Operation Metro Surge is a large, ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota, launched in December 2025, that surges federal immigration agents into the Twin Cities and later the whole state to locate, arrest and remove noncitizens whom DHS characterizes as worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens. It is not created by a special statute; it is an ICE enforcement initiative carried out under existing Immigration and Nationality Act authorities that let DHS investigate, arrest, detain and remove people who are removable under federal immigration law, including:
DHS press releases describe Operation Metro Surge as focused on arresting noncitizens with criminal convictions or charges in Minnesota, particularly in jurisdictions it labels as sanctuary because they limit cooperation with ICE.
An ICE arrest detainer is a written request from ICE to another law-enforcement agency asking it to:
Legal basis:
State governors and city mayors do not control federal immigration enforcement, but they do control their own officers and jails. Under the anti-commandeering doctrine of the Tenth Amendment, the federal government generally cannot force state or local officials to carry out federal programs.
As a result, states and cities can lawfully adopt sanctuary or limit-cooperation policies that, for example:
Congresss research arm and legal scholars have concluded that, absent a specific federal law commanding a state action (which would itself be constitutionally suspect), states and municipalities have broad discretion to refuse to use their own resources to help enforce federal immigration law.
After an ICE arrest like those described:
Criminal charges for the underlying conduct (like DUI or theft) are handled separately in criminal courts; immigration proceedings are civil.
DHSs Worst of the Worst initiative is a public-facing branding and database, not a program created by a specific statute. Through the Arrested: Worst of the Worst website (wow.dhs.gov) and related press releases, DHS selects and highlights noncitizens arrested by ICE whom it characterizes as the most serious criminal illegal aliens. Entries typically include the persons name, country of origin, location of arrest, and a list of criminal convictions or charges.
DHS has not published transparent, formal criteria for how it chooses who is listed as worst of the worst. In practice, the site and releases emphasize people with serious or multiple criminal convictions (such as homicide, sexual offenses, gang-related assaults, or serious drug crimes), but independent reviews of the database note that it also includes many individuals with less serious or nonviolent offenses, suggesting that selection is discretionary and driven by agency messaging priorities rather than a codified legal standard.
In the Minnesota press releases, DHS states that Governor Walz and Mayor Frey have released nearly 470 criminal illegal aliens and that there are more than 1,360 people with ICE detainers in state custody, but it does not provide the underlying dataset or methodology.
Those figures appear to come from internal ICE tracking of detainer requests and outcomes. Publicly available ICE statistics summarize national and sometimes regional arrests, detainers, and removals, but they do not break out these specific Minnesota counts or link them to decisions by particular state or local officials. Independent media and researchers have noted they cannot verify the 470 and 1,360 numbers against any detailed public database.
As of now, the specific case-level data behind these Minnesota figures are not published, so the numbers in the DHS releases cannot be independently confirmed using public sources.