ICE Is Strangling the Minneapolis Economy
President Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, announced Thursday that Operation Metro Surge—the violent occupation of Minneapolis and surrounding regions by DHS kidnapping squads—was going to end. At a minimum, it’s unclear how honest Homan was being; if the Minneapolis city council is any judge, ICE kidnappings were still ongoing Thursday, and Homan said that some officers would remain. On Wednesday, one particularly violent kidnapping in St. Paul left three cars wrecked and someone being taken out in an ambulance.
Given the Trump administration’s outrageous dishonesty about every possible subject, it would be wise to assume that the occupation—with kidnapping squads regularly snatching people off the streets, with cars full of ICE goons hanging menacingly around workplaces, schools, and even day cares—will continue until proven otherwise.
It follows that a substantial fraction of the Twin Cities population will keep staying at home for fear of being black-bagged and deported, quite possibly to one of the most infamous torture dungeons in history: the “Black Beach” in Equatorial Guinea. Bars, restaurants, and other venues are seeing serious declines in business, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods.
It’s a localized economic heart attack not unlike the one that hit the planet in March 2020. And if ICE really is leaving Minneapolis, it’s a safe bet that another city will be swarming with kidnappers soon.
Recall that the coronavirus pandemic caused probably the sharpest economic contraction in world history. In just one month, the American economy lost about 20 million jobs, and the unemployment rate soared to 14.8 percent. The reason is that a modern economy is built on a heavy circulation of money—your income is my spending, and vice versa. When cities locked down and everyone who could stayed home, a huge share of economic activity vanished overnight.
Of course, Trump’s artificial lockdowns are not hitting everywhere in the country at once—such an effort would take millions if not tens of millions of MAGA storm troopers—but it’s still hitting a notably shaky national economy, and this time there are no pandemic relief packages on the horizon.
Coincidentally, the latest revisions to the 2025 jobs numbers are in, and they show that the economy was much, much weaker last year than it seemed at the time. The January survey showed a halfway decent 130,000 new jobs, but revisions reduced total job creation last year from 584,000 to just 181,000.
There is little sign as yet of an actual recession happening. But the economy is plainly much cooler than it was last year, let alone during the peak of the Biden boom. In 2024, there were 1.46 million jobs created; in 2022, there were 6.27 million. As a rule, the economy is either growing or shrinking; if the process of circulation slows down enough, it usually begins to snowball, as layoffs lead to reduced spending, more layoffs, less investment, and so on.
It isn’t just Minnesota, either. My colleague David Dayen reported back in August that ICE’s attack on Los Angeles—which was considerably less brutal than what is happening to the Twin Cities—caused considerable economic problems. The Wall Street Journal reports that in South Texas, builders are struggling to finish constructing their developments, because workers fearing deportation are not showing up: “Nationally, a third of commercial contractors reported being affected by immigration-enforcement actions in the past six months, according to a January report by trade group Associated General Contractors of America.”
There is a similar story happening in agriculture, with many farmers worrying that they won’t be able to get the spring planting in because of a worker shortage. Farm owners will likely be bailed out with subsidies from Trump, as they were in his last term, but that won’t replace farmworker spending in the economy, or deliver food to American shelves.
All this is adding up—and Trump is not helping matters with the rest of his deranged policy agenda. Firing tens of thousands of government workers is another blow to the economy, particularly around Washington, D.C. The on-again, off-again tariff war has severely dented business confidence and led to a serious pullback in investment, as well as raised prices for many items. Things are particularly bad in manufacturing and the car industry, which had made major investments and plans based on Biden’s green industrial policy, only for Trump to pull the rug out from under them. Ford had to write off a $19.5 billion EV investment; Stellantis a $26.5 billion one. Manufacturing employment has shrunk by 83,000 under Trump.
It is simply staggering how gratuitous all this is. It is well known by now that for the last 40 years, Democratic presidents have turned in better economic performances than Republican ones. Some of that can be chalked up to bad luck—George W. Bush happened to be in the chair when the financial crisis hit, while Trump has his turn when COVID struck (though both bungled the response). But now we have a president who was handed a thriving economy on a silver platter and ruined it for no remotely rational reason. The post-pandemic inflation goat was through the snake, as it were; job creation and growth were both ticking along nicely. Had Trump done nothing, he likely would be presiding over a Goldilocks economy and gotten credit for a success he had nothing to do with, just as he did in 2018-2019. But no.
Swing voters who broke for Trump because of inflation, take note: He and the rest of the Republican Party are job-killing maniacs who will ruin the economy to make one of the whitest states in the country even more pale.
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