The morning after the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, “I voted” stickers peppered the memorials of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota. The sticker-laden tributes serve as a stark reminder that although the cruelty of U.S. immigration enforcement operations in 2025 and 2026 have largely disappeared from the news cycle, their legacy remains. During Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, one-in-four residents who interacted with federal agents reported physical assault. Federal agents drew weapons on approach in nearly 40% of interactions and just after approach in a further 30%. The majority of people arrested (64%) had no criminal history, and over 1,000 lawsuits challenging detentions have been filed with nearly 90% resulting in court-ordered releases. These excessive and unlawful uses of force also assumed an inhumane character at times: a five-year-old and his father with legal immigration status were arrested, and a U.S. citizen was taken from his home without a warrant, paraded unclothed in the freezing Minnesota temperatures.
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The traditional American emphasis on freedom from government intervention – even at the expense of providing “positive freedoms” such as healthcare – makes those infringements of personal liberties particularly difficult to reconcile. The violation of foundational protections against arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killing by the state are especially incongruous. That these events occurred in the name of border security, 1,520 miles from the Southern border, is another reason to consider how this could happen. The few explanations presented so far are generally underdeveloped, incomplete, or one-dimensional. They tend to implicitly attribute the cruelty of Operation Metro Surge to President Trump’s alleged authoritarian tendencies or the frequently discussed militarization of ICE. However, under scrutiny, these explanations alone prove insufficient.
Explanations centered on Trump’s alleged authoritarian tendencies do not account for why similar operations have not occurred under other governments also characterized as authoritarian. India under Narendra Modi provides a case in point: Modi declared that 1.9 million undocumented Muslims were ineligible for refugee status and faced imminent detention, and he has deployed the military against citizens in the Kashmir region. Yet, Modi’s government has not carried out an immigration operation comparable to Operation Metro Surge. This suggests that authoritarian tendencies, even in combination with aggressive anti-immigration policies and a willingness to deploy force against civilians, cannot fully account for the extent of actions in the U.S. Explanations centered only on the militarization of U.S. immigration enforcement are also incomplete. That militarization significantly predates both Trump administrations and therefore does not fully explain why Operation Metro Surge occurred at all, nor why it did not occur during the first Trump administration.
Considering those factors in combination with other key factors through a lens that takes into account both cultural and political-economic factors can offer a more comprehensive explanation. Specifically, multiple conditions seem to have converged: militarized immigration enforcement institutions, decades of cultural discourse that securitized and dehumanized immigrants, record levels of unauthorized border crossings, and the leadership of Trump and his loyalist appointees. The result was a perfect storm. Some of these conditions had developed gradually over decades and under both U.S. political parties; others were more recent developments.
There were several slow-forming conditions which evolved over decades but were accelerated by Trump. The discursive framing of immigrants as national security threats – particularly since the aftermath of 9/11 made otherwise extraordinary actions, such as the deployment of 4,000 heavily armed federal troops into Minneapolis suburbs, conceivable. The dehumanisation of immigrants weakened people’s moral constraints against using force on those targeted by immigration enforcement. At the same time, the institutional capacity to carry out such actions had developed over decades. Both ICE and CBP report directly to the President and are relatively insulated from congressional and public constraints. Both were also increasingly militarized over several years by Democratic and Republican administrations. With budgets that exceed those of most national militaries, these features have made it possible over decades for those enforcement agencies to function like an executive’s army.
What changed in 2025 was who was positioned to act on these pre-existing factors. Trump accelerated these conditions and, in his second term, appointed anti-immigration loyalists who often demonstrated a willingness to resort to force. It was the combination of these pre-existing factors and Trump’s willingness to mobilize them in pursuit of an exceptionally restrictive immigration policy that drove the violent and cruel implementation of Operation Metro Surge.
The significance of this convergence is not that liberal democracies are inevitably vulnerable to any single anti-democratic actor, but rather that rights protections can erode when multiple, mutually reinforcing conditions converge in particular ways. One could argue that, given his acceleration of these conditions, Trump was a trigger and therefore the causal factor, but such an argument ignores the fact that the institutional capacity to carry out such actions already existed, and it remains in place for a future leader to exploit.
This reality ties into a commonly discussed concept in security studies: a threat can be understood as a combination of both an actor’s capabilities and their estimated intentions. Intentions are inherently uncertain and changeable, and therefore impossible to ascertain with complete confidence. Capabilities, by contrast, are more observable and relatively stable. Regardless of an actor’s intentions, the institutional capabilities they help build and mobilize can outlast them, remaining available for future actors to exploit. This distinction helps frame both what made Operation Metro Surge possible and what needs to be considered to prevent similar operations in the future. Arguments centered solely on Trump’s intentions or his characteristics as a political actor, however accurate and well-founded, address only one side of the equation. The other is the domestic enforcement capability the U.S. had accumulated by 2025 through ICE and CBP, which any future administration will inherit.
Taking Operation Metro Surge seriously suggests that preserving liberty may require not only eternal vigilance, but also the capacity to anticipate how existing capabilities can be harnessed by actors with particular intentions to erode protections once considered secure. The voters who left their stickers at the memorials after casting their midterm ballots were expressing their opinion about who should and shouldn’t hold that capability next. Whether anyone should hold it in its current form, however, is a question the new U.S. Congress can not avoid.
Harper Dunne is a research intern at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Stockholm, Sweden, and works as a contract researcher for Stichting Vluchteling (the Netherlands Refugee Foundation). Her research focuses include security studies, migration, human rights, and the relationship between state power and democratic accountability. She recently completed an MSc in Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs.