ICE said they were leaving — then they issued this memo

Friends,

Last week, we cautiously celebrated the end of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. It was a real win after two months of sustained resistance from faith communities, neighbors, and organizers.

Together, we said the pressure worked.

I meant every word of that — it did work.

But on Wednesday, the Trump administration filed a memo in federal court — part of a case tied directly to refugees arrested in Minnesota — giving ICE new powers to detain legal refugees who haven’t yet received their green cards.

These are people who came here lawfully. People who went through years of extreme vetting. People the U.S. government itself invited in, processed, and told: you are safe here.

Now DHS is threatening them with arrest and indefinite detention if they don’t “voluntarily return to custody” to be re-examined.

Beth Oppenheim, the CEO of HIAS — a Jewish humanitarian organization that has helped resettle refugees for over a century — didn’t mince words: “They were promised safety and the chance to rebuild their lives.”

There are 5,600 refugees in Minnesota alone who fall under this new directive. This memo is the administration’s attempt to justify arresting them.

The surge may have ended. The cruelty didn’t.

All along, we’ve been warning that ICE operations have never been about one operation in a single city. Trump’s plan was to make an example out of Minnesota.

Now he wants to prove that even people who have followed every rule, every law, and every process aren’t safe if his administration decides that they shouldn’t be.

But we’re not going to stand for it — we’re standing for the common good. 

Faith communities in Minneapolis didn’t stand outside churches in the freezing cold for two months just so ICE could decide to come back in through a different door.

We’re not done. We’re in place to organize with faith leaders and legal advocates to respond to this new threat. The organizing infrastructure we built during Operation Metro Surge doesn’t go away — it goes to work on this.

But it takes resources to keep people on the ground, connected, and ready to respond. Your contribution right now keeps us in the fight.

If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

They blinked on the surge. We can’t let them think they can quietly escalate somewhere else.

In this together,

Doug

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