A man walked into Soleil Ramirez’s restaurant last month and started to ask strange questions: How many people do you have on staff? Why are you so small? “Stuff nobody asks,” she said.
The man then started talking loudly into his phone. “I’m here doing a dip in a restaurant. There’s not a lot of people here, so I don’t know if it’s worth coming,” Ramirez recalled him saying. The encounter left her unnerved.
Ramirez has owned and run Crasqui, a Venezuelan restaurant, in St Paul, Minnesota, since 2023. Though she never got confirmation – the man left once it became clear restaurant staff were concerned about his presence – she concluded he was likely a federal immigration officer in plainclothes.
“It’s terrifying. All my employees are legal. I’m 100% legal,” said Ramirez, a political refugee from Venezuela who moved to the US in 2016. “But that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
The Trump administration in December launched “Operation Metro Surge”, sending more than 2,700 federal agents to Minnesota, with a concentration on the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, as part of its crack down on immigrants.
The operation seeks to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants from the region, officials said. Both cities have become home to large immigrant communities over the last few decades, with large Somalian, Hispanic, Hmong, Laotian and Ethiopian enclaves across different neighborhoods.
Minneapolis residents say these communities are now under attack, pointing to sporadic and often brutal arrests by federal immigration officers, including those from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting immigration enforcement, are
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