Seattle-based photographer Nate Gowdy went to Minneapolis to document the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Metro Surge. From January 17 to January 26, and February 13 to February 18, he photographed the civilian efforts to protect their communities from the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. This is what he saw.
January 17, 2026 — Invasion
I landed at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport at 3 p.m., and stepped through the sliding glass doors into the extreme chill of a Midwest winter. It was the first day of a cold snap, with a few inches of snow on the ground and highs around 13 degrees. I exhaled. My breath fogged my glasses.
Eleven days earlier, the Department of Homeland Security had launched what they called the largest-ever immigration enforcement operation, centered on the Twin Cities. They deployed roughly 3,000 personnel, more than the metro area’s 10 largest local police departments combined. State officials and the mayors of Minneapolis and Saint Paul sued. They described Operation Metro Surge as an “invasion. ”
Ten days before I arrived, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, in the driver’s seat of her car. She was driving away from the agent when he shot her three times. Authorities called it self-defense.
Good’s death prompted outrage and protests. In the days that followed, businesses throughout the Twin Cities locked their doors, not to close, but out of fear. Parents kept children home. Residents circulated agent sightings and license plate numbers on suspicious vehicles in encrypted Signal group chats.
When I arrived in Minneapolis, I expected to find overarmed agents, tear gas clouds, traumatized civilians, and I did. I also found people walking their dogs, running errands, meeting for dinner.
Daily life continued, but it was unmistakably altered. Community events were canceled. It came through in every conversation with residents: weekend plans became risk assessments about the federal agents operating in residential neighborhoods without visible name tags or badge numbers. Tension lived in lowered voices and furtive glances toward any vehicle with tinted windows.
For eight days, I worked from a rented Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates with a group of other photojournalists. We taped a PRESS sign inside the windows as a disclaimer to the volunteers standing on almost every street corner in the subzero cold. We tracked federal movements through Signal channels, mixing confirmed sightings with rumors in a steady stream of pings. We stayed in contact with five other cars of photojournalists, all trying to document every abduction—failed or successful—that we could.
As we moved through the city, residents told us about their community-led rapid-response trainings. Volunteers distributed whistles and explained how to document raids safely. From this peaceful resistance, we learned to drive slowly through residential blocks, roll down our windows, and identify ourselves.
“We’re press. We’re watching ICE, too.”
Five years earlier, on January 6, 2021, I photographed the pro-Trump mob as thousands laid siege to the United States Capitol. Claims that “Might Makes Right” exploded into acrid fear. I have an audio recording of that day, when I was deep in the crowd at the Capitol steps, that can still bring back that fear. Wild and chaotic.
In Minnesota, the fear worked differently. It folded itself into school pick-ups, grocery runs, work commutes. People recalculated familiar routes before starting engines. Ordinary traffic drew scrutiny. Conversations sought a lower volume. Or went completely underground. The anxiety was procedural.
Veteran conflict photographers deployed to Minneapolis recognized the pattern: when heavily armed forces operate in civilian space, residents adjust.
As we drove, we kept our windows cracked to hear observers’ whistles carry through the thin, frigid air. From blocks away, over and over again in the weak winter light, concerned citizens on street corners signaled the presence of federal agents, putting the whole community on alert.
The first agents we found were idling in a white minivan near a Catholic church after a Spanish-language mass. Two men sat inside wearing tactical vests and face coverings, ball caps pulled low. No visible name tags. No badge numbers. A Minnesota Vikings towel and a Black Ice air freshener hung from the rearview mirror.
One agent rolled down his window and pointed at the polarizing filter I was holding to my lens.
“What’s that do?”
“It helps me photograph you through your tinted windows.”
He nodded. I snapped a few frames. The window went back up.
Around the corner, volunteers ushered church-goers in the opposite direction. Within minutes, the lot was empty.
January 21, 2026 — Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino
Earlier that afternoon, we’d seen word on Signal: “Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino is moving through the Twin Cities in a five-vehicle convoy.” For hours, observers and press fell in behind.
The convoy ran red lights and looped roundabouts, blasting “Ice Ice Baby” and the ice-cream-truck jingle as agents pointed professional cameras out windows, filming the terror they were inflicting on the people filming them.
When they stopped at a Speedway gas station, Bovino let the press document him grandstanding on a snowbank as a right-wing influencer asked softball questions. His breath hung in the cold, rank and visible. A fistful of Slim Jims bulged in his pocket. When the convoy accelerated back into traffic, we lost them on the highway.
We’d been trailing the convoy for most of the day, so we stopped in a Somali cafe to regroup. A tea kettle shrieked in the kitchen and we stood on alert. None of us will hear whistles the same way again.
At the cafe, videos started popping up from the convoy. In one, now infamous, Bovino shouted three warnings, then lobbed a canister of green smoke into the crowd of residents and children, during what locals described as an attempted abduction. People scattered. Parents shouted for their children.
January 23, 2026 — “Please, stop making things worse.”
On our sixth day, tens of thousands of Minnesotans joined a general strike opposing the federal surge. It was the first general strike in the US in 80 years, and the crowd marched in wind chills nearing 40 below. I went to change my camera battery, and found the latch frozen shut. Within 20 minutes, even packed into the dense crowd on the street, it was too cold to think. But Minnesotans rallied against the administration for hours.
The following morning, Minneapolis resident and VA intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti was trying to help another observer when federal agents shot and killed him. By the time I reached the neighborhood-wide crime scene, ICE had withdrawn. Minneapolis police in riot gear were left behind to hold the perimeter. They could have helped de-escalate, but they didn’t.
A woman beside me pleaded, “Please, stop making things worse.”
Officers responded by launching gas canisters into the crowd of grieving neighbors around me. My eyes burned. I nearly threw up. Residents pressed water bottles into each other’s hands to flush the caustic chemicals from their eyes.
Through the day, people gathered around a growing memorial between strips of yellow tape. Some grabbed candles from emergency kits and lit them. At the impromptu evening vigil, tears froze on my glasses. Icicles stiffened my mustache.
February 13, 2026 — “I’ll believe it when my neighbors feel safe.”
Within 48 hours of Pretti’s death, Bovino was removed from the operation. I was back in Seattle by then, following the reset from afar.
I got back to Minneapolis the day after “border czar” Tom Homan announced a “significant drawdown.” Personnel numbers would decline. Enforcement would continue.
I met a woman on the sidewalk and asked about her thoughts on the drawdown. “I’ll believe it when our neighbors who’ve been in hiding for weeks feel safe enough to walk down the street,” she told me.
Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, what began as a mass demonstration had settled into a sustained presence. Legal observers rotated shifts in neon vests. Mutual-aid volunteers stocked folding tables. Observers tracked agent arrival and departure times. Whistles hung from lanyards, ready.
A bearded farmer in camouflage winter gear introduced himself as Uncle Billy. He had driven from Arkansas. A longtime registered Republican, he told me: “This isn’t the party I signed up for. This isn’t small-government conservatism.”
Vehicle after vehicle rolled through. Some cars, suspected to be ICE, had no visible plates. Another had a new plate bolted awkwardly on top of the old one. A woman beside me yelled and blasted her airhorn as the car passed.
Then a two-tier car carrier pulled around hauling six fresh SUVs and trucks with tinted windows.
The mass of live-streamers was gone. The national television crews were gone. The agents were not. Twelve citizens kept watch on the building.
Detainees were released one or two at a time, perhaps a dozen over an hour. Mostly Hispanic men, and one French speaker. Each time someone walked out, legal observers in high-visibility vests stepped forward.
“¿Tiene hambre?”
“Sí.”
A volunteer handed him a tamale. A second draped a blanket over his shoulders.
Another man, just released, wore a paint-speckled Carhartt jacket. I learned he’d been pulled from a job interview. When a woman spotted her partner, she rushed forward and wrapped him in an embrace. The volunteers guided them toward folding tables and comfort. Toward rest.
I met Julie Prokes around 8 p.m., at the end of a 10-hour shift. He ran a warming tent and table with hot chocolate, instant noodles, snacks, and phone chargers. Whatever people dropped off. He said it was his 23rd straight day outside Whipple.
“You can’t control what happens inside. We can control how people are received when they get out.”
February 14, 2026 — “Customers are staying home.”
Karmel Mall, the country’s largest Somali shopping center, was full of bright fabric shops and halal markets. Tax preparers and travel agencies shared space with glass cases of gold jewelry and racks of flowing satin abayas in electric blues and emerald greens. The food court smelled of cardamom and fried sambusas filled with ground meats and leeks.
Vendor after vendor said business was way down. Some said as much as 90 percent. One woman said she hadn’t made a sale in two months because “the people are staying home.”
A few storefronts down is 65-year-old Osman Abo. He came to Minnesota from Somalia three decades ago and has sat behind his counter for 20 years. Now, business has slowed to a crawl.
On a typical Saturday, the mall would be full of families shopping and teenagers killing time. Now there are long stretches of days without a sale.
Unprompted, Abo reached into his wallet and pulled out a laminated Trump donor card. Then a Republican Party membership card. He said he had been donating since 2019. He held them up for me to photograph.
“I’m Republican,” he said. “I help Republicans. I vote Republican.”
Then he drew a line between policing and what he was seeing now.
“Police is okay. Criminal go to jail. I’m not criminal. I’m citizen,” he said.
He said he would remain a Republican. Still, he shook his head at the idea of MAGA.
“Last two months, not good,” he said. “How I can pay the rent? My house rent, my store rent. How?”
That evening, Lee’s Café, owned by a man named Liban Sheikh hosted a community gathering for volunteers. He passed trays of sambusas around the crowded room. Folding chairs scraped as people crammed into the small space. His employees refilled tea glasses, declining payment from anyone who tried to leave cash behind.
I asked him how business had fared during the surge.
“A lot of mess,” he said. “Our president makes a lot of mess.” He looked around the room. “I love my neighbors and they are heroes.”
I asked how he was holding up.
“Yeah, I’m still hanging,” he said. “I have a lot of friends. The community supports me. We will be all right.”
February 17, 2026 — “Too afraid to go to the grocery store.”
On my second-to-last day in Minnesota, two women who asked to be called Betsy and Maria invited me to join them at church—not for a Sunday service, but to document their congregation’s version of protecting those less fortunate than themselves.
They’d converted the basement into a soup kitchen of sorts, assembling meal kits for the most vulnerable members of their community. People were “too afraid to go to the grocery store,” they told me.
Maria took me to her house before she and her daughter left to get dinner. She led me into the dining room, which she called “The Little Pantry”—shelves packed wall to wall with canned goods, rice, cereal, and diapers, no table to eat on any longer. Maria, a Latina mother, worked with the local high school’s food shelf and local schools to ensure donations reached families afraid to leave their homes.
Her daughter, a fourth grader, moved easily through the room—bringing in and sorting items, counting cans. In her class of 24 students, eight had been absent for most of the month. A third of the room empty. The fourth grader said the pattern held across grades. Some kids had begun to return, but three or four desks still sat vacant.
She spoke about the families they were helping with the matter-of-fact seriousness of someone far older. This was a civic education: helping her mother respond to fear with action, learning that community is something you practice.
February 19, 2026 — “Turn around and point your weapons that way.”
When I left Minnesota, I did what I always do after a major assignment. I listened.
I have audio recordings from January 6 and from Minneapolis. I didn’t set out to make sound recordings that would explain the difference between them. I was documenting what was in front of me. But listening back, the contrast is unmistakable.
The Capitol audio sounds like a declaration. Layered voices. Imperatives. “Push!” “Hold the line!” Metal clanging. Wind gusting. The surge and swell of bodies pressing forward. The energy moves in one direction, toward breach. Even the fear in the recording faces outward.
The Minneapolis audio sounds like interruption. A woman’s voice, close and human: “You represent us in this equation. Turn around and point your weapons that way. We are your community.” Another woman repeats, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” The crowd begins chanting “Alex Pretti. Alex Pretti.”
And suddenly, my own voice: “Fuck you!” The officers in riot gear had just lobbed a bevy of tear-gas canisters at us. Everything goes quiet, except for coughing and someone in the distance calling out: “Water? Water? Who needs water?”
The January 6 recording captures a crowd trying to overwhelm a system. The other captures a system overwhelming a crowd.
At the Capitol, the sound builds toward force. In Minneapolis, force descends into the people.
This piece was produced with contributions from Lisa van Dam-Bates and R. Langford.