Minneapolis, MN
Minneapolis immigrants still feeling the sting of Trump’s largest crackdown yet
R, a day laborer from Ecuador who cleans houses for a living, waits for work outside a Home Depot in the Twin Cities, Minn. 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.
Tim Evans for NPR
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Tim Evans for NPR
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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Tim Evans for NPR
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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Tim Evans for NPR
“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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Tim Evans for NPR
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.
Tim Evans for NPR
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Tim Evans for NPR
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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Tim Evans for NPR
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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Tim Evans for NPR
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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Tim Evans for NPR
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.
MINNEAPOLIS (WJON News) — It will be a celebration of everything purple this week in Minneapolis. The city will once again hold a Prince Celebration from Wednesday through Sunday.
Chaka Khan will help kick off the festivities at First Avenue on Wednesday night.
The five-day festival will have a wide array of things to do and see. There is a Prince Sing-Along at the Celebration Block Party on Saturday. Fans can walk the purple way with the second annual Purple Path, which is a city-wide tribute with eight temporary sidewalk clings marking significant sites tied to the artist.
The goal of the sing-along is to have 15,000 people singing arm-in-arm.
Plus, at the Meet Minneapolis Visitor Center, you can check out a replica of the motorcycle used in the 1984 movie “Purple Rain,” a five-foot-tall exact replica of the “cloud shoe” worn by Prince in the music video for “Raspberry Beret,” and paintings by Peyton Scott Russel.
Morris Day, Tevin Campbell, and more will play a concert at The Armory on Friday night.
There will also be walking tours, appearances by Prince’s bands the Revolution and the New Power Generation, and a Prince night at the Twins’ game on Thursday.
Purple Path map, Prince Celebration 2026
Meet Minneapolis, Convention & Visitors Association
Meet Minneapolis, Convention & Visitors Association
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New York City has gone YIMBY.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his new housing plan on May 26, with an agenda to build 200,000 new affordable homes, convert existing hotels and office buildings into low-cost apartments, and support the city’s tenants against “bad landlords.” He has endeared himself to the pro-housing, “yes in my backyard” cohort.
The scale of the mayor’s affordable housing plans is ambitious, especially for a city as populous and expensive as New York. But City Hall has some tangible inspiration. As Mamdani repeated in a series of press conferences this week, NYC needs to be more like Austin and Minneapolis. Seattle, Vienna, and Auckland also got honorable mentions.
What these cities have in common is fewer zoning regulations and more housing investment from local governments. One of the biggest drivers of skyrocketing housing costs in New York and cities across the country is simple supply and demand: There isn’t enough housing for everyone who wants it, allowing home sellers and landlords to hike prices for scarce goods. Some cities that built big have seen rent and home price growth slow or even reverse. Mamdani and pro-building advocates hope that the same can happen in the Big Apple.
“Let the lessons other cities have learned guide our future,” the mayor said to a crowd in Astoria, Queens. “Let our size be our strength. Let us implement these policies at scale. Let the largest city in the nation deliver the largest housing transformation this country has ever seen.”
Other cities show that increased housing supply lowers cost
Other big cities — both in the US and internationally — have tried similar strategies to boost housing access. Mamdani has pointed to the success of Minneapolis’ “2040 plan,” which focused on growing housing supply with new, denser builds and increased options for low- and middle-income residents. A paper by researchers at Middlebury College estimated that rents and home prices in the Twin City were 17% to 34% lower than they would have been without the reforms.
Austin successfully lowered median rents by 18.2% between their 2022 peak and 2026 — a difference of $302 per month, a Realtor.com report found. The key reason was an increase in supply coupled with slowing demand: The city invested in building more homes, and migration to Austin dipped compared to COVID-era highs.
Seattle, meanwhile, made zoning reforms to encourage affordable housing and protect tenants. Vienna heavily subsidizes more than half of the city’s housing supply, keeping rents low. And Auckland passed legislation to make it easier to build homes and invest in urban infrastructure.
Nikolai Fedak, president and founder of the organization New York YIMBY, told Business Insider that Mamdani’s plan is “an excellent first step” to address the housing crisis, and he would like to see the mayor push more market-rate development in neighborhoods with easy access to train and bus lines.
“It is fantastic to see a Mayor begin to embrace the reality of supply and demand curves but we have much farther to go,” he said. “And the best and easiest step to make this happen would be razing and replacing neighborhoods of single-family mansions sitting on some of the most valuable and transit-accessible real estate in the entire country.”
Mamdani has committed billions of dollars to increase NYC’s housing supply, which may help meet demand and encourage more affordable rents. His plan to freeze the rent on the 44% of the city’s apartments that are stabilized, however, risks pushing up prices for unstabilized units. St. Paul tried something similar, and one study found that the policy largely cut costs more for higher-income renters, and the rent control was eventually walked back in favor of building new homes.
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, told Business Insider that Mamdani’s plan “centers around one goal: growth,” and the success of these housing projects depends on buy-in from the public and private sectors. Cutting outdated regulations is a good start, he said.
Realtor.com Senior Economist Jake Krimmel — a NYC resident himself — added that he appreciates Mamdani’s “yes, and” approach to housing, and said that the mayor has done a solid job with policies that both incentivize developers to build more affordably and appeal to the YIMBY contingent: “To thread that needle is difficult,” he said.
Building large-scale affordable housing is a heavy lift. There are funding hurdles at both the City Council and state level, alongside longstanding zoning restrictions that can prevent new construction or the conversion of existing commercial buildings. In NYC, where half of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, it’s also challenging to make that housing accessible.
The recent overturning of a longtime state cap on home construction in NYC will allow more homes to be built, City Hall has said, and the mayor is working with the state and federal government to ensure future funding for housing projects. The administration also plans to build dense housing on property the city already owns, reducing some cost and regulatory barriers.
“New York City will build,” Mamdani said. “And then New York City will build some more.”
Minneapolis, MN
Friends, family and community gather to honor Officer Jamal Mitchell with street dedication
A Minneapolis street will forever serve to honor the police officer who lost his life on it. A portion of Blaisdell Avenue is now called “Officer Jamal Mitchell Way.”
Two years ago, Officer Mitchell was shot and killed while responding to an active shooter. The man who murdered him was the person Officer Mitchell was trying to help.
Mitchell’s friends, family, and community gathered on Saturday to make sure his name is remembered.
“He is emblematic of everything that Minneapolis is about,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “This is someone who lived his life in service to those he loved — a hero, who gave his life to protect others without a second thought.”
“May every person who passes this sign take a moment to reflect on the example Jamal Mitchell set for all of us,” said Katie Blackwell, Interim Chief of Minneapolis Police. “Jamal, we will never forget you.”
“Man, do we miss him,” said friend and neighbor Chris Dunker. “Our backyard barbecues, our game nights, even just conversations, Jamal, with you in your front yard as you were playing with your kids.”
“Jamal, my friend, we miss you daily. We admire your bravery, we honor your legacy, we will never forget your sacrifice to this community,” said Dunker. “Rest easy, brother.”
Mitchell was awarded the Medal of Honor and a Purple Heart after his death in 2024. His former commander says Mitchell’s name on the street sign reminds us we are the fabric of each other.
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