Ice Out Of Minnesota Protest and March

Hundreds of protesters marched along Lake Street in south Minneapolis on December 20, 2025, in below-freezing temperatures to oppose U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations under Operation Metro Surge, a federal enforcement initiative that had intensified arrests and fear across the city's immigrant communities.

Operation Metro Surge had prompted visible alarm in the neighborhoods around Lake Street in the days before the march. Businesses near Karmel Mall posted notices refusing ICE entry without a court order, and a whistle-warning system spread through the community as a signal that agents were nearby. Posters appeared on utility boxes along Hennepin Avenue in Uptown calling on residents to protect Somali neighbors and know their rights.

The march began at Mercado Central and ended at Karmel Mall, the enclosed shopping center on Lake Street at Pillsbury Avenue that serves as the commercial and social heart of Minneapolis's Somali community. Marchers moved through the cold and into the mall itself, filling the corridors to show support for Somali-owned businesses that had been directly affected by enforcement activity and by hostile rhetoric targeting the community.

This demonstration was part of a sustained wave of protest activity in Minneapolis that began after the 2020 killing of George Floyd and has continued in response to successive crises — police violence, housing, and now federal immigration enforcement. What distinguishes this period is the concentration of anxiety in specific immigrant communities and the tight geography of the response, centered on a stretch of Lake Street that has long been the city's most culturally diverse commercial corridor.