‘Operation Metro Surge’ to end in Minnesota

0:00WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I'm not going to remove everybody, all the state's order of officers, but like I said, Operation Metro Service is ending. Border czar Tom Homan says the administration is wrapping up its special operation in Minnesota. But ICE is not leaving the Twin Cities.

0:34It's Thursday, February 12th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:43Today on the show, the government has locked up thousands of immigrant children, some for months at a time. One nine-year-old Colombian girl drew a portrait of herself and her mother in their government-issued uniforms. I think they're trying to process it in the way that they can as kids. life in immigration detention. Also, we'll get some insight into those special security reasons the government gave for temporarily grounding flights at the El Paso airport before they abruptly lifted the order. Long story short, sounds like a communications breakdown over the use of an anti-drone laser that ended up shooting down a party balloon.

1:24What you're seeing here is, I think, a difference of opinion between the FAA and any other departments here. on what it took to kind of check all the boxes to start using this weapon. Before we get to that story, though, the 10-week surge of federal immigration enforcement agents in Minnesota may be coming to a close. Tom Homan, who's in charge of border policy for the Trump administration, announced that Operation Metro Surge in and around the Twin Cities will end. For more on what that means, we called up Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Baxed. Here's his conversation with Indira Lakshmanan. So Borders are home and says he will stay in the Twin Cities as the operation draws down.

2:07What is the timeline for that drawdown? And are there already fewer federal agents visible on the streets? He says it's a small period of time that there will be extra people here. Some of them will be involved in making sure the security of the agents that are staying behind is in place. Others will be involved in continuing fraud investigations. but he says, by and large, the people will be moving out within the next week or so. We haven't necessarily seen the reduced presence on the streets. We still see chases. We still see agents showing up. Whether that changes in the next coming days is going to be something that Minnesotans are very paying close attention to.

2:47They met this with relief, also some wariness, because they feel like the past drawdown didn't really show itself. Hmm. Homan credited the operation with more than 4 ,000 arrests, and he said that agents are encountering fewer, quote, agitators on the streets. Let's listen to what else he said. We don't want to see any more bloodshed. I don't want to see any more bloodshed. I pray every night for the safety of law enforcement personnel and the safety of those in the community, whether you're here legally or illegally. I don't want to see anybody harmed. So, Brian, thousands of federal agents have swarmed and surged in your community.

3:27Reflecting on it, how are you going to remember this period? Well, it was one where Minnesota really stood up, and that's what the governor and other local officials are talking about, how there was the fear at the outset that there could be some rioting and some chaos, and we really haven't seen a lot of that. Of course, we did see two Minnesotans killed on the streets of Minneapolis, and we also saw the images that will endure probably beyond Minnesota was the five-year-old boy who was picked up in Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis, when they were looking for a parent of his. So those are the types of things that will really be the signals.

4:03And, of course, those whistles that people had to alert their neighbors to possible presence of ICE agents, those will be a symbol that people will really reflect on. Your governor, Tim Walz, held a presser today and said the long road to recovery starts now. The trauma that's been inflicted, certainly across an immigrant community, but to every single Minnesotan, is unlike anything we've witnessed. We've been through challenges. We've been through natural disasters. We've been through COVID. But this is something that I don't think any state has ever experienced. The governor is calling on the federal government to pay for damages that have been caused in the Twin Cities.

4:44What damages is he referring to, Brian? That's right. He said you don't get to break things and just leave. He's talking about the business hardships that have stacked up where some businesses closed, employees didn't show up. There were schools that saw reduced aid because students didn't want to go to class. So those are the types of things that he will be asking the federal government for, and he'll be asking state legislators to consider that when they're back in session next week. That's Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Bax. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome.

5:22Well, as we follow what the administration's announcements actually mean on the streets in Minneapolis and across the country, we're also keeping track of what happens to people detained by ICE, namely children. After the break, Indira takes a look inside the detention center in South Texas, where kids describe crowded, unsanitary, and depressing conditions. Stick around.

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7:11The father of Liam Conejo-Ramos says his five-year-old son suffered psychological trauma after the pair were seized by immigration agents in Minneapolis and shipped to a detention center in Texas. Father and son were released earlier this month after their case captured national attention. But there are many more kids like Liam. The Trump administration has detained thousands of children in its mass deportation campaign, including some kids as young as one or two years old, according to federal data. Many have been separated from their families and held for months on end in conditions described as cold, crowded, and unsanitary.

7:49Joining us now is Pro Publica reporter, Micah Rosenberg. Welcome, Micah. Thank you for having me. Micah, you communicated with dozens of detainees, half of them kids at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas. You managed to speak to some in person, also have video conversations, and some of the children even wrote you letters and sent you drawings. How did you manage to do that while they were under detention? Well, as you can imagine, it's complicated for detainees sometimes to communicate with the outside world. But they are able to make phone calls. I was able to connect with sort of an in-detention video messaging service and spoke to them that way.

8:30And some of them had access to email as well. And so through that correspondence, I was eventually able to arrange to visit a few of them in person in the center. And when I was there, I asked some of the mothers if their kids might be open to writing me letters. And ultimately, a detainee who had been released, brought out the physical copies of the letters and shared them with me. Okay. You managed to take video of some of your conversations. Here's nine-year-old Suze Fernandez from Venezuela, who was living in Houston when she and her mother were scooped up and detained and moved to this detention center.

9:15So in that video, she's saying she doesn't feel good because there are always officers around her. She can't even go to the bathroom alone. She also wrote you a letter saying that this experience changes her opinion of the United States. And she told you that she and her mom came to the U.S. looking for a good and safe place to live after the conditions in Venezuela. Is that a common refrain, or what else did the kids tell you about living in Dili? This is one surprising thing that came out in this reporting is that while this family detention center had been opened in previous administrations, in the past, it really was for recent border crossers.

9:56Now, in the second Trump administration, border crossings have fallen to record lows. And the center is really starting to fill up with more people who've been arrested around the country in these stepped-up ICE operations. So a lot of the kids I talked to, like Suzez, had been living here in the United States sometimes for years. Some of them spoke perfect English. They were in the middle of their high school years or their elementary school years and were really sort of taken out of their more established American lives. And what did they tell you about the conditions of living in this detention center?

10:33Well, a lot of the children told me that they were constantly sick. There was a lot of colds going around. I met one 18-month-old who had a serious respiratory infection, and she was hospitalized for more than a week. The kids also spoke about food that was repetitive. Some mothers told me that they found even worms or mold in the food. the company, CoreCivic, that runs the facility and the government have said that health and safety are their top priority, but that was the experience that the detainees described. Here's Alexander Perez, a 15-year-old from the Dominican Republic, sharing some advice for other detainees.

11:23So in that clip, he's urging others to be patient. He also told you about going to school at Dilley. What did he say? Well, he said that school in Dilley was really only an hour a day. If you didn't get there on time, you wouldn't get a spot. And then once you did get in, I heard that it was mostly sort of packets and worksheets and handouts. And Alexander, for example, who was a high school student, said the material was for much younger children than him. So it wasn't really stimulating. And ultimately, he stopped going. All right. Well, there's legal precedent in this country since the 90s that kids are not supposed to be held in detention for more than 20 days in such immigration cases.

12:06You found about 300 kids who were sent to Dili who had been held there for more than a month. Has the Trump administration said why it's ignoring that time limit precedent? Well, yes, you're exactly right that that sort of guideline of not holding children in immigration detention for longer than 20 days is from a longstanding legal settlement that's been in place for many years. The administration says that that settlement is outdated, and so they have tried to terminate that agreement. But this is still a battle that's raging in court. You have published many of the letters that you received from the kids.

12:44There were drawings of rainbows, of family members, really touching stuff, showing how they were feeling and their depression. What struck you about those letters? I was really struck at how the kids were able to be so articulate in some cases about what they were going through. They were really expressive about their feelings, but then also what they missed about their lives on the outside. As you mentioned, some drew really beautiful drawings. One nine-year-old Colombian girl drew a portrait of herself and her mother in their government-issued uniforms with their little government ID badges.

13:27So I think they're trying to process it in the way that they can as kids. Hmm. The Department of Homeland Security said that all the detainees there at Dilley are being provided with proper medical care, three meals a day, clean water. How do you square that with the testimony that you heard directly from so many of the migrants who are detained there? Well, I think that this facility, you know, they do say it's retrofitted for families. It's not like a typical adult detention center, which is much more restrictive and has, you know, they can move freely around. So I think the perspective of the administration is that this is an appropriate pace for families.

14:09I think for the detainees, a lot of the trouble that they were experiencing was just sort of the sheer number of people that were being detained at the same time. There were long lines, they said, to wait for medication and for medical care. There were long lines to wait to use the computer. I think the large number of detainees in that way has maybe exacerbated some of the conditions inside. So shortly after you visited Dilley, ICE released about 200 people from there all at once without any explanation. You were able to follow up with some of the kids who were released. What did they tell you?

14:46Yes, I most closely followed up with a family in Hicksville, New York, a 14-year-old and her mother originally from Honduras who I had met inside the center. after they had come to the United States. They had grown their family, and the mother had two small U.S. citizen children. And so when she and her older daughter were detained, she was separated from a kindergartner and a toddler. And so when they came back, the kindergartner said that he was afraid to go to school. He was worried that if he left, that his mother wouldn't be there when he went back. And we also followed up with the 14-year-old who went back to her high school, and she was speaking with the principal because she had been worried about falling behind because of all of the absences.

15:39Listeners will remember that during Donald Trump's first term, there was a widespread policy of separating children from their parents at the border when people tried to come across the U.S. border illegally. It turned out that there also had been some family separations under the Obama administration as well, although it had not been a systematic policy. There was national outrage, court cases. Now it seems like a system is emerging in which Trump is allowing for the long-term detention of kids with their parents. Is that better? Well, this is really the main message of the Trump administration and various officials has said, look, if you want to remain with your family, you can be deported together.

16:24They've explicitly said that they're not separating families, though some families who may have U.S. citizen children on the outside are being separated in different ways. So it turns out there are family separations because of mixed status families. All right, well, that's ProPublica reporter Micah Rosenberg. We will link to her story about kids in immigration detention at hereandnow.org. The story is called The Children of Dilley. Micah, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

17:01Coming up, what exactly happened over El Paso this week? The Federal Aviation Administration shut down the airspace there for special security reasons, and then just as abruptly lifted the order. Now it seems like it might just all have been a miscommunication involving a balloon. More after the break.

17:38Even if you're far from West Texas, you might have been shocked to hear earlier this week that the government was shutting down the airspace around the El Paso airport for 10 days. The The Trump administration said a drone operated by a Mexican cartel had raised alarms. We then learned Customs and Border Patrol officials used a laser system on loan from the Pentagon, which had not yet been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, to shoot something down. Only, it wasn't a drone, after all, but a party balloon, according to reporting by NPR. For more, we called up Dan LaMoth of the Washington Post.

18:20He told Robin Young the incident exposed an unsettling communications breakdown between the Pentagon, the FAA, and the Department of Homeland Security. Tuesday, we saw this unexpected announcement of the FAA closing the airspace. And really, it traces back to this temporary transfer of this laser system, which is getting at something that is a serious issue with, you know, kind of the proliferation of drones. And, you know, there have been, and even prior to this, I was down on the border in this area last year, there had been serious concerns about whether drones would come over and how cheap they were.

19:01And it wasn't a reach for troops on the ground, the Border Patrol on the ground to worry about what they might face in that regard. Yeah. But as you explain, this temporary loan now of this system from the Defense Department to Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, wasn't really up and running. I mean, they hadn't even met yet to talk about safety. So what I mean, what made them pull this thing out and start using it? And were they trained to do it? Yeah. I mean, I really with what you're seeing here is, I think, a difference of opinion between the FAA and the other departments here. on what it took to kind of check all the boxes to start using this weapon.

19:45So there was a meeting scheduled on February 20th where they were supposed to address safety issues. Not a coincidence, I'm told, that the 10 days would have very much matched with the 10 days between now and February 20th. So basically the FAA said we're closing down the airspace until we address this. Ah, so it was the FAA that called for closing down the airspace because they had not been consulted in the use of this system to shoot down what turned out to be really a balloon. I mean, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, you know, the threat has been neutralized. And I bet it was. You know, it was shredded.

20:22So how did that happen? Yeah, I mean, I think what happened yesterday, based on additional reporting through the evening last night, the Trump administration very quickly tried to kind of cast this as a legitimate action. There have been real drones down there. I'm told even they've seen real drones down there in recent days. So it was not a reach to say that there had been drones coming over the border. That is true. It just is relatively irrelevant to the discussion of what happened on Tuesday. Right, which was it was a balloon, you know, and a Pentagon undersecretary, as you point out, posted a social media image, you know, of a laser being fired and a bald eagle and a big defend the homeland, you know, against a balloon.

21:11When, as you say, there are real issues. So what are your questions now? I mean, one would be of safety shooting something in the air like that around an airport and not consulting the FAA first. So what are the questions coming out of this? I mean, I really think as we look forward, this is a serious discussion with a lot of difficult challenges going forward. You know, we're looking at with the drones that have now appeared all, you know, all manner of different places. You know, there have been problems with drones flying around airports previously. There have been problems with drones flying around military bases previously.

21:47You know, and we haven't yet seen any kind of attack with these drones. domestically. But it's a serious concern that defense officials have, Homeland Security officials have. And I think the balancing act here of how do you deal with this threat while at the same time not creating other problems to domestic aircraft or other issues, you don't want to take a situation and then just create a different problem in the process. And as you remind us and just briefly maybe comment on it, that the FAA and the defense officials have had strains since that January 2025 terrible collision between the Army Black Hawk helicopter and the commercial jet.

22:30That is unnerving to see that there is a strain between these two agencies that have to work together. Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, through that incident, you know, the FAA, you know, the flight control towers, like there were all manners of things raised on that side. Then you also had the helicopter that was not exactly where it should have been in the sky. Both are contributing factors based on the investigation after the fact. And in the initial days, both agencies kind of blamed each other. Yeah. Well, now they have to work together on what you say is a serious issue on the border, not the occasional balloon.

23:10Washington Post reporter Dan LeMond, thank you so much. Thank you.

23:19That's our show for today. Here and now, anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Will Walkie, Lynn Menningon, and me, Chris Bentley. Our editors were Todd Muntz, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Andre Peralta and Matt Reed. I wrote the theme music, along with Mike Moschetto and Max Liebman. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow.

23:57Thank you.