Over 3,500 people were detained during Operation Metro Surge. Here’s where they went.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (Minnesota Reformer) — Most immigrants arrested in Operation Metro Surge were sent to Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, after being detained at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minnesota.

Nearly half of them were eventually deported, mostly to Mexico and Ecuador.

Only two people were deported to Somalia, according to the data, even though the ostensible reason for the immigration enforcement surge of federal agents to Minnesota in the winter was to target Somali Minnesotans. The vast majority of Minnesotans with Somali ancestry are citizens.

The figures underscore the modest impact of Operation Metro Surge on the Trump administration’s nationwide goal of 1 million removals per year: Despite expending vast resources here, including 3,000 immigration enforcement agents, the administration managed to deport roughly 1,700 people from Minnesota in three months.

The findings come from a new Reformer analysis of data obtained from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project, which is the most detailed data available on ICE arrests during the surge.

The Reformer analysis looks at the paths of 3,571 immigrants who were arrested in Minnesota between Dec. 1 and March 10 and were detained in at least one detention facility, including temporary holding facilities like the Whipple Building.

ICE activity slowed significantly after President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced the imminent end of the surge on Feb. 12, shortly after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. ICE is still detaining people — over 20 roofers were detained in Bemidji Thursday — and flying out detainees through the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, albeit far fewer than the January peak, according to data from plane-watching activists with MN50501.

The most recent release of data goes through just March 10 and doesn’t include the more than 600 ICE detainees whom the MN50501 activists — usually plane spotter Nick Benson — observed being flown out of the airport since then. It also doesn’t include information on what happened to people who were still detained as of early March.

ICE challenges the accuracy of the Deportation Data Project data, even though it comes from its own internal data, but has yet to offer alternative figures.

“They try to make their own data seem untrustworthy, or they try to highlight flaws in the data,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a fellow at the American Immigration Council. Still, he said, the Deportation Data Project data is “very relevant because it’s (ICE’s) own data.”

The Department of Homeland Security has increasingly stopped publishing data, which is part of a pattern of data erasure by the Trump administration, leaving the public less able to verify the administration’s changing statistics in press releases and other claims about its mass deportation campaign. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics used to regularly publish monthly data on immigration enforcement, but key data hasn’t been updated since 2024. The website ice.gov/statistics has data only until December 2024, despite saying the site would be updated quarterly.

“It is important for us to see this data to be able to have a sense of when the government’s telling the truth, when the government’s not telling the truth, and to be able to measure the scale of their operations,” Reichlin-Melnick said.  

ICE’s operation in Minnesota, focused in the Twin Cities metro area, was confronted by massive protests and newly mobilized networks of volunteers who tracked ICE agents and vehicles; fed thousands of immigrants who were afraid to leave their home and encounter agents who wound up shooting three people, killing two U.S. citizens; and stood guard at immigrant-owned businesses.

Lawyers, many of them volunteers, filed over 1,000 habeas corpus petitions challenging people’s detentions, with immigration judges ordering detention releases in a majority of cases.

Still, over 1,700 people were eventually deported after their arrest during the surge. For comparison, around 600 people were deported in the three months prior to the surge.

Around 900 people were still detained by the time the data ended in early March. A similar number of people were released from detention, often by ICE through a conditional release called an “order of recognizance” or because they were bonded out by an immigration judge while their immigration case continued in court.

Just a handful of immigrants were recorded as signing a voluntary departure agreement in immigration court. Nationally, voluntary departures have spiked under the Trump administration, and detainees and their advocates have accused immigration authorities of coercing detainees into signing voluntary departure papers while holding them in squalid, crowded conditions at detention centers.

Confusingly, “voluntary departure” does not include people who used a government app to leave with a federally paid plane ticket and a cash incentive, now $2,600, which is known as “voluntary self-departure” or self-deportation.

The Trump administration’s stated purpose for Operation Metro Surge shifted in January from rounding up Somali Minnesotans to focusing on “criminal illegal aliens” of all backgrounds — often describing its targets as the “worst of the worst” — but only 1 in 5 immigrants who were eventually deported had a criminal conviction, mirroring arrest trends. The agency’s definition of a crime includes misdemeanors, such as unauthorized entry into the country or traffic violations. Less than 13% of deported immigrants had pending charges.

One person detained in the surge, a Nicaraguan man named Victor Manuel Díaz, died in Camp East Montana. ICE attributed Díaz’s death to suicide, though his family told Sahan Journal that they doubted that claim, and his family’s attorney told the Associated Press that he’s considering a wrongful death claim.

A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, found that detention facility staff didn’t place Díaz in a suicide-resistant cell even though he showed risk factors for suicide.

The majority of immigrants who were deported in the surge were sent to Mexico and countries in Central and South America, in line with the countries of origin of most people who were arrested.

ICE arrested around 100 Somali immigrants — and, in other cases, U.S. citizens of Somali descent — and eventually deported two immigrants to Somalia. The agency deported people from Mexico, Central America and South America at a far higher rate — for example, over 60% of Mexican immigrants who were arrested were eventually deported to Mexico.

Most detentions lasted less than a month from initial arrest to release or deportation, though some dragged on for two or three months.

Appeals courts are split on the constitutionality of a Trump administration policy threatening prolonged imprisonment without bond, which immigration experts say flies in the face of decades of federal practice that let many immigrants stay free on bond while they pursue their immigration cases. In some states where federal courts have sided with the Trump administration, immigrants can now be held indefinitely in detention centers.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on the issue, which would be its most significant foray yet into the Trump administration’s immigration detention policies.

Most people detained during Operation Metro Surge were sent to two or three facilities. Most often, they went through the Whipple Building and Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, the nation’s largest immigration detention center, now notorious for its dangerous and disease-ridden conditions.

Camp East Montana — a camp of hardened tents at Fort Bliss, the site of a former World War II detention camp for Japanese Americans — was hurriedly constructed last summer to meet the growing need for detention space after the Trump administration enacted its policy of mandatory detention for many undocumented immigrants.

In its report on Camp East Montana, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found “serious performance and oversight challenges,” posing “serious risks” to detainees and staff. It also found that the detention facility wasted tens of millions of tax dollars, for example to pay contractors for meals when there were no detainees there, while causing suffering and death through mismanagement.

Among a slew of other examples, the report found that detainees with chronic conditions didn’t receive adequate treatment or care; for example, no detainee with diabetes or HIV had treatment plans.

The Reformer has reported extensively on a woman with a large ovarian cyst who was stuck in detention at Camp East Montana and a second facility in El Paso for months without adequate medical care. She was finally released in June following efforts by members of Congress.

At least three detainees have died in Camp East Montana, including Díaz and a man whose death was deemed a homicide after he was suffocated in a struggle with multiple guards.

Reports out of the Whipple Building — a federal building at Fort Snelling, the site of a former detention camp for 1,600 Dakota non-combatants following the 1862 U.S.-Dakota war — have also been bleak, especially at the peak of the ICE surge in Minnesota in January.

The Star Tribune reported at the time that detainees were given no bedding and scant meals and were placed in holding facilities so crowded that immigrants in one cell took turns lying down. The building is designated as a “holding facility,” designed to hold detainees for less than 12 hours, but many detainees were held overnight, or in some cases, for multiple days.

Detainees were also held at over 40 other facilities, largely in the Midwest and the South. Several hundred went to jails in Minnesota counties that have agreements with immigration authorities to detain people.