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Sabrina Rucker wasn’t just focused on protecting her immigrant neighbors and coordinating with activists in grassroots response networks during “Operation Metro Surge,” the aggressive federal immigration crackdown that rocked Minnesota this past winter.

Rucker, co-founder and CEO of a local publishing company, StoryForge, conceived the idea to document the crackdown after she tried — to no avail — to get a cousin to understand its intensity in the suburbs, especially in her affluent Apple Valley home, about 20 miles south of Minneapolis. Then it hit her: If her cousin couldn’t grasp what was happening, others probably couldn’t either. So in February, during the peak of the surge, Rucker started the Metro Surge Anthology, a project that documents stories from impacted individuals and families in immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

“Personal stories have the power to reach people in a way that big, flashy news stories don’t,” she told Truthout. “My hope is that compiling a bunch of real people and their experiences in one place will be more compelling to sharing what the reality of Operation Metro Surge was like to a broader audience who really didn’t understand. Having an accurate picture of what it was like is really important.”

Today, she’s hardly alone. State officials, nonprofit groups, and independent oral historians are also recording experiences from Operation Metro Surge and the related but little-known Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (PARRIS), which targeted about 5,600 refugees in Minnesota. While their motives vary, these projects share one goal: to capture both the brutality of the crackdown and the grassroots resistance that emerged in response.

Llana Barber, a history professor and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, has collaborated with some of those documenting the experiences. She says these initiatives aren’t just crucial archival records for future researchers; they also inform ongoing political and grassroots work nationwide.

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“The immense outpouring of community care and mutual responsibility that happened during the surge — to me, it’s really important to document that for what it was and not let it get misread or misrepresented as something nefarious,” she told Truthout. “It was such an inspiring community response: the way that people developed all of these elaborate networks to take care of their neighbors, make sure that their rent was paid, that they had food to eat, that their kids were safe going to school, and that schools were open — all of the ways in which communities came together to protect one another was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen in my life. And making sure that the truth of that gets recorded and that the power of that gets recorded is why these documenting projects are so important.”

The Documentation Initiatives

The Minnesota state government is leading the largest effort to collect stories about the crackdown. In the spring, Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order establishing the Governor’s Council on Recording the Truth of Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS on Minnesotans, or the Minnesota........

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