each built in the late 19th century by Aaron Carlson as a duplex and then extended by him in the 1920s and subdivided. I decided to photograph the slightly older of the two (1897 versus 1899), even though I can’t count the obscuring of the original facade in the category of beauties. It simply is too interesting a glimpse into the evolution of this Minneapolis housing to be ignored. And that’s even before the name “Aaron Carlson” meant anything to me. (Later in the walk I saw the name on a smokestack and looked it up.)

As I walked by other residential properties, mostly from varying decades of the 20th century, I was frequently as interested by the flowering bushes and trees as by the buildings. Likewise, when I came around to the Johnson Street side of the park, I was as drawn to the daffodils planted around the sign as I was by the water park visible in the background.

After following 16th Avenue along the northern border of the park, I turned north on Buchanan Street and found myself walking alongside a school building for which the playground equipment already signaled that it wasn’t just any school. Yinghua Academy is a Mandarin Chinese immersion school.

Before I turned onto 17th Avenue and saw the front of the school (complete with a fitting Little Free Library), I paused to consider the white duplex at 1709 Buchanan. The horizontal lines and white color made me think of one of the less common styles of modernist architecture, loosely inspired by the Secession Building in Vienna. I don’t know whether that was intentional; the history of the building’s construction and expansion is complex.


Once I was back to 18th Avenue, I headed west from Pierce Street to Central Avenue, with southward spurs down Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets. This is a rhododendron-enhanced residential area dead ending at the railroad-adjacent industrial zone that now contains Sociable Cider Werks and the former Industrial Machinery Company building, fancifully called “The Alamo.” I saw the front of that building once I turned onto Central Avenue.


To access the part of this industrial area that is south of the tracks, I turned east on 14th Avenue. Extending south of there on Tyler Street is the former Crown Iron Works, redeveloped by Hillcrest Development. Today it is the Crown-Arts Center, billed as a “Creative Office Campus.” Sadly, one of the tenants I visited, Bauhaus Brew Labs, has closed in the interval between my walk and completing this writeup.



Tyler Street also brought me back to The Broadway building, where I had begun my walk. Across the parking lot from it is a 2023 apartment building featuring a mural by Chuck U. The parking lot also provides a good view of the historical signage (“The Land-O-Nod Co., Bedding Manufacturers”) and is the site for a sculpture by Zoran Mojsilov.)



The parking lot also provides access to the side of the building opposite Tyler Street, where there is a sheltered area between the building itself and the retaining wall of Central Avenue, which ascends to Broadway. That area contains a stone amphitheater and a patio served by Padraigs Brewing. There I capped my walk off with an N.E. Porter and a Potter’s Pasty.



All photos by Max Hailperin
Related
Minneapolis, MN
Feds release key evidence in Minnesota ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
MINNESOTA (TNND) — Federal prosecutors have turned over key evidence in the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to Minnesota investigators after months of legal battles, marking a major breakthrough in the state’s effort to investigate the deaths.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that the evidence was released by U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen’s office after a lengthy dispute over access to the materials. The transfer includes previously withheld hard drives containing witness statements, police body-camera footage and Good’s damaged SUV.
“The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said in a video statement. “Any time the government is responsible in whatever way for taking the life of a community member, we need to have a full and thorough investigation.”
The Minneapolis immigration crackdown, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” ended in February after being billed as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever.
A private autopsy found that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot three times by a federal immigration agent during a Jan. 7 traffic stop, including a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot and killed during a Jan. 24 protest. The medical examiner ruled he died after being struck multiple times by federal agents.
At least nine people have been killed nationwide in encounters involving ICE agents since the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign began last year. No one has been charged in connection with the deaths, and the federal government has argued that state prosecutors lack jurisdiction to investigate federal officers.
The latest development also comes as questions continue to surround other recent fatal ICE shootings. An ICE agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, while prosecutors in Houston said federal officials are still withholding key evidence in their investigation into another deadly shooting involving an ICE officer last week.
New video of Minneapolis ICE shooting from agent’s perspective (CNN Newsource)
Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March, accusing federal authorities of refusing to provide evidence needed for the state investigation.
Court filings suggest the breakthrough came after federal prosecutors sought evidence gathered by state investigators in a separate case involving ICE agent Christian Castro.
Castro, 52, has been charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime in connection with the Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Prosecutors allege Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home while pursuing another man, striking Sosa-Celis in the thigh.
State and local prosecutors told federal officials they would share evidence in Castro’s case only if the federal government agreed to reciprocate in the investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti.
“We are willing to share evidence with you if the exchange is reciprocal,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans wrote in a court filing.
Lawyers for Good’s family called the evidence transfer “an important and meaningful step toward justice and accountability.” The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which has taken custody of the materials, said “great strides have been made” to ensure a “thorough and complete review” of both shootings.
But an attorney for Pretti’s family said Rosen’s office still declined during a Monday meeting to confirm whether any formal cooperation agreement exists between state and federal investigators.
“No family should be required to beg federal authorities to do their job,” attorney Steve Schleicher said in a statement. “Without a public commitment by federal authorities to cooperate with the state, it is difficult—if not impossible—to pursue justice that holds the individuals accountable for Alex’s death.”
The evidence transfer marks the first significant cooperation between state and federal investigators since Minnesota filed its lawsuit, potentially allowing the long-stalled investigations into both fatal shootings to move forward.
_____
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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