The Briefing:
- Of the 32,000 estimated job losses in Minnesota, 25,000 fell on U.S.-born workers and 7,000 on non-arrested immigrants who cut back their labor market participation due to fear of enforcement — evidence that mass deportation eliminates American jobs rather than creating them.
- ICE and Border Patrol agents carried out nearly 4,000 arrests in Minnesota between December 2025 and February 2026 during Operations Metro Surge and PARRIS, with January 2026 alone accounting for 2,524 arrests — compared to a pre-surge monthly average of just 185.
- The City of Minneapolis released a June 2026 updated impact assessment covering December 2025 through April 2026, estimating the operation caused nearly $700 million in total economic losses — including $445 million in lost business revenue and $152 million in lost wages.
- A May 2026 Brookings Institution study found the ICE enforcement surge cost the U.S. economy an estimated 668,000 jobs across 86 cities, with between 51,000 and 297,000 of those losses falling on American-born workers. A September 2026 Brookings follow-up study confirmed the employment shortfall is still widening, with no signs of recovery nearly a year after surges began.
A report published October 8 by the Immigration Research Initiative and the Minnesota Budget Project estimates that the recent spike in ICE arrests erased roughly 32,000 jobs in Minnesota — and three-quarters of those losses landed on U.S.-born workers, not immigrants. The finding dismantles one of the central economic arguments used to justify mass deportation: that removing immigrants frees up jobs for Americans.
How 4,000 Arrests Became 32,000 Lost Jobs
The analysis is built on research by Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox of the University of Colorado, who developed a national regression model measuring the employment cascade triggered by steep increases in ICE arrests throughout 2025. Researchers from the Immigration Research Initiative and the Minnesota Budget Project then applied that model to actual arrest figures from Minnesota, using a conservative approach that, by the authors’ own assessment, may understate the true damage if the arrest-to-job-loss relationship turns out to be non-linear.
The core finding is striking: for every 1,000 immigrants taken into custody, the model identifies a statistically significant 0.54 percent drop in employment among U.S.-born men in the affected region — regardless of whether those workers were directly tied to immigrant-heavy industries.
The damage spreads through three interlocking forces. Immigrant and American-born workers typically occupy complementary rather than competing roles, meaning the removal of one group eliminates work for the other. At the same time, immigrant households reduce their everyday spending, which shrinks the consumer base that sustains American-owned restaurants, shops, and service businesses. On top of that, a chilling effect pulls workers with legal status — green card holders, DACA recipients, and naturalized citizens — away from their jobs out of fear of reckless enforcement, compounding the labor shortfall at every level.
The Hospitality Sector Got Hit Hardest
A separate study by North Star Policy Action in partnership with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Policy Research focused specifically on Minnesota’s leisure and hospitality industry during the first three months of 2026. Researchers compared actual federal employment data against a modeled “synthetic Minnesota” that projected what the sector would have looked like in the absence of the enforcement surge…