While local journalists in Minneapolis are no strangers to covering difficult news, protests and civil unrest, it’s been a long season in the city.
“We’ve had political assassinations. We had a multi-fatality school shooting, and now the largest immigration crackdown in American history has all happened in Minneapolis in the last eight months,” said Liz Sawyer, a reporter at The Minnesota Star Tribune. “So people are generally exhausted and overwhelmed both in the newsroom and in the community.”
The intensity of the moment — marked by the federal immigration enforcement surge and the fatal shootings of two Minneapolis residents by federal agents — has stretched local newsrooms in ways that feel distinct from past crises. Journalists who reported on the mass protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 said that they’ve applied the lessons from that period — about safety, verification and community trust — to the current moment.
To prepare, Sahan Journal and the Star Tribune invested in tactical gear like eye protection and gas masks to protect journalists on the ground. Sawyer said her team was in a hostile environment training the day before federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti after he tried to help a woman the agents had pushed to the ground. AP visual journalist Mark Vancleave, who was with the Star Tribune when Floyd was killed and is a Minneapolis resident, also said he relied on tactical gear and partnering with colleagues to protect himself while reporting in the field.
Some of the differences between 2020 and now are obvious. When Floyd was killed, the country was in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no vaccine, the city was mostly shut down and people were afraid to leave their homes. Today, Minneapolis schools and businesses are mostly open. Even as whole groups in the community are afraid to leave their homes, daily life continues, unevenly and under strain.
A vehicle with a broken window sits in the street after federal officers removed the passengers on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Floyd’s killing was the catalyst for a boiling over of longstanding tensions between the community and local law enforcement. The unrest that followed was Minneapolis’ reckoning with itself and its own history of racial inequity and policing. The current moment is different: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement force, deployed at the direction of the president, operating inside the city but largely outside of local control.
That distinction became clear in early December, when the federal government launched “Operation Metro Surge,” with the intent to detain and deport Somali immigrants — a community that President Donald Trump referred to as “garbage” and said he does not want in the country. Minnesota is home to more than 80,000 Somali immigrants, most of whom have legal status or are U.S. citizens. Minnesota Public Radio reported that officials initially expected about 100 federal agents in the Twin Cities and surrounding areas.
The move immediately put the community and local newsrooms on alert, and the situation has only escalated since.
“Day to day, we’re on alert that breaking news can happen,” said Joey Peters, the politics and government reporter for Sahan Journal, which focuses on reporting for the immigrant community and communities of color in the Twin Cities. “We expect breaking news to happen any day, multiple times a day.”
The current federal presence — 3,000 officers in the Twin Cities and surrounding areas — feels outsized to Andrew Hazzard, also a reporter for the Sahan Journal.
“The scale of this presence of federal agents in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities is so insanely disproportionate to the size of our community in general, the size of our immigrant communities in particular,” Hazzard said. “We’re not Chicago or Houston or certainly not New York or LA. We’re not some massive, massive city.”
Another difference is time. After Floyd was murdered, the community response was almost immediate, and the worst of the clashes lasted for about four days.
“It very, very quickly escalated where we had civil unrest and widespread property damage and fires that engulfed a huge, important business corridor in our city,” Sawyer said. “Whole neighborhoods went without grocery stores and pharmacies, and it was scary.”
Sawyer recalled seeing neighbors use garden hoses to douse their lawns and homes in an effort to protect their property.
This time, the pressure has been slower and more sustained. For nearly two months, ICE’s presence has weighed on the Twin Cities, reshaping daily life and the rhythm of news coverage.
“I think what’s different about this — it has that same sort of sense of righteous rage — but it feels much more like an occupation currently,” Hazzard said.
Federal agents patrol a street, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)
ICE’s presence has touched nearly every facet of life in the Twin Cities. “There’s so many newsworthy events happening around us at all times currently that one of the biggest challenges for me personally is just trying to decide, OK, what’s a story that I can get out today?” Hazzard said.
At Minnesota Public Radio, every journalist is working on stories related to the ICE presence. “It’s been all hands on deck,” said Matt Sepic, a correspondent for MPR News. Reporters that cover local health and education are covering how ICE is affecting these components.
Sawyer said the same dynamic is happening at the Star Tribune. “The crackdown touches every single beat. I mean, it’s affecting local business, it’s affecting tourism. It spans way beyond public safety. And so we’ve all been involved to varying degrees, and we’re trying to take care of each other.”
Another stark difference in this moment is the sheer breadth of misinformation and disinformation — “information warfare,” in Sepic’s words.
“What we’re dealing with now is just an onslaught of lies and disinformation,” he said.
Even though there were multiple angles of verified video in both the shooting death of Renee Macklin Good, a mother and poet, and the shooting death of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, federal officials have denied the circumstances surrounding their killings and offered accounts that conflict with what journalists have been able to independently substantiate.
“The highest levels of the United States government were engaging in a disinformation campaign to smear them as domestic terrorists,” Sepic said. “And as journalists that’s not something that we’re used to having to deal with, and we’re covering it this time.”
Sawyer said another challenge newsrooms are having to navigate is the proliferation of manipulated and AI-generated photos and videos circulating online.
“We didn’t have AI deepfakes back then,” she said, referring to coverage of Floyd’s murder. “We suddenly have this new element to untangle, which is that you can very easily manipulate an image and convince people on the internet, especially those who are not here, that it’s real. And even the White House is doing it.”
At the Star Tribune, video footage is verified and reverified before publication. In many cases, that includes tracking down the person who filmed the video, interviewing them and having a newsroom staffer with metadata expertise review the file for signs of manipulation. And then the video still has to clear editors and managers before it runs.
“We’re not just going to strip something from the internet that’s posted by some anonymous name and publish that,” Sawyer said.
Sepic said the moment is unprecedented — one in which Americans can no longer rely on federal institutions the way they once did, forcing journalists to rethink how they approach their reporting.
“I think the biggest lesson now — and too many news organizations have been pulling punches for too long as we’ve seen this rising tide of authoritarianism in this country — is we can’t be afraid to say that the government is lying when the government is lying, because that’s the whole point of the First Amendment and why the framers put it there.”
