On Friday, legal observers on an encrypted group call in Minneapolis received a desperate plea. A fellow observer was following federal agents who’d just loaded her friend into an unmarked vehicle. Now, she herself was boxed in.

“Please help,” the woman said, again and again, her voice rising to a scream.

Then, her pleas stopped.

By the time support arrived, the observer was gone. All that remained was an empty SUV, engine running, abandoned in the middle of the city’s snow-lined streets.

Referred to locally as abductions, it was at least the fourth such disappearance of the day — the third in a span of less than 30 minutes.

The observers call themselves commuters. They are locals who have organized to resist “Operation Metro Surge,” a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol campaign targeting Minnesota’s undocumented population, by monitoring federal operations in the Twin Cities. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, has called the incursion the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.

“She was so scared. The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”

Three days before the commuters were taken, the new head of Metro Surge, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan, announced a “drawdown” of 700 federal officers and agents. The president had tapped Homan to head the mission a week earlier, appointing the former ICE acting director to take over from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose heavy-handed tactics culminated in three shootings in three weeks, including the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Homan has vowed to take a more “targeted” line of attack in Minnesota. His announced drawdown has fueled speculation that the civil rights abuses and unlawful arrests documented in viral videos and court filings during Bovino’s tenure may be coming to an end. On the ground, the feeling is quite different.

In a message circulated among commuters Friday, the community group Defrost MN, which uses crowdsourced data to track federal immigration operations, warned residents of an “uptick in abductions” — which refer to arrests of both immigrant community members and legal observers — following Homan’s takeover and an increase in the number of government personnel and vehicles involved in those operations.

“National attention on Minnesota has waned with the departure of Bovino and rhetoric by Homan that things are de-escalating,” the group noted, but recent data and reports from commuters in the field did not support those conclusions. Despite orders to the contrary, the group continued, “Agents continue to draw their weapons and deploy chemical agents against observers.”

Meanwhile, the deportation pipeline out of Minnesota continues to flow, with 66 shackled passengers loaded onto a plane the night of Homan’s address — the highest total in nearly two weeks — according to........

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