Minneapolis' economy circles the bowl at a $203 million loss

Minneapolis city officials just dropped a bombshell preliminary report, claiming the feds' massive immigration crackdown (Operation Metro Surge) slammed the local economy with an estimated $203 million hit in January 2026 alone (and spilling into the roughly 11-week operation overall).

Leftist Mayor Jacob Frey called the damage "staggering" and firing off a direct challenge: "Was this operation, that has inflicted so much damage on our city that we can indeed calculate in real dollars, was it worth it?" 
Frey and other incompetent leaders are now begging for federal and state cash to bail them out, insisting the totals are likely lowball estimates and don't capture the full pain.

Breaking down the city's math on the wreckage: Small businesses and restaurants got hammered hardest, bleeding $81 million (some accounts nudge it to $82 million) in lost revenue. Fear kept customers away, foot traffic tanked, and entire stretches of the city turned into ghost towns.
Workers, illegal aliens and citizens alike, stayed home scared, costing $47 million in lost wages.
Throw in extras like $4.7 million+ in hotel cancellations stretching into summer, plus spikes in social services demands, police overtime, and other ripple effects, and you hit that eye-popping $203.1 million "impact" figure.
Congrats Dems; you really know how to make your screw ups hit record proportions.
Frey hammered the point home: "Families were torn apart, small businesses lost millions and students had their learning disrupted." He framed the whole surge, with up to 3,000 federal agents flooding neighborhoods, as something that "stoked fear and ultimately chaos in the communities that we love," adding, "The damage caused by this operation doesn’t disappear just because the operation is ending."
This fresh mess surfaced in mid-February 2026, straight from the city's own preliminary assessment, and got splashed across local media like the Star Tribune, KSTP, FOX 9, and more. 

If you enjoy  Brain Flushings and would like to subscribe or Buy Me a Coffee, or even check out the sponsors on this page, I would appreciate it, as it supports my work and my coffee drinking habit. No pressure and subscribing is free. So is checking out the advertisers on the blog.

Important note: These are estimated economic damages from reduced activity, not a straight punch to the city's budget or tax haul, though it obviously drags those down indirectly. And no, this has zero connection to the 2020 George Floyd riots (which racked up far bigger regional damage numbers in the hundreds of millions to over half a billion). 

This one's tied squarely to the 2025-2026 ICE operation and its fallout in immigrant-heavy communities.

Tweet