Waiting to exhale Former Manitobans living in Minnesota wracked with fear, disgust as turmoil continues to unfold By: Scott Billeck Posted: 5:33 PM CST Friday, Jan. 30, 2026

Amy Hewett-Olatunde apologizes again and again as her voice cracks at the other end of a phone call, emotions overtaking her mid-sentence.

The former Manitoban, who has taught in Minnesota’s Twin Cities since the turn of the millennium, struggles to speak through tears, despite her efforts to steady herself.

“It was just, it was just really hard,” she says, describing a recent hug with one of her students, a moment heavy with fear.

The student had been sheltering at home for more than a month, afraid they could be nabbed as masked and heavily armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents swept the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul for “illegal aliens.”

Hewett-Olatunde, originally from Carman, now lives and works in a St. Paul neighbourhood largely home to immigrant families and refugees — including Somalis, whom President Donald Trump has referred to as “garbage.”

The high school where she works has begun to offer virtual learning, allowing students to stay at home as their families fear being detained or deported, regardless of whether they have proper documentation. As a result, some classrooms have only 10 per cent of the students.

“Some of them left their country to come to a country where it isn’t supposed to be that way,” she says.

“Some of them left their country to come to a country where it isn’t supposed to be that way.”

It’s the questions from her students that hit Hewett-Olatunde the hardest: how long will this last or why aren’t things returning to normal.

“It’s really difficult to receive emails from kids saying, ‘I love you, I miss you,’” she says.

“To deliver groceries to students, and then having them sobbing in your chest because they are just so isolated and so sad, and they just want to be at school, like any kid.”

A recent embrace has haunted Hewett-Olatunde.

“I could just feel (the student) kind of exhaling… as I was hugging them, like they could just finally take a deep breath and just let it out,” she says. “The moment when I left, the look on their faces as they looked back through the screen door… I wish I could do more.

“To walk away, not knowing what the next couple of days or weeks would look like for the students… It’s just really heartbreaking. It’s just hard.”

ICE launched Operation Metro Surge in early December, targeting and deporting undocumented immigrants. The operation — and the turmoil surrounding it — escalated sharply on Jan. 6 with the deployment of 2,000 federal agents.

The following day, a federal agent fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good as she attempted to drive away from an encounter with ICE officers. The White House called Good a domestic terrorist and defended the killing as self-defence, a claim disputed by eyewitnesses’ accounts and video. The incident ignited widespread protests across the Twin Cities and beyond.

Last week, the operation sparked further outrage when a five-year-old preschooler was taken from his family’s driveway after federal agents apprehended his father. The boy has since been held in detention in Texas alongside his father, where White House officials labelled him an “illegal alien.”

Hewett-Olatunde said she’s had worried students ask her if ICE could come to their school and start detaining them.

“I told my class one morning that if that happened, I would do whatever I needed to do to get that kid on the bus or back into the school with the doors locked, and it wouldn’t matter if I got detained because of it,” she says. “And I remember the look on some of the kids’ faces in class. One of the kids was like, ‘You get arrested, you go to jail.’ I said, ‘I would go to jail for you, if it meant that you were going to be safe.’”

Tensions in the Twin Cities reached a breaking point last Saturday when 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal immigration agents while he was filming their operations with a phone.

Although Pretti was legally carrying a concealed handgun, the Trump administration defended the shooting and initially labelled Pretti as a “would-be assassin” there to “perpetuate violence,” unfounded claims his family strongly condemned.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accused the administration of “false narratives,” calling for an end to the operation and activating the Minnesota National Guard. President Trump has since said he is seeking to de-escalate the situation and may scale back ICE’s presence.

For now, roughly 3,000 federal agents remain deployed across the Twin Cities, outnumbering Minneapolis-Saint Paul police officers by three to one. ICE reports approximately 3,000 arrests since the operation began.

Jonathan Braverman, a former Winnipegger who graduated from the University of Manitoba in 2000 and now resides in Minnetrista, about 25 minutes west of downtown Minneapolis, says he is “disgusted” by what is happening.

“It’s hard to be proud to be an American.”

“It’s hard to be proud to be an American,” the dual-citizen says. “You’ve got people carrying papers downtown now, just to prove they’re U.S. citizens.”

Braverman says he avoids downtown altogether. Even with U.S. citizenship, he remains wary because he is also Canadian.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do to me,” he says.

It is the two killings — and the way the White House has falsely framed them, in light of the video evidence — that have affected him most.

“It’s scary to think of what we would be talking about if people didn’t have their cellphones,” he said. “You can’t tell a lie to what your eyes are telling you, right? No matter what this administration is doing.”

Braverman says conversations around the killings have revealed deep divisions.

“One conversation I had, I was like, clearly, Renee Good didn’t do anything wrong, and someone was saying to me, ‘Well, if you look at these things, (the agent who shot her) was fighting for his life, and he had a history of being dragged (by a vehicle),” he says. “Just to think that your eyes saw something different from what I saw… but that’s not what people are seeing.”

The killing of Pretti has struck a particularly raw nerve.

“There’s just no justification, that he was going to massacre people, and that he was a domestic terrorist, that he was preventing a lawful investigation,” Braverman says.

“Pardon my French, but it’s bulls—-. I’m disgusted.”

The father of two described how the fear has touched his own family: his son, juggling school and fast-food shifts, has watched classmates and co-workers simply stop showing up for school and work.

“This Mexican restaurant my family has been going to for 20 years, since we moved to Minnesota, has a sign up on the door,” he said. “You have to call there to be let in because they’re afraid of any kind of raid.

“It’s scary times around here. It’s enough to make you mad.”

“It’s scary times around here. It’s enough to make you mad.”

Braverman says he applied for his son to get his Canadian citizenship last year. “Every day, he’s asking me when he’s getting his Canadian papers,” he says. “He wants to go.”

In Colorado, where Pretti’s parents are from, the presence of ICE and the atmosphere surrounding it have been comparatively calmer. But as one resident and former Winnipegger warned, anything could happen.

“I’m a white woman living in the suburbs, who is also an American citizen, so my experience is obviously not representative of everyone living in Denver, especially people of colour or immigrants or asylum seekers,” says Karen Rocznik, a former CTV and CBC reporter. “The Denver Mayor, Mike Johnston, has vowed to protect residents if ICE was to ramp up their presence here. You just never know, though.

“I know I would feel extremely uneasy if ICE were to be more of a presence here, given the situation in Minneapolis.”

On Tuesday, DHS was investigating actions by ICE agents in Vail, Colo., about 160 kilometres west of Denver, following reports that agents left ace of spades playing cards inside the vehicles of people they detained.

The ‘death card’ has long been associated with racism and death, dating back to the Vietnam War. The cards reportedly said “ICE Denver Field Office,” along with the address for ICE’s detention facility in Aurora, Colo. ICE has condemned the incidents, promising swift action for those responsible.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the actions of people, both Hewett-Olatunde and Braverman say.

Says Hewett-Olatunde: “The collective people of Minnesota, who have pulled together and shown up and stood up for and stood with the people that are being targeted… There are legions and legions of people who love and support (our students and their families), and they will do what they need to do to fight for what they deserve. They deserve to stay here.”

“People are fighting back with what they can, with their cellphones and such,” Braverman says. “There is strength in the people. The people will overthrow. The people will push back. And they will win all of the time. I think (Trump) underestimates the power of the people.”

As example of the changing tide, Braverman pointed to the decision to relieve Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino of his duties at the start the week. Then on Friday, the federal Justice Department announced it would conduct a civil rights investigation into the death of Pretti, a major concession in the wake of the backlash against President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Meanwhile, Canada is never too far from Hewett-Olatunde’s mind. She was back home in Carman two weeks ago for a funeral.

“It’s the best times when I go home to Canada,” she says. “You can take a little bit of an exhale when you cross the 49th parallel and cross into Manitoba.”

scott.billeck@freepress.mb.ca