Federal immigration enforcement activity in Minnesota intensified with the launch of Operation Metro Surge in December 2025. According to news reports, nearly 4,000 federal agents were deployed over the following months, resulting in over 3,000 arrests, including U.S. citizens, refugees, individuals with protected status, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants.
In the ensuing crisis, Minnesota Law faculty responded in numerous ways. Many provided analyses of critical legal issues to the public, bench, and bar. In the clinics, faculty and students mobilized to advocate for their clients and the rule of law. Others brought the legal issues into their classrooms.
Since December, more than 1,000 habeas corpus petitions have been filed in federal court, along with other lawsuits related to federal action against legal observers, protesters, and journalists. Emmanuel Mauleón, an associate professor of law who specializes in the Fourth Amendment, race and law, and policing, notes the scale of these filings.
“Much of what we saw in Minnesota was driven by what I call federal noncompliance, or disregard not only for constitutional rights but also for court orders,” Mauleón says. “The fallout from these legal questions will continue to play out in the courts, like First and Fourth Amendment rights, questions about access to counsel, and the limits of immigration enforcement.”
Setting the Stage
Linus Chan, the James H. Binger Clinical Professor of Law and faculty director of the Detainee Rights Clinic, says policy and enforcement changes began earlier in the administration. Among these changes were the detention of students and deportations to countries such as South Sudan and El Salvador. The government also began detaining individuals attending immigration proceedings.
“Quite a few things changed that were putting in the groundwork for the fear and terror that we’ve seen in the Twin Cities,” Chan says. “This was all part of the idea that the United States would exert its authority to start a program of mass detention, meaning they would arrest and detain as many people as they possibly could, and they would do it in an outwardly aggressive fashion. They would grab people from their cars, off the street, at work, and at home. You saw it happening with a lot more frequency and manpower and in a more open way starting December 1.”
Chan describes these practices as a shift in how detention authority is used. “The part that disturbs me the most is how casually the federal government is using its power to detain people and doing it in such a casual way without recognizing what an awful responsibility it is to take away freedom,” he says. “How can we call ourselves the home of the free? It’s ridiculous.”
Chan is concerned that court rulings have not always led to immediate changes in enforcement practices. “They would force other courts to rule on that for each person [the government] arrested, and it created a huge backlog of cases,” he says. “Instead of taking the decisions and realizing what they might mean, they would double down and detain more and more people.”
Mauleón points to the outcomes of habeas petitions as part of the legal landscape. Judges have ruled in favor of petitioners for several reasons, he says, including violations of their rights while in detention and detention without a final order of removal.
“If you have thousands and thousands of people being detained and flown out of state and being detained for long periods of time in horrendous conditions, and then it turns out they weren’t subject to any enforcement activity at all, it tells us that they aren’t targeting the worst of the worst criminals, as we’ve been told,” Mauleón says. “That’s a mass dragnet of enforcement and terror. The brutality and the terror are the point more than anything over actual immigration priorities.”
Legal Questions and Enforcement Practices
Mauleón identifies several areas where current enforcement practices differ from previous norms, such as entering homes without judicial warrants and limiting local law enforcement investigations after fatal encounters involving federal agents.
Another shift took place after the recent concurrence on an emergency stay in the case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that four factors — race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, occupation, and being in a particular location — were sufficient to establish reasonable suspicion of a person’s unlawful presence.
First Amendment issues have also emerged. Jane Kirtley, a Minnesota Law affiliated faculty member and the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, notes multiple incidents involving journalists and individuals who observe or record enforcement activity.
“The Justice Department is weaponizing statutes to shut down journalists’ practices that they don’t like,” Kirtley says, noting that the government is relying on statutes with little precedent. “None of these things can be looked at in isolation. It’s what I see as an overall pattern on the part of the Trump administration to do everything they can to intimidate journalists who are engaging in reporting they don’t like.”
Reports from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker document multiple incidents involving journalists in Minnesota, including the use of crowd-control measures and arrests. Chan also describes how agents interacted with protesters and legal observers. “Agents met resistance with force. They decided that the best way to handle this was to intimidate people who were trying to protest and keep people accountable,” he says.
Legal observers have reported additional encounters with federal agents, including being followed and informed that their personal information was being recorded. In a federal lawsuit, one observer described being told that facial recognition technology had been used. Shortly afterward, her TSA PreCheck and Global Entry privileges were revoked.
“The point is the insidious nature of this,” Kirtley says. “What is happening behind the scenes? What dossier are they developing on you, and what are the ramifications down the road? The lack of clarity on what the implications are will certainly have a chilling effect.”
At the Intersection of Legal Advocacy and Community Response
Students in the Detainee Rights Clinic and others at Minnesota Law are working on a range of cases related to immigration enforcement, including detention matters, habeas petitions, and restraining orders.
“Our role is to work on the case in front of you,” Chan says. “We know it can be difficult and overwhelming and trying at times. But that is our way of helping the situation.
Beyond individual cases, faculty in the Binger Center for New Americans have prepared videos to educate ordinary people about their legal rights and have worked with their partners in law firms and immigration organizations to coordinate responses. Mauleón points to significant community responses to enforcement actions throughout Operation Metro Surge.
“Minnesota really provided not only help for people in the state but also a blueprint for how to stand up to government overreach and a world that people don’t agree with,” Mauleón says. “There is still tremendous fallout and a tremendous number of people who have been detained, injured, and killed. It’s inspiring to see that, even in the face of all of those very real risks, people thought that the risk of not doing something was greater.”
As legal challenges continue and cases move through the courts, the full implications of Operation Metro Surge remain unresolved. Faculty and students at Minnesota Law are closely engaged in analyzing these developments through scholarship, clinical work, and public discourse. The questions raised — about constitutional protections, the scope of federal authority, and access to due process — are likely to shape ongoing debates in Minnesota and beyond.