Frey drove to the state Senate building, across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, where Democratic members of Congress were hosting a shadow hearing about ICE activity in Minnesota. Frey was set to testify. Sitting outside, he learned that the hearing would begin only after several speeches, and the speeches wouldn’t begin for another thirty minutes. He became agitated at the thought of spending so long in St. Paul, ten miles from his city. “I don’t know, man,” he told an aide. “I don’t want to not be there. In Minneapolis.” The street outside was quiet. His team hadn’t yet heard of any ICE activity in the city that morning. “But yeah,” Frey said. “It’s happening. Right now. I’m certain.”
The latest version of Trump’s immigration enforcement began seven months ago, when he sent ICE into Los Angeles. Home Depots were raided, and people were disappeared off the streets. By the time agents arrived in Chicago, three months later, the country was accustomed to seeing images of protesters wearing gas masks. ICE actions began to take on more overt elements of stagecraft. Gregory Bovino, a commander-at-large of the Border Patrol, has toured cities on foot, followed by cameras and surrounded by masked agents. The operations were given names: Operation Midway Blitz, in Chicago; Operation Catahoula Crunch, in New Orleans; Operation Charlotte’s Web, in Charlotte. In Minneapolis, it’s Operation Metro Surge. D.H.S. routinely publishes the mug shots and names of those charged with a crime—“the worst of the worst.” The threat now hangs over other Democratic officials that Trump might, at any time, turn their cities into war zones. “It’s a blue state with a blue mayor, and a blue governor,” Frey told me. “It’s a performance. It’s a very dangerous performance.”
Frey grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. His parents were professional ballet dancers who later ran a chiropractor’s office together. Frey went to law school and became an employment and civil-rights attorney. He also spent time as a professional runner, and when he visited Minneapolis, in 2006, for a marathon, he has recalled thinking, “Yeah, I could live here.” He became the mayor in 2018, at thirty-six. Two and a half years later, a police officer killed George Floyd, prompting nationwide protests. “Then you had a global pandemic, and people had cabin fever, and everybody had masks, and so there’s the whole anonymity associated with that, and you had a hundred years in the making reckoning around social justice,” Frey said. Buildings burned to the ground; businesses were looted.
Frey found himself at the center of a fraught conversation about how to be a good white ally. In June, 2020, at Floyd’s memorial service, he knelt before the casket and wept. Two days later, at an outdoor rally, he was asked to commit to abolishing the police department. With hundreds of people standing around him, many filming on their phones, he said no. Video of the moment went viral. Frey, wearing a face mask printed with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE,” was booed out of the event. “Go home, Jacob. Go home,” people chanted as he walked out. “Shame.” In the weeks and months that followed, Frey found himself speaking from a place of fear. “I was very scripted, because I was worried I was gonna step on a land mine,” he told me. “You lose who you are. It’s literally not your words.”
Frey’s theory of how the operation in Minneapolis began goes like this: “I think somebody from pretty high up in the federal Administration said, ‘Go to Minneapolis and get a bunch of Somalis and deport them,’ and then nobody really pushed back, and then they get here only to figure out, They’re all citizens,” Frey said. “They’ve been here for longer than I’ve been here.” Trump became fixated on Minnesota after investigations into alleged social-services fraud in the state. Members of the Somali community have been charged as a result of the investigations. In December, Trump referred to the Somali community as “garbage.” Days later, D.H.S. announced a surge of agents to the city. But the vast majority of Somali people in Minnesota are citizens. Frey believes that agents have now diverted their attention to the Latino community. Minnesota’s estimated undocumented population, according to the latest available data from the Pew Research Center, ranks behind that of twenty-three other states, making it a small target for such a large operation.
