Safe and Sheltered: How Tenant Organizers Protect Their Neighbors in Minneapolis

Taylor Kohn lives in the same Minneapolis neighborhood where ICU nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents in January. But even aside from this high-profile killing, Kohn says that since CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began occupying the city last December, every block has been written with one traumatic memory or another. On the route she takes to walk her dog every day “is where I hid when [the] feds were tear gassing us.” Farther down the street “is where I [think I] saw a teenager sobbing while they were put in an ICE vehicle,” she adds.

Kohn says every Minneapolis resident seems to have their own personal geography of trauma, which speaks to the immense scale of “Operation Metro Surge.”

The deployment of more than 3,000 federal immigration enforcement agents began last December. Agents have since arrested 4,000 people—including U.S. citizens, immigrants in the process of applying for asylum, community observers, and a 5-year-old who was used as bait in an attempt to lure his mother from their home. They have also shot three people, two of them fatally.

But far from the example the Trump administration hoped to make out of the operation, the Twin Cities have emerged as a national model for community defense—from the mobilization of its rapid response infrastructure to the vast network of mutual aid that drew from donations across the country and neighborhood watches that tried to protect their communities from ICE abductions. All of these decentralized networks were entirely run by volunteers.

Tenant organizers have played a pivotal role in that web of grassroots organizing. With their existing connections, they have been well positioned to help neighbors shelter in place. And as tenants’ safety needs move beyond alerting those at risk about ICE presence to ensuring that they’re able to stay in their homes safely, tenant organizers are playing an even more central role.

The ‘Least Risky’ Place to be

“It’s like COVID—with an occupying, armed, very violent, extralegal force,” says one volunteer and longtime tenant advocate who has worked in both rapid response and tenant mutual aid organizing in a Twin Cities suburb. (The volunteer’s name is being withheld for safety concerns.)

He says that, much like during the emergence of COVID-19, people have been sheltering in place, with families terrified to leave their homes, children learning remotely, and businesses they either patronized or worked at struggling to survive.

During the early years of COVID-19, “People were fearful of leaving their home because of public health concerns,” Eric Hauge, a co-executive director of the statewide tenant hotline HOME Line, told Minnesota Public Radio. “Now, we’re hearing people haven’t left their home because they think they’re going to get abducted or shot.”

But home can also be a fraught place, depending on whether landlords choose to protect or betray their tenants—and whether tenants are behind on rent.

Kohn is a member of Minneapolis-based Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia/United Renters for Justice (IX) and a leader in the IPG Tenant Union, which includes Minneapolis properties owned by Investment Property Group, a property owner notorious for health and safety violations, including rampant pest infestations and ongoing maintenance issues.

The union formed only last year, says Kohn, to demand livable conditions.

It was through union members that she found out one of her neighbors had been arrested by federal agents at their home in early December, allegedly with the assistance of a building staff member.

“The neighbor is not back yet, which is just devastating,” says Kohn. “I found out about it from others in the union, and we were able to come together to protest that our landlord has cooperated with ICE.”

While ICE officers are not legally allowed to access multifamily buildings without a judicial warrant, they can go into tenant-only common spaces with the consent of a building owner. They are still supposed to have a judicial warrant to enter a tenant’s home.

One infamous example of landlord cooperation from late last September saw agents descend from a Black Hawk helicopter into a Chicago apartment complex and a parking lot filled with armored vehicles. Agents broke down doors and arrested U.S. citizens and immigrants, including children, parading them in front of cameras.

A subsequent investigation found that the night raid was conducted with the “owner/manager’s verbal and written consent.”

Agents have raided homes in Minnesota, too. In January, masked federal agents forced open the door of a Minneapolis home and broke into another with a battering ram—without a judicial warrant in both cases.

Earlier this month, agents shot through the door of a home, seriously grazing a tenant’s thigh as a bullet passed through the apartment and into the unit below, where it landed near a child’s playpen used as a crib.

“Nothing is safe right now,” Kohn acknowledges. But, she says, “being at home is still the safest. It’s the least risky course of action when everything is risky.”

A Grassroots Formation

Minneapolis residents, many of whom are organizing for the first time, have stepped into activated networks of community care and rapid response to protect their neighbors, including participating in neighborhood ICE watches and risking aggressive—or even lethal—confrontation with agents by blowing whistles and tailing ICE vehicles to distract and divert them from their targets.

“Renee Good [being] murdered on one of the early days of rapid response drove home just how serious, how risky it was,” says the volunteer and tenant advocate. “[But] the fact that thousands of Minnesotans are continuing to do the exact same thing that [Renee Good] did—getting in the faces of ICE agents as they’re abducting people—is stunning and belongs in the history books.”

That organizing has also brought tenants together who didn’t know each other. Even apartment buildings that were previously unorganized have quickly mobilized tenant networks and established lookouts. “Folks are watching the doors and going to management to make sure that those external doors are not propped [open] or the locks aren’t broken,” says the volunteer.

“Right now, we are seeing the largest volunteer grassroots effort that I’ve ever seen, and I study these things for a living,” says Kenton Card, a researcher working to reform the rental housing system.

On the morning of February 6, before speaking with Shelterforce, Card was on morning patrol, heading out at 5:30 a.m. to report any suspicious activity. Even at that hour, he says, “There was somebody sitting in a lawn chair around the corner from my place, just drinking a coffee and watching his block.”

While Border Czar Tom Homan announced an end to Operation Metro Surge in early February, communities remain vigilant, especially as ICE arrests had been reported on the day of the announcement.

But even if the drawdown is significant, there comes a second threat. As was the case during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, families are once again under lockdown, fearing for their lives by going to work or facing workplace closures given what’s raging outside. But bills are still due, rent chief among them: Staying sheltered is a crucial line of defense for vulnerable households.

Here, too, neighbors have stepped in: they are raising emergency rent relief for at-risk families through social media campaigns and Venmo donations, swelling into a robust network of funds unaffiliated with any established organization. Through these community-led mutual aid funds, anyone across the country can “adopt a family’s rent” or donate to pay for their utilities.

“This is actualizing an abolitionist community care-like politics,” says Card. “Every act of violent repression grows social movements.”

Organizing for a Sustainable Future

Card believes that block organizing remains the most urgent strategy for keeping families safe, but he’s also excited to see tenant associations talking to and strategizing with each other. “A crisis is always a good time to form a tenant union because there’s attention, money, mobilization, and involvement,” he says.

A new coalition of tenants and tenant unions across the St. Paul and Minneapolis metro areas called the Twin Cities Tenants Union launched in early February. Charlie Tirey, an organizer with the new group, says, “Not only are we organizing as tenant unions into this larger Twin Cities Tenant Union; we are [also] organizing as whole communities. It’s exactly the medicine needed in this moment.”

Kohn’s IPG Tenant Union has joined the coalition. “We want to build something that can protect us during this particular moment of crisis and also sustain us in the long term,” she says.

The Twin Cities Tenant Union’s first call to action as a coalition was calling for a statewide eviction moratorium.

“We’re not only facing violence from the federal [government]; we’re [also] facing violence from our landlords,” says Tirey. “We have to be caring about the community as a whole, and that’s what this eviction moratorium aims to do.”

Last month, Hennepin County—where Minneapolis is the county seat—reported a 45 percent increase in eviction filings compared to the same month last year.

“Landlords are still filing those evictions, so we have been doing a ton of mutual aid [to try] to crowdfund to pay these rents, because the government has failed us,” says Kohn.

While Gov. Tim Walz has been sympathetic to the Minnesotans out in the streets protecting their neighbors, his office told Axios that he “does not currently have the legal authority to enact an eviction moratorium.”

Organizers say that without a moratorium, their most vulnerable neighbors will be left unhoused during the greatest public health crisis the city has seen since the pandemic.

“In a capitalist economy, policymakers don’t typically regulate the private rental market, except in times of crisis,” says Card. “This is one of those exceptional moments when they absolutely should.”

Executing an eviction is going to lead to more abductions. An eviction moratorium provides a concrete way to immediately help people. . .”

Kenton Card, researcher and advocate

Card, who testified in front of the Minneapolis City Council in support of a moratorium, says, “Executing an eviction is going to lead to more abductions. An eviction moratorium provides a concrete way to immediately help people stay in hiding, stay sheltering in place.”

In lieu of action from Walz, city council voted earlier this month to provide $1 million for emergency rental assistance and $500,000 for immigrant legal aid. With the year’s first state legislative session underway, lawmakers are currently weighing rent relief measures to stabilize communities. One bill that would allocate $75 million in emergency rental assistance to counties and Tribal Nations across the state has already passed the Senate Housing and Homelessness Prevention Committee. The bill will be referred to the Senate Tax Committee.

*Sahan Journal *quoted Sen. Lindsey Port, who authored the bill, explaining: “At this moment we are on the cliff’s edge of a terrible eviction crisis. This is not a bill that will fix the system. This is not a bill that will keep our communities stable for years. This is an emergency fix likely for the next three months.”

“Rental assistance will help, and legal aid will help, but an eviction moratorium is going to provide the first line of defense,” says Card.

“An eviction moratorium is a lifesaving measure,” says Yusra Murad, a community organizer with IX. “It’s not just a housing policy question; it’s a question of whether or not we can act to keep families together and keep people alive.”

‘In Solidarity’

Across the country, calls for eviction moratoriums amid ICE raids have been connecting housing movements.

At the beginning of this month, Portland City Council in Maine passed a resolution asking Gov. Janet Mills to consider a 60-day eviction moratorium after ICE officers flooded the state.

The resolution, which passed unanimously—and on an expedited emergency basis—stated that the council “stands in solidarity with officials in states and cities around the country who are struggling with the destabilizing impacts of an unprecedented surge in immigration enforcement.”

The request is currently under review, said the governor’s office.

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he was “willing to look into” calls for an eviction moratorium amid the 60-day surge of immigration enforcement known as Operation Midway Blitz that tore through the city last fall. Ultimately, his office did not act; nor did Gov. JB Pritzker.

In Los Angeles, the Evict ICE, Not Us! coalition has been fighting for an eviction moratorium since last year. They still don’t have one.

The County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted earlier this month to amend an existing ordinance so that tenants in unincorporated areas of the county would have to owe at least two months of unpaid rent—up from one—before landlords could proceed with an eviction. A week later, a stronger motion that would have covered the whole county and raised the threshold to three months failed to come to a vote. That means LA cities would each need to enact their own measures to similarly raise the threshold for when an eviction can be filed or otherwise protect their vulnerable residents.

“We need this,” says Chelsea Kirk, the cofounder of the Los Angeles–based Rent Brigade, which began producing research on predatory landlords in the wake of last year’s fires and has now pivoted to producing data on the impacts of ICE raids. “Otherwise, our elected officials are enabling the kind of outcome that the Trump administration hopes to see, [which] is immigrants self-deporting and leaving the country. In this case, they’d be doing so not because they were detained, but because they can’t afford to live here anymore.”

That’s why organizers in Minnesota are hoping the state will be the first to pass an eviction moratorium—and become a model for other states. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board recently became the first entity in the state to implement an eviction moratorium on its rental and commercial properties, pending Mayor Jacob Frey’s signature. The Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution calling on the governor to enact an eviction moratorium, but it has not been acted on.

At the end of the month, organizers across the country will convene in the Twin Cities for a week of action to share tactics and strategies against ICE raids. “We learned from cities [that] were occupied before [ours], and there [are] going to be cities that are occupied after [ours],” says Kohn.

Meanwhile, the Twin Cities Tenant Union has given Walz until March 1, 2026—the first of the month, when rent is typically due—to answer its calls for an eviction moratorium. Otherwise, it has planned a rent strike, which, it says, could be the “largest rent strike in the United States in the last 100 years” if carried out.

We are building … infrastructures of care and support and waiting on our highest elected leaders to step into their leadership and figure out their role.”

Yusra Murad, community organizer with Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia/United Renters for Justice

“Millions of dollars are flowing in rent relief right now, through established community groups, but also just through a few devoted people getting together and delivering cash to families on their block,” says Murad. “We are building these infrastructures of care and support and waiting on our highest elected leaders to step into their leadership and figure out their role.”

After 74 days of what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) dubbed “the largest DHS operation ever,” besieged Minnesotans feel no less at risk. ICE’s presence appears to have only shifted to Twin Cities suburbs, becoming increasingly covert.

“While the public may think that the curtain is closing on this violent episode, it’s just going to go somewhere else,” says Tirey.

“Our community is still under occupation,” says Kohn.

“We hear from community members that ICE continues to terrorize their neighbors,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said during a recent news conference. “Their tactics may have changed, but the community feels no safer.”

“Even if every single agent up and left this afternoon, it’s going to take months for people to dig out of the financial and economic hole that they’re in,” says Murad. “And that’s to say nothing about the grief and loss, and the sense of safety that has been compromised. People will never be the same.”

A short walk from Kohn’s home is the site of Pretti’s murder, now home to a “beautiful memorial,” she says. “Every day, you can go down there and find something stunningly human happening.” It offers a somber moment of quietude amid what still feels like a chaotic and threatening reality.

Kohn says it’s the work that neighbors have been doing to protect one another over the last nearly three months that gives her hope. “We’re in this together, and none of us is doing well, but we all have each other’s backs,” she says. “We’re getting through.”