On Monday, Mar. 16, Swarthmore’s department of peace and conflict studies hosted “All Hats on at the Same Time: Research, Activism, and Resistance in Central Minnesota,” a talk featuring political scientist Pedro dos Santos. Dos Santos, who is an associate professor of political science at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota, delivered a comprehensive — and at times deeply personal — account of belligerent federal immigration enforcement in the state and the grassroots resistance it sparked.
Dos Santos opened by acknowledging that his talk would not focus on its initially slated topic. He had been invited to speak on women’s issues in Brazil but felt compelled to change the subject following the events that unfolded in Minnesota earlier this year.
“Ideally, I wouldn’t be here talking about this,” he said, “but the time is now.” The shift in topic, he noted, also aligned more naturally with the priorities of the college’s peace and conflict studies department.
Federal action in Minnesota has primarily taken the form of Operation Metro Surge, a sweeping federal interior enforcement campaign, which has deployed roughly 3,000 federal agents since November 2025. Over the course of the following months, the Department of Homeland Security has made more than 4,000 arrests in the state. The city of Minneapolis alone has reported at least $203.1 million in losses related to human security, encompassing livelihood, shelter, food security, and mental health within a single month. The killings of two citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, also took place as part of these operations. Dos Santos cited documented evidence of both violent and illegal conduct by federal officers, as well as racial profiling.
The scale of the operations becomes clearer when mapped onto the demographics of Central Minnesota, a region with an estimated 750,000 residents that has seen higher population growth in recent census data, largely driven by foreign-born migration, even as the domestic-born population has declined. Somali communities are a notable and growing presence, representing 19% of the population in Waite Park, 14% in Pelican Rapids, and 11% in Saint Cloud. Dos Santos noted that 90-92% of Somalis in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, which made the targeting of those communities all the more alarming to residents early on.
Dos Santos’ unique perspective derived from his three overlapping roles in the immigration conflict, which he referred to as his “hats:” he is a scholar of Brazilian immigration in Minnesota, a board member of Fe y Justicia (a nonprofit serving the Latine immigrant community in Central Minnesota), and a concerned Minnesotan who has been personally involved in resistance to federal operations. His account of a face-to-face interaction with an ICE agent was one of the talk’s most striking moments.
Dos Santos was in Belton, near Saint John’s campus, when a convoy of seven federal vehicles arrived at a trailer park on private property. The agents knocked on doors, looked through windows, and tried door handles without a judicial warrant. Dos Santos, who was there to monitor and alert the community, approached one of the agents.
“I asked him if he had a warrant,” he recounted. “He said he didn’t have one but asked me for my papers.” Dos Santos told the agent he had his papers but would not show them. “There was a face of anger on this guy that is still in my mind,” he said.
A supervisor soon intervened, calm and clearly trained, and explained they had an arrest warrant for a specific individual, not a judicial warrant permitting entry. Dos Santos said the exchange was tense. He spoke candidly about the gravity of the situation: “What am I supposed to get into? What does my family get from this? That first guy, things could have gone sideways [with him] really quickly.”
During the following weeks, he frequently returned to that trailer park and others like it, sometimes daily. The visits from federal agents continued for roughly three weeks, eventually shifting to workplaces when early-morning raids at residences yielded few results. This move significantly disrupted Minnesota residents’ ability to get to work as usual. “These are people at work. They’re not just hanging out,” dos Santos said.
Organized resistance in Central Minnesota emerged from relatively little pre-existing infrastructure, dos Santos explained. Encrypted messaging apps provided a platform for an impromptu network of volunteers who monitored federal activity and alerted vulnerable communities in real time. A small corps of data scientists, recent college graduates among them, began crowdsourcing and cleaning incident reports, eventually creating public dashboards. A community-built dispatch app developed in Minnesota now tracks sightings and patterns of federal immigration enforcement agents.
As of early March, the data showed 799 total confirmed ICE sightings, with a concentration between January and mid-February, after which activity began to decline. In Central Minnesota specifically, 54 confirmed incidents were recorded.
Dos Santos was also candid about the difficulty of sustaining the movement, particularly in smaller towns with residents who are newer to civic organizing. He described training frameworks he developed with a colleague, Pastor Eden Mercedes, designed to ease community members into participation without demanding too much.
“You figure out, not today but later, what you think you can do to help,” he said, describing the approach. “Some days you may not want to do that, and that’s okay.”
He ended with a reflection on what he called a “dual state,” drawing on political theory that describes a normative state operating alongside a parallel structure that exercises unchecked force. The visibility of that dynamic, he argued, depends on proximity. Those insulated by neighborhood, skin color, or citizenship status can move through daily life without ever witnessing what is happening blocks or miles away, according to dos Santos.
“I could go to work and not see ICE,” he said. “The second situation [the “dual state” scenario] allows people to not see what’s happening, even when they live right there.” For dos Santos, the act of being present at sites of injustice, of being a disturbance to federal agents who know their conduct is illegal, is itself meaningful. “Every single time that we show up,” he said, “that matters.”
The event was organized by the department of peace and conflict studies as part of its ongoing effort to bring scholars and practitioners into conversation with the Swarthmore community on urgent political questions.
