During a recent public hearing before the St. Paul City Council, Angela Clair recounted hearing a woman screaming as a caravan of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents grabbed her off the sidewalk near the child care center where Clair serves as director.

As a helicopter hovered overhead and legal observers blew whistles, the center went into a lockdown that lasted three hours that day, and then did the same for four hours the next day when ICE circled again.

St. John’s Episcopal Church offers whistles and advice on alerting the community to ICE activity in St. Paul on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“If you have not heard someone being taken by ICE, it stays in your head,” Clair told the city council. “I hear it every night when I go to sleep. … This is not OK. … We have families who are choosing to keep their children home … because they’re afraid.”

Another child care center director recounted how vehicles full of taunting men have driven by more than once.

“Is this one of those fake daycare centers? I’ve never see any kids in here,” yelled a man from a passing car. On another day, she said, a man got out of a vehicle, squatted in front of their center and defecated.

Children no longer allowed to play outside

Child care centers that no longer allow children to play outside, even when temperatures climb. Centers patrolled by groups of parent volunteers watching for federal agents at drop-off and pick-up times. Centers heckled by men in passing cars, questioning their legitimacy.

Celeste Finn, director of Big Wonder Child Care in St. Paul on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Celeste Finn has heard all of that and more from fellow St. Paul day care providers grappling with the uncertainties — if not the outright open hostility — that has followed Operation Metro Surge, which was once billed as a 30-day saturation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota.

As the operation draws into its second month, some child care providers wonder how long they’ll have to keep doors locked or run practice safety drills showing kids where to hide from federal agents. They’ve lost clients and employees who are fearful of leaving home.

“If you’re Spanish immersion in the Twin Cities, you definitely have some (parent patrolling) going on, because ICE has visited those locations repeatedly,” said Finn, the director of Big Wonder Child Care in the Summit Hill neighborhood. “ICE will just swing by, yell at the legal observers, film the legal observers, and then leave. They’re trying to show that the protests are bad, so they’ll get them riled up. It doesn’t make people feel safe.”

Finn said she didn’t think the drawdown of 700 ICE agents will mean much.

“ICE is only going to be more exponentially funded, and any drawdown is temporary,” she said. “They’ll go somewhere else. It’s probably only going to be a matter of time before they come back. That’s how I’m thinking that the next three years will look like. Seven hundred is not a respite, and the activity that we’re seeing has not gone down … If anyone had told me that February of 2026 would look like this, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy, that’s impossible,’ and now the impossible has happened.”

YouTube campaign stokes reaction

Finn said she’s grateful to members of St. John’s Episcopal Church, who volunteer to serve look-out for ICE as kids are dropped off and picked up. “Most centers don’t have that kind of community support,” she said.

For Minnesota, which grappled with an affordable child care shortage long before ICE entered the picture, child care has been at the center of the state’s fraud debate and a recent target of heightened immigration enforcement.

In December, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley published a video of himself standing outside a series of Twin Cities daycares that appeared to be closed. He claimed the centers, run by Somali-Americans, were all engaging in fraud by receiving public funding.

The operators of some child care sites later said Shirley had filmed his video during their off-hours, or they had declined to open their doors to his masked camera crew, which arrived unannounced.

The reaction from the public and the federal government was nonetheless swift, with the Trump administration quickly moving to freeze child care funding to Minnesota and other states, and Operation Metro Surge soon following.

Upwards of 2,000 ICE agents, assisted by U.S. Border Patrol, have gone beyond targeted arrests of convicted felons. They’ve visited the grounds around language immersion schools, high schools and child care centers in what some have described as an attempt to bait legal observers and parent patrols, if not detain parents and employees.

Attendance at centers that serve Black and brown kids has dropped, and some centers have closed temporarily, according to a spokesperson for Kids Count On Us, a coalition of Minnesota child care programs, teachers and parents. ICE agents have repeatedly parked in the parking lot of a Minneapolis child care provider who is Somali-American, she said, causing parents to avoid dropping kids off.

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City involvement

Using the working title “Neighbors Protecting Neighbors,” Finn has been attempting to organize child care providers to demand more clarity from City Hall about their rights, police responsibilities and what protections the city can offer against ICE intruding on their premises. So far, she said, she’s been disappointed with what she deemed St. Paul’s slow response and sometimes conflicting explanations from the city council and the mayor’s office.

Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore. and other cities have expanded their “separation ordinances” in recent months by banning ICE from city-owned parking lots or restricting their police departments from cooperating with federal immigration agents unless they’re looking for a suspect in a violent crime.

The St. Paul City Council voted Wednesday on a ban, similar to the one instituted by Minneapolis last December, keeping ICE off city property, and additional ordinances are in the works that would require federal agents to lower their face masks and keep badges and other indicators of the agency they work for on their outermost layer of clothing.

Also Wednesday, Education Minnesota, the state’s largest teacher’s union, joined public school districts in Duluth and Fridley in filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court seeking to block ICE activities near public schools.

Still, “no one is tracking the data if ICE has broken into centers or came into a child care center with a judicial warrant. We just know it’s happening,” said Finn, who said child care centers are coming up with their own “risk reduction” plans that include “yellow alert” and “red alert” protocols, like choosing hiding places for kids.

The plans, she fears, may come with hidden liabilities.

“If I share these risk reduction plans with my insurance provider, next year are my insurance premiums going to go up?” Finn said.

Neighborhood patrol

L., an information technology professional who has school-aged children, began patrolling his St. Paul neighborhood within a four-to-six block radius of his home in early January. He monitors for ICE activity, checks for missing license plates, and keeps a close eye on pick-up and drop-off times at his children’s school, a nearby public daycare, a community center and a language immersion school.

He’s since gotten connected to other like-minded legal observers through the Signal chat forum, which has helped observers — many of them parents — organize around open patrol shifts. Some institutions were quicker to embrace that model than others. He estimates the area he patrols now spans some 50 volunteers.

“It’s typically hyper-local people,” said L., who asked that his name not be used to avoid monitoring by ICE. “The community center is getting more familiar with how others are organizing, how schools are organizing, how daycare centers are organizing. There was a concerted effort, especially after (the shooting death of) Renee Good, through schools and other centers.”

“Everything on our end is peaceful and by the law,” he added. “It’s amazing to see. It’s amazing but it’s not surprising. I think everybody in these communities knows and values our neighbors, no matter who they are and where they come from. All of us in the community know how valuable these centers are that teach and hold our children, and we’re going to do everything we can to protect them.”

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