Dateline returns Tuesday, March 3 with ICE: America’s Turning Point? Watch on SBS or SBS On Demand at 9:30pm AEDT.
It’s a frigid winter morning in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with temperatures outside around -14 degrees Celsius. On an average street, in a typical suburb, Hanad stands at a living room window and looks at the morning snow outside. He’s been stuck in this house for two months.
A stranger walks by and Hanad quickly closes the blinds. No one – except him and the owner – knows he lives in this house and anyone outside of it could be a potential informant for Immigration and Customs Enforcement – also known as ICE.
Hanad is not this man’s real name, but his condition is very real. He has been in hiding since ICE began patrolling the streets of Minneapolis last December looking for undocumented immigrants.
“Before these guys started their operation, life was good for me. I lived in my own place and paid my rent,” he tells SBS Dateline.
Somalia-born Hanad initially stayed there when ICE’s operations began. But soon the risk became too great.
“We couldn’t leave our homes because ICE agents were waiting for us in the parking lot. So we couldn’t even leave our homes to go to work. There were days we couldn’t even go out to get food.”
He eventually snuck past the ICE teams and fled to this safehouse. Hanad was born in Somalia but says he was forced to leave for his own safety in 2024 after his father and brother were killed by militants from the al-Shabaab terror group.
“I traveled through 12 countries. Sometimes we went without food for more than 10 days. So it was a very difficult journey,” he says. “Our goal was to reach America. We were looking for a better life and security.”
Hanad applied for asylum, but was granted temporary protection status (TPS) in the meantime. In the US, TPS can be granted to people from certain countries who are dealing with issues such as civil war or environmental disasters. People on the TPS cannot be removed from the US and can be allowed to work. For Hanad, it was his lifeline as he waited for a ruling on his asylum application.
He chose Minnesota because it has the largest population of Somali immigrants in the US. Many of them live in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, which became ground zero when Trump’s immigration crackdown — known as Operation Metro Surge — hit the city.
How fraud allegations laid the foundation for ICE
In September 2022, the Biden administration announced charges against 47 people in Minnesota accused of defrauding US$250 million ($351 million) from a state-run, federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The founder and executive director of the nonprofit at the center of the fraud scheme was not Somali, but most of its employees, associates and co-defendants were Somali Americans.
Last December, after a video from a conservative influencer alleging that other daycare providers had committed fraud went viral, President Trump, Republicans and conservative media outlets seized on the scandal as evidence of widespread misuse of public funds by illegal immigrants, escalating attacks on the entire Somali American community to legitimize the administration’s focus on Minnesota.
“Somalis (sic) defrauded that state of billions of dollars,” Trump claimed at the time.
“I don’t want them in our country, to be honest. Their country stinks. We are going in the wrong direction if we continue to bring waste into our country.”
In January, at the same time that about 3,000 ICE agents and 1,000 Border Force agents were flooding Minnesota, Trump scrapped temporary protective status for people from Somalia like Hanad.
“My asylum application is still pending and has yet to be decided by the court,” he said.
“When my TPS expires on March 17, I will have no other immigration status in this country.”
Hanad fears he will die if forced to return to Somalia.
“Sometimes I have scary dreams that I will be picked up by the authorities and sent back to where I came from,” says Hanad.
“The problems that existed in Somalia when I left… still exist. The problems that led to my father being killed and me being tortured.”
Blue State Retaliation
Minnesota was key to US President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss when he failed to flip the state. He made baseless claims of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens.
The state has voted Democratic since 1972. Minneapolis has also declared itself a “sanctuary city,” with leaders consistently refusing to support federal immigration enforcement.
When ICE operations began in Minnesota in December 2025, federal authorities claimed it was to remove dangerous criminals who had illegally entered the US. But critics say it was an act of retaliation for directly opposing Trump’s mass deportation policy. They say this has resulted in significant violations of the law against both minorities and American citizens, including the killings of two anti-ICE protesters – Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
After Good’s death, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told NPR that the Trump administration is “not doing this for security, it’s for politics, not to reduce crime, but for retaliation.”
Becoming an ICE target
The same day Good was shot by an ICE agent, Ahmed Bin Hassan was working as a local Uber driver. He was watching videos of Good’s murder when a Border Patrol agent knocked on his window.
The officer asked if Ahmed was a U.S. citizen. He was born in Somalia, moved to the US at age 17 and has been a citizen for ten years. Believing his rights were being violated, he refused to answer the officer’s questions. Within minutes, Ahmed’s car was surrounded by at least six more officers.
“One man said, ‘I’m an immigration officer, can’t you read?’ So that kind of pissed me off because they were going off of what the fake propaganda from MAGA media was putting out, which was that Somalis can’t spell or read.”
“They target whoever they want. When it comes to minorities, they see a black person and they approach them, ‘Where’s your ID? Where’s your American citizenship? Where were you born?’ Those kinds of questions.”
Civil resistance and community networks
When the ICE wave reached Minnesota, local communities began organizing and fighting back. Lizzie is involved in a community network that tracks the whereabouts of ICE agents. She says observing involves looking out for tagged or known ICE vehicles and sharing the information with community networks.
“It’s people who are medics, it’s people who deliver groceries, it’s people who take people to the doctor or to their court hearings. And it’s incredibly organized,” she says.
Lizzie believes the ICE operation in Minnesota marks a dangerous turning point for the country.
“These are the things I learned in school, the bit of history we learned here. This is the Anne Frank, hide your neighbors in your attic moment.’
“As a pessimistic optimist? I think we’re crazy.”
After the ICE peak
In mid-February, amid mounting political backlash, the Trump administration announced that the ICE surge in Minnesota had ended.
Tim Homan, known as Trump’s “border czar,” took command of immigration enforcement in Minnesota after Good and Pretti’s deaths. At a news conference, he announced that 700 officers would be leaving Minnesota and said the operation was a success but acknowledged it was not “perfect.” He also said the operation had become “more streamlined”.
According to Homan, ICE and Border Patrol had arrested some 4,000 undocumented migrants, “including murderers, sex offenders, national security threats, gang members and other violent criminals.”
However, independent observers claim that the vast majority of detainees have no criminal record.
Locals in Minneapolis say it will take years to repair the damage. Many are still in hiding, and the Trump administration is now aggressively pursuing observers like Lizzie through the courts.
Shortly after speaking to SBS Dateline, Lizzie received a text message telling her she had until 8:45 a.m. the next morning to turn herself in at City Hall or she would be arrested.
She surrendered herself the next day and was charged with a run-in with ICE agents while acting as an observer. They claim she hit their vehicle and disrupted an operation.
Lizzie denies the allegations and claims it was her constitutional right to observe their activities.
In his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, February 24, Trump referenced the Somali community again, referring to the “Somali pirates who plundered Minnesota.”
People like Hanad struggle to understand how he targets their community.
“I don’t understand why he is targeting us, Somalis in particular. We are hardworking people. We are a community.”
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