It was February in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Maria Gonzalez was leaving her hotel cleaning job. Thirty minutes later, a co-worker uploaded a video in their group chat that showed ICE agents storming the hotel and searching for Latino people as part of Operation Metro Surge. They eventually grabbed three of her colleagues and took them away; she believes that, had she still been at work, she likely would have been detained. “Yo me sentí muy triste, triste por mis compañeros,” she said: I felt very sad, sad for my co-workers.
The incident came after her shifts had already begun to slow down. The hotel business tends to be weak in winter months, she said, but it nosedived starting in December as the surge began, which meant she was called in to work less. Then a week after the hotel incident, ICE showed up at her own door while she was at home with her husband and two teenage children, pounding and kicking it, demanding to be let in. She hid in her bedroom, “gritando y llorando porque no sabía que hacer,” she said: screaming and crying because she didn’t know what to do. They stayed for 20 minutes before finally leaving.
After that incident, Gonzalez didn’t want to open her blinds, let alone leave the house. But she’s the only income-earner in her household: Her husband hasn’t been able to work for years thanks to diabetes that’s led to sight and kidney problems requiring regular dialysis. So she reached out to a women’s group organized by Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, a tenant union organization, asking for help covering her $1,500 monthly rent. Between that group and a mutual aid group at her daughter’s school, she was able to get food and pay rent while in hiding.
Gonzalez finally decided to return to work at the end of March “con mucho miedo,” she said, with a lot of fear, but she knew she had to start earning money again. The work is still slow—she only works three or four days a week, not earning enough to cover her rent and other bills. On top of that, her landlord just raised her rent by $75 a month. She got help paying June’s rent, but she believes that’s the last month that mutual aid groups will be able to assist. Her children are now applying for after-school jobs to chip in. If she can’t figure out how to pay July’s rent, she’s worried that her family will be evicted from their home of three years. She’s never faced eviction before. She’s always paid her taxes and has no criminal record. But if they lose their house, she thinks they’ll have to move back to Mexico despite the fact that her two children, who are U.S. citizens, have always lived in this country. “Tengo miedo,” she said: I’m scared.
The most visible form of Minnesota residents’ resistance to the ICE surge President Trump sent to the state last December was the swarms of people whistling and watching when agents attempted to detain people and following agents in their cars. Beneath the surface, state residents were also organizing to help keep their neighbors fed and housed as they hid out from ICE or if they lost loved ones to kidnappings. The groups of commuters and watchers have gone relatively dormant after ICE agents were drawn down—although not removed—from the area starting in February. But the mutual aid groups keeping families afloat have become more necessary than ever. They have prevented eviction filings from skyrocketing and helped people stay in their homes. Now their work is starting to wind down as donations dwindle and burnout takes hold—even as the need keeps increasing.
Beneath the surface, state residents were organizing to help keep their neighbors fed and housed as they hid out from ICE.
Twin Cities residents started hiding in their homes as early as December, and the financial strain came soon after. HOME Line, a nonprofit that runs a statewide tenant hotline, experienced a record number of calls and “a dramatic increase in inquiries about financial aid,” said co-executive director Eric Hauge. Between January 1 and May 31, he said, it received 901 such inquiries statewide, compared to 480 over the same time period in 2025. That’s even higher than in the beginning of 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging and the state’s eviction moratorium lapsed, when the organization received 773 calls. “We’ve had more financial aid inquiries in five months of the surge than we did at the most harmful part of the pandemic,” Hauge noted.
Mutual aid rent relief efforts started to stand up in January. At Minneapolis resident Flannery Clark’s child’s elementary school, families started hiding in December, but it didn’t become clear how many until the kids returned from break with an option of remote learning. About 70 percent of the families at the school took that option. “It quickly became clear that that also meant that the parents also weren’t going to work and that this was going to be a crisis really fast,” she said. “Very abruptly in mid-January it became clear that raising money for rent was going to be the best way that a lot of us could help our neighbors.”
But just as quickly, she realized that there was no infrastructure in place to do this work. “Nobody knew what they were doing, we were all sort of figuring it out as we went along,” she said. “The cliché of building the plane while flying it has never been more true in my life.” She and her fellow organizers had to put together a contact list of families who needed help and overcome the various language barriers. At some point, there was a mix-up in which someone asked for pork chops and got flip-flops. To reduce the chaos, they developed a “buddy system” where a volunteer built a close relationship with a particular family, checking in regularly to find out what they needed.
Anna Schmitz also realized that at least one of the impacts of Operation Metro Surge would be people needing help paying rent. As executive director at the Whittier Alliance, a neighborhood association, in February she got connected with Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a mutual aid network in the Twin Cities area that had just sent out a first wave of rent relief. The organization had found it logistically difficult—many of the people who needed assistance didn’t have bank accounts, for instance, or know how to cash a check—and wasn’t planning to keep going, so the Whittier Alliance offered to deal with the logistics.
It took off. Word quickly got around about Neighbors Helping Neighbors, and then established organizations like the Salvation Army and even Hennepin County started referring people in need to them. The organization gave out checks and, for those without bank accounts, told them to go to the issuing bank to cash it to avoid fees. “We caused a bank run when we did a big wave of relief,” Schmitz recalled with a laugh.
Most of the efforts have been incredibly small—dozens of rent funds across the Twin Cities made up of two to five people working together to help those on their immediate blocks or in their churches or children’s schools. The fund at the school where Jennifer Arnold, executive director of Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, sends her son has helped 100 people a month since January.
In the height of the surge, individual donations from people all over the country poured in, particularly through the Stand With Minnesota website. That money kept Arnold’s and Clark’s funds flush with enough money in the early months. “I don’t know that most of our rent funds would have made it in those first couple of months if not for the money that was raised through that,” Clark said. All told, her fund has paid out $720,000 in six months.
The need for rental assistance didn’t abate even after Trump called off the intensity of the surge and many, although not all, ICE agents left the area. If anything, it’s only getting worse as families continue to go without income. “The snowball effect and the scars are very much there,” Clark said. Many people have lost work because their employers shuttered thanks to the economic impact of the ICE activity. Approximately 4,600 jobs were lost in restaurants, retail stores, and hotels alone. “Restaurants closed for good because of Metro Surge, because the clientele wasn’t coming out and the workers couldn’t work,” Arnold noted.
Others lost work when employers, spooked by the raids, cracked down on immigration status and employees didn’t have the right paperwork. A lot of families lost a member, or multiple members, to detention and deportation, many of whom were breadwinners; the remaining family members have to make do without that income. Parents who lost their spouse have to juggle caring for children and potentially finding work. Some are still too afraid to leave their homes. “People just aren’t on their feet again,” Arnold said.
HOME Line saw an 88 percent increase in calls about financial aid in April and May compared to those months in 2025; it received an all-time high number of calls in the month of May. “The need is still there,” Hauge said. Evictions actually fell in January and February, likely because of all the assistance, but in April they were up 8 percent compared to the year before. “We are not seeing the demand for rent going down in a dramatic way,” Clark said. “We are paying almost as much rent in June as we did in January.”
Organizing so intensely while most people continued to work, parent, and go about their regular lives has led to a lot of burnout.
Rent funds and mutual aid work, however, are rapidly disappearing. Some of that is because donations have fallen off a cliff with the media attention tuned in elsewhere. Locals have donated so much that they don’t have much more to give. They “weren’t able to expend themselves indefinitely,” Schmitz said. The Wilson Foundation has stepped in, pledging to match $16 million in contributions, but it’s not clear how long that money will keep flowing.
Organizing so intensely while most people continued to work, parent, and go about their regular lives has also led to a lot of burnout. Schmitz’s fund sent out its last rent assistance checks in April after donations dropped off, and in the face of a difficult conundrum: To continue, the organization would have had to significantly change its systems to keep handling the number of requests it was getting or shut down. It chose the latter because “it just wasn’t sustainable,” Schmitz said. The week that the effort ended in April was the week it received the most requests yet.
Most school-based funds are wrapping up as the summer months hit, in large part because it’s hard to stay in touch as everyone scatters for the vacation. Clark’s fund will end at the end of the school year for that reason and because there isn’t enough money to keep going. The fund Arnold has been organizing with at her school is giving out its last rent payments for June 1, but when she asks the people she’s helping about their financial situation, “I don’t anticipate that everyone can pay rent in July,” she said.
Evictions are set to rise precipitously, especially because mutual aid kept them at bay. “If it had not been for the massive mutual aid effort happening over the last five months, the number of eviction filings would be dramatically higher,” Hauge said.
The state government, as well as county and city governments, has stepped in with rental assistance funding. The Minneapolis City Council passed $3.8 million in rental assistance, which will be distributed by Hennepin County to local housing nonprofits, along with the county’s existing $9.6 million in assistance. Meanwhile, the state passed $40 million in May. But the required paperwork could keep the money from getting to many of those most in need. Hennepin County requires people to have an actual eviction filing and an upcoming court date. The money Minneapolis passed to help city residents comes with a lower eligibility standard: People just have to have a prefiling eviction notice, the first step a landlord takes in the process.
This will be an insurmountable barrier for a lot of families. Many immigrants live in housing without formal leases and therefore don’t end up in the formal eviction system when their landlords want to kick them out. A tenant without a formal lease can fill out a shelter verification form instead, but that requires a landlord’s cooperation and many are not willing. Some immigrants don’t even know how to get in touch with their landlords; they just pay rent when someone shows up each month. Gonzalez applied for rental assistance through the city but, because she doesn’t have a Social Security number despite living in the country for 20 years, she didn’t qualify.
Even someone with the right paperwork may struggle to get through the process. Arnold knows someone who called trying to get city funding and didn’t get a call back for a week; she worries that many who are facing eviction will simply leave their housing when faced with such a wait to avoid a formal eviction. People are in need of cash, and fast.
“I don’t think the majority of our families either will be able to navigate [the application system] or will be eligible because of nontraditional leases and subleases,” Clark said. Just $400,000 of Minneapolis’s funding has gone out to city residents so far, according to Will Lehman, area manager of homelessness prevention for Hennepin County, while the county has sent out $4 million so far this year.
Meanwhile, despite a big push from advocates and some lawmakers, the state hasn’t instituted eviction moratoria or lengthened the eviction process to give people more time to put money together before getting kicked out. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey twice vetoed such a measure, although the Saint Paul City Council has given tenants a 60-day eviction notice period through the end of the year.
“There is a pending eviction crisis,” Clark said.
Those who have been involved in rent relief efforts have come to recognize that there was an existing need for help, and a high rate of evictions, even before Operation Metro Surge. Eviction filings in 2025 were at the highest level HOME Line had ever recorded, Hauge said. Ever since the lifting of the pandemic-era eviction moratoria in 2022, Hennepin County has seen “eviction filings rise to a level we’ve never seen before and they have persisted,” Lehman said. “Operation Metro Surge poured a little bit of gasoline on an existing flame.”
Inquilinxs Unidxs was part of launching the Twin Cities Tenant Union with other tenant unions and is hoping some of its current door-knocking to connect people with rental assistance could lead to the formation of more tenant unions. “In the long term, we believe every tenant deserves a union,” Arnold said. “Metro Surge really taught us that you’re safest at home and when you’re connected to people.”
The surge also brought new people into this organizing work and radicalized them. They may now stay involved in long-term organizing. People are “looking for, ‘What’s the next thing, how do I continue to contribute?’” Clark said. Eviction prevention and housing justice is “a place where there’s a lot of energy.”
