“I’m taking this risk because I know we have to fight hard to make changes that we need, to make changes that we deserve,” said Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, a Minnesota labor organizer who was abducted by ICE on January 9 during Operation Metro Surge. He was giving testimony at the Minnesota Truth Council on August 21, one of numerous people speaking about the ordeals they went through as a result of the federal crackdown.

On March 25, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order creating the “Governor’s Council to Record the Truth of Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS,” also known as the Minnesota Truth Council. The goal of the Truth Council is to produce a historical record of experiences of Operation Metro Surge that will include a report with findings and recommendations for policymakers. Orozco Verdusco gave his testimony to the Truth Council at an event hosted by the Advocates for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization located in Minnesota that has been collecting stories since mid-May.

Orozco Verdusco said that when he first learned about Operation Metro Surge, he didn’t leave his house for more than 20 days. “I left because I had a work meeting. I was followed just a few blocks from our home. They followed me for about eight miles before pulling me over and arresting me,” said Orozco Verdusco.

He says the next day they were flown to Texas. “After 72 hours we were told we could talk to our families which didn’t happen. Three or four days later we had the opportunity to talk to them for three minutes. Only three minutes,” he said. Three weeks later, they were moved to New Mexico. “During that move, we were given no food, no drinks, all day and night,” he continued. “They stopped at a gas station. They got food, they got drinks, they ate and drank in front of us. They said when we arrived we would be given food and drinks. Well it was not that way. It wasn’t until the next morning that we could have breakfast. Finally we could call our families and talk for a little bit longer. When I talked to my family they told me my lawyer had presented a habeas corpus which had been denied. Every time I had an opportunity to talk to my family, they were telling me stories about people, organizations, communities, supporting me.”

Orozco Verdusco was released in June after being in detention for almost six months. In May, a federal judge ordered that anyone who was in the process of obtaining a T or U visa should be taken out of detention. A T or U visa enables immigrants who are victims of trafficking to remain in the U.S. for a period of time and grants them protections. Because Orozco Verdusco and his wife are in the process of getting a T visa, he was released. “This is a bad moment we are living in, but it’s going to be better because of the people that live here,” he said. “I’m thankful to all those who prayed for me to come back, to join my family again.”

The event where Orozco Verdusco spoke took place at the first ever Convergence for Democracy at the Minneapolis Convention Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minn. The Convergence, hosted by Tending the Soil and co-sponsored by May Day Strong and Freedom Trainers, served as a national gathering for labor, community, faith, and legal advocates devoted to defending democracy in a moment of increasing authoritarianism and fascism. Speakers iterated that defending democracy means defending each other. The gathering was full of learning and trading resistance stories, and the opposition and resistance to Operation Metro Surge was highlighted in many of those stories. 

Six more people testified to the Truth Council at the Convergence, including Christin Crabtree, a grassroots community organizer and Minneapolis resident and parent who cofounded Minneapolis Families for Public Schools. She gave testimony about the day ICE swarmed upon Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis on January 7, which was also the day ICE shot and killed Renee Good.

Crabtree says that she was at work the day that Renee Good was killed, and she had not planned to be at school dismissal, but showed up anyways. As students were exiting, a convoy of SUVs stopped in front of the main entrance of the school. “I ran faster than I ever had in my life,” said Crabtree. “I saw masked men with giant guns and in my mind visualized what had happened to Renee Good just hours before. Agents tackled our educators, aimed guns at our kids, and used chemical agents on our community, on our kids who were just trying to go home. I was mere inches from Greg Bovino. I remember the sound of a gun being cocked.”

Crabtree referenced the detention of Quentin Williams, an assistant teacher at Roosevelt who is now pursuing a lawsuit against the federal government after being tackled by agents. “He was a Black man being attacked by militarized police as high school students bore witness,” said Crabtree. “I felt echoes of 2020.”

Gabby Benavente Hobart is an educator at a high school in North Minneapolis working with Spanish-speaking students who are learning English and math. After the 2024 election, educators organized meetings to develop safety protocols for what to do if ICE showed up at school. “Still this preparation would not prepare us for the scale of the horror that was about to unfold,” said Benavente Hobart in her testimony to the Truth Council. “I am deeply grateful to my fellow educators at my side and in my union as well as community members in all walks of life.”

She recalled how one student apologized for having to log out of Zoom because ICE was in the street nearby. She shared how she consoled a mother whose son and husband were detained and separated by ICE. “To this day I think of him, how he was denied the joy of walking alongside classmates during graduation.”

Matt Allen is a local hip hop artist who goes by Nur-D. He gave testimony about his ICE detention after attending a protest after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. 

“I watched on my phone as Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood,” Allen said. “When I went out to have my voice be heard, I was attacked violently from behind by more than half a dozen men with guns who threw me to the street. They beat my body, they sprayed acid in my face, they told me I was being arrested for assaulting an officer, a charge I have yet to see.”

Allen said agents put him in a vehicle and he was released later. “We are living the worst case scenario,” he said. “What are you willing to do to stop it? They are killing people. And they will continue to capture and kill people not because a law says they can, but because they want to.”

Garrison Gibson Brown gave testimony about his arrest and time in ICE detention. Gibson Brown said he was born in Liberia, that he has resided in the U.S. since four years old, and that he has been checking in with ICE regularly since 2009. He said on January 11, his family was woken up by ICE agents who had entered his house without a warrant and broke down the front door. The agents cuffed him in front of his family.

“After being at Whipple for a couple hours, the next morning they put some of us on a plane and sent us to Texas,” said Gibson Brown. “It was no better in Texas than it was at Whipple. The cells were dirty, the [correctional officers] they talk to you like you’re not human.”

On the day ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, civil rights attorney Nicole Salonek Schladt was at Powderhorn Park bringing her child to therapy when she saw three large SUVs in the parking lot surrounded by masked agents. She approached the vehicles and noticed three teens huddled in the back seats. “They were all my children at that moment,” she said.

After an ICE agent told her to get out of the way, she began walking alongside the vehicle from a distance when another agent approached her from behind. “A gun appeared less than 12 inches from my face. I had no time to react, no time to panic,” she said. “The agent shot me in the face at point blank rage with what I learned were two projectile pepper balls. Everything went black. When I came to, lying in the snow, I could hardly breathe, I could hardly think.”

She vomited, removed all of her clothes, and was frothing at the mouth. “A park employee ushered me out of the cold into the rec center, a street medic emerged from literally nowhere and began flushing my eyes, a neighbor brought me a sheet and held it around my naked body,” she said. Her child’s therapist did breathing exercises and several people offered to share video recordings of the incident. It was then that they received news about Good’s killing.

“Another queer white woman, a mother like me, was dead, and I by the grace of God or something was not,” she said. Although she was alive, she experienced the impact of being shot by pepper balls, and was later diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and cervical radiculopath that gave her nerve pain throughout her arms and hands. “My nail beds and scalp blistered,” she said. “I learned intimately why pepper ball projectiles are prohibited as chemical weapons in international armed conflict.”

Benjamin gave testimony about his father who was detained and deported during Operation Metro Surge. He says he grew up in Honduras learning about movements for equality in the U.S. He says his father was often working with Fe y Justicia, a nonprofit in central Minnesota that provides training and clinics for community members. On January 10, Benjamin says his father was driving when he was pulled over and his seatbelt was cut and he was abducted by masked men. After being detained, he was moved to Texas where his attorney had no jurisdiction, and then they moved him to New Mexico. “During the 43 days my dad spent in detention he tried to stay sane, he held back his tears because he did not want us to worry,” he says.

Eventually, his father was deported to Honduras. “When someone comes from a country where access to healthcare, freedom of speech is limited, I cannot blame my dad for wanting something different,” he said. “I’m not here to pretend my dad did not overstay his visa. I’m here to tell you that breaking an immigration rule should not take someone’s humanity away. Behind every case number, there is a person and behind them is a family loving them and waiting for them to be treated as a human being.”

Formed in 2018, Tending the Soil is an alignment of nonprofits and labor organizations in the Twin Cities that includes CTUL, Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia/Renters United for Justice, New Justice Project, SEIU Local 26, and Unidos MN. Cat Salonek Schladt, executive director of Tending the Soil, said that the goal of the conference was to build the national movement to resist authoritarianism. “We sit in the reality that the government is fueled by corporate greed that is killing everything in this young country,” she said in the opening plenary.

Ricardo Levins Morales, visual artist, organizer, and author based in Minneapolis, whose work inspired the name Tending the Soil, spoke during the closing plenary at the Convergence. “What we live under is a system for whom the basic hardline non-negotiable is the permanence of a permanent underclass. It cannot survive without that,” said Levins Morales. “Waves of movement ebb and flow, but they can still be part of a rising tide. People can often get really scared when a movement ebbs away and think, ‘oh it’s over now,’ when it could sometimes only be the first wave of a rising tide that will continue to climb. That’s what we’ve been experiencing.”

Author Info

Amie Stager is the Associate Editor for Workday Magazine.