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The ICE Occupation of Minneapolis Is Still Wreaking Economic Carnage - The American Prospect.It was February in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Maria Gonzalez was leaving her hotel cleaning job.Thirty minutes later, a co-worker uploaded a video in their group chat that showed ICE agents storming the hotel and searching for Latino people as part of Operation Metro Surge.They eventually grabbed three of her colleagues and took them away; she believes that, had she still been at work, she likely would have been detained.“Yo me sentí muy triste, triste por mis compañeros,” she said: I felt very sad, sad for my co-workers.The incident came after her shifts had already begun to slow down.The hotel business tends to be weak in winter months, she said, but it nosedived starting in December as the surge began, which meant she was called in to work less.Then a week after the hotel incident, ICE showed up at her own door while she was at home with her husband and two teenage children, pounding and kicking it, demanding to be let in.She hid in her bedroom, “gritando y llorando porque no sabía que hacer,” she said: screaming and crying because she didn’t know what to do.They stayed for 20 minutes before finally leaving.After that incident, Gonzalez didn’t want to open her blinds, let alone leave the house.But she’s the only income-earner in her household: Her husband hasn’t been able to work for years thanks to diabetes that’s led to sight and kidney problems requiring regular dialysis.So she reached out to a women’s group organized by Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, a tenant union organization, asking for help covering her $1,500 monthly rent.Between that group and a mutual aid group at her daughter’s school, she was able to get food and pay rent while in hiding.Gonzalez finally decided to return to work at the end of March “con mucho miedo,” she said, with a lot of fear, but she knew she had to start earning money again.The work is still slow—she only works three or four days a week, not earning enough to cover her rent and other bills.On top of that, her landlord just raised her rent by $75 a month.She got help paying June’s rent, but she believes that’s the last month that mutual aid groups will be able to assist.Her children are now applying for after-school jobs to chip in.If she can’t figure out how to pay July’s rent, she’s worried that her family will be evicted from their home of three years.She’s never faced eviction before.She’s always paid her taxes and has no criminal record.But if they lose their house, she thinks they’ll have to move back to Mexico despite the fact that her two children, who are U.S.citizens, have always lived in this country.“Tengo miedo,” she said: I’m scared.The most visible form of Minnesota residents’ resistance to the ICE surge President Trump sent to the state last December was the swarms of people whistling and watching when agents attempted to detain people and following agents in their cars.Beneath the surface, state residents were also organizing to help keep their neighbors fed and housed as they hid out from ICE or if they lost loved ones to kidnappings.The groups of commuters and watchers have gone relatively dormant after ICE agents were drawn down—although not removed—from the area starting in February.But the mutual aid groups keeping families afloat have become more necessary than ever.They have prevented eviction filings from skyrocketing and helped people stay in their homes.Now their work is starting to wind down as donations dwindle and burnout takes hold—even as the need keeps increasing.Twin Cities residents started hiding in their homes as early as December, and the financial strain came soon after.HOME Line, a nonprofit that runs a statewide tenant hotline, experienced a record number of calls and “a dramatic increase in inquiries about financial aid,” said co-executive director Eric Hauge.Between January 1 and May 31, he said, it received 901 such inquiries statewide, compared to 480 over the same time period in 2025.That’s even higher than in the beginning of 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging and the state’s eviction moratorium lapsed, when the organization received 773 calls.“We’ve had more financial aid inquiries in five months of the surge than we did at the most harmful part of the pandemic,” Hauge noted.Mutual aid rent relief efforts started to stand up in January.At Minneapolis resident Flannery Clark’s child’s elementary school, families started hiding in December, but it didn’t become clear how many until the kids returned from break with an option of remote learning.About 70 percent of the families at the school took that option.“It quickly became clear that that also meant that the parents also weren’t going to work and that this was going to be a crisis really fast,” she said.“Very abruptly in mid-January it became clear that raising money for rent was going to be the best way that a lot of us could help our neighbors.” But just as quickly, she realized that there was no infrastructure in place to do this work.“Nobody knew what they were doing, we were all sort of figuring it out as we went along,” she said.“The cliché of building the plane while flying it has never been more true in my life.” She and her fellow organizers had to put together a contact list of families who needed help and overcome the various language barriers.At some point, there was a mix-up in which someone asked for pork chops and got flip-flops.To reduce the chaos, they developed a “buddy system” where a volunteer built a close relationship with a particular family, checking in regularly to find out what they needed.Anna Schmitz also realized that at least one of the impacts of Operation Metro Surge would be people needing help paying rent.As executive director at the Whittier Alliance, a neighborhood association, in February she got connected with Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a mutual aid network in the Twin Cities area that had just sent out a first wave of rent relief.The organization had found it logistically difficult—many of the people who needed assistance didn’t have bank accounts, for instance, or know how to cash a check—and wasn’t planning to keep going, so the Whittier Alliance offered to deal with the logistics.It took off.Word quickly got around about Neighbors Helping Neighbors, and then established organizations like the Salvation Army and even Hennepin County started referring people in need to them.The organization gave out checks and, for those without bank accounts, told them to go to the issuing bank to cash it to avoid fees.“We caused a bank run when we did a big wave of relief,” Schmitz recalled with a laugh.Most of the efforts have been incredibly small—dozens of rent funds across the Twin Cities made up of two to five people working together to help those on their immediate blocks or in their churches or children’s schools.The fund at the school where Jennifer Arnold, executive director of Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, sends her son has helped 100 people a month since January.In the height of the surge, individual donations from people all over the country poured in, particularly through the Stand With Minnesota website.That money kept Arnold’s and Clark’s funds flush with enough money in the early months.“I don’t know that most of our rent funds would have made it in those first couple of months if not for the money that was raised through that,” Clark said.All told, her fund has paid out $720,000 in six months.The need for rental assistance didn’t abate even after Trump called off the intensity of the surge and many, although not all, ICE agents left the area.If anything, it’s only getting worse as families continue to go without income.“The snowball effect and the scars are very much there,” Clark said.Many people have lost work because their employers shuttered thanks to the economic impact of the ICE activity.Approximately 4,600 jobs were lost in restaurants, retail stores, and hotels alone.“Restaurants cl