This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
Photos by Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber
ALBERT LEA, MINNESOTA – It’s afternoon and I’m riding shotgun in Theron Gjersvik’s pickup, patrolling the town to look for any sign of ICE. A camouflage pair of binoculars sits on the middle console and a camera is at the ready in the backseat. It’s blisteringly cold, and he drives with gloves on. We pass a lake with a blue plastic tent on it, and after I ask what it’s doing out there and Gjersvik tells me it’s for ice fishing, I feel like the city dweller I am.
Gjersvik is patient with me as he explains all the little details of life in Albert Lea that an outsider might not immediately understand. When we stop for a train to cross through town, he tells me that its cars are likely filled with corn and soy on their way to the Gulf of Mexico to be exported. He explains that there has long been a Latino community in the town, but only in the last decade or two has the population of Karen immigrants grown. A minority ethnic group from Myanmar, many Karen have settled in Minnesota as refugees.
Gjersvik was born and raised in this southern Minnesota town and has no plans to leave, even though his farming business is, in a word, “horrible.” (He had to downsize his farm by some 200 acres in recent years just to break even.) Like many farmers in the country, he grows the corn and soy that is fed to livestock before they’re butchered and processed into the pork loins or turkey legs that fill our dining tables. Some of that meat processing, he explained, happens right here in southern Minnesota, in freezing cold plants where a largely immigrant workforce cuts and shapes the animal carcasses and sends the best parts off to be packaged and sold.
Though it’s become harder to be a farmer, Gjersvik has found one niche and booming market—goats—that has proven profitable. He sells most of his goats to a company in the Twin Cities, where they might end up spiced and stewed as part of an iftar feast in a Somali community. Every so often, a local Karen family will come directly to the farm to painstakingly examine all the caprine options, pick a favorite, and have Gjersvik shoot it himself so they can cook it up and share it at a wedding.
You could be forgiven if you thought Gjersvik, a white farmer with a massive truck, was a conservative. But there we were, rolling through town looking for any sign of ICE, and talking about how Gjersvik’s white privilege is exactly what allows him to show up at the scene of an arrest, document what he sees, and leave again with impunity.
Gjersvik is just one of an informal, quiet, and multiracial network of locals who have mobilized in the past two months as ICE swarmed into Albert Lea. These residents balance their day jobs with going to the Mexican grocery store to pick up food for families, patrolling the town’s poorer streets where ICE agents tend to pop up, and preparing to show up to an active raid or abduction at the drop of a hat.
The same work is being undertaken in rural communities all across Minnesota, from the charming college town of Northfield to snow-covered Willmar. It’s happening in the larger St. Cloud region and in the other meat-processing towns like Albert Lea’s neighbor Austin.
You can’t always tell who is part of these networks, and that’s what makes them powerful. They’re fresh out of college—and retirees. They’re longtime protesters—and “apolitical” people who suddenly realized they couldn’t sit idly by any longer. They’re pastors and imams, brewery owners and teachers.
A few things are universal: They are scared, exhausted, and they say that the news of a drawdown just isn’t their reality.
ON FEBRUARY 4, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S BORDER CZAR, Tom Homan, who has led the Minnesota ICE surge since Border Patrol officer Gregory Bovino was sent home, announced a drawdown of 700 ICE agents from Minnesota after weeks of heightened violence and enforcement.
Homan said that would bring the number of federal agents in the state to around 2,000, down from an estimated 4,000 at the peak of the surge. The following week, Homan reported that he had sent more agents home and claimed that the number of federal officers in the state will “get back to the original footprint,” which hovers somewhere around 150.
Despite this, reports kept surfacing of continued ICE enforcement in what’s known as Greater Minnesota, the parts of the state that lie outside of the Twin Cities. These exurban, suburban, and rural communities often receive less media attention and have fewer advocacy organizations. So I decided to go and see for myself what Minnesotans have been seeing.
I asked every community member I spoke to if they noticed less ICE enforcement since the drawdown had been announced. Their answers, across three vastly different towns, were all an emphatic “no.” A few observers noted that they had been seeing fewer agents than they had during the surge weeks in January and early February. But most attributed that to a change in tactics, not an actual retreat.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Lauren Baske Davis, a pastor at the First United Church of Christ in Northfield, told me about the news of a drawdown. And according to Gina Washburn, an ICE observer with Northfield Supporting Neighbors (NSN), three different ICE cars had been spotted across the city (including two outside of medical facilities) just the day before I arrived.
I met Baske Davis and Washburn in the cozy, wood-paneled community room of St. John’s Lutheran Church, which is led by Pastor Pam Fickenscher. We were joined by Anika Rychner, who runs the town’s Community Action Center (CAC), a well-established nonprofit that provides housing and food assistance, and Pastor Paul Graham, another faith leader who has been outspoken in his support for immigrants.
Even before Operation Metro Surge (the name for ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s operation in Minnesota) officially began in December, residents of Northfield, a picturesque Midwest town that is home to Carleton College, had a startling wakeup call. In November, federal agents violently detained a local man out of his car. They smashed the car window and arrested the man in front of his son, who can be heard yelling, “That’s my dad!” on videos taken by bystanders. Hundreds of Northfield residents gathered for a prayer vigil five days later.
“That very violent event really woke the community up in advance of the larger surge,” said Fickenscher, “and made it very clear that this was not just about the metro, but something that was going to be happening all over our state.”
Perhaps that early violence is part of why Northfield residents were ready to jump into action against ICE when its presence surged in January and February, as Baske Davis told me. “I had folks in my congregation saying: ‘What do we do?’”
She gathered those congregants for a meeting with the CAC, local leaders, and NSN members to discuss how they would support their immigrant neighbors. That meeting has since become a weekly occurrence.
“There’s this term, ‘neighborism,’ that’s coming out of this time,” Baske Davis said. After that initial meeting, “all of our members were plugged in. They were like: ‘I’m already making sure that kids are getting rides to school. I’m already tied into my local PTA.’”
As neighbors found ways to help, pre-existing groups like the CAC and NSN were content to work in the background. Since the CAC has existed since before the surge, a large portion of Northfield’s immigrant population is already tapped into their services, said Rychner, and the group didn’t want to risk that.
“That was one of the reasons that we chose to be quiet,” she said. “If we stood up and were really loud about what we’re doing, it could potentially become an unsafe space for people who needed us.”
The pastors and community advocates I spoke to in Northfield described their approach as more subtle and understated than has been seen in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Rychner described relying heavily on bonds between neighbors, leveraging the connections that already exist between congregants at the same church or parents whose kids are in the same class. “You can’t just send strange cars into neighborhoods of people who are already sheltering in place and terrified of any strange vehicle,” she said.
I saw this interpersonal philosophy of organizing on display in all the rural towns I visited. Residents consistently told me that the kinds of mass protests seen in the Twin Cities just wouldn’t translate to their communities and wouldn’t meaningfully help their immigrant neighbors. In fact, as Rychner mentioned, highly public actions and communications could have the opposite effect, drawing too much attention toward important community resources.
“In the Twin Cities, you saw the whistles and the reporting and the observation, which is all great and super powerful,” Graham said. “Here in Northfield, I think the reaction was quieter. It was more like neighbors helping neighbors.”
Even the ICE patrols and observers take a more restrained approach, to protect both themselves and the immigrants whom ICE targets. Washburn, who helps train the volunteers who observe and follow ICE vehicles, says that new members have to sign a set of written rules, which they call their “guardrails,” dictating that they won’t be directly confrontational with agents, won’t be disruptive, and won’t try to interfere.
Early on, Washburn said, she tended to get more in agents’ faces, making clear that she was following and observing them. But after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by immigration officers in Minneapolis in January, she re-evaluated her strategies to keep herself and her fellow patrollers safe.
This approach also protects ICE’s targets, she said. In her experience, agents tend to act more aggressively with their targets when they see a commotion around them. Washburn and other observers have also developed a “philosophy of noise and confrontation” that is conscious of the mental well-being of their neighbors.
Chaos, whistleblowing, and yelling “[affect] individuals within the community that we’re trying to serve,” she said. “We think about things like children being frightened by all that commotion. We think about elderly persons with disabilities … being triggered by the sounds of sirens, the sounds of horns.”
Early on during the surge, the observers had a dispatching system to track and verify ICE sightings. Bilingual members of the group would be on call 24/7 to receive reports of ICE in town. They would then send out an alert to a pool of verified observers, and the first two people to respond would head out to verify the report. If they confirmed that it was, in fact, ICE, they would send a report to a public WhatsApp channel with license plate information, location, and other crucial details. Vulnerable community members in the WhatsApp channel use the alerts to avoid the area or shelter in place until observers can give an “all clear.”
But, Washburn explained, the observers realized they needed to adjust their strategies as ICE became more secretive. The group pivoted to a patrol system, while still keeping the dispatchers on duty.
“We have a map of the city, and we have specific key target locations where ICE predominates,” she explained. Places like a local mobile home park and certain apartment complexes have been consistent ICE hot spots. “We send verifiers, at least two per location, starting at about 6 a.m. So we have at least anywhere from six to eight individuals out in locations.”
Washburn’s phone buzzed in her lap as she explained the system. It was one of her observer group chats. She said that her phone is almost constantly ringing with information from on-duty patrollers. The dispatchers have it worse, she said, “fielding calls all through the night.”
When observers notice a suspicious vehicle—out-of-state plates, or someone loitering outside a hot spot for a long time—a designated “traffic controller” cross-checks the license plate numbers with a database the group has created of known ICE vehicles. If the car is confirmed to be ICE, observers keep their eyes on it, following it throughout town.
“It’s not unusual that in a day we will have multiple ICE vehicles in multiple locations,” she said. They tend to play what she calls a cat-and-mouse game, leading observers from location to location. “They’ll switch, and then they’ll switch again, and then they’ll hide, and then they’ll pop back out. And we’ll do that for hours and hours,” until suddenly all the ICE vehicles converge on one location and attempt to make an arrest.
The week before I got there, the day that Homan announced the drawdown, Washburn said it felt like the town was swarming with ICE cars.
When someone is arrested by ICE, a well-oiled legal machine kicks into gear. Family members or friends of the detained person call NSN and give their name and Alien Registration Number. The NSN volunteer taking the call tries to gather as much information as they can. When did they enter the U.S.? How long have they been in Northfield? Armed with that information, they turn to a Rolodex of lawyers who take their call and spring into action.
Washburn says that these lawyers typically file a petition for habeas corpus within just hours of the arrest. These petitions allow detainees to challenge their detention in front of a judge and can help them be released more quickly. The legal fees can be expensive, but a group of Northfield “angels,” as Washburn calls them, step up immediately and put the costs on their credit card.
This speedy legal response is critical, because ICE has made a habit of transporting detainees immediately to Texas to get them out of the Minnesota jurisdiction, making it harder to file for habeas corpus. The infrastructure is “really glorious work,” Washburn said, “because every single case in which we have assisted in a habeas, the person has been released.”
Everyone in the room, myself included, gasped or whispered solemnly: “Wow.”
Rychner shared another staggering success: “We have people who now have March rent coming up who haven’t worked. We’ve been able to help everybody who’s asked for help [with rent].”
Despite the financial support for individuals, many Northfield businesses are struggling profoundly under the occupation. ICE has initiated a number of I-9 audits against Northfield businesses, which require owners to produce immigration and payroll documentation for their employees. One small business in town was audited and has since shut its doors, at least temporarily. Its windows are darkened, with paper taped up to keep people from looking in. Some restaurants, like a Mexican place named El Triunfo, are still open but keep their doors locked. Customers must knock to be let in for a meal.
On January 8, Washburn brought in a group of attorneys to give a training to local businesses. The lawyers instructed employers to put up signs in their buildings to keep ICE out of private spaces and gave them a script to use if agents come to the door.
Northfield is lucky to have groups like the CAC and NSN, a large and liberal enough population that supports their efforts, and a sympathetic city government. Just three days before I visited, Northfield’s city council and Housing and Redevelopment Authority approved a $50,000 donation to the CAC to provide rental assistance for immigrant residents.
“You messed with us, and you messed with our kids and our families and our community. We’re not gonna tolerate this anymore,” Washburn said. “It’s pretty cool. Northfield’s cooking.”
NOT EVERY AREA HAS THE SAME INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT and deep ranks of willing volunteers as Northfield. In some communities, advocates are working against their local governments and making do with only a fraction of the manpower. That’s what I found in Willmar, a city of 21,000 almost three hours northwest of Northfield.
The drive to Willmar was on one- and two-lane roads that cut through vast fields of snow, occasionally passing through towns that were often not much more than an antiques shop, a dive bar, a massive grain silo, and an American Legion center. Approaching Willmar, I started to see signs of a small city: motels, drive-through coffee chains, and a regional big-box home improvement store called Menards.
Downtown Willmar is all brick, with a small street grid and red “Season’s Greetings!” banners lingering on the lampposts. I made the mistake of walking around without gloves and a hat, and froze as I checked out the shopping district. There’s a brewery and a local theater, but also the Somali Star restaurant and a boba shop with a Karen owner. I ducked into one of the Somali grocery stores, which smelled like incense and sold everything from clothing to camel milk.
The Somali community has strong roots in Willmar. Many immigrants work at the local Jennie-O turkey processing plant, which has been the target of at least one ICE raid. Their Muslim faith restricts them from working in pork processing plants in other parts of the state.
Willmar has been lauded for its multicultural population; in 2019, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote a piece called “President Trump, Come to Willmar,” and deemed the town a “modern, successful American melting pot.”
Now, that success is at risk. As I wandered through the downtown, ICE’s impacts were visible to the naked eye. Multiple storefronts were dark and locked, even at midday on a Saturday. The town felt quiet, even more than expected because of the cold.
I was grateful to finally duck into Azteca, a Mexican restaurant where a small lunch rush was finishing up. There, I sat down with three community organizers over chips and horchata. Pastor Andrés Albertsen, an Argentinian immigrant who leads Willmar’s Iglesia Luterana Paz y Esperanza and serves as visitation pastor for Vinje Lutheran Church, came in wearing a knit gray sweater with an alpaca design. He chatted with the cashier in Spanish before introducing me to Sarah Kretschmann, a deacon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Willie Gonzalez, a local business owner and advocate for the town’s Latino community.
Gonzalez told me that one of those darkened storefronts was his. He shut down his restaurant, Spurs Bar and Grill, until at least May. Too many of his customers were staying home because of the surge, and he couldn’t afford the overhead. In the darkened windows of Spurs I saw two signs reading: “Stand with our families” and “Build Minnesota together.”
I asked the three how ICE’s presence in Willmar has been different than what has been seen in the Twin Cities, and Kretschmann reflected on Willmar’s small size.
“There’s not a bench to pull from in the same way that there might be in an urban setting,” Kretschmann said. Along with other volunteers, she’s been bringing groceries and medication to some 300 families, an effort that has quickly become overwhelming and unsustainable.
Willmar also has a strong conservative streak, they told me. Trump won the city with around 56 percent of the vote in 2024. The county sheriff signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE, a memorandum that allows local law enforcement to assist with immigration enforcement. There are four county jails in Minnesota that serve as ICE detention facilities, and one of them is in Willmar. Of the jail’s 190 beds, 150 are designated for federal detainees.
“This jail … was intentionally built bigger than the needs of the county so that the county jail could profit from hosting other kinds of inmates,” Albertsen explained. That strategy has worked; according to a county budget report, the county received around $4.3 million a year from the jail in recent years.
“There were times when, in order to have room for more ICE detainees, they sent their own regular inmates to a neighboring county,” Albertsen said.
On the ground, ICE’s presence has been unbearable. Kretschmann and Gonzalez recalled one day when six arrests were happening seemingly all at once, with multiple ICE agents at each scene. One of the arrests happened right outside of Azteca, Gonzalez explained, pointing out the front window.
That day, January 12, ICE agents violently arrested a 19-year-old Somali high schooler on the sidewalk in front of Azteca, dragging her into their unmarked vehicle as residents shouted and took videos. For days, ICE didn’t list her location online, and her family received no communications from her or the government. Though she was eventually released, the damage had been done. The day after the young woman’s arrest, about 90 percent of Somali students stayed home from school, according to Shafia Abdullahi, the cultural liaison at Willmar Public Schools.
“The tactic that they’re doing is just military. Just shock, shock, shock,” Gonzalez said.
Kretschmann nodded. “There are just so many more officers than I think even I was expecting out in rural Minnesota,” she said.
Despite the dominant feelings of terror and shock, there have been some bright spots of solidarity. Gonzalez looked down at his leather motorcycle jacket, which was emblazoned with bright-blue lettering reading, “St. Michael’s Legion.” He explained that he was a member of the group, a motorcycle club for first responders, police officers, and ex-military. In December, before he shut down Spurs, Gonzalez hosted a Christmas fundraising event there, and his fellow Legion members offered to guard the business to prevent ICE from entering.
“This group is really red. Really red,” he said. “But they know who I am, what I stand for, and they said: ‘They’re not going to come in here to your place.’” The Legion members stood guard in a two-block radius around the restaurant, and the fundraiser went off without a hitch.
“It’s been fascinating to see some minds and hearts starting to change a little bit,” said Kretschmann, reflecting on how conservative neighbors like Gonzalez’s Legion brothers have been processing ICE’s presence. “There have been some folks showing up to protest that I’ve talked to that are like: ‘This is the first protest I’ve ever been to, I voted Republican, but I’m really disappointed with what’s happening.’ It’s been surprising to me in a positive way.”
Just two days after the Somali high schooler was arrested, another ICE arrest in Willmar made national news. At a different Mexican restaurant in town, El Tapatio, the owner noticed what appeared to be ICE vehicles loitering outside the restaurant. Word eventually reached Gonzalez through the grapevine, and he called the restaurant owner, urging him to close the restaurant for the rest of the day.
It was too late—six ICE agents were already inside, eating lunch.
Worried, Gonzalez drove over and sat down in the restaurant. He half-jokingly told one of the agents to take an Alka-Seltzer if the spicy food was too much for them. Nothing happened, and the agents left without incident.
But when the restaurant closed later that day, ICE appeared. They arrested the restaurant’s two owners (a previously married couple) and a dishwasher.
“It just felt like such a violation of our hospitality as a community,” Kretschmann said.
The day after the arrest, the owners’ 20-year-old son reopened the restaurant and managed it until his father was eventually released. According to Albertsen, Gonzalez, and Kretschmann, the man’s mother was deported.
When I expressed shock that the owner had already returned home and was back to running the restaurant as though nothing had happened, Kretschmann nodded.
“Why put people through this? They’re back and having gone through the incredible trauma of this arrest and assault. It is just such a waste of human energy and resources, and it shows that it has a broader intention of intimidation,” she said. “And it’s working, unfortunately.”
Kretschmann says she knows people who have seriously considered self-deporting, a policy that the Trump administration has pushed aggressively to meet its deportation targets. Albertsen has a Peruvian friend who was arrested and offered the chance to apply for asylum. But his friend decided it was better to just leave the country.
Another Willmar resident, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, has been sheltering a family of four in their home for the past three weeks. The parents, along with their seven- and 11-year-olds, are too afraid to stay at their home, since they believe ICE could target them there.
“That’s what neighbors do,” the resident who opened their home said. “That’s what people who love their community do.”
THAT NIGHT, I WENT TO THE ISLAMIC SOCIETY OF WILLMAR for a community iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast during Ramadan. Dozens of non-Muslims, including members of the city government, took off their shoes and sat on the mosque’s red-carpeted floor to share a meal with the mosque’s Somali members. We ate sambusas stuffed with ground beef, fried potatoes with yogurt and a biting green chili sauce, stewed goat, and fruit. Babies cooed and little kids played together, running barefoot around the maze of people eating.
After the Maghrib prayer and everyone’s first plate of food, the mosque’s liaison officer, Sheikh Mohamed Bulhan, spoke and expressed his gratitude.
“Looking at what’s happening in our country, Ramadan is an opportunity to come together for the common good. It strengthens unity, shared values, community, neighborhood,” he said. “Ramadan is not an individual exercise. It is a communal thing. We need to support one another and stand for one another.”
Later, he told me that members of the community had been sheltering at home out of fear of ICE. During the holiest month of the year for Muslims, he said, this social isolation is particularly tragic.
He also emphasized what other advocates across Greater Minnesota had told me: “The disadvantage of living in a small town is [that] you don’t have what we call ‘strategic depth,’ meaning you don’t have a lot of space to maneuver or fight back.”
“We’re talking about a generational trauma,” he said. “ICE has attacked our trust in government. ICE has attacked our humanity.”
Gonzalez, who never considered himself very political, said ICE’s presence in Willmar has fundamentally altered how he sees himself, his community, and the country.
He had been supporting his immigrant neighbors since ICE came to town, but things became personal on February 6.
Gonzalez helps take care of a friend’s property in town, along with a woman who only speaks Spanish. The woman called him after seeing suspicious cars in the area, so he drove over to check it out. He didn’t notice anything, so he started to back out of the driveway, looking out the back window. When he faced forward again, he saw that his car was surrounded by eight agents. He immediately sent a text to the network of observers he works with: “I need help.”
“They put my face in the snow. I kept telling them: ‘It’s burning.’ My face was burning because they had my head shoved down, and I believe they had their knees on my neck and my back,” he said. He remembers lying there, not believing how incompetent the officers were as they tried multiple times to handcuff him. (It has been widely reported that ICE agents receive only rudimentary training.)
“I get out of the car, and the first thing they say is: ‘Give me your papers,’” he recounted. He refused and asked why they wanted his papers in the first place.
“You’re an illegal,” one of the agents said.
“I’m an illegal?” replied Gonzalez, who was born to a Lakota father and Mexican mother. “I’m more legal than all you guys put together … I’m Native!”
The ICE agents didn’t like that remark. Things escalated, and they pushed Gonzalez to the ground, which loosened two teeth and left him bleeding from a scratch by his lip.
Eventually, the officers let him go.
Though the arrest was violent and shocking, the most difficult reckoning came after the incident, when Gonzalez realized that not everybody in Willmar would have his back. He says that very few people reached out to reassure him. He filed a police report but found himself being questioned by an investigator instead.
“I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel backed [by] this county. People are supposed to protect me,” he said. “And that goes to show that if they’re doing it to me, [and] I’m a citizen …” he trailed off.
“Now I know where I stand. I have a big flag in my place. I look at my flag, and I’m like: ‘Wow. You failed me.’”
MY NEXT STOP AFTER WILLMAR WAS ALBERT LEA, a town of 18,000 just north of the Iowa border. I met four Albert Lea residents—Theron Gjersvik, Irasema Hernandez, Therese Salazar, and Mary Hinnenkamp—in the basement of the United Food and Commercial Workers union hall. We stayed bundled in our coats as we spoke for hours around a plastic folding table.
We began with the history of Albert Lea, and it felt apt to be discussing it in a union hall. This is a town that has been defined by industry and organized labor.
When Hinnenkamp moved to town in 1979, she said, “it was kind of a bustling town with great expectations of growing because of the cross of the freeway.” I-90, which runs east-west, and I-35, which runs north-south, cross here.
But those big hopes haven’t been realized, Hinnenkamp explained. During the Reagan era, unions struggled for relevance. An ill-fated 1985 strike at a nearby Hormel meatpacking plant, one of the signature labor actions of the 1980s, lasted nearly a year, leading to violent confrontations with scabs and eventually a total surrender with 80 percent of workers being replaced, as chronicled in the 1990 Academy Award-winning documentary American Dream.
In the early 2000s, a major meatpacking plant in town burned down, and workers lost their jobs. The town has long had a Latino community, but in recent decades, their share of the population has grown, along with a community of Karen immigrants. Now, the town has an aging white population and growing immigrant populations.
In 2017, the town lost its hospital, and residents now must make the 30-minute drive to Austin for advanced medical care. Gjersvik went to a recent school board meeting and is worried that they are preparing to close a school to balance their budget.
“You see a town that’s losing retail, wages have fallen, lost [its] hospital, and then [has] a lot more diversity. And you kind of wonder, how does somebody like Trump get elected? I think there’s some of the ingredients there,” Hinnenkamp said.
As I drove through Albert Lea later that afternoon with Gjersvik, he showed me some of the town’s major meat and food plants. These are hulking, windowless concrete buildings, with in some cases tall chain-link fences around the perimeter that were erected during past strikes. Select Foods, which processes pork, is one of the biggest in the area, with a large immigrant workforce.
“It used to be full, that parking lot,” Hernandez had said earlier. “Not anymore.”
According to Gjersvik, ICE patrols the area constantly, and has arrested a number of employees. Others are staying home out of fear.
“If they take a lot more [workers],” Salazar theorized, “Select Foods won’t be able to operate.”
Since the Latino and Karen communities in Albert Lea are so tight-knit, one family leaving their job and moving away could start a domino effect, Salazar said. The risk that families will start self-deporting is real.
“I’ve heard people say they are going back because they moved here because of a sense of security. But if they’re gonna live in fear, they’re like: ‘Might as well just go back to my country,’” she said.
But Gjersvik worries that some Albert Lea residents and companies are too worried about the economic consequences of ICE enforcement, and not worried enough about the lives of their immigrant neighbors. “It’s this idea of finding our heart for our neighbors because of economics and not finding our heart for our neighbors because of human rights,” he said, to nods from the others in the group.
Like in Willmar and Northfield, businesses have been forced to shut their doors—at least temporarily. Salazar told me that the local Mexican grocery store had been nearly empty for weeks, but only recently started to fill up again after the announcement of the drawdown.
As we spoke about how ICE’s presence was threatening the town’s already tenuous economy, Salazar and Hernandez, both mothers, understood the severity of the country’s political climate by how it affects their children.
Salazar thought back to Trump’s first election in 2016, when her daughter was in middle school. She came home one day and told her mom that white kids had been telling their Hispanic classmates: “You guys better pack up your bags, because you need to go back to your country. So hopefully you have your luggage ready.”
Salazar’s daughter is now in college, but Hernandez shared that little has changed in the town’s middle schools. Once ICE started to appear in December, her daughter came home and reported that white students had said: “All the brown kids, line up! They’re here for you.”
Dealing with the racism of their white neighbors is nothing new for Salazar and Hernandez; both women have had the police called on them for simply existing. Salazar’s neighbors called the police for having Christmas lights they deemed too bright, and for letting her dogs outside. Someone called the police on Hernandez for being outside in a neighborhood, trying to find the right address for a work assignment.
The cumulative effects of racism and fear of ICE can be traumatizing for students, which deeply concerns educators like Christoph Dundas, a high school band teacher in nearby Austin. Like Albert Lea, Austin is a meat-processing industry town. Austin is the headquarters of Hormel Foods, the makers of Spam and Applegate. Dundas and I talked over Mexican food, just a block away from Hormel’s Spam Museum, which has a statue of a farmer and two hogs out in front.
Dundas told me how his students have been faring. One student was late to a music lesson because he had been on the phone with his mom. Earlier that day, Dundas said, ICE had arrested three high school students in Austin’s downtown. The student’s mom was calling to make sure her son wasn’t one of them, and that he was carrying his passport.
“It affects education, because what am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, that’s difficult … can you play me a G-sharp?’” Dundas joked. “It takes over energy and focus and impacts the learning environment for students when they are worried about life and family.”
Dundas said that his fellow teachers are working hard to help their students, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. His colleagues have noticed class sizes decline as students stay home, and advocates worry that it will cause long-term damage both educationally and emotionally.
“I know at least a few kids who have been home already for a month, and they’re in elementary school,” said Hernandez. “I do work with some teachers, I’ve dropped [off] homework for some of them, but I don’t know if it’s even getting done because I’ve never picked it back up.”
Gjersvik mentioned that there’s a scarcity of mental health resources in their town. Salazar and Hernandez worry that children and adults in the Hispanic and Karen communities aren’t culturally encouraged to process their emotions.
Salazar herself had always been told by family members to hide her emotions and keep her head down. Despite this, she couldn’t help but cry at an Albert Lea City Council meeting on February 9, when she gave a public statement about how ICE was affecting her family.
“Both my daughters are carrying their passports,” she said, wiping a tear away. “I shouldn’t have to send my kids that are U.S. citizens with their passports because I don’t know if they’re going to be detained.” Her voice hitched. “I can’t even allow my mom to go outside during the day when I am not home.”
She described to me her work organizing Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day celebrations for city residents, which she has done for years.
“Everybody loves the music, the food, the parties,” she said. “But are you saying you just love our music? You just love our food? But you don’t love us enough to fight for us to stay here?”
We left the union hall late that afternoon and spread out in different directions across town. Hernandez would deliver more groceries. Gjersvik and I would patrol through the town’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. That night, I would drive for hours through freezing farm towns, back to Minneapolis, as snow flurried across the highway.
This article appears in Apr 2026 issue.