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Author’s Note: All interviewees are identified by assumed names due to safety concerns.

Official narratives can be deceiving, and that is especially true in this political moment. The Department of Homeland Security has declared that fewer than 500 federal immigration agents are currently deployed in Minnesota, after announcing that its monthslong assault on Minneapolis and surrounding areas, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, was coming to an end. But as Francis, an organizer with the rapid response group Defend the 612 told me, “500 is, without a doubt, still a surge.” Francis pointed out that the first “surge” Minneapolis saw in December was an influx of 150 agents. A force numbering in the hundreds — several times larger than that initial deployment — is not a retreat. It is a tremendous enforcement footprint in a single metropolitan area, and a force capable of inflicting mass terror, carrying out targeted abductions, and sustaining a climate of fear.

This is how authoritarian governance works: when backlash makes extremity costly, the state dials it down just enough to shift the narrative, and what remains is recast as normal. When I spoke recently with members of Defend the 612, a rapid response network in South Minneapolis, this tension framed their reflections on what officials are calling an ending.

Melvin, a business owner who has lived in South Minneapolis for 20 years, told me, “For at least a week there has been less activity in South Minneapolis, but there are still abductions and kidnappings happening periodically.”

Members of Defend the 612 described a shift in federal deployments, as more abductions were occurring in the “further suburbs” and late at night. With less spectacle, more dispersion, and a narrative of withdrawal, federal agents remain embedded in the area, establishing a new baseline for attacks on the local immigrant population.

As Sasha, a rapid responder who is also a state government employee, pointed out, there is no reliable, official accounting of how many immigrants are being abducted. “Nobody’s tracking this information. The city governments aren’t tracking it. No entity of the government is tracking it. Our view of the problem is limited to the observations of humans who are looking for it.”

“Reforms” Didn’t End Police Violence in 2020 and They Won’t End ICE Violence Now

While the corporate press embraces the narrative that the crisis in Minneapolis has passed, these organizers are steeped in the lived reality of an ongoing struggle. However, as the pace of their local response work has become less breakneck, some members of Defend the 612 welcomed the opportunity to sit down and discuss the lessons they’ve learned, the grief they carry, and the sense of belonging and fellowship they hope will endure in their communities.

A Practical Lesson: Speed Matters

A couple of weeks ago, ICE agents got chatty with some volunteer observers they had taken into custody. The agents revealed that they had tracked the rapid response times of volunteers who were showing up to oppose their work across Minneapolis. According to Francis, “[ICE agents] had timed out the rapid response time in Minneapolis in general to be about seven minutes and on the South Side specifically to be about two minutes.”

Members of Defend the 612 said this account was consistent with their own observations that abductions in South Minneapolis had ramped down recently, even as attacks in other communities remained intense. They believed ICE agents had adapted to the terrain of struggle by calculating where they could operate with the least friction.

The group said that approaches to operational security, or “opsec,” were an important factor. Autonomous groups across Minneapolis have adopted different approaches to vetting, with some groups maintaining communication channels that were 100 percent vetted, and others creating channels that included as many community members as possible, without any vetting process. A rapid responder who identified themself as “Joe” observed that neighbors that had unvetted chats had the fastest rapid response times. “There are benefits to vetting and I do think we need highly vetted chats, but having some unvetted chats is also very useful,” they said.

This observation was consistent with my experiences in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz. While some vetted lines of communication are........

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