Operation Metro Surge has fallen from the national headlines, but elevated ICE activity continues in Minnesota. Fewer than 1,000 federal immigration agents remain, down from a peak of over 4,000, but up from the previous 190 agents that oversaw immigration enforcement and removal across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota. Many immigrant families continue to stay home out of fear. ICE activity has also shifted to outside the Twin Cities, including rural meatpacking towns as far as three hours away from Minneapolis.

More restrictive immigration policies have chilled social and economic activity within rural immigrant communities and contributed to staffing cuts at one Minnesota meatpacking plant. The threat of immigration enforcement makes workers more vulnerable to abuse and poses an existential dilemma for meatpacking towns that largely benefit economically from immigration.

“People who used to go out and run their errands, now are scared to do that,” says Jackson Henry, union representative for UFCW Local 1189. “We have gone and tried to help people by delivering food, and even when we go to those people’s homes, sometimes they won’t come out, that’s the level of fear that people live with.”