Minnesota CEOs Cry Crocodile Tears Over ICE
Dozens of Minnesota-based corporate executives issued an open letter this week urging an “immediate deescalation of tensions” after an immigration agent executed legal observer and ICU nurse Alex Pretti last Saturday.
The 79 CEOs and trade group leaders referred to President Trump’s terror campaign without naming it directly, citing “the recent challenges,” and claimed they have been hard at work “every day behind the scenes with federal, state and local officials to advance real solutions,” though they did not specify anything they had done. Instead, they said only that they “have been working for generations to build a strong and vibrant state here in Minnesota.”
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After weeks of silence and in some cases allowing immigration agents to use their property as a staging ground, they used the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce website to “call for peace and focused cooperation.”
They failed to mention that they were instrumental in bringing Operation Metro Surge to Minnesota, through their public support and active lobbying of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). The law allocated more than $170 billion over four years to deport one million immigrants annually. Congress had already appropriated $10 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when the law dropped; the additional money nearly tripled its funding for 2025 alone to almost $29 billion.
Immigration agents have killed at least eight people and wounded nine more nationwide during their extended terror campaign, while causing at least 32 others to die in detention camps.
OBBBA paid for what ICE acting director Todd Lyons called its “largest immigration operation ever,” including sending 3,000 agents to the Twin Cities—five times the number of Minneapolis Police Department cops. Agents have committed daily atrocities since they arrived in December, including using toddlers as bait and then throwing them in ICE prison, and publicly executing legal observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
As Brad Johnson points out in his newsletter Hill Heat, “America’s corporate titans lobbied hard last summer for the devil’s bargain of the One Big Brutal Bill Act,” including the multiple CEOs of Minnesota-based companies. That includes 3M (originally known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing), which directly endorsed OBBBA on a White House endorsement sheet, citing the extension of corporate tax cuts, which it said were “crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in global markets and fostering innovation.”
CEO William Brown of 3M was a signatory to the open letter. Winnebago Industries, whose president and CEO Michael Happe also signed the letter, was part of a statement of support for OBBBA last year that highlighted research and development and expensing tax breaks.
Johnson listed four other CEOs who are executive board members of trade organizations that lobbied for OBBBA: Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford (Business Roundtable), Hormel CEO Jeff Ettinger (the Meat Institute), Allianz CEO Jasmine Jirele (U.S. Chamber of Commerce), and Target CEO Michael Fiddelke (the National Retail Federation). Target also makes its property available for ICE to use, even after agents targeted its own employees.
A comparison of the open-letter signatures and the executives listed among Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill endorsements shows several more Minnesota-based executives who want to have it both ways: Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman, and US Bancorp CEO Gunjan Kedia, all of whom are members of the Business Roundtable, which lobbied for OBBBA. In addition, Minnesota-based Medtronic and Boston Scientific, whose executives signed, are on the board of directors of the trade group AdvaMed, which supported OBBBA. And the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce also supported OBBBA; they coordinated and released the open letter.
Seventeen companies whose CEOs signed the letter—Allianz, Ameriprise Financial, Boston Scientific, Cargill, CHS, Inc., ECMC Group, Ecolab, General Mills, Hormel, Land O’Lakes, Mayo Clinic, Medtronic, Securian Financial Group, Solventum, Target, UnitedHealth, and Xcel Energy—also reported lobbying directly on OBBBA in federal lobbying disclosures. Blue Cross and Blue Shield reported 52 separate lobbying reports about OBBBA; Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota president and CEO Dana Erickson signed the letter.
Many of these companies have employees at their headquarters who are leaving work to go out and legally observe or defend their neighbors from ICE enforcement. The muted response in the letter doesn’t match the anger of the workforce, even before you get to the prodigious lobbying resources wielded by these companies that helped to create the situation inside the state.
The Prospect contacted all of the companies asking for comment, including why the CEO signed the open letter; whether they regret supporting Trump’s spending bill; and how they will contribute to repairing the damage ICE has caused in their state, including whether they will allocate corporate resources and funds to do so.
A spokesperson for Xcel Energy responded by sending a link to a press release about a $3.5 million fund to help small businesses organized by the Minneapolis Foundation, to which several of the open-letter signatories had donated. He did not respond to a follow-up asking how much Xcel, which has a $45 billion market cap, had contributed.
A spokesperson for ECMC Group, meanwhile, said that the open letter speaks for itself. She would not say whether the company regretted its support of OBBBA, only that it wanted to support student loan borrower efforts “to rehabilitate their defaulted loans a second time in the event of financial hardship,” which is not what the Prospect asked about.
A spokesman for Allianz said the company declined to comment; no other company responded. That includes UnitedHealth Group, which brings its own brand of hypocrisy to the discussion. Stephen Hemsley, CEO of the Minnesota-based company, signed the open letter.
UnitedHealth is the largest Medicare Advantage insurer, serving about eight million people, and is responsible for perpetrating what can reasonably be described as a fraud against U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for services. According to a new analysis by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the fraud will require taxpayers to cover an estimated $76 billion in unnecessarily expensive charges this year, significantly more expensive than the $1 billion alleged Medicare fraud that supposedly prompted the immigration operation in Minnesota.
THE STATE OF MINNESOTA IS REELING after weeks of aggressive immigration enforcement and practical occupation by federal agents. These actions have had significant immediate and long-term costs, according to researchers at North Star Policy Action, an economic analysis group in the state.
According to their estimates, it costs state, local, and federal taxpayers roughly $18 million a week to pay the federal salaries of 3,000 immigration agents, food and lodging, maintenance of detention facilities and transportation, and overtime for local and state law enforcement. More broadly, the occupation has slowed economic activity to a crawl, as immigrants and people of color across the state go into hiding. “It’s an economic and social dead zone. It’s worse than the pandemic,” said Jake Schweitzer, executive director of North Star Policy Action.
One in seven businesses in Minneapolis and St. Paul are run by immigrant entrepreneurs, according to the American Immigration Council. Those businesses have seen drops in revenue between 50 and 100 percent, published reports indicate. Businesses that rely on tourism or leisure activities are also suffering.
Schweitzer said that conditions are most dire for local restaurants, construction sites, and day care facilities, which have large percentages of employees from immigrant populations. Those businesses have routinely shuttered, and some have gone out of business entirely. When child care facilities close, caregivers must take off work if they can’t find someone else to watch their kids. “Day care isn’t a thriving economic situation to begin with,” Schweitzer said. “How do you further break a broken market?”
Overall, North Star Policy Action conservatively estimates a 10 percent decline in economic activity, which translates to $80 million in losses per week. The group added that long-term costs are even more dire, like from Black and Latino students missing over a month of school, acute health care needs rising as residents skip preventive care, and housing costs rising as construction slows and housing gets built more slowly.
Schweitzer wondered when an immigrant or a family of color would decide that it’s safe to come out from hiding. “That is not an obvious switch that flips,” he said. “So some of these acute impacts may end up becoming long-term impacts.”
When the state casts around for ways to recoup these economic losses, they are likely going to go to the very signatories of this open letter and the businesses they run. “We’re going to have to find the resources somewhere,” Schweitzer said. “Our state budget is already under intense strain from that very bill, because of Medicaid and SNAP cuts and administrative burdens on our cities.”
The Prospect asked signatories to the letter whether they would be willing to contribute to a fund to offset Minnesota’s costs from the immigration surge they effectively enabled by backing OBBBA. None of them said they would. The $3.5 million in grants from the Minneapolis Foundation’s Economic Response Fund, which several signatories contributed to, is less than one-tenth the amount of donations given after George Floyd’s killing in 2020, and too small to cover the economic loss in the state from the federal activity.
Said Schweitzer: “I don’t expect to see them lining up and offering.”
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