On a warm Thursday evening in late April, a south Minneapolis brewery hosted a fundraiser for Juntos Podemos, a volunteer mutual aid group that has been helping immigrant families with groceries and rent. Music played, neighbors bid on silent-auction items and organizers tracked donations by hand.
Juntos Podemos had set a $20,000 goal. By nightfall they had raised about $15,000 — a welcome sum, but roughly $5,000 short of what they’d hoped for.
That gap reflects a larger trend since Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement campaign that swept parts of Minneapolis earlier this year. The operation, which ended in February after thousands of arrests, upended many immigrant households and sparked a wave of community giving and volunteerism. But as the immediate crisis faded from headlines, donations and volunteer hours have dropped sharply even though needs remain.
Masked ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents are no longer conducting high-profile raids, and neighborhood networks that once stood ready to warn families have relaxed. Still, many immigrants are far from recovered. Dozens of people who spoke with local organizers and reporters say they lost work during the enforcement operation, fell behind on bills, and continue to struggle to make rent.
Anaí Tepozteco, a Juntos Podemos co-founder, said the group still receives requests for groceries and rent help every week. ‘We want to keep assisting families with groceries but also families who are behind with rent,’ she said as she checked the fundraiser tracker. Tepozteco and other mutual aid organizers worry that donor fatigue will leave a gap in support just when household debts and eviction risks are rising.
HOME Line, a Minnesota tenant advocacy nonprofit, reported a 26 percent increase in eviction filings in Minneapolis in April compared with the same month last year. That spike has heightened urgency for rent-relief efforts that sprang up when enforcement activity was at its height.
Sulia Altenberg, who helped organize rent relief in her Powderhorn neighborhood, described how community giving surged in February and March, sometimes bringing in as much as $10,000 in a single day. Her effort distributed funds that paid rent for more than 230 households and she says two local foundations contributed about $300,000 in April — money that covered rent for more than 60 families.
But donations have dwindled and the neighborhood fund’s account is effectively empty. ‘It’s all gone,’ Altenberg said. Small donations now trickle in; sometimes it’s just a few dollars overnight. With fewer volunteers and limited cash, she is worried about how long the local effort can continue.
Alexandria Guzman Gomez runs a separate rent-relief initiative in Minneapolis that has disbursed more than $1.5 million in aid. She says the community is exhausted. Volunteers have returned to work and school, and many donors no longer have the capacity to give. Rising costs for food and gas are compounding the problem. Since the onset of conflict in the Middle East this year, local gas prices climbed above $4 a gallon, compared with under $3 a few months earlier, and grocery prices have risen as well.
Gomez, who plans to begin graduate school in social work this fall, expects her own volunteer time to wind down. She hopes others will step forward, but acknowledges that people have jobs, families and limited resources. ‘There is still a huge need for relief and support in the Twin Cities,’ she said.
Some individual households illustrate the precarious situation. Paola, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, said she stopped working and went into hiding for two months during the enforcement operation after her husband was deported last August. Without steady pay, Paola says she fell behind on bills and still owes money to the smugglers who brought the family to the U.S. She worries about covering rent and utilities while trying to rebuild income.
Organizers say mutual aid continues in Minneapolis, with neighbors sharing food, gas money and referrals, but the scale is smaller than during the surge. Many groups are scaling back distributions and rationing limited funds. Leaders warn that short-term emergency donations helped avert disaster for hundreds of families, but sustained assistance will be necessary for people still recovering from lost wages, mounting debt and the trauma of enforcement activity.
For now, volunteer groups are stretching resources as far as possible and planning smaller fundraisers. Some organizers hope renewed media attention or institutional support will emerge to refill coffers; others are preparing to triage requests and prioritize the most urgent cases.
The reporting for this story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.