A crowd of people march with signs protesting ICE during Minnesota’s general strike. Todd Strand/Alamy, reprinted from The Conversation.

This article is republished from The Conversation. Read the original article and listen to the podcast here.

Whenever US federal immigration agents pull up to a location in Minneapolis, people take their whistles out, start blowing them and start filming.

In December 2025, the US government sent more than 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge. They joined more than 700 agents already present in the state – their mission to find and deport people the Trump administration calls “worst of the worst illegal alien criminals.”

The residents of the  metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and Saint Paul – quickly came together to try to prevent their neighbours being caught up in ICE raids.  As well as monitoring ICE activities, block by block, people are organising mutual aid for neighbours fearful of going out in case of immigration raids.

Since their arrival, the Trump administration claims ICE agents have arrested more than 4,000 people in Minnesota.  They have also killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Daniel Cueto-Villalobos, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, who lives in southern Minneapolis and studies race, religion and social movements. He tracks the neighbourhood groups that have sprung into action in response to the ICE presence back to mutual networks set up during the 2020 COVID pandemic, and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman.

“What it did was force us to talk to each other in the most basic sense, and get together as a community to develop these networks that we see really playing out today,” says Cueto-Villalobos.

Listen on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Gemma Ware is editor and host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast.

Daniel Cueto-Villalobos is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. His areas of focus include religion, race, and social movements. His doctoral dissertation examines how local congregations in Minnesota navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and engaged in racial justice work following the 2020 killing of George Floyd. Daniel is involved in a number of mixed-methods projects examining religion, inequality, and public life in the contemporary US. His work has been published in Social Problems, Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Daniel contributes regularly to The Society Pages and he has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio.