Minnesota immigrant advocate organizations have noticed a growing number of cases in which the federal government is trying to revoke the refugee status of some people who have already been admitted — in some cases, years ago. First reported by Sahan Journal, it's a continuation of Operation PARRIS, a federal operation claiming to target fraud in the refugee program.

Joining Minnesota Now to explain why and how some of Minnesota's refugees are experiencing this is Rachel Kohler. She's the immigration services supervising attorney at the International Institute of Minnesota.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Demand for food is at an all-time high as Minnesota’s hunger relief network struggles to keep up with the pace amid higher grocery and fuel prices.

Second Harvest Heartland reports that at the end of fiscal year 2026, the regional food bank distributed more than 172 million pounds of food to food shelves statewide in the last year — a record amount. According to Toni Scott, chief supply chain officer at Second Harvest, that’s a 500 percent increase over the last two decades and a 20 percent increase in the last four years.

“What we haven’t seen is a slowdown,” Scott said. “The number of visits is accelerating, and food shelves are opening more hours. They’re doing things to increase access, and we just feel like we are not keeping up.”

Factors driving these numbers include government shutdowns, Operation Metro Surge, inflation and rising fuel costs. Scott said diesel prices have risen 70 percent since March, which added $20,000 in monthly expenses to Second Harvest’s budget. As of Friday, the average diesel fuel price in Minnesota hovered around $6.18, according to AAA.

Minnesota residents made more than 9 million visits to food shelves last year, according to The Food Group, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit that works statewide with food shelves to alleviate hunger and meet residents’ nutritional needs.

Those numbers are increasing due to federal cuts to safety-net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, Scott said.

“So as we see more financial pressures coming,” she said, “and more families affected by SNAP cuts and other policy changes, we know that we will continue to see those increases and are just doing all we can to try and keep up.”

Food shelves are doing what they can to manage the increased strain on their services. Scott said Second Harvest has looked at other parts of its budget to trim in order to meet the demand, including where to source specific produce as freight has gotten more expensive because of diesel prices.

That meant the food bank had to scale back on the types of food it gets, like citrus from California. Off-season produce might get more difficult to get because of the high gas prices on incoming freight. Scott said other food shelves are struggling with this increased cost burden.

“We have been doing everything we can to optimize our network and find efficiencies, but that increase is so significant that it’s not something we can offset with efficiency,” she said. “So, [we’re] pulling other levers to make sure that we can continue to serve our neighbors.”

Second Harvest, Scott said, continues to advocate for more state and federal money. Last legislative session, The Food Group and Partners to End Hunger Coalition secured $5 million in one-time funding for food shelves — on top of $4.6 million that was already allocated — and $5 million in one-time funding for food banks.

“This is not a place where we will pass on costs to our partners or neighbors, and so as we can continue to experience these increases that extend beyond what we had in our budget initially, we absolutely have to find other places to support that,” she said. “We are committed to maintaining service in the community and the amount of food we are getting out.”

Watch a few minutes of TV, and you’re just about guaranteed to see a campaign ad.

You’re also just about guaranteed to hear about fraud. Republican candidates across the state are looking to ride a wave of frustration with Gov. Tim Walz over fraud in government assistance programs under his administration.

And several of those ads don’t simply call it fraud; some refer to “Somali” fraud.

“Somali fraudsters have stolen billions, and Amy Klobuchar made it worse,” alleges an ad paid for by a political action committee called Restore Sanity.

In an ad by her campaign, Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya promises to “deport non-citizen fraudsters.”

Minnesota’s Somali Americans have been a target of criticism around fraud — spiraling at times into hate speech against the community as a whole.

The biggest of the state’s fraud cases, Feeding Our Future, has resulted in more than 65 people convicted of fraud; the majority are Somali American. The convicted ringleader of the scandal is a white American citizen. Last year, federal officials cited fraud as a reason to send a surge of federal immigration enforcement agents to the state.

Now, rhetoric targeting Somali Minnesotans is continuing in some campaign ads.

Dan Myers is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota who studies political ads. He recognizes an old advertising tactic at work here.

“This is a long history in American politics of trying to cast part of the other party not just as people we disagree with, but as people who are not ‘us,’” Myers said.

In this election cycle, that means trying to link the Democrats to Minnesota’s Somali community — the “them” side of the “us-versus-them” narrative that ads are looking to create, Myers said.

In another ad funded and created by Restore Sanity, a video clip shows DFL governor hopeful Amy Klobuchar speaking a phrase in Somali to a crowd.

“Remember who Amy Klobuchar had words for,” the narrator says, “and who she didn't.”

The clip of Klobuchar is from a 2017 community event, unrelated to fraud and before the Feeding Our Future scheme began. Reviews of some of Restore Sanity’s ads have noted some contain exaggerations and inaccuracies — not uncommon in campaign ads across the political spectrum.

Myers said those kinds of explicit racial attacks fell out of favor in advertising a couple decades ago, after research showed that it turned some viewers away and became less socially acceptable. But he’s seen more of it since 2016.

“I think one thing that Donald Trump has done is to normalize talking very explicitly about race in America and about a particular view of race in America, and so that's just made it a lot more acceptable for people to say explicitly racially targeted things in the public sphere and not pay the same price for it,” Myers said.

He noted that many of the ads that explicitly name the Somali community are created by political action committees, not the campaigns themselves. They’re often attack ads, mentioning only the name of the candidate they oppose.

“They don't have to worry as much about muddying the name of the candidate they're for,” Myers said.

And some of the more explicit ones funded by PACs are harder to find online, appearing only in on-air commercial breaks. Restore Sanity has posted several of its ads on its social media; it has not posted the ad that shows clips of Klobuchar speaking Somali.

Recent news has set off another wave of commentary targeting the Somali community. A shooting in Eden Prairie, which law enforcement officials attributed to gang activity, led some elected officials and residents to call for scrutiny against “Somali gangs.” More criticism came after the FBI charged a Somali American teenager with planning a shooting at the Mall of America.

Campaign ads have followed suit.

A narrator in an ad opposing DFL Attorney General Keith Ellison says, “first the fraud, now Somali gangs.” That ad is paid for by a group called the Safer Minnesota Fund.

“We need safe communities, not Somali gang shootouts,” Republican candidate for governor Lisa Demuth says in a new ad by her campaign.

Local Somali leaders pushed back on that characterization, and on blaming the entire Somali community for the actions of a small group.

Myers said the campaign ad tactics likely run the risk of losing Somali American voters. That demographic typically swings toward Democrats, but in 2024, showed some movement away from the party.

Salman Fiqy considers himself one of those lost Somali Republican voters. He once ran for office unsuccessfully as a Republican, and he’d worked to bring Somali voters into the party.

But he decided last year to pull back, after Trump made negative comments about Somali Americans. This year’s campaign rhetoric, he said, is more of what drove him away.

“It's very sad to see a whole entire political campaign built on vilification of the Somali community,” Fiqy said.

More Somali community leaders have said the campaign rhetoric — and the broader stereotyping of the Somali community — is concerning. Some leaders say they worry the words will translate to violence. Several mosques have stepped up security.

“It's unfathomable to paint an entire community with the actions of just a few people,” State Senator Zaynab Mohamed said.

She said — whether it's from campaign ads or elected officials — those comments don’t reflect the community.

“These people have been in Minnesota for decades, and this is home. Some of them are in their second and third generations,” she said. “They're going to continue to serve this community and be your local neighbors. And the actions of a few are not an indictment of the entire community.”

Most of us think of libraries as a place to peruse and check out books, use a computer, conduct research for a school paper and find resources to help with a job search. But the city of New Ulm is taking the community resource aspect of its public library to a whole new level, providing frozen meals and fresh produce for residents to take home.

The New Ulm Public Library’s new community fridge and freezer were installed last week as a free resource to residents experiencing food insecurity. It’s found on the main level near the Children’s Room. Visitors can take home items such as frozen kale and bananas, fresh cantaloupes and green beans and even some pre-made frozen meals.

It’s funded by the Brown County Statewide Health Improvement Partnership (SHIP), developed in partnership with the Food Environment Action Team and the Heart of New Ulm Project, a community-driven public health initiative.

Tom Polich spent Tuesday morning restocking the fridge and freezer with frozen ham stew and honey and lime chicken dinners, bananas, kale, carrots and other foods. Polich is the regional food rescue coordinator of Region Nine Development Commission — a multi-county public planning and regional government agency based in Mankato.

He told MPR News the library’s community freezer and fridge provide another resource to the growing number of residents of the community who don’t have enough to eat.

“They don’t have to make a special trip somewhere,” Polich said. They can still utilize the food shelves in our area, but a lot of them are only allowed to use the food shelf once a month.”

And while New Ulm does already have a food shelf, said April Ide, director of the New Ulm Public Library, adding a community fridge and freezer in a place that’s visited often helps broaden access to those in need.

“We’re all about access to information and resources, and we a lot of times are answering questions from patrons where we’re trying to point them in the direction of our local resources to meet their needs,” Ide said, “It’s great for us to be able to offer one [of those resources] right here at the library.”

The New Ulm Community Fridge and Freezer is open to anyone in the community — no questions asked. There are no forms to fill out; there’s no need to sign-up in advance. People don’t even need a library card; they can just walk in and take out some vegetables, fruits or a ready-to-bake or heat meal from the community fridge and freezer.

“Our food shelf does a great job, but the library is just open [during] a really diverse set of hours,” said Kaitlin Gawrsich, community health improvement coordinator of The Heart of New Ulm, which is a community-driven public health initiative.

“They’re also open on the weekend. They’re also open in the evening. They’re open in the morning. Just kind of works for everyone, and it’s just a really accessible place,” Gawrsich added. “[It’s] a really dignified way to get what you need and meet those needs. There’s no stigma for visiting the library. Anyone can be here. Everyone’s welcome.”

The New Ulm community fridge and freezer also helps fight food waste, by gathering up and then handing out food that otherwise would’ve been tossed away in dumpsters and headed to landfills.

Polich said that the South Central Minnesota Food Recovery Program based in Mankato, Minn. takes surplus food from local restaurants, grocery stores and big chains such as Walmart, and even area farms, and distributes those food items to food shelves and community fridges.

Similar community fridges are found elsewhere around the Mankato area, most often at health and medical clinics. The food recovery program says it has rescued over 10,000 pounds of food from different sites in the past six months.

“Without the food rescue, a lot of this would have ended up in places like landfills which causes environmental issues, it’s just kind of the right thing to do,” Polich said. “The food is good stuff, and we just want to make sure it goes out to feed people. We always say, ‘save the food, feed the people.’”

Overall, there has been a warm reception to the fridge and freezer, Ide said, and she’s glad that the library can be one place where people can get what they need.

The demand for food aid across Minnesota is on the rise. Second Harvest Heartland told MPR News that the regional food bank distributed a record-breaking 172 million pounds of food in the last year. That’s 20 percent more food than the nonprofit distributed four years ago, and a 500 percent increase over what it provided 20 years ago.

“What we’re seeing is that our neighbors are needing more support than ever,” said Toni Scott, chief supply chain officer at Second Harvest Heartland, “and while we are doing all that we can to keep up, we are also struggling to meet the need.”

Correction (Oct. 15, 2026): An earlier version of this story misidentified Kaitlin Gawrsich's title. The story has been updated.

Federal authorities investigating Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar seized the Democratic lawmaker's phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her relatives, according to a person briefed on the probe.

The subpoenas were issued for a grand jury collecting evidence in Minnesota as federal authorities probe potential fraud in Omar's immigration paperwork, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation. The investigation led to federal agents searching Omar's Washington, D.C., home on Monday just weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is seeking reelection.

The scope of the investigation into Omar is unclear, though Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has suggested that authorities were examining potential crimes related to her family’s immigration paperwork.

On Tuesday, Washington D.C. U.S Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a Fox News interview that “there are several investigations going on" related to Omar and that her office is also probing issues concerning the lawmaker's financial disclosures.

“If there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted,” Pirro said.

The search of Omar's home so close to next month’s midterm contests that will determine control of the House and the Senate was swiftly condemned by Democrats, who accused the administration of targeting the Democrat for political purposes. Omar, in a statement on X, called the search an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”

“For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation,” she said. “I will not be silenced.”

A phone message seeking comment was left Wednesday with a representative for Omar.

Though the Republican focus on Omar’s background dates back years, the search notably took place three weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is seeking reelection. The Justice Department has historically sought to avoid public investigative actions involving a candidate within 60 days of a primary or general election.

Omar, who was first elected to the House in 2018, represents Minnesota’s 5th District, including Minneapolis. She is part of The Squad of progressive lawmakers who are a vibrant political force on the left wing of Congress but have also endured repeated attacks from Trump, dating back to his first term. She was one of the first two Muslim-American women in the House and the first African refugee to be elected to Congress.

Jennifer Cortez’s husband was set to be released from immigration detention at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building the morning of Oct. 2.

A federal judge ruled Yader Cortez Andino’s warrantless arrest was illegal and he should be released immediately.

Cortez called his wife around 11 a.m. from Whipple and said something didn’t feel right. Although he signed release papers and his belongings were returned to him, immigration agents directed him out a back door, not to the front lobby where his lawyer waited for him.

“Not even 15 minutes later I get a phone call again,” Jennifer said. On the call was her husband, telling her he’d been re-arrested. She couldn’t believe it.

The two parent three kids together. Jennifer brought the older two children into the relationship, and the youngest, Arianna, is their biological child.

“We put up banners, we put up balloons, we were so excited he was coming home. And then to just have to let down all my kids,” Jennifer said.

“You feel powerless,” she said.

Yader Cortez Andino is the third person MPR News has spoken to who was immediately re-arrested by ICE at the Whipple building after a federal judge ordered their release.

A man from Mexico was re-arrested just steps outside the Whipple building on Sept. 25. A man from Guatemala didn’t even make it outside the doors of Whipple when he was re-arrested on Oct. 1.

In each case, the men had filed successful habeas petitions challenging their detainment on several grounds, including that their arrests were illegal in the first place.

This strategy comes as the grounds for filing habeas petitions have narrowed in Minnesota. In March, an appeals court decision sided with the Trump administration’s novel and controversial interpretation of immigration law. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide if ICE’s new policy of holding immigrants in detention indefinitely without offering them a bond hearing is legal.

‘We don't even understand why we have to walk them out the building’

Court records and statements made by ICE officials indicate the strategy is more widespread than the three men MPR News spoke to.

Court records suggest two other men were ordered released and then immediately re-arrested at the Whipple building Sept. 9 and Sept. 22.

In the Sept. 9 case, the man’s shoulder was dislocated during his re-arrest, according to court documents.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan reviewed video footage provided by ICE of that re-arrest and determined ICE agents “swarmed” the man as he stepped outside the Whipple building, according to court documents. Bryan also determined ICE agents failed to effectively serve the man an arrest warrant, instead waving a folded piece of paper in front of him “for at most three seconds” before handcuffing him.

“The Court cannot agree that a reasonable person would have felt free to leave when exiting the detention facility and immediately being stopped by ICE officers,” Bryan wrote in his second release order.

He also wrote that if the Sept. 9 re-arrest is considered lawful it “would render habeas relief meaningless.”

MPR News asked the White House, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement multiple questions about this strategy, including when it started, whether ICE was directed by DHS or the White House to re-arrest people in this way, the size of the ICE legal teams who review habeas cases, how much money ICE spends housing people in detention who they’ve re-arrested and why people with pending asylum claims or green card applications would be selected as candidates for re-arrest.

The White House referred the questions to DHS. DHS and ICE did not respond to the request for comment.

However, Cortez’s lawyer said ICE officials told her on Oct. 2 that this strategy is routine.

Nervous something might go wrong

Danielle Oxendine Molliver doesn’t normally meet her clients at Whipple when they are released from detention.

But Jennifer Cortez was nervous something might go wrong with her husband’s scheduled release because of the way his immigration case had been handled in the last year.

Yader Cortez was arrested by ICE on his way to work on June 30, without a warrant. Cortez said ICE agents cited his recent DWI during his arrest, but a judge had sentenced him to probation — not incarceration — the day before.

For months, Jennifer acted as his advocate, hiring a lawyer to file a habeas petition for her husband and then hiring a new lawyer, Oxendine Molliver, to take over the habeas when progress in the case was slow. Yader Cortez had a pending asylum case based on his escape from a dictatorship in his home country of Nicaragua. He had also applied for a green card in August 2025, after he married Jennifer.

Oxendine Molliver arrived early on Oct. 2, around 8 a.m. and asked when her client would be released. She said an administrative staffer at Whipple told her Cortez was still being processed and she should come back around noon.

“I went to the window and I asked him specifically, ‘You're not going to re-arrest him?’” Oxendine Molliver told MPR News. “And his quote was, ‘No, we don't do that.’”

Oxendine Molliver drove to her office to wait. As she was on her way back to pick up Cortez a few hours later, she got a “hysterical” call from his wife.

“They told him he was being released. They handed him all of his property. They handed him his check refund from the commissary,” Oxendine Molliver said.

Cortez said he was even given back his shoes with laces, which he wasn’t allowed to wear in detention.

“He asked them to please escort him out the main door to his attorney. They said, ‘No, no, no, no. You're going to go out this door,’” Oxendine Molliver said.

According to Cortez, he was directed out a back door. The door was closed behind him and waiting for him were ICE agents in plain clothes. He said the agents told him the judge was wrong to order his release and they arrested him again. Then they told him to remove his laces.

Oxendine Molliver arrived at Whipple to the sound of Cortez yelling her name, desperate to meet with her. After they spoke, Oxendine Molliver demanded to meet with a representative of ICE who could shed light on what just happened to her client.

Two ICE officials in uniform met with her, she said. They didn’t share their names. They seemed confused by how upset Oxendine Molliver was. One suggested she calm down.

“I basically said, I do feel crazy. This situation is crazy. You all are acting crazy, and what about humanity?” Oxendine Molliver said.

Oxendine Molliver asked them on what grounds they re-detained her client and when ICE began this new practice of instant re-arrests.

“It’s not new; we’ve been doing this since May,” one official told her. “We don't even understand why we have to walk them out the building,” he added.

The officials told her ICE has a “whole legal team working on these habeases” and they identify “good candidates for re-arrest.”

One person on that legal team is attorney Courtney Campbell with the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, or OPLA, the largest legal team within Homeland Security.

Oxendine Molliver also met with Campbell who said she advised Enforcement and Removal Operations, a division within ICE, that Cortez could be re-arrested. Campbell said nothing in U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell’s order prohibited re-arrest.

Oxendine Molliver told Cortez that she would fight his re-arrest. But it was late on a Friday and it became clear that at the very least he’d be back in custody over the weekend.

‘Made a legal resident over the weekend’

Judge Blackwell disagreed with ICE’s interpretation of his order.

On Monday, Oct. 5, he wrote that the government had failed to follow his order requiring Cortez’s immediate release and an update confirming the “the time, date and location” of the release within 48 hours.

“Respondents must comply with the Courts order immediately, and must file a letter no later than 4:00 p.m. on October 5, 2026, showing cause why they should not be held in contempt for violating the Courts order requiring an update within 48 hours of the ordered release,” Blackwell wrote.

In a belated status report filed on behalf of Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, attorney Carl Berry wrote that Cortez was released Oct. 2 — for three minutes.

Oxendine Molliver also filed a motion asking Blackwell to enforce his release order and spelled out in detail the bait-and-switch.

In a final twist, Cortez’s pending green card application was approved just after his re-arrest. MPR News reviewed the online status notice posted on Oct. 3 that said his case was approved.

“[ICE] knew it was pending. They knew it had been expedited. They knew it was going to happen any day,” Oxendine Molliver said.

“He was made a legal resident over the weekend.”

Cortez was released Monday evening, Oct. 5.

“I think it was sort of a perfect storm,” Oxendine Molliver said. “I think that they pulled this really crappy maneuver, and they kind of got caught doing it.”

Oxendine Molliver said Cortez earning his freedom is a win, but he’s “completely traumatized.”

And his case is unusual. After a dubious arrest, people can go months in detention, sometimes paying for multiple lawyers, and only a fraction will be released back to their families.

“Now we're in these huge litigious battles, and these families don't have the money and they don't have the time,” Oxendine Molliver said.

Correction (Oct. 13, 2026): An earlier version of this story misstated the month Yader Cortez Andino applied for his green card.

On a remote farmstead in rural Minnesota, tucked behind a grove of trees, an immigrant worker from Nicaragua etches out a meager existence.

The work here is hard: Chores start early in the morning and go late into the night and involve tasks like hauling hay, feeding the livestock and mucking out the animals’ stalls, which smell rank, especially when it’s hot.

But the hard physical labor is preferable for this worker when compared to the reality of what awaits him back in Nicaragua, whose president, Daniel Ortega, announced his plan to end free elections in July.

MPR News agreed to refer to the man by his nickname, Alex, because he is not legally authorized to work in the U.S. He’s 31.

“The reason I traveled here to the United States was that the political situation in my country was very bad,” Alex said in Spanish, using a phone app to translate.

But he lives in fear of arrest, especially in light of the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota this past year.

Newly updated data shows more than 2,300 noncitizens arrested in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge were deported or left the country. That's according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement numbers obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by MPR News and APM Reports.

Still, many workers continue to fly below the radar. Data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs indicate there were around 81,000 undocumented workers in Minnesota as recently as 2024.

And in rural areas, where populations have been dwindling, those workers often fill jobs that locals don’t want, according to David Peters, a professor of agriculture and rural policy at Iowa State University.

“I would say that in communities that have large-scale livestock production and processing, the majority of the people working on in those operations tend to be immigrants,” he said.

And he said those immigrants typically have work papers. But he says how legitimate or genuine those documents are is another question.

“A lot of farms tend not to ask too many questions,” Peters said. “They tend to follow the law very narrowly in the sense that they have a potential worker, they present their documents and the business is only responsible for making sure that those documents appear reasonably genuine.”

Arrangements that persist in agriculture

At this farm, which raises livestock, Alex makes a little more than $3,000 a month and sends some of his earnings back home to family in Nicaragua.

Jefe, his boss, whose real name isn’t being used because he hired Alex knowing his legal status, said that's a good wage.

"What these guys get paid, an American will not do it,” he said. “I don't want to be, you know, racist or sound bad, but that’s just that's the truth."

Most employers of large farms find difficulty connecting with immigrant workers themselves. So instead, they use an intermediary like Jefe, according to Peters.

"It's all done very informally. But this is, I think, a common way in how farmers are able to get good quality workers at the wages that they are able to pay," he said.

Peters noted the influx of immigrant labor into rural Minnesota was temporarily offsetting the declining populations.

“And the interesting thing is, in 2025, which is the last year we have data from, that level of growth rate has been cut by 55 to 60 percent due to immigration enforcement,” he said. “So just in one year, rural Minnesota's population gains were cut by over half.“

For his part, Jefe, the on-site boss, said he understands some aspects of the immigration surge, such as targeting criminals. But he said farms need workers like Alex.

"As far as immigration, I agree that they can take the bad ones, but don't take the good ones,” he said.

Fleeing Nicaragua

In the “credible fear interview” immigration officials conducted with Alex, a copy of which was reviewed by MPR News, Alex said his journey began back in 2018, when the Nicaraguan government began committing atrocities against citizens who were speaking out against its policies.

Alex said because he and his family refused government recruitment, they were at risk of being killed.

“The president wanted us to take part in the massacres he commits there and in the mistreatment of people,” he said.

He said shortly before fleeing his home country in 2022, he was stopped on the street by a police officer. The officer told Alex to prove he supported the president’s regime, and when he couldn’t, he was beaten with the butt of a rifle.

Alex said the only reason he wasn’t killed that day was because it was daylight. A crowd of people had also gathered around him. Before letting him go, Alex said the officer told him if they crossed paths again, he had better be able to prove he supports Ortega’s government or he would be killed.

Three days later, he left the country. Still injured from the beating, Alex said his two-week journey to the U.S. was difficult.

“I suffered a great deal on the trip. I spent nights without sleep and days without eating,” he said.

Alex crossed into the country by way of the Rio Grande, which acts as a natural border between the U.S. and Mexico. He was then taken into custody by border patrol agents in McAllen, Texas, before being moved to a facility in Los Fresnos, Texas.

“I was actually detained by immigration for three months. It was a very trying time for me. I thought I would be deported. But thank God I was released,” he said. “However, due to issues with transportation or finding someone to take me further — and perhaps not having the money to continue — I didn't make it to my court hearing.”

To complicate matters further, a few months ago Alex was arrested for a DUI. But he was bonded out before immigration authorities were notified, which in all likelihood would have led to his deportation. Now he rarely leaves the farmstead out of fear.

"It’s about as cut-off as it can be. This is what safety looks like, I think, in this time: a camper, a couple pickups, a pile of wood, a garden full of vegetables, some machinery to fix and a farmstead to work on,” said Ivan Olson, Alex’s friend. “It's kind of the American dream if you think about it, but it's wrapped in this weird nightmare thing that's going on."

When asked if the reality of the American dream he chased lived up to its expectations, Alex laughed. “No,” he said, gesturing around to the dilapidated property he lives at.

Still, he’d rather be here than in Nicaragua. “I am terrified of what could occur if I were sent back.”

President Donald Trump's administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas as it accuses the company of fraud.

Supporters of the Republican president have long argued that various programs like the one Vice President JD Vance accused Microsoft of abusing essentially empower American companies to recruit foreign workers for jobs that end up undercutting Americans. In a wide-ranging announcement Thursday, Vance and other top administration officials also called out universities over their use of J-1 visas for international students and information technology outsourcing firms.

The announcement came hours before Trump was scheduled to award the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, part of an event at which he is granting some of the nation’s most prestigious science and technology awards to his tech billionaire allies.

Vance says U.S. workers are replaced with ‘foreign indentured servants’

Vance said that the program from which Microsoft is being suspended requires companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labor to show they need to give a foreign worker a green card because of a lack of American workers.

“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants," Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft."

Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, near Seattle, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said in a White House news conference announcing the decision. "Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers."

Vance said H-1B workers are effectively foreign indentured servants because if they lose their job, they have to leave the country, and they earn less than Americans in the same position.

H-1B program has been scrutinized

The H-1B program has long been a target of Trump supporters who say that the program undercuts American workers and is rife with abuse.

H-1B visas are meant for high-skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. Technology companies are the biggest users, with nearly three-quarters of approvals going to workers from India.

Trump also has targeted foreign students

The Vance announcement came a day after Trump's administration launched another broadside against international students and their ability to work in the U.S.

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practical Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.

Vance also called out universities that he suggested were abusing a program to allow international students to come to the U.S. These temporary visas, called J-1 visas, allow international visitors to temporarily come to the U.S. for work and study exchange programs. Vance singled out nine universities that he said merited further investigation for J-1 visa fraud, saying they used the program in greater proportions than their counterparts.

The universities were Harvard; Yale; Stanford; Brown; the University of Pittsburgh; the University of California, Davis; the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech; Arizona State; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. The universities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is the second of a two-part series on family separation in the Twin Cities. Read part one here: “Minneapolis family shares story of ‘violent’ ICE detainment and 10 months of separation”

Luis Caiza is in limbo. He hasn’t been deported. He hasn’t been released from detainment. He’s still in ICE custody, nearly 10 months after his arrest.

His loved ones are more than a thousand miles away in Minnesota.

Caiza lives in a cell at Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico. He’s been there since Feb. 2. MPR News interviewed him in Spanish from the detainment center.

It’s a day-to-day struggle in detainment, Caiza said, mostly because of his separation from his family. He said while he’s locked up, he thinks of Minnesota and memories of his three children and wife, Marjorie Flores.

“The time I spent with my children and my family, with my wife, that is what I carry with me and for that I want to return to Minnesota,” he said.

Caiza said when he was living in Minneapolis with Flores and his kids, he’d spend his free time with them. Now, he only gets to hear their voices through the phone.

“I’ve always been focused on them, and that’s the pain I carry whenever I speak to my children. I can’t make video calls to them. I can’t, because they start crying and get upset, and it affects me the same way,” Caiza said.

These days, he said, “I just talk to them on the phone.”

Along with thousands of other immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Caiza was arrested by federal agents earlier this year during what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement called Operation Metro Surge.

Before he was held in detention at the Torrance County facility in Estancia, New Mexico, he had brief stays at the Whipple Federal Building and in Texas.

Caiza and his family left Ecuador and came to the U.S. seeking asylum. They don’t have criminal records. A judge said he was a flight risk — but his attorney says that’s not true. Caiza said he wants to stay with his family.

A judge also said Caiza had prior DWIs that contributed to the denial of his asylum claim. His attorney said that is also not true, and an MPR News analysis of court records did not find criminal records for Caiza.

During Caiza’s time in detainment, he has advocated for himself and his fellow detainees against what he calls inhumane conditions.

He said detainees at the facility have difficulty in getting basic necessities. Caiza has composed two separate letters in Spanish, detailing violent altercations and poor conditions inside the Torrance County center. The letters, translated into English, were provided by his lawyer Danielle Molliver.

In one letter, he wrote, “We are living with certain inhumane hardships that prevent us from accessing the basic necessities required by any human being or person in custody.”

He said he has endured tooth infections, bad food and a lack of fresh clothes.

“Our right to due process is being violated, leading to our rapid expulsion from the country,” Caiza wrote.

He also said that Torrance only staffs the facility with a mail clerk three days a week. That means legal documents needed to support their immigration cases “is extremely slow.” Caiza also pointed out that government-imposed court deadlines are 15 to 20 days.

That is “a time frame that is difficult to meet without legal representation.”

He said detainees can’t ask for new clothes and they are not given any new ones.

“We just have what we were given: two T-shirts, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of sock,” he said.

CoreCivic, which runs the facility, said in a statement to MPR News that the health and well-being of individuals in their care is their top priority. They say detainees have access to healthcare services, and that they provide three nutritious meals a day. They said there are ways for detainees like Caiza to raise concerns.

Caiza said he’ll keep fighting for asylum and for his release. His family keeps him going.

“They give me the strength to keep fighting here until God — until God decides the day and hour have come,” he said. “But what I long for most is to be with them in Minnesota.”

Molliver said he was ordered removed from the country by a judge. She said the Board of Immigrant Appeals returned the decision and ordered an immigration court to make appropriate findings of fact and conclusion of laws.

Caiza is also waiting on an asylum appeal to be filed this month.

Molliver filed a second petition this week challenging Caiza’s detainment based on his prolonged ICE detention and procedural errors.

In a sunny room at a Twin Cities-area assisted living home, a young woman leans down to squeeze her mother’s hand, as she sits in a wheelchair.

The care facility has been the mother’s home for four years. Here, she gets care for a brain injury sustained in a bombing at the Kabul airport. She can’t walk or take care of herself — but she can answer basic questions and laugh at her daughter’s jokes in her weekly visits.

Both women are asylees from Afghanistan, and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from the federal government based on their immigration status. Speaking in Farsi with an interpreter, the daughter said the care home covers what her mother needs for day-to-day life.

“They provided us all the medication which is required,” she said. “My mother requires 24-hours-a-day care, and that is the kind of place she will need.”

But in the coming days, she may have to move her mother out — and the family doesn’t know where she’ll go. Her Medicaid benefits, which covered her stay in this care home, ended on Oct. 1, due to federal rule changes enacted in the “one big beautiful bill.”

“We are in a stressful situation,” her daughter said. “We are thinking all day long, day and night, to find out the solution.”

So far, she doesn’t have one. Advocates for the family — and for immigrants in similar situations — say it’s creating a massive strain for them, and for the agencies and counties that are now scrambling to cover their care.

What rules changed?

According to Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, more than 5,000 immigrants in the state lost Medicaid coverage due to the federal rule change this week.

Under the old rules, immigrants in the United States legally — including refugees and asylees — were eligible for Medicaid before they got their green card. The new rule eliminates eligibility for anyone over the age of 21 and not pregnant who doesn’t yet have a green card.

The impacted group also includes Afghan and Ukrainian humanitarian parolees, trafficking victims, noncitizens protected under the Violence Against Women Act, and qualified noncitizen veterans living in Minnesota.

“The Trump Administration has a public mandate, a statutory obligation, and a moral duty to safeguard our federal healthcare programs,” said Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in a statement announcing guidance on Medicaid changes.

A spokesperson at DHS said that most of the individuals impacted — about 75 percent — will qualify for the state’s insurance program, Minnesota Care.

But Minnesota Care doesn’t cover some of the services that Medicaid waivers do. Those allow people to get care and support in their homes and communities — like the care home service that the Afghan woman receives.

DHS has identified more than 200 people receiving waiver services who are losing their coverage.

A family ‘trapped’

The daughter found out about the rule change via a letter in the mail from DHS, notifying her that her mother would no longer be eligible for Medicaid under the new rules. She saw it less than two weeks ago. The family appealed the end of care, but has not heard an answer.

They believe the mother will also lose access to her wheelchair, which was paid for through Medicaid.

The daughter says she can’t take her mother in; she lives in an apartment with no elevator, and has to leave home to go to work.

She asked for help from Michael Van Keulen. He’s the executive director of Open Path Resources, a Twin Cities organization helping immigrant communities navigate life in Minnesota.

Van Keulen said the family has only found two possibilities for the mother, should she have to leave the care home: a homeless shelter, or a stay at Hennepin County Medical Center.

A homeless shelter, he said, is off the table. They’re not equipped to accommodate the mother’s need for around-the-clock care.

And the county hospital isn’t an ideal option, either.

“They'll have to take up a bed with no solution in sight, no change in sight, and dramatically more expensive model of care,” Van Keulen said.

For now, the woman is still in the care home. The home’s director told MPR News she worked out a plan to keep her there for a few extra days, with the home taking on the cost of her care. But after that, the small, seven-bed home can’t afford to cover the bill for her care.

The daughter said the problem would also be solved if they were able to get their green cards, which she says her family applied for two years ago. But their applications are still pending.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, current processing times for green card applications are about three years. Immigration experts in the Twin Cities say that, a few years ago, it took just nine months.

Van Keulen said that leaves the family squeezed from two sides, with no word on their green cards and no word on how to access the healthcare they need without them.

“These are people intentionally trapped into a status that's being attacked,” Van Keulen said.

Looking for solutions

Immigrant assistance organizations are helping eligible clients transfer over to Minnesota Care. But the process can be tricky to navigate.

Michelle Eberhard, director of refugee services at the International Institute of Minnesota, said every individual is in a different situation. Some people received letters informing them that they’d been automatically switched to Minnesota Care; others received another letter from DHS with forms and instructions to apply for Minnesota Care.

“It's not totally clear to me kind of how someone ends up in one process versus the other,” Eberhard said.

The result is a logistical maze.

“The concern I have is that there are people who may not really understand what's happened, and if there was an action that was needed prior to Oct. 1, that could be problematic because they would go into the month potentially not covered,” Eberhard said.

Van Keulen said the family he works with has not found a way to get the woman’s current needs covered under Minnesota Care. He’s gone to officials in Hennepin County and state legislators to ask for help.

Hennepin County Commissioner Heather Edelson said the county is scrambling, too. She’s been on the phone with constituents and case managers, trying to figure out what is and isn’t covered in different people’s unique cases.

“We want to figure out how to get people the care they need, but the county also can't take on costs that can't be covered for every single person that is not able to get Minnesota Care,” Edelson said.

She said it’s part of a broader concern she has about the federal government cutting benefits and leaving counties to fill the gaps. In this instance, she said, the county is now on the hook for finding care for people, or paying their hospital bills if they can’t stay in their current care situations.

“We're trying to figure out with all of the changing rules how we can actually be helpful, and there's a lack of resources with an abundance of people to help,” Edelson said.

The family at the center of this situation is hoping they find an answer before they need to move the mother out of her home — and likely into Hennepin County Medical Center.

The daughter said she’s grateful for all the help she’s getting, and for the benefits the government has provided her mother before. But after surviving a bombing and going through the process to get asylum and apply for green cards, she said, she feels like the government is breaking a promise to her and her family.

“You leaving us here in this situation is injustice,” she said. “We were not expecting this situation. We came here as legal immigrants … we followed rules and policy.”

The Minnesota DHS Refugee and Immigrant Helpline remains available for free at 1-800-814-4806, and individuals can call to connect with resources for healthcare and insurance.

MPR News health reporter Erica Zurek contributed to this story

There are more than a quarter million Somali Americans in the U.S. and more than 80,000 in Minnesota. The diaspora is a frequent target of attacks from the White House down to online influencers and commenters.

Two Minnesota journalists aim to combat racist misinformation and fill coverage gaps with true stories about Somali American life, with a new digital platform called The Somali Brief.

Founder Mukhtar Ibrahim has been rethinking how to cover immigrant communities in Minnesota for years. He worked for the Star Tribune and at MPR News before founding Sahan Journal in 2019.

Journalist Ubah Ali became the Twin Cities' first Somali American TV news reporter when she started at WCCO a few years ago. Now, she’s lead reporter for The Somali Brief.

They joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about the new venture.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Starting Thursday, more than 5,000 immigrants in Minnesota will lose access to federally funded Medicaid health coverage following changes enacted in a sweeping tax and spending bill signed into law in July by President Donald Trump.

The law ends Medicaid eligibility for many immigrants with legal status who do not yet have green cards, including refugees and asylum seekers. It affects hundreds of thousands of immigrants across the country.

Michelle Eberhard, director of refugee services at the International Institute of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, said hundreds of refugees her office assists previously qualified for federal Medicaid coverage, known in Minnesota as Medical Assistance, based on their legal status in the U.S. Under the new rules, they will lose it.

“This is a dramatic shift, especially for those individuals who maybe have some medical needs that require more attention,” Eberhard said. “To have kind of built their lives around the understanding of those types of supports, and then now, suddenly, things are changing.”

According to Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, the changes will affect more than 5,000 noncitizen adults in the state aged 21 and older who are not pregnant.

In addition to refugees and asylees, this includes Afghan and Ukrainian humanitarian parolees, trafficking victims, noncitizens protected under the Violence Against Women Act, and qualified noncitizen veterans living in Minnesota. Green card holders can keep their Medical Assistance coverage.

“The Trump Administration has a public mandate, a statutory obligation, and a moral duty to safeguard our federal healthcare programs,” said Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in a statement announcing guidance on Medicaid changes.

The Minnesota Department of Human Services began sending letters in late August and early September to individuals who will no longer qualify for Medical Assistance. Those who lose coverage may have other options, including private health insurance coverage through MNsure, Minnesota’s health insurance marketplace.

A spokesperson for the Human Services Department said that 75 percent of those losing access to Medical Assistance are eligible for MinnesotaCare, a healthcare program for low-income Minnesotans.

“We in Minnesota are fortunate to have the option to offer people in this category MinnesotaCare,” temporary DHS Commissioner John Connolly said in a statement. “Other states have many more people impacted and do not have a similar program that can help.”

Eberhard acknowledged that MinnesotaCare is a good option, but she cautioned that the transition could still be complicated for many individuals. Her office is helping people switch health plans, but she is concerned some might be left without coverage in the coming months if they miss enrollment deadlines.

Immigrants are already less likely than U.S. citizens to have health insurance. Immigrant advocates and health policy experts say these changes could worsen the existing disparities in health coverage among noncitizen communities.

Eberhard said she worries the rule change could lead people to skip medical appointments.

“When something becomes more complicated to navigate, there are some people who are just going to say, ‘Actually, I don’t need to go to the doctor because I can’t figure out how to get there,’” Eberhard said.

Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare differ in several ways. MinnesotaCare requires a monthly premium and includes some co-pays, while Medical Assistance provides coverage for services that MinnesotaCare does not, such as home and community-based care and long-term care services.

Immigration service providers say it is particularly challenging due to the increasing wait times for green cards. Eberhard said refugees used to receive their green cards about nine months after applying; now, the process takes nearly three years.

This extended wait means people will spend more time ineligible for federal medical benefits.

Ruth LePage, director of refugee services at Arrive Ministries, said she is frustrated by the impact the change will have on the people her organization serves.

“We work with people who are legally present in the United States, have been invited into the country, have jobs and social security numbers, and pay their taxes, and have applied for the next step in the immigration process, and all of that seems to be worth nothing right now,” LePage said.

Service providers are assisting individuals in finding backup options before their Medicaid coverage ends on Oct. 1.

“It's a lot of paperwork and a lot of calling and being on hold and trying to get interpreters,” LePage said. “I would say it is yet another attack on lawful status holders in this country.”

The Minnesota DHS Refugee and Immigrant Helpline remains available for free at 1-800-814-4806, and individuals can call to connect with resources for healthcare and insurance.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the administration to resume, for now, deportations of migrants to countries that are not identified in their removal orders, handing President Trump another victory in his aggressive immigration agenda.

The court also said it would take up the case for full oral argument in December.

The court's brief order granting the petition did not outline a reason for staying a lower-court order that blocked the third-country deportations. But it asked both sides to argue whether lower courts had the jurisdiction to rule on the issue and order nationwide relief, as well as whether the Trump policy is legal or whether it violated the due process clause or conventions against torture.

Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices the third-country deportation policy amounted to "an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens," in court papers earlier this month. The administration said it has used the policy to deport tens of thousands of noncitizens to Mexico and countries in Africa and Latin America after the migrants' home countries refused to accept them.

"While certain aliens may benefit from stalling their removal, the Nation does not," Sauer wrote in an emergency application Sept. 24.

The court's brief order on Tuesday noted that the three liberal justices objected to staying the order.

The action by the high court marks the third time the justices have rejected efforts by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston to pause the deportations, which the judge said violate due process rights and fail to give detainees meaningful notice to raise arguments that they have credible fears of torture or abuse in the countries where they could be sent.

The National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is representing migrants facing deportation, said in court papers that their clients are facing significant harms.

"The record shows that class members removed without meaningful notice or an opportunity to present country-specific protection claims have faced prolonged and arbitrary detention, beatings and sexual assault, disappearance, and chain refoulement to countries from which the United States had already granted them protection," wrote lawyer Trina Realmuto. "These harms cannot be undone."

The Department of Homeland Security said Murphy's rulings have created a logistical nightmare, including canceled flights, potential diplomatic clashes, and a lag in removing people convicted of assault and drug crimes.

The administration argued that if a country has assured Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it will not engage in persecution or torture, that should be enough to deport a noncitizen to a country that's not their own.

The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority has recognized the president has substantial authority over the border. Last summer, in a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled President Trump has sweeping power to end the temporary protected status program for people who can't return to their home countries because of wars and natural disasters.

Copyright 2026, NPR

An international human rights organization is joining advocates’ calls to abolish ICE, in a report that alleges a pattern of human rights violations.

In the report released Thursday, Amnesty International outlined a lengthy list of violations of international human rights law: unlawful killings, discriminatory detentions, and violent repression of peaceful protest, among others.

Those findings were based on interviews the organization conducted with about 150 people in metro areas that the federal government targeted in immigration enforcement surges, including Minneapolis. Researchers also visited the city earlier this year.

“Our report documents a chilling pattern of human rights violations across the U.S. intended to instill fear within migrant, asylum seeker and refugee communities,” said Nadia Daar, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “ICE’s record of violating human rights is nothing new, but our report shows many of these abuses have reached a perilous new level.”

It’s the first time the organization has called to abolish ICE.

“The cruelty and human rights violations we documented are not isolated incidents. They reflect a deeper, widespread problem with immigration enforcement operations in the United States,” Daar said. “Piecemeal reform is not the way forward.”

The report reiterates allegations against DHS and ICE outlined in ongoing federal lawsuits, media reports and accounts from community members.

In response to a request for comment on the report, a DHS spokesperson cited a list of people detained by ICE in Chicago, who the agency says have criminal records.

Liliana Zaragoza is the director of the Racial Justice Law Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School and a resident of south Minneapolis. At a press conference announcing the report, she said she’s hopeful it can be another tool to push for change.

“It's one of the many, many efforts of trying to understand what happened, what can we do differently, how can we get accountability for what happened?” Zaragoza said.

‘Widespread and systemic’ discrimination

While federal leaders said the surge of agents to the Twin Cities was an effort to detain and deport the “worst of the worst” criminals, Amnesty International’s report outlines patterns of federal agents instead detaining people based on race.

“Incidents of targeted enforcement were far outnumbered by the numerous accounts of ICE and Border Patrol stopping and detaining individuals based on their race, skin colour, national origin or ethnicity,” the report reads.

Researchers cite the arrest of Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen of Somali descent detained by federal agents in Minneapolis in December. Hussen said he asked agents detaining him to check his passport, and agents refused. Agents put Hussen in an unmarked vehicle and drove him to the federal Whipple building. He was released hours later after eventually being allowed to show a photo of his passport.

Hussen later brought a lawsuit against the federal government alleging racial profiling and unlawful arrests.

The Amnesty International report also documents instances of ICE and Border Patrol targeting Indigenous U.S. citizens in the Twin Cities area. Minnesota state Rep. Liish Kozlowski, DFL-Duluth, spoke to researchers for the report, and said Indigenous friends and family faced aggression, including their cousin who was stopped by agents.

“They smashed her window at gun point,” Kozlowski told researchers. “They roughed her up; she was pregnant. Her husband yelled, ‘She’s Native American, here’s her Tribal ID card.’ An ICE agent responded, ‘That doesn’t f****** matter, this is our land now.’”

Amnesty International said that pattern of discrimination and racial profiling constitutes a violation of international human rights agreements.

Inhumane detention

Researchers say the racial profiling led to unlawful detentions.

The report cites accounts from attorneys and residents who say detainees were denied due process. Some detainees were barred from contacting a lawyer, according to the report.

A woman identified only by the first name Sofia told researchers she was detained with her husband in a parking lot in Bloomington by federal agents in civilian clothes. She said they had no identification or warrant, and they never asked her for any identification, either.

She had a pending asylum claim and had been living in the U.S. since 2023. During the arrest, she asked agents if she could call a family member to take care of her children; agents did not let her make the call. She was detained at the Whipple building for over a month and remains in deportation proceedings.

Most detainees in Minnesota were taken to the federal Whipple building. The report says the facility was overcrowded and unsanitary and didn’t comply with human rights standards.

Those violations need more assessment, researchers said.

“The unnecessary and prolonged detention of people in inhumane conditions in facilities not even equipped for overnight detention, combined with coercion to accept ‘voluntary’ departure, may amount to torture,” the report says.

Lethal force

Researchers identified seven incidents in which they say federal agents used lethal force in violation of human rights, including three unlawful killings.

Those include the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which researchers say “may amount to extrajudicial executions” under international law. They also noted the killing of Silverio Villegas González, who was shot and killed by a federal agent in Chicago in September 2025 – another case that researchers said could amount to an extrajudicial execution.

Researchers also identified lethal force in the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis, which left him injured. The ICE agent who shot Sosa-Celis, Christian Castro, is facing federal and state charges for assault and for lying to investigators in the aftermath of the shooting.

Calling for immediate abolition of ICE

The call to abolish ICE is an unusual move for Amnesty International. Amy Fischer, the organization’s director of refugee and migrant rights, said Amnesty International has never specifically called for a government agency in any country to disband until now.

But she said the patterns of violence and discrimination outlined in the report are foundational to how ICE works — not something that the agency could fix through trainings or policy changes.

“This report really was a tipping point, in the same way that the way we saw the Trump administration do their immigration enforcement across these four cities was also very much a tipping point for immigrant communities and communities that defend immigrants,” Fischer said.

Zaragoza said she’s glad to see this recommendation in the report. She recalled growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border, before ICE was established in 2003, and being able to show her ID and cross into Mexico to visit family without fear.

“We are not safer today because we have a larger immigration apparatus,” Zaragoza said.

She said she wants a return to that safety for her two kids.

“I dream for both my kids, and all of the kids who experienced Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities, and in all of the other cities represented here today, that they can grow up in a time without ICE as well,” Zaragoza said.

The report is one of several assessments of human rights violations in Minnesota, including a recent one by Human Rights Watch.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.

ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.

The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.

The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.

Lawyers and relatives distressed by lack of information on detainees

The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.

ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.

As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” he said. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, has argued that people who are subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases when immigrants fail to show up, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.

Detainees with final removal orders still have options to appeal

Still, those detainees have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen the case or by bringing what’s known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering that detainees be released or granted bond hearings.

ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

More people have been issued final removal orders after failing to show up for hearings in recent months because the administration's immigration courts have taken steps to make it harder to participate and to reopen such cases, she said.

“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

Some with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many of them are facing removal to third-party countries where they have no ties and their disappearance in ICE's system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.

Lawyers say clients have vanished from ICE locator system

ICE initiated the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Previously they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track them down.

Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield the locations of detainees for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.

But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.

Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.

“If you can't find your client, don't know what's happening to your client, you can't get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and wounded a man Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas, local authorities said, and anti-ICE protesters quickly gathered at the scene.

The man was in serious but stable condition at a hospital after being shot once in the torso on the capital city's north side, Austin officials said at a news conference.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, confirmed the man was in stable condition and “in federal custody pending removal.”

Homeland Security Investigations, with FBI assistance, is investigating “the officer involved shooting of an illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal,” the department said in a statement.

City police officers were not involved in the operation or the shooting, which occurred after a traffic stop, Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said while briefing reporters along with the city's mayor and other officials.

Mayor says he wants city’s police involved in investigation

Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, said he wants the city's police department to have a role in the investigation so it can provide “clear, third-party eyes” in the process. Watson said he does not think it would be appropriate for ICE to conduct an investigation on its own.

Austin residents have “a right to feel safe in their city,” Watson said. A proper investigation will only enhance credibility, he added.

The chief said there were not many facts she could provide so soon after the incident but added that her department’s special investigation unit was at the scene.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said it received a request from ICE for assistance in a vehicle pursuit around 12:50 p.m. By the time DPS troopers arrived, the shooting had already taken place, the department said in a statement Sunday evening.

Attorney says man shot is from Venezuela

An immigration attorney representing the man’s family identified him as Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man.

Attorney Kate Lincoln Goldfinch said in a video posted to her Instagram account that she believed he had no criminal history and no final order of removal from the U.S., but she later told The Associated Press that she did not know his current immigration status.

The man’s family has struggled to get any information from the hospital about his status or location, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.

Just before 7 p.m., the man’s wife was informed by the hospital’s attorney that the man had been released into ICE custody a few hours earlier, Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote in a text to AP.

“No one bothered to update her,” she wrote.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the man remained hospitalized while in ICE custody or if he had been transferred elsewhere.

Protesters turn out at the scene

A dark blue Toyota Corolla was parked under an overpass with damage to its passenger-side door and what appeared to be bullet holes. The car was towed away in the early evening and traffic began moving again.

A large law enforcement presence was present along with a crowd of about a hundred protesters. Some demonstrators cursed at police officers holding riot shields, while others yelled out as passing cars honked in support of the protest. One man held a sign saying, “Nobody is safe” and, on the other side, “ICE Nazi.”

Asked if Austin authorities knew where the involved federal agent is, given that agents have left states after previous shootings nationwide, the mayor said: “We do not know that. But my hope would be that, an agent that’s involved in an officer-involved shooting would not leave the city. Certainly not leave the state.”

The office of Travis County District Attorney José Pompa Garza asked that local police and prosecutors be included in the investigation.

“We further request cooperation from the federal government in giving us access to the evidence,” the DA's office said in a statement Sunday evening.

U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, a Democrat representing parts of Austin, called for transparency as the shooting is investigated.

“It is awful that this horror has come to our doorstep,” Casar told reporters. “For Austin to be safe, ICE should end its surge here.”

ICE enforcement surged around the nation over the summer

The shooting comes as ICE surges enforcement across the country this summer, producing more than 50,000 arrests a month for the first time in its history in July and August.

In July, an ICE officer fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, of Houston, after federal agents driving unmarked vehicles pursued him while he was taking his construction crew to a job site.

Also in July, 25-year-old Johan Sebastián, a Colombian man, was shot by an ICE officer in Maine. The officer is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told AP.

The administration’s enforcement efforts were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis last January — and then allegedly lied to the FBI about it — was arrested Wednesday in Minneapolis, and made a court appearance on Thursday.

Christian Castro, 52, was taken into custody by Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agents at about 2:15 p.m. Wednesday in downtown Minneapolis on a warrant for his arrest. He was booked in the Hennepin County Jail just after 4 p.m.

He made an initial appearance in Hennepin County court on Thursday afternoon on state charges, where a judge set bail at $200,000 with conditions.

Castro posted bail and was released at about 6 p.m.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the conditions for bail included pre-signing a waiver of extradition, surrendering his passport, and electronic home monitoring. He’s also not allowed to talk with other ICE agents.

Castro was set to appear in federal court in St. Paul on Friday morning on federal charges.

The charges stem from the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge.

Castro shot Sosa-Celis, an immigrant from Venezuela, in his leg on Jan. 14 after firing through the closed door of his home. Castro had pursued Sosa-Celis to the house after a car chase involving Sosa-Celis’ roommate Alfredo Aljorna.

Two days after the shooting, federal prosecutors relied on Castro’s narrative to charge Aljorna and Sosa Celis with assaulting a federal agent. Prosecutors dropped the charges in February after video from the city surveillance cameras showed that the men had not assaulted anyone.

Castro spent three months in a Texas jail awaiting extradition on state-level assault charges from Hennepin County. He was released from jail on Aug. 27 after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to approve an extradition request from Minnesota — and after a federal judge in Texas, declined to force the Republican governor’s hand following a lawsuit by DFL Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

Castro was then indicted on federal charges of making materially false statements to the FBI following the shooting. The government alleges that Castro told six separate lies to an FBI agent. The case marks the first time a federal agent has been charged in federal court in connection with Operation Metro Surge.

Castro made an initial appearance on the federal charges in Texas earlier this month, and was released ahead of his scheduled federal court appearance in the Twin Cities on Friday.

Attorney Daniel Gerdts said Castro’s attorneys in Texas had been coordinating his voluntary surrender in Minnesota for days. He said state authorities planned to take Castro into custody at his office Wednesday, but that Castro was arrested by Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agents on the street nearby instead. He said Castro drove to Minnesota from Texas with his wife to turn himself in and that prosecutors with both the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office were aware of the plan.

“Everybody knew this well in advance,” Gerdts said. “I don't understand why the deception —what that's about, it's just theater as far as I'm concerned.”

A spokesperson for the BCA said agents were involved in negotiating a surrender for Castro, but “when they witnessed him in downtown Minneapolis they saw an opportunity to arrest him for his warrant.”

At a news conference after Thursday’s state court hearing, Moriarty, the county attorney, said Castro did not follow directions.

“When you are a fugitive from justice, who has continually refused to come up here to Minnesota, you do not get to dictate how you are taken into custody,” Moriarty said. “He was specifically told to show up at the BCA and turn himself in. He did not do that, and so the BCA arrested him.”

Moriarty said it should not have taken this long for Castro to face a Minnesota judge.

“He could have waived extradition at any time during that 90 days. He chose not to,” she said.

MPR News confirmed eight Somali men are being held at Guantanamo Bay. This comes after MPR News correspondent Matt Sepic reported on the situation. He had a brief conversation with Adam Abdullah, who was living legally in the Twin Cities when he was detained in December, at the start of Operation Metro Surge.

After officials moved him to Kentucky and Louisiana, he was told he was being sent to Somalia but instead is being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Democratic U.S. Sen. Tina Smith on All Things Considered to about what happened. Sen. Smith said there have been discussions about the use of Guantanamo Bay amid the White House’s immigration crackdown.

“The administration says we send the worst of the worst to Guantanamo,” Smith said. “Yet in the case of Mr. Abdullah, there has been no evidence presented about what he has done, no explanation for why he has been detained. I mean, there is really has been no due process.”

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

A Tuesday court ruling means David Streever of Rochester, New York no longer has to worry that federal officers may threaten him over a harsh email he sent to the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year.

Streever filed a lawsuit in July arguing ICE agents had violated his First Amendment rights when they tried to track him down at his home, an airport and a hotel to confront him about the email and serve him with a warning notice that said he may have violated the law.

Streever's email compared ICE's former acting director, Todd Lyons, to a Nazi, called him a "monstrous human being" and predicted he would be tormented by his own conscience. Streever told NPR he sent the email after federal immigration officers fatally shot two observers in Minneapolis in January.

The warning notice agents left at Streever's home said "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW" and lists federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. "Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above," reads the bottom of the form.

Streever, who is represented by the nonprofit free speech group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), argued the federal agents' actions violated the First Amendment and caused him to self-censor his views.

"Mr. Streever's injury is the loss of his freedom to engage in political speech now because the threat of such an investigation or prosecution looms over him like the sword of Damocles, and he is forced to self-censor under that threat," Contreras wrote in his ruling.

He wrote that because it was likely the federal government had already infringed on Streever's First Amendment rights, he was issuing a preliminary injunction while the case continued so that Streever could continue to speak freely.

The court order blocks DHS and ICE from, "taking further steps in reliance on the Warning Notice…and from issuing any substantially similar threats to [Streever] aimed at his protected expression during the course of this matter."

In a statement, Streever said, "I'm deeply relieved that the court affirmed what I knew all along: that I am permitted to speak my conscience in the United States of America, including when I criticize government officials."

He added, "While I wish this ordeal hadn't happened, hopefully this incident will serve as a reminder that the First Amendment protects us all."

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In court filings, DHS defended its investigation of Streever by citing an increase in threats of violence against public officials. The federal government had argued Streever's case should be dismissed and had said the investigation into Streever was closed in late June, before he filed his lawsuit.

The federal government's filing did not assert that Streever's email was a violent threat that could be prosecuted.

In his ruling, Contreras asked the government to turn over the report that closed its investigation of Streever.

"ICE knowingly pursued an American citizen for criticizing his government — speech that is at the heart of the First Amendment," said FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh. "Ominous letters warning people their speech might land them in prison are meant to coerce people into silence, and that's not how the First Amendment works."

Copyright 2026, NPR

The Hispanic Heritage Awards took place outside of Washington, D.C., for the first time ever Thursday night with a ceremony hosted in Minnesota.

The White House established the awards nearly four decades ago to commemorate the creation of Hispanic Heritage Month. The annual celebration honors the contributions and accomplishments of Latinos in the United States and Latin America.

Rita Moreno, Gloria Estefan and Bad Bunny are among big figures to have received Hispanic Heritage Awards in the past.

Organizers said they wanted to hold the event in Minneapolis this year because of the federal immigration surge last winter.

Antonio Tijerino, president and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, said a local man invited national leaders to visit in February. They came and left inspired by how people rallied to protect their neighbors.

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“We can’t ever allow a feeling of helplessness to become a feeling of hopelessness. And Minnesotanos are neither helpless nor hopeless,” he said. “They are an embodiment of solidarity, unity, resourcefulness, strength, brilliance, faith, bravery and ganas. And that’s why we’re here.”

Major Latino musical artists received awards in person at Orchestra Hall: Oscar D’León, Eladio Carrión, Ximena Sariñana and Mon Laferte.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas was also present to receive the Public Service Award. He thanked Minnesotans for their activism during Operation Metro Surge.

“The whole nation was inspired by how this community came together when it was under siege by ICE and the Trump administration, with thousands of agents on the street trying to pick up kids and their parents,” Castro said. “And so to have [the Hispanic Heritage Awards] here this year is very fitting.”

The final honor of the night — the humanitarian award — went to the people of Minnesota.

Over 30 Minnesotans took the stage to receive the award, reflecting a range of organizations, businesses and other entities that actively supported people during the federal immigration surge, according to a host committee member.

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The iconic California-based band Los Tigres del Norte presented the award to Minnesota and performed two songs meant to represent Latin Americans in the U.S.

Luis Hernández said the band wanted to send a message.

“We have to keep on going. We don't have to give up, especially in these moments,” he said.

Hispanic Heritage Month officially begins next Tuesday. Congress established the month in 1988 to celebrate Latino history, identity and culture in the U.S. Since then, it’s kicked off with an award ceremony in Washington, D.C.

This year, the Hispanic Heritage Awards are leaving D.C. for the first time and coming to Minneapolis. During Thursday’s ceremony at Orchestra Hall, the people of Minnesota will receive a humanitarian award for resistance to Operation Metro Surge.

Other honorees include singer-songwriters Mon Laferte and Ximena Sariñana, musician Oscar D’León, rapper Eladio Carrión and Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. Past award winners Los Tigres del Norte, a regional Mexican band, will perform at the event, which will be hosted by comedian Anjela Johnson Reyes.

Hispanic Heritage Foundation President and CEO Jose Antonio Tijerno joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about the honorees and the significance of this year’s awards.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Salvadorans who have lived in Minnesota for more than 25 years under Temporary Protected Status could soon lose their legal status in the U.S.

TPS for El Salvador is set to expire Wednesday. It would be the latest group to lose those protections as the Trump administration moves to end TPS designations.

Ana Pottratz Acosta, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, joined MPR News host Nina Moini to explain what this means and what happens next.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Community land trusts make it possible for land to be owned collectively while individuals own the homes and businesses on it.

The model grew out of the civil rights movement, when Black farmers in the rural South used collective ownership to build economic independence despite barriers to credit and land access.

Today, community land trusts help preserve affordable housing and commercial spaces while giving communities more control over their future.

The Rondo Community Land Trust in St. Paul is one example. It is working to rebuild community wealth and preserve the legacy of the historic Black neighborhood displaced by Interstate 94.

MPR News host Angela Davis and her guests talk about how community land trusts work, why collective ownership matters and what the model could offer communities across Minnesota.

Guests:

• Mikeya Griffin is the president and CEO of Rondo Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that creates permanently affordable homes and commercial spaces that keep land, opportunity, and legacy rooted in community. She grew up in St. Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood and is the first African American woman to lead the 30-year-old organization.

• Debbie Montgomery is a community leader who grew up in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. She was the first Black woman police sergeant in St. Paul and the first Black woman elected to the St. Paul City Council. She also served as assistant commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. At age 17, she became the youngest person to serve on the national board of the NAACP, an organization that works towards equity, political rights and social inclusion of Black people and people of color.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.    

On Instagram and TikTok, Jen Shaffer is the Formidable Genealogist. She chose the name, she said, to stand out. “It was unique, and it was just a little imposing, maybe,” she said.

Shaffer works out of New Brighton untangling the mysteries of clients’ family trees. Recently, she’s trained her research powers, and her social media feeds, on a different set of questions.

“Genealogy lovers. Stop scrolling,” she said in one video. “The National Archives is closing its public research facilities in Chicago and San Bruno, California but they won’t say when.”

In June, the National Archives and Records Administration released a three-sentence statement announcing it will close its buildings in Chicago and the Bay Area in the next few years. The Chicago branch holds federal documents linked to the upper Midwest, including Minnesota. Shaffer says her clients find records there that “make names and dates into actual people.”

Genealogists and historians were alarmed by the news. They raised concerns that the records will move far away, and in some cases, become practically impossible to access.

After Shaffer began posting about the closures, she heard from employees of the branches that are expected to close. She said they fear losing their jobs.

“Several staff members also alerted me to how those records are not ancient records just used for genealogy,” she said. “They're used actively by living people.”

The Chicago branch holds naturalization documents that she said people need to apply for dual citizenship, for example. It also holds records on tribal enrollment, boarding schools, and treaties for the Great Lakes region.

Anton Treuer, a scholar focused on Ojibwe language and culture, said most records on Native American history are in Chicago and Kansas City. He has turned to those records to write history books, and to provide expert testimony in court.

“I have found records in the National Archives that affirmed and validated tribal oral histories about critical events and have made really immeasurable impact on a number of treaty litigation cases,” he said. For instance, he said historic records played a role in a lawsuit that four tribal nations in Wisconsin won over taxes on tribal lands.

“It may be the case that there are some people who do not want tribes to litigate abuses of the treaties that they signed and want to undermine tribal sovereignty,” Treuer said.

The federal government is required by law to keep government records open to the public. Treuer said they could become temporarily inaccessible during a move. After a move, people would have to either travel, or request (and pay for) scanned copies. The government could deny requests it deemed unreasonably difficult.

For Treuer, that's not just inconvenience.

“Any move to restrict or provide impediments to the free and ready access of citizens to information about their government or its operations, past, present, and future, is dangerous,” he said.

The National Archives and Records Administration did not respond to a request for comment. Late last week, it released more detailed plans. Most Chicago records will go to Kansas City and the rest to four other locations around the country. The announcement did not include a timeline.

It said the buildings that are closing need upgrades the government can’t afford and the move is part of a long-term effort to consolidate storage space as more records are digitized. Right now, only about four percent of federal records have been scanned, according to the agency’s website.

“I think it's a change that's been going on for 30 years in philosophy and priorities,” said former National Archives employee John Scroggins, who grew up in Minnesota.

Scroggins pays attention to the status of regional archives, because he says he helped build that system, starting in the 1960s. He saw them as a way to get people interested in history.

“We had the locations, we had the volunteers, and we had support in Washington,” he said. “And we did things to bring the regions more to people's attention than they do now.”

In recent years, the government has closed other regional archives: one in Anchorage under the Obama administration and another in New York under Biden’s.

This time, members of Congress are getting involved. A group of Democratic U.S. representatives have introduced a bill to block the closure of archives, but it's not clear if it will pass. Scroggins expects to see more closures in the future.

Fridley schools open their doors Wednesday to all students to start the new year. Leaders here, though, have been working for weeks to prepare to welcome back kids knowing the trauma induced by the surge of federal immigration agents into the Twin Cities last winter still lingers.

The north suburban school district saw some of the state’s highest levels of disruption to daily activities as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents flooded the region.

Agents conducted raids near school buildings, sped through intersections where elementary students were trying to cross during arrival times, parked in school lots and followed and attempted to intimidate school leaders, district officials say. Hundreds of children stopped attending classes.

“There was a lot of concern about what do we do if and when the federal government shows up at our school and … how do we protect our kids,” Fridley kindergarten teacher and union leader Phil Boyd recalled. “We’re sitting and thinking about how do we protect our children from our federal government, which seems completely insane.”

As Fridley schools return for the new school year, district leaders say the surge’s emotional pain remains and the financial damage caused by the ICE surge must be addressed.

Still, on the first day of school there is reason for hope. District leaders worried enrollment levels would drop as families were caught up in immigration raids or self-deported to avoid becoming the target of violence or being separated.

That hasn’t happened, said Brenda Lewis, Fridley’s district superintendent.

“Our families trust us. It’s exciting,” Lewis said of the higher enrollment. “Our hiring pools, too — we have so many robust candidates. In all of the horror that we saw last year and were subject to, like, people are choosing our district.”

Financial strain, legal battles and trauma

Lewis and other Fridley district leaders spent the winter personally patrolling district buildings on a daily basis to intervene in emergencies driven by ICE’s presence in the area.

Boyd, who said he still gets triggered by the sound of helicopters, said the trauma of living through the surge didn’t fully hit him until he started summer break.

“When I was able to sort of relax and be away for a minute, I realized, ‘Oh. I need time to rejuvenate.’ And every year you need some time, but this is different.”

District leaders are also involved in an ongoing court case, suing the federal government to keep ICE away from schools and redesignate them as “sensitive locations.”

“There’s no closure,” Lewis said. “We don’t have sensitive locations back. We don’t know, ‘Are they coming back? Are they coming back after midterms? It’s out of our control. And yet we have to be immediately responsive.”

The district is also still reeling from the financial impact of the surge.

When students were afraid to leave their homes, the district lost state and federal dollars from enrollment and school meals. They paid for emergency e-learning and door-to-door transportation for kids who wanted to attend class but whose parents didn’t feel safe transporting them.

The district has identified approximately at least $1.97 million in direct costs and revenue associated with the immigration-enforcement crisis. Lewis said that figure doesn’t include enrollment-related state aid losses, additional staff time, security expenses or mental health and academic recovery costs.

Jake Karnopp, who chairs the Fridley school board, said the surge felt like a “kick in the teeth” as it happened and will take a long time for the district to recover.

“We were seeing an upward projection” before the surge, he added. “Our test scores were increasing, our enrollment was increasing, our behaviors were decreasing, our attendance was getting better. We were on an upward trajectory of really improving our school district, and then this hit.”

Still, he remains positive about the future. “It’s going to take a while for those things to come back, but I'm very confident that they will come back because of the district that we work in.”

For this week, the mission is to try to make things as normal as possible for everyone in the new school year after months of upheaval.

“We're creating welcoming buildings that are open and caring and express … ‘This is a welcome environment for everyone who walks through the door,” said Boyd, the kindergarten teacher.

“We don't just pretend like it's over and done with and it didn't happen. We honor the experiences and the fear that we had,” said Lewis. “This horrible, unrational, tragic 12-week event occurred in our community, and yet our community just rose and said, ‘We're gonna protect.’”

By Becky Z. Dernbach and Cynthia Tu, Sahan Journal

This story comes to you through a partnership between MPR News and Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to providing authentic news reporting about Minnesota's new immigrants and refugees. Use the audio player above to hear Sahan Journal education reporter Becky Dernbach speak about this story on Minnesota Now.

One January night, 13-year-old Alessandro, his parents and his two younger sisters slipped out of their St. Paul home. They brought only diapers for the baby and a small suitcase of clothes they grabbed in a hurry, leaving everything else behind.

Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had come to Minnesota as part of an aggressive campaign to arrest as many immigrants as possible. For two months, the Honduran immigrant family hadn’t left their home even to buy groceries, while throughout the Twin Cities ICE arrested parents at school bus stops and children returning from school.

And now, ICE had come knocking at their door. Days later, the family escaped in the night, heading east to New York City. Alessandro sent a good-bye message to his favorite teacher, saying he hoped to someday return to Battle Creek Middle School.

Though many districts tried to keep students engaged through online learning and food deliveries, some families, like Alessandro’s, decided they had to leave. A new Sahan Journal analysis shows the extent of the enrollment loss following Operation Metro Surge: as many as 1,700 students left the Minnesota school districts and charter schools with the highest percentage of English learners.

“Kids literally disappeared,” said Brenda Lewis, the superintendent of Fridley Public Schools. “Literally in an unprecedented manner. Overnight.”

José Pecina Galvan, a bilingual educational assistant at Alessandro’s school who became the main point of contact for about 50 Spanish-speaking families, says 10 to 15 of his students never came back. Some moved to another state or city to be with family, including an 11-year-old who had to move to Missouri to stay with his sister after both his parents were detained at work. Some returned to their home countries.

“Some of them I just couldn’t even get ahold of,” Pecina Galvan said. “The mom or dad might have got taken, and they don’t have family, we don’t have a way to reach them.”

Sahan Journal requested October and March enrollment data from the 20 school districts and 20 charter schools with the highest percentage of English learners in Minnesota. Across the 29 districts and charter schools that provided data, enrollment was down by about 1,700 students in March 2026 compared to October 2025. By contrast, midyear enrollment across those same districts declined by fewer than 80 students in the 2024-2025 school year.

The enrollment losses spanned urban, suburban, and rural districts and charter schools with high English learner populations. And the midyear enrollment declines compounded a year-over-year drop. The same districts and charter schools lost about 1,000 students between October 2024 and October 2025.

Learn more about the data methodology on the Sahan Journal’s website.

The post-Metro Surge decline could foreshadow longer-term losses. As birth rates have fallen, and Minnesota loses residents to other states, immigration has been a key factor fueling enrollment in some districts.

Some students who left their schools over the winter may be back this fall. But educators and advocates say they’ve heard from many families who have spent their summers preparing to self-deport.

Mara Solis, a fourth-grade teacher at St. Paul’s Wellstone Elementary School and a member of the teachers union’s Immigrant Defense Committee, worries that numbers will drop further in her district and throughout the metro area in the fall. She said she fears that “we’re going to see big enrollment surprises come October when we do our final counts.”

Empty seats, even as students trickle back

All but one of the school districts that provided data to Sahan Journal saw a midyear enrollment decline. The largest declines were in Minneapolis and St. Paul, which each lost nearly 500 students.

Alli Kildahl, a social studies teacher at St. Paul’s Battle Creek Middle School, recalled the first day students were back in person after a temporary online learning option ended in March.

“When that initial burst of joy faded, we looked around and realized we’re still missing a lot of kids,” she said. “A lot of them slowly trickled back over the next month or two. And some of them are still not anywhere to be found.”

Suburban districts like Roseville, Fridley, Columbia Heights, North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale, and Burnsville-Eagan-Savage also lost dozens more students than usual midyear, as did some rural communities with high immigrant populations including St. James, Long Prairie-Grey Eagle and Willmar.

Among the charter schools that provided data to Sahan Journal, enrollment was overall more stable, but some schools serving high Spanish-speaking populations saw midyear enrollment dips, too. About half of the charter schools that responded to Sahan Journal’s data request saw slight midyear increases.

Gabby Benavente Hobart, a bilingual paraprofessional at North High School in Minneapolis, said one of her students was deported to Ecuador, some moved out of state and the school lost contact with others. When students started returning from online learning, she recalled “a lot of joy” tempered by the feeling of loss for the students who didn’t return.

“It was heartbreaking because their absence was definitely felt, and it was profound,” she said.

Lewis, the Fridley superintendent, said her district serves a large Somali population, most of whom do not require English language services, as well as a growing number of Spanish-speaking new immigrant students. Both populations stayed home during the ICE surge.

“It’s a horrible feeling in the middle of what was happening to just have classrooms empty and not to know where children are,” she said.

Fridley school staff maintained active outreach efforts with families, delivering groceries and identifying whether they needed support with rent or utility payments. The district also created an online option, which Lewis said stemmed enrollment losses.

In Fridley, more than 460 students went online during the ICE surge. Many districts and charter schools, mostly in the metro area, provided online options for their students during this time; these online options served more than 20,000 students at their peak, according to data collected by Sahan Journal.

Still, Fridley, a district of 2,600 students, saw a midyear enrollment drop of 55 kids — about 2 percent. Some students left the Fridley area, which they now saw as unsafe, Lewis said. Some parents could no longer afford their housing after they could not go to work, and moved in with relatives.

But some children left without saying where they were going.

Another measure of students disappearing is through 15-day drops. Under state law, school districts must drop students from enrollment after 15 consecutive absences. In Fridley, the number of students removed from enrollment for high absenteeism who never returned to school tripled in the 2025-2026 school year compared to the previous year, rising from four to 12.

“That means we can’t get a hold of the family, and we have not heard from any other school district or charter in the state that they’ve been enrolled. So those are literally children that we have no information on where they are,” Lewis said of those 12 students. “Those are the tough stories, because you just don’t know. Did they move out of state? Did they self-deport? Were they detained?”

Faribault Public Schools, a diverse district in a meatpacking town an hour south of Minneapolis, also saw a significant increase in 15-day drops that didn’t return to school. In the 2024-2025 school year, 11 students were dropped and did not return. But last year, that number increased to 48.

In a statement, Faribault Public Schools acknowledged an increase in 15-day drops compared to the previous five years.

“While we are aware of the increase, we are unable to attribute it to any single factor, though we do believe there is likely a correlation between Operation Metro Surge and the 15-day drops we saw in January and February,” the district said in a statement. “As with any enrollment changes, a variety of circumstances can influence a family’s decision.”

Decline dates to beginning of second Trump administration

Sarah Schmidt de Carranza, executive director of multilingual learning for St. Paul Public Schools, traces her district’s decline of enrollment among English learners to Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, nearly a year before Operation Metro Surge began.

Typically, her district welcomes many newcomer students just starting to learn English every spring. But with the border effectively closed, and historically low numbers of refugees being admitted to the United States, there are now very few newcomer English speakers.

“Honestly, they have plummeted,” said Schmidt de Carranza.

Then Operation Metro Surge began. Thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents descended on the Twin Cities, detaining more than 3,400 people, including at least 70 children.

“It took what was already going on and exacerbated it,” she said. “Maybe a lot of families that weren’t necessarily thinking of leaving did because they felt unsafe. … We definitely saw some enrollment impact because of that as well.”

A net of 900 students left St. Paul Public Schools between October 2024 and March 2026 — including nearly 500 English learners. Schmidt de Carranza kept monthly counts, and saw another 150 English learners leave the district between March and June 2026. She also noted that English learners weren’t the only population affected by Operation Metro Surge — many St. Paul students who speak another language at home are also proficient in English.

As enrollment of English learners declined and the district faced a $14 million budget shortfall, the St. Paul school board voted in June to cut 16.3 positions for English language teachers. Schmidt de Carranza said the district would continue to meet the staffing ratios for English learners required by the union contract.

“But providing additional staffing above and beyond what the contractual agreement is, is not really something that we’re able to do right now,” she said.

Solis, the Wellstone Elementary teacher, said that many of the positions cut, like English language teachers and counselors, are essential to new immigrant students.

“It’s going to even further affect those students that were most highly impacted by the surge, because the teachers that are being cut are the people that offer stability to their everyday life,” she said.

Back to school

For Alessandro, the transition to New York City was tough. Instead of getting to school on a yellow bus, he had to take the subway to school by himself. He missed his friends and teachers at Battle Creek Middle School.

“I felt bad, as if I was missing class,” Alessandro said in Spanish.

“My son just wasn’t the same,” said his father, Orlando. “Mentally, he just shut down.”

Sahan Journal is not using full names for the family due to their immigration status.

After three months in New York, Orlando decided to bring the family back to Minnesota. He was concerned that his son wasn’t adjusting — both his grades and self-esteem had dropped. He wanted Alessandro to finish the school year in St. Paul.

Alessandro was thrilled to return to Battle Creek Middle School. “This is where I feel safest, where I know I have someone to talk to in school,” he said.

Now, he’s looking forward to starting eighth grade, and his younger sister will be starting kindergarten.

But his teachers are concerned about what the school year will look like. Kildahl said the budget cuts hit Battle Creek Middle School hard — and she’s worried about further enrollment losses.

“The school is just going to be really different when we come back,” she said. “The class sizes are going to be big, and we are going to be missing families.”

Attorneys representing the 38 people charged in connection with an anti-ICE protest at a St. Paul church filed more than five dozen motions Monday, including requests to have the charges dismissed.

One of those requests argues that the defendants — including journalists who covered the protest — have been singled out for selective or vindictive prosecution under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

In short, the 1994 law was passed in response to violent anti-abortion protests at clinics. It also ensures the ability of people to access worship services without being intimidated or physically blocked.

During the Jan. 18 protest at Cities Church, demonstrators chanted in opposition to a church pastor who at the time was a high-ranking ICE official. Prosecutors allege they engaged in “intimidation, threats, interference and physical obstruction.” All 38 defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Defense attorneys argue that the Trump administration is enforcing a double standard based on the political views held by demonstrators. And it points to incidents where people engaging in other protests that targeted LGBTQ-friendly churches in Texas and Florida didn’t face similar charges.

“Not only has the administration left similar church protests unprosecuted, but it has also pardoned and dismissed cases involving recidivist and even violent anti-abortion offenders,” reads the motion.

Attorneys also allege the administration has a “permissive attitude” when it comes to undercover ICE agents conducting surveillance in churches.

That’s a reference to the case of 15 anti-ICE protestors charged in an alleged conspiracy to impede or injure federal law enforcement officers during the ICE surge into Minnesota this winter. A defense attorney in the case disclosed Homeland Security Investigation files showing that an undercover officer conducted surveillance inside University Baptist Church, which at the time was hosting what the government described as a left-wing martial arts group.

The Minneapolis church is part of a nationwide alliance of churches that asked for and received a court injunction blocking federal agents from enforcing immigration laws on their properties. University Baptist Church officials accuse the government of violating that court order. A hearing in that case will be held in Massachusetts on Friday.

Another motion to dismiss the Cities Church case filed Monday asks the court to dismiss the charges based on what it says is the overuse of customs administrative summonses by Homeland Security investigators. The summonses were sent to “telecommunications, airlines, social-media and internet platforms, a rental-car company, a retailer, a state employment agency, and other third parties.”

Attorneys say the Department of Homeland Security, through Homeland Security Investigations, used 92 summonses to investigate and prosecute the defendants.

“DHS does not possess general jurisdiction to investigate every federal crime; its investigative authority is limited to the functions Congress expressly assigned, transferred, or otherwise vested in the Department and its components,” reads the motion.

The government has responded to previous motions challenging its investigative authority by accusing defendants of trying to “micromanage the government’s prosecution.”

The case has seen some unusual turns, including an order issued last month requiring the government to turn over all grand jury materials to be reviewed by a judge.

Grand jury proceedings are generally secret. But the Justice Department’s actions have been more scrutinized since a federal judge in Chicago uncovered prosecutorial misconduct in a case involving anti-ICE activists, which led to charges being dropped.

Reporter Jon Collins contributed to this story.

Nothing about Colin Kaepernick, the football player, changed on that warm Southern California night a decade ago.

Not his speed. Not his arm strength. Not the improvisational skills that made him one of the NFL's most electrifying, if at times erratic, quarterbacks.

And to be honest, nothing changed about Colin Kaepernick, the 28-year-old man, that night either.

If anything, the moment the San Francisco 49ers star decided to take a knee during the national anthem before a preseason game on Sept. 1, 2016, to bring attention to a series of social issues he cares deeply about — from racial injustice to minority oppression to police brutality — only revealed to the world at large who Kaepernick always believed himself to be.

“It wasn’t a sudden act,” he wrote in a statement this spring announcing his memoir, ”The Perilous Fight," a title borrowed from a passage of the very song to which his name will forever be linked.

No, it wasn't.

That night wasn't even the first time the player who always seemed to have one eye on the field and the other on the world at large chose to do something other than stand during the anthem. In the two previous 49er exhibitions that August, he sat on the bench, largely unnoticed, as the anthem played.

Only after connecting with former NFL player and retired Green Beret Nate Boyer in a hotel lobby did Kaepernick move from the bench to a knee, something Boyer suggested would be more respectful to those in the military.

He didn't announce he was going to do it. He didn't share it on social media. He didn't promote it in any way. He just did it, quietly placing his right knee on the ground, his left arm across his left knee and staring silently ahead as Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Steven Powell sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

When Kaepernick huddled with noted sociologist and then-49ers advisor Harry Edwards in the aftermath, they both knew Kaepernick's decision carried considerable risk.

While Kaepernick, who is biracial, was hardly the first athlete of color to parlay the playing of the anthem into an attempt to draw attention to social inequity — from U.S. track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics to college basketball player Ariyana Smith at Knox College, who in late 2014 stood under the basket with her hands up during the anthem, then laid on the court for over four minutes in protest over the shooting death of Black teenager Michael Brown in Missouri — Edwards understood the spotlight the NFL provides and Kaepernick's status within the game had the potential to make it a divisive cultural flashpoint.

“I said, ‘You know, this is going to become a major issue,’” Edwards told The Associated Press. “You are a Black male and seen as a greater threat because of the centrality of male activities and male sports. And so there’s no way that there’s not going to be a price to pay for this.”

The price ended up being Kaepernick's football career.

The conversation Kaepernick intended to start was instead hijacked. The method of Kaepernick's protest became the focus, with critics calling it offensive, particularly to those in the armed forces.

Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lashed out and later, as president, labeled any player who knelt a “son of a bitch”. Fans burned Kaepernick's jersey in anger. The boos that cascaded in his direction every Sunday were hardly limited to 49er road games, though the franchise trudging through a miserable 2-14 season didn't help.

While supporters pointed out that Kaepernick's right to kneel is one of the freedoms protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, the very thing those in uniform are commanded to defend, it didn't seem to matter.

No matter how hard Kaepernick kept trying to steer the talk toward racial injustice, it swerved in seemingly every other direction instead.

Four months after kneeling for the first time, Kaepernick threw his 1,692nd and final pass in the NFL, a 9-yard touchdown pass to tight end Garrett Celek late in the fourth quarter against Seattle, a play that highlighted some of what made Kaepernick so tantalizing as a player. He dropped back, glanced to his left, then stepped up in the pocket and fired a dart over the middle to Celek in the end zone.

The score brought the 49ers to within three. San Francisco never got the ball again. The Seahawks ran out the clock, and Kaepernick's No. 7 jersey disappeared down the tunnel toward the locker room one last time.

The 49ers hit reboot during the offseason, firing head coach Chip Kelly and replacing him with Kyle Shanahan. Kaepernick met with Shanahan and new general manager John Lynch, then opted to void the remaining year on his contract and become a free agent.

The player whose rise in 2012 sparked San Francisco to an NFC title, who once led former NFL quarterback-turned-analyst Ron Jaworski to wonder aloud if Kaepernick could become one of the best ever at the position, never pulled on a uniform again.

Kaepernick and former teammate Eric Reid — who knelt alongside him in 2016 — filed a lawsuit against the NFL claiming owners colluded to blacklist them out of the game. A settlement was reached in 2019, and while Kaepernick kept one toe in the game — as late as 2022, he worked out for the Las Vegas Raiders — both he and the league seem to have moved on.

An absence that still leaves some wondering ‘why’?

Nearing 10 years after the 72nd and final touchdown pass of his career, the circumstances remain hard for some to square. How is it that 32 teams saw a player in his prime, a player who guided a team to the Super Bowl, and who was only a couple of years removed from leading his team on a pair of deep playoff runs, and decided “nah, we're good"?

The NFL is, in just about every way, a meritocracy. Pedigree doesn't matter, only production. The league's history is filled with players granted countless second (and in some cases, third or fourth) chances despite various misdeeds, some of whom returned to the field after spending time in prison.

Over the last month, the Seattle Seahawks sprinted to land cornerback Terrion Arnold even as he faces eight felony charges stemming from an incident in Florida. Arnold, who has denied the allegations, agreed to a one-year deal on Saturday and was immediately placed on the commissioner's exempt list by the NFL while it conducts its own investigation.

Kaepernick, by contrast, remains unsigned to this day even as countless quarterbacks with lesser resumes have drifted in and out of the league.

His exile doesn't quite make sense to longtime Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Cam Heyward. Heyward described Kaepernick as “hell of a talent” who created “headaches” for opponents on the field and who once passed for 302 yards, ran for 62 more, and accounted for a pair of touchdowns in the Super Bowl, a game Heyward is still waiting to play in as he enters his 16th season.

Heyward, a seven-time Pro Bowler and the league’s 2023 recipient of the Walter Payton Man of the Year award for his charity work and contributions to the community off the field, also remembers a player who stuck to his convictions in the face of withering pressure.

The way Heyward figures it, isn't that kind of the point? While stressing he didn't have all the specifics on why Kaepernick never played again, Heyward said the quiet part out loud when asked if he felt Kaepernick's stand was the driving force behind why he didn't play beyond 2016.

“I don't think any player deserves that,” Heyward told the AP. “I think we all strive to be football players, but then we also strive to give back. And you never would think it would lead to that. It feels like he paid the price with his career. I just don't think that's right.”

Even as football opportunities dried up, Kaepernick doubled down on his activism

It's telling of how fraught Kaepernick's decision remains 10 years later that numerous people who either played or coached alongside Kaepernick in 2016 declined to speak to the AP about their experiences of that season and its fallout.

“I think that this reluctance to even talk about it now is indicative of to what degree did the NFL substantively address it,” said Frederick Gooding Jr., a professor of African-American studies at TCU and the author of a book examining the intersection of race, media and sports. “If anything, people should be more open to talk about this, warts and all.”

It hasn't happened on the scale Kaepernick envisioned, and Gooding added that he believes one reason Kaepernick never took another snap was the way he “forced people to get uncomfortable.”

It wasn't until 2020, in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minnesota, that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged the league misstepped by not listening to players like Kaepernick who were fighting for social equality. By then, Kaepernick was already three-plus years removed from the sport.

“Now that the game has been decided, now that his career is effectively over, now from a power and control standpoint, the NFL still is able to acknowledge that maybe they should have listened better, but they’re not losing anything,” Gooding said. "Now the stakes are lower for them to admit in retrospect.”

While demonstrating during the anthem spread across the league in the immediate aftermath — with as many as 200 players taking a knee at times during the 2017 season — the temperature, at least inside NFL stadiums, has been turned down even as it remains ratcheted up in so many other areas of society.

Edwards, whose roots in promoting social justice date back to his time counseling Smith and Carlos to raise their gloved fists in a Black power salute while on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics, once publicly lobbied for Kaepernick to return to the game.

Now, he sees the work Kaepernick and his wife, Nessa, have done through the years — from the “Know Your Rights” camps they host to promote “education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization” for people of color to the independent autopsies their foundation pays for (most recently following the death of Black teenager Nolan Wells in Mississippi) — and believes the game would have just gotten in the way.

“Nothing he would ever accomplish in football, even if there was a team that would bring him on board, would match his importance as a sports political figure in the first two decades of the 20th century,” Edwards said. “And I think that that’s critically important that that example be out there. There will be others who will come along. The only thing that’s missing today is that broad-scale societal movement that athletes use as scaffolding to make their statements.”

Kaepernick’s activism inspired others from afar

Marcellis Perkins watched intently from the other side of the country as the rhetoric around Kaepernick heated up. A sophomore forward on the Holy Cross men's basketball team at the time, Perkins had long felt the pull of civic engagement while growing up in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

An advisor, sensing a need for allyship in a particularly fraught environment, suggested to Perkins and a handful of other athletes that they start meeting regularly in an effort to carve out a place for them to openly share their experiences.

During those early days the group, which became known as Men of Color Athletes (MOCA), would talk openly about Kaepernick's commitment to his cause at a time it wasn't unusual for them to hear criticism of the 49ers quarterback in their own locker rooms in Worcester, Massachusetts — a good 2,500 miles from San Francisco.

“I'm like well, if our coach says this or the captain of the team says this, how can we feel like we express ourselves or find the words to talk about what’s actually happening from our perspective without feeling like we'll be penalized?" Perkins said. “And so the best thing we could do is create a space for ourselves where we can talk and share these resources, share these thoughts and better equip ourselves.”

Perkins, who now holds a doctorate in philosophy and is the program director for an entrepreneurship program at TCU, likened Kaepernick's stand to ones made by predecessors Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown, only they were living through it, not reading about it in a book.

In Kaepernick, the men in MOCA saw “somebody reflecting and representing us and using their voice.” What began with a group of around 10 athletes quickly grew into 30 and laid the foundation for a women's group.

An enduring example

On a personal level, Perkins watched Kaepernick deftly navigate the transition from athlete to former athlete, a path Perkins had to walk himself when injuries forced him to spend his final years at Holy Cross watching from the sideline.

Perkins has been heavily involved in several projects since moving to the Fort Worth area, including serving on a non-profit board that addresses health inequities and for a time, running an after-school program at an all-boys school. While Perkins has always felt pulled in this direction, Kaepernick provided more than a gentle nudge.

It's one of the many ways ACLU President Deborah Archer told the AP that Kaepernick's journey “set an example” for others to follow.

“He showed what they can do, the power that they have to start conversation,” she said after the organization presented Kaepernick with an activism award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in July. "For so long athletes, actors were told: That’s your lane, stay in your lane. He showed that there is no lane. We are all a part of this democracy, that we all have a right to speak, we all have an obligation to speak.”

An obligation that Kaepernick is perhaps even more fervently committed to now at 38 than he was at 28. Yes, speaking out came at a high personal cost. And yes, there will always be a segment of the populace whose judgment of him will begin and end with the image of Kaepernick on one knee while someone sings about “the land of the free and the home of the brave."

No, he did not make it to the Hall of Fame as some once thought might be possible. Yet for those like Perkins who were inspired by watching someone take a stand at deep personal cost in hopes of creating what Edwards likes to call the quest for a “more perfect union,” it hardly matters.

“I would hope and I would think that when he looks back on his legacy, he'll say ‘I made the right decision because of all the lives that were impacted, all the lives that were changed,’ ... that is a different level of greatness," Perkins said. "The media might not celebrate it, but the people will. I think that’s all that matters.”

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a man and lying about it during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis was released from a Texas jail Thursday, after a judge refused to order his return to Minnesota.

Christian Castro was released at the break of dawn from a detention center in Brownsville. He motioned his hand toward a few camera operators and a reporter crowding around him and quickly got into an SUV that drove off.

A day earlier, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in an order that said he couldn't prevent a county sheriff from releasing Castro or order Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to sign his extradition warrant.

Castro is charged in Minnesota with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the Jan. 14 shooting of 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

Castro is accused of firing gun through door of home

Castro is accused of firing a gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home, shooting Sosa-Celis in the leg. Prosecutors say Castro also falsely accused Sosa-Celis and another man of attacking an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel.

After a Minnesota judge issued a nationwide warrant for Castro's arrest in May, authorities, including Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, arrested Castro in Cameron County on May 29. Minnesota authorities have sought his extradition since his arrest, but he remained in custody in Brownsville, a city bordering Mexico.

Under Texas law and barring extradition, Castro had to be released after 90 days of detention, which was Thursday.

Minnesota officials believe Castro could flee to Mexico.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a request for a temporary restraining order last week seeking to block Castro’s release or to order his return to Minnesota.

Abbott waiting for internal state investigation about Castro

Texas attorneys on Tuesday argued the judge could not rule on a decision that’s still pending. Abbott has not denied the extradition. Instead he is waiting for the outcome of an internal state investigation considering whether Castro was legally a “fugitive” under the Extradition Clause, the lawyers said.

The judge wrote in Wednesday’s order that the court couldn't yet step in.

“The Court concludes that it lacks subject matter jurisdiction because the case is not ripe for adjudication,” the order read. “Minnesota cannot premise its causes of action on the allegation that Governor Abbott may violate those authorities in the future; it must prove that a violation has already occurred.”

The judge said in his order that the extradition laws do not outline how long the Texas governor can take to make that decision.

Abbott said last week he would not respond to the extradition request, citing the ongoing investigation into fraud in government social service programs in Minnesota, which President Donald Trump used to justify his immigration crackdown there.

Abbott directs ‘bad lawyers’ comment at Minnesota attorney general

After the judge's decision, Ellison posted online that the Texas governor had an obligation to extradite Castro. And by refusing to extradite him, “Greg Abbott is turning Texas into a sanctuary state for violent criminals.”

Abbott responded to Ellison.

“You guys are such bad lawyers. You showed up unprepared, uninformed & unpersuasive,” Abbott wrote online. “You don’t know the law & it showed.”

The Texas governor accused Minnesota of refusing to enforce immigration laws and threatened to send immigrants in the future to their state as he did with New York City, when thousands were released into Texas under President Joe Biden's administration.

A message seeking reaction from Ellison was sent to his office Thursday.

Minnesota officials say Castro could flee the country, citing calls he made from jail to a woman in Mexico, talking “about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released,” according to the lawsuit.

The judge conceded that Castro could flee the country but added that “the threat of injury by itself does not create an issue ripe for adjudication.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people during July, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration, according to new figures.

The spike in immigration arrests shows that the administration has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention but have nonetheless been disruptive.

The July arrest tally of 49,571 marks a 15 percent jump from 43,021 arrests a month earlier and a 70 percent increase from 29,241 in February, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, according to government data that was provided by ICE to the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press.

As part of the surging arrest numbers over recent weeks, ICE officers have made arrests at traffic stops. They've increasingly relied on state and local law enforcement partners who are assuming immigration enforcement duties. And they have started to arrest people from Haiti who've seen their protections from deportation stripped away.

The new arrest numbers show the administration “didn’t stop the enforcement,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for more immigration restrictions.

“They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective.”

Immigration arrests the month before Trump entered office hovered a little over 8,000 a figure largely made up of immigrants transferred from city or state jails and prisons and turned over to ICE to remove from the country. During Trump’s first year in office the numbers started climbing as the administration loosened restrictions on where and who ICE could arrest while it also infused the agency with billions of dollars.

By December, the number of arrests jumped to more than 40,177, according to the data, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

In the aftermath of two fatal shootings in Minnesota in January that sparked protests and an uproar from Democratic lawmakers, arrests began to fall in February. After remaining stagnant for months, the numbers surged in June.

Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 20,000 of the July arrests, in a sign of how important those states have become to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Both states have leaned heavily into cooperation agreements with ICE called 287g agreements that allow local and state law enforcement to essentially operate as arms of federal immigration enforcement.

In his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pledged to keep ICE out of the headlines, suggesting that the administration’s immigration crackdown might take a softer approach. But his tenure has been marred by a number of fatal shootings of immigrants in encounters with ICE officers. And the figures show Mullin hasn’t shifted the agency from President Donald Trump’s vision for mass deportations.

Under Mullin's predecessor, Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was often characterized by high-profile operations that targeted specific Democratic cities including Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Operations often led by former Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino were blasted out on social media videos showing officers bursting out of moving vans to chase people or rappelling from helicopters onto apartment rooftops.

But Krikorian said those tactics were “provoking a lot of ordinary people, turning them off even if they liked the idea of the immigration law being enforced."

The spike in arrests comes as the agency, infused with billions of dollars last summer by Congress, has also hired 12,000 new deportation officers and investigative agents.

Patricia Quiñonez, a journalist at Utahlozanos, which covers the Venezuelan immigrant community in Utah, said immigration arrests during traffic stops have increased sharply in recent months.

“They stop you for whatever reason — for example, you don’t have a drivers’ license, your vehicle tags are expired, your windows are more tinted than what is allowed. From there, they take advantage of the situation and ask about immigration.”

People with valid work permits and pending asylum claims are among those arrested, said Quiñonez, who believes they are being targeted by race.