On the morning of February 1, I waited at a bus stop to meet Christin Crabtree, who had invited me to a mutual aid run in South Minneapolis, Minnesota. In December, Crabtree and two friends started raising funds to buy burritos from immigrant-owned businesses and distribute them to unhoused people. But that morning, Crabtree—a mutual aid organizer and mother of two—was running late. Community members patrolling the neighborhood had spotted agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staging at a nearby public park; within minutes, dozens of observers responded by blowing whistles to alert their neighbors, and were soon tear-gassed by ICE agents.
“The neighborhood is on edge,” Crabtree informed me over Signal, a secure messaging app used by activists. Now was no longer an appropriate moment for a journalist to stop by the restaurant. We pivoted to a new plan: She would pick up the burritos by herself and we would meet at a nearby café to drop them off together.
As I waited for my bus, I caught myself peering into the window of every passing car, looking for tactical fatigues and face coverings. It had been two months since the start of ICE’s largest-ever operation, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” and three weeks since the number of federal agents deployed in Minnesota reached 3,000. In that time, agents had killed two U.S. citizens, used a five-year-old as bait to entrap his family into being detained, kidnapped thousands of immigrants, and terrorized entire neighborhoods.
Joseph Mogul
Four days after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents on January 24, 2026, community members in Minneapolis mourn his loss at a vigil at the location where he was shot.
Everybody in the city seemed to be on guard. Even when the most visible spectacle of an ICE occupation wanes, the spectre remains—and it can wax again at any moment. Nevertheless, Minneapolis has seized the world’s attention for its revolutionary neighborliness, evident not only in the block-by-block, rapid ICE response system, but also in the mutual aid networks that emerged behind the scenes, enabling immigrants fearful of federal agents to shelter in place.
To the untrained eye, this organized resistance could appear to have sprouted overnight. However, the seeds of revolutionary neighborliness in Minneapolis had been planted years prior through networks developed to support unhoused people—networks that are now being tested and forced to adapt as unhoused residents of the Twin Cities are vulnerable to ICE terror.
The burrito project is one such adaptation. It began at a single restaurant in South Minneapolis, where the employees stopped coming to work because they feared ICE would show up and abduct them. The owner, an immigrant himself, decided to continue paying them as they sheltered at home. One of Crabtree’s friends, who knows the owner, heard that he was struggling.
From this predicament, Crabtree and two friends saw an opportunity to simultaneously support immigrant businesses, enable workers to shelter in place, and also feed unhoused people. They have since expanded to ten businesses, raising $19,000 in mutual aid funds to distribute 2,000 meals. The organizers leverage preexisting mutual aid infrastructure to distribute burritos directly to people they know living on the street, and to locations that offer services and shelter to unhoused people.
Joseph Mogul
Christin Crabtree sorts through mutual aid donations for unhoused people at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center in Minneapolis, on January 31, 2026.
Crabtree has a background in mutual aid work: She spent five years organizing with her unhoused neighbors living in encampments, and seventeen months working alongside Indigenous organizers to support Camp Nenookaasi, a community-based unhoused encampment in Minneapolis rooted in Indigenous practices. Camp Nenookaasi formed in August 2023 (although an earlier camp by the same name existed in 2022) as a response to the staggering rates of murder and disappearance of Indigenous women, offering traditional medicines and healing practices for its majority Indigenous unhoused residents.
Minneapolis is home to one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the United States, who face disproportionate rates of homelessness due to systemic racism and colonial federal policies that dismantled Indigenous sovereignty. Camp Nenookaasi facilitated consistent connections with service providers and mutual aid groups. “It became a really strong community,” Crabtree says. “There was always food and warm clothes and tents.”
But every time Nenookaasi would settle at a location, she says, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) would arrive and evict everybody, confiscating tents and supplies. An autonomous movement emerged to defend encampments from eviction. Neighbors alerted each other through Signal chats and social media when an eviction was happening, arrived to confront MPD, and replenished the encampments’ resources when necessary.
During our drive to drop off burritos at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood, Crabtree points out several abandoned patches of grass where Nenookaasi encampments once stood. On January 6, 2025, fires of unknown origin broke out at two encampments in Minneapolis, including Nenookaasi. The police responded to the fires by evicting 200 people from the encampment grounds. The city has since pursued a zero-tolerance policy against encampments.
Mutual aid organizers across Minneapolis describe this day as a seismic shift in the city’s homelessness landscape. Ruth Buffalo, chief executive officer of MIWRC, heard about the evictions and got in touch with Nenookaasi organizers. “We just asked, ‘How can we help?’ ” says Buffalo. “And they said, ‘We have a van full of relatives in here if you could open up a warming room for a few hours in the night.’ ” After a quick huddle with staff, MIWRC opened its doors. That night, Crabtree says with tears in her eyes, “was the beginning of what we do here now.”
MIWRC’s warming center, which is open 24/7 during severe weather conditions and serves breakfast three days a week, is a haven for unhoused people to shelter and receive services. “We used to have a hundred people every breakfast,” says Buffalo, “but since the federal agents, it’s more like forty . . . . We don’t know exactly who is missing as a result of ICE.”
While there are some documented cases of unhoused people taken by ICE in Minneapolis, it’s nearly impossible to track how many. That’s partly a function of the city’s encampment eviction policy. Shelters are often at capacity, and deny access to people who use drugs. Warming centers like MIWRC stepped up after January 6, 2025, but they can’t keep their doors open all the time. Nenookaasi was one of many encampments in Minneapolis where unhoused people had congregated and received consistent care. Without these gathering spaces, relationships are severed, and it’s hard to know when or why somebody goes missing.
We drop off the burritos at the MIWRC warming center, which is more sparsely populated than usual. “We think about being a good neighbor as being able to knock on someone’s door and ask for sugar,” Crabtree says. “People just need a lot of sugar right now.”
Over a cup of coffee, Naomi Wilson, an organizer with the mutual aid collective Sanctuary Supply Depot, shows me her friendship bracelets that she made with unhoused neighbors. “Everything I do in my life is motivated by love for my neighbor,” she says. “To see the whole metro region mobilize around loving their neighbor . . . that gives me hope.” When Wilson and her husband moved to Phillips in 2022, their home was located on the same block as an encampment. “It was very easy to build relationships with unhoused people,” Wilson says.
In 2020, organizers with the sanctuary movement, a weeks-long project to shelter unhoused people in a South Minneapolis hotel, founded Sanctuary Supply Depot. “The goal from our inception was being an abolitionist movement dedicated to providing survival supplies for unhoused people,” says Wilson, who joined in 2022. “I think the city, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, was able to build a really robust mutual aid infrastructure,” she says. “Now we are trying to carry on that legacy.”
Sanctuary Supply Depot has open hours during which unhoused people can pick up free tents and survival supplies, and they partner with other groups that distribute supplies in St. Paul, where there are still large encampments. Every Sunday, they organize pop-ups to hand out sandwiches and water in communities with large unhoused populations. But the presence of ICE has severely disrupted their operations. “It’s a perpetual state of unknowing and worry, ” Wilson says. “Unhoused people are particularly vulnerable to ICE, because it’s not the same as if you have a family at home wondering where you are. There’s fear that unhoused people are just being disappeared.” She has lost contact with multiple neighbors who she worries were taken by ICE, and encourages people to shelter at MIWRC when possible.
In 2023, Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches (GMCC), an interfaith, social services nonprofit located in the heart of Minneapolis’s immigrant community on Lake Street, invited Sanctuary Supply Depot to partner for their Friday showers program. On Fridays, GMCC President and Executive Director Adrienne Dorn says, the organization opens its doors to provide a place to shower, as well as meals, groceries, a variety of supplies, and respite from the outdoors. Typically, 150 people show up to Friday showers, but that number has recently dwindled to fifty. “I would love to say that’s because the need isn’t there anymore,” says Dorn. “That folks got up on their feet and no longer need to come here. But I don’t think that’s the case.”
Dorn emphasizes that the unhoused and immigrant communities are not mutually exclusive, and that being unhoused can mean different things for different people, including living on the street, on a relative’s couch, or in a car. According to Dorn, many of GMCC’s housed attendees have said they’re afraid to leave their homes because of ICE. GMCC has adapted by reviving a COVID-era food delivery program and partnering with nearby schools to provide services.
These adaptations have been a crucial lifeline for some, but you can’t shelter at home without a home to shelter in. Mutual aid organizers like Wilson are doing their best to check in on their unhoused neighbors and keep track of who ICE has taken; however, with the encampments gone, she says, “we don’t know where to look.”
Wilson claims that organizers who work with unhoused people were some of the first to start resisting ICE, and credits the existing infrastructure for the mutual aid networks that formed during the federal occupation. “For people who have been organizing together for years, it’s very easy to pivot and build new things.”
Once per week since 2023, a mutual aid organizer we’ll call Steve arrives at a community kitchen at 7 a.m. and spends the next two hours cooking hot meals, which are then distributed by mutual aid groups to unhoused people across the Twin Cities. Much like GMCC, these groups have also pivoted their strategy: When ICE’s Minneapolis operation ramped up, they mobilized to create a grocery delivery system for immigrants sheltering at home.
On January 28, Steve—who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for privacy reasons—invited me to tag along for a grocery run. Our first stop is Joyce Uptown Food Shelf, a distribution center he heard about through unhoused mutual aid connections, where organizers can reserve free groceries for delivery. We drop in and pick up eight bags of dry goods.
Joseph Mogul
Steve, the pseudonym for a mutual aid organizer who is a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota, stands in front of his car filled with groceries for two immigrant families sheltering at home in the city of Minneapolis.
Our next stop, Marissa’s, is a Mexican supermarket located one block away from where Minneapolis-based nurse Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents four days prior. As we enter, I notice a person wearing a keffiyeh and a whistle standing by the entrance, presumably on guard for ICE. The store is almost empty—immigrant-owned businesses have been hit hard.
Steve unfurls his shopping list, which the two families of six he’s aiding sent earlier that day. Google mistranslates “arena para gatos” to “cat flour”; after debating whether “arena” is cat food or cat litter, we ask a store worker for help, and following a comedy of translational errors, we realize it means litter, which they don’t sell. At checkout, the cashier slides us a free Jarritos.
We make a quick pitstop at the vigil for Pretti, who spoke his last words to a woman being thrown to the ground by federal agents: “Are you OK?” The vigil occupies half the street, strewn with flowers, candles, signs, and portraits of Pretti. A woman starts bawling, and another comes over to give her a warm embrace. Nobody in Minneapolis seems to be “OK.”
On the way to our next stop, I ask Steve if he’s experienced any burnout from doing mutual aid work on top of being a Ph.D. student and a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota. “I don’t feel burnt out,” he says. But then he pauses, and begins to cry. “I mean, it just has to happen. Maybe that’s too much pressure on me, but it doesn’t feel like I can stop. I just want the families to know how much people care about them.” At this point, he’s sobbing, and I’m crying, too. “I want their families to be here forever,” he says, through tears.
We sit in silence for a minute or two. “I haven’t felt emotions like that come through until we were talking,” he finally says after a few collective deep breaths. “I really needed a cry.”
We continue on to the Seward Community Co-op, which has a shelf of free produce designated for mutual aid pickups. A few stops later, Steve’s car is so full that I’m balancing the ten-pound bag of cat litter in my lap. We head to the families’ houses, where the drop-offs go seamlessly. Steve says his interactions with the families are deeply affecting, even when they don’t talk much. “When we get to see each other at the door . . . and embrace, those are positive moments,” he says. “It happens without words in some cases.”
Sarah Jane Keaveny, a shelter nurse, stands in front of a room of about forty-five people, most of whom are currently or formerly unhoused, at a meeting of Better Understanding Involuntary Local Displacement (BUILD). BUILD is a research collective of University of Minnesota researchers, service experts, and people with lived homelessness experience. The project began with a study on the impacts of encampment evictions; after data collection concluded in March 2025, BUILD continued facilitating monthly meetings, where hot coffee and snacks are offered to participants.
At the meeting, the conversation quickly turns to ICE’s presence in the city. “How many people have seen ICE agents around?” Keaveny asks. The vast majority of hands in the room go up. “How many of you have gone to a place you usually go and seen ICE agents?” Again, the majority of the room raises their hand.
Three weeks prior, ICE had in fact reared its head outside Southside Harm Reduction Services (SHRS), where BUILD hosts these meetings. “They were on the block for someone else and the community rallied and blew whistles,” Zach Johnson, SHRS program director, tells me. “ICE just started pointing at people, and they grabbed our participant.”
SHRS had implemented ICE-response protocols the day before the encounter outside the office. A staff member monitors exterior doors, which remain locked at all times. “If ICE shows up, they call down an SHRS administrator, who demands a judicial warrant,” Johnson says. “If they don’t have it, we tell ’em to fuck off.” Although ICE agents had not attempted to enter the building the day the SHRS participant was abducted outside, SHRS held a debrief afterward about how their protocols worked in the moment. “We all kinda rallied around this process,” Johnson says. The other participants, he says, responded positively: “Some of them were like, ‘Hey, look, these guys really got our backs.’ ”
The participant who ICE detained outside the SHRS building was released the next day. “He’s dealt with law enforcement a lot and his feedback was, ‘They’re just more cops.’ It’s true, in a sense, from what I’ve seen on the block here,” says Johnson, who describes having witnessed local police brutally attack two men at a bus stop, one of whom was asleep. Metro Transit Police tackled the sleeping man, kneeled on him, and strapped him to a gurney before throwing him into the back of a vehicle. Johnson hasn’t seen him since—one of many instances he witnessed police assaulting and disappearing unhoused people right outside SHRS.
SHRS was founded in 2017 as a fully-mobile volunteer harm reduction project, and has since transformed into a nonprofit with paid staff and a permanent location in Phillips. SHRS’s outreach team distributes safe-use drug supplies, cold weather gear, fresh water, and food to people living on the streets, in addition to hosting drop-in medical services. They also organize pop-ups at sites like the Native American Community Clinic, where SHRS staff test people for infectious diseases. “Through that work,” Johnson says, “you’re able to develop deep relationships with participants to work on things like housing, health care, and treatment.” But since ICE showed up, he says, “Things are more tense; people are on edge.”
In the BUILD meeting, the attendees discuss how to refer to federal agents. “They’re gray dudes, always operating in a gray area,” one man says, jumping to his feet. “They’ve been doing this shit since the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María.” The rest of the participants join in on calling ICE “the gray dudes.” Another man chimes in. “Fuck the police and fuck ICE,” he says.
Other people say they view ICE as a uniquely cruel force beyond that of local police, given their ability to act on violent whims with apparent impunity. “If you hurt their feelings, they can kill you,” says one participant.
Before the BUILD meeting wraps up, Keaveny shares the National Lawyers Guild phone number, community members pass out know-your-rights resources, and organizers impart tips about how to resist ICE. The group pauses for a collective deep breath and Keaveny shares some closing words. “All of us in this room are safe,” she says. “We’ve been caring for each other. We know each other. And that is resilience.”