What happened
Operation Metro Surge began on 4 December 2025 as a Twin Cities immigration enforcement push and escalated on 6 January 2026 into what DHS itself described as the largest such operation in US history, deploying 2,000 agents to Minneapolis-St Paul. Reporting indicated the operation focused disproportionately on the city's Somali immigrant community. Over roughly four months it detained thousands of people, cost the city an estimated $700 million, and ended with two American citizens shot dead by the federal agents sent to carry it out.
**Renée Good, 7 January 2026.** DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired in self-defence after Good, 37, tried to run him over — calling it "an act of domestic terrorism." Bystander video shows a different sequence: an officer reached into Good's open car window and pulled on the handle; Good reversed briefly, then moved forward and to the right, turning away from the officers and toward the flow of traffic. Ross, by then standing at the front-left corner of her turning vehicle, fired three shots, killing her. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey watched the footage and rejected the government's account in blunt terms: "Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit." The FBI took over the investigation; as of April 2026, reporting found no federal investigation had produced public findings.
**Alex Pretti, 24 January 2026.** Pretti, a 37-year-old VA intensive-care nurse, was filming CBP agents who had pushed a woman to the ground. An agent pepper-sprayed Pretti and the woman; when several agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, one announced he was carrying a holstered firearm. Multiple bystander videos, later corroborated by an internal CBP report, show agents disarming Pretti and physically restraining him — and then shooting him at least ten times in about five seconds while he was already subdued and unarmed. DHS's initial public statement claimed Pretti had "approached" agents with the weapon and "violently resisted" disarmament — a version a subsequent congressional oversight report found the video evidence directly refuted.
In both cases, the government's first public account was more favourable to the agents who fired than the video evidence, released later, turned out to support — and in both cases, the false account was the official record for days before independent footage surfaced to contradict it.