Tanisha M. Fazal, University of Minnesota
Most of the many challenges of teaching Political Science during the Trump Administration have been intellectual and traditionally pedagogical. But what happens when the challenge becomes more physical, so much so that students and faculty alike may become concerned for their safety? Minnesota’s colleges and universities confronted exactly this situation from December 2025 through – and beyond – March 2026, as the result of Operation Metro Surge, a major federal immigration operation in the state. Minnesota is not alone in this regard. Operation Midway Blitz brought hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops to Chicago in Fall 2025. Los Angeles was similarly affected in the early summer of 2025. The increased frequency of such actions suggests that they could be replicated elsewhere, generating implications for universities, departments, and instructors that have not yet been systematically thought through.
Teaching during Operation Metro Surge was an unequivocal challenge. While there were (unconfirmed) reports of federal immigration officials approaching people on campus, the bigger practical issue for many students was getting to campus. With the Twin Cities metro area on high alert, a climate of fear conditioned this academic term. Even if university leadership takes a strong position, there are a myriad of small decisions that need to be made, often at the level of the individual instructor. It would be folly to pretend that we navigated it perfectly. In what follows, I outline the issues and trade-offs we confronted regarding undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and staff. While I do not wish anyone else to experience such a semester, I hope that these reflections are useful in the event that this hope is in vain.
Operation Metro Surge
Operation Metro Surge brought more than 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to Minnesota. Many of these officers were sent to the Twin Cities, which is home to over a dozen institutions of higher education, serving more than 60,000 students. For context, the ICE contingent outnumbered the Minneapolis Police Department by a ratio of 5:1. State and local elected officials, national newspapers, and even the Minneapolis Police Chief criticized the enforcement action on several dimensions, including how poorly trained many newly hired ICE agents were.
There were many reports of mostly non-white people, including an off duty police officer, being stopped while driving. In at least one instance, ICE officers took someone from their still-running car, which then rolled into the street. While the Trump Administration’s messaging singled out Somalis, it is important to recognize that Minnesota has welcomed many refugee populations over the years. Thus, there are numerous vibrant and established immigrant communities in the state and especially the Twin Cities. Many local Latino-owned businesses either shuttered or significantly reduced operations during the immigration action. An African mall was essentially deserted. Employees stopped coming to work and customers stopped coming to eat at the Asia Mall in a first-ring suburb. In addition to significant Somali and Latino communities, the Twin Cities metro area is home to a large Hmong community; one member of the Hmong community was dragged out of his home in his underwear and arrested by ICE in a moment captured on video that went viral. People hid in their homes, often keeping their children home from school.
Not everyone saw ICE. But everyone knew they were here. Some portion of local residents hid. Another, substantial, portion protested and supported their neighbors. And while there were certainly supporters of the immigration action in the area, I think it’s fair to say that most people were afraid. It is terrifying to hear about people being abducted from parking lots, their homes, their children’s schools, and their workplaces. It is even more terrifying for people who are not white to hear these stories. Indeed, inspiring fear in the local population was likely a major goal of the operation.
Teaching During Metro Surge
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to the office at the start of the Spring 2026 semester. After teaching the first few classes of the term on zoom, I breathed a sigh of relief when I made it to campus without incident.[1] But the pepper spray recovery kit in the vestibule of the building as I walked into work was a definite gut punch.
It was clear that everyone was on high alert. On one hand, it was reassuring to see signs – literally, signs on classroom doors marked “This classroom is a private area only open to students and faculty pursuing the educational mission of the University” – that people in the academic community were supporting each other. On the other hand, these signs reinforced the gravity of the moment and underlined the importance of thinking through how to address the effects of the immigration surge in our teaching.
How should a university community respond to such a challenge? Not every contingency can be anticipated in advance. But major concerns included the possibility of ICE on campus, classroom disruption, and addressing a general climate of fear. Student attendance was a significant worry, especially for black and brown students. Below, I discuss specific issues that arose with respect to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty and staff. Many of these issues are connected by the fear of coming to campus and attending classes in person
Undergraduates
Most of our current undergraduates were in middle or high school during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving classes online has been shown to have negatively impacted learning for college students. Yet, students cannot learn effectively if they do not feel safe. Thus, a virtual option may be the best (if still subpar) choice for students with safety concerns coming to campus.
In this circumstance, several questions and trade-offs arise:
- Going completely virtual? One option is to teach the entire class online. This option was especially important at the start of our semester, when tensions around federal immigration activity were especially high: Renee Good was killed on January 7; our semester began on January 20; there was a strike and massive protests on January 23; and Alex Pretti was killed on January 24. Our campus is an urban one, bisected by the Mississippi River. Federal immigration officials were reported to be staying at a hotel on one side of the river and conducted intense activities essentially adjacent to campus on the other side of the river.
- Expiration of virtual learning. Within a month of the start of the semester, university leadership required that all classes return to their original modality. Most students and instructors prefer in-person learning and the university has an obligation to deliver instruction in the promised modality (except for hopefully once-in-a-lifetime cases like the COVID-19 pandemic). For faculty members who had begun the semester fully online, many had returned to in-person teaching already prior to the university-imposed deadline.
- Who gets the zoom link? This seemingly trivial issue was one of the trickiest. Despite the fact that most students prefer in-person learning on principle, having a zoom link for class is undeniably handy for students with tight schedules, who are ill, or who just don’t feel like coming to class that day. Some instructors always have a zoom link available for these reasons. Others created a zoom link last semester for the express purpose of accommodating students with safety concerns. Sending the link out to all students creates greater access. But it also comes with trade-offs: hybrid classrooms are challenging to manage logistically; having fewer students physically present lowers the energy level of a class; and, if everyone has the zoom link (or if it is given to students on a one-off basis because they are sick), the privacy of students with safety concerns may be compromised. Our Dean created a “flexible learning request” that students could fill out. As an instructor, having those approvals could be helpful in determining which students should receive the zoom link. Note, though, that if the link is restricted to a certain set of students, other students in the class may resent not having the link if they are ill but would still like to at least observe. Considering these trade-offs at the front end may help instructors preview what issues may arise as the semester proceeds.
- Participation for virtual learners. One of the challenges of hybrid learning is trying to ensure that all students have a good educational experience. Instructors generally will want to avoid a “separate but unequal” experience for students online versus in person. Here, this problem is amplified by two factors. First, given the rise of AI, many instructors are weighting class participation more in course grades. And second, students who have safety concerns coming to campus are already in a “separate but unequal” category and this distinction is only compounded by hybrid learning. There are few good solutions to this problem. Instructors should be honest with virtual learners about the constraints of a hybrid classroom and, if possible, create additional spaces (e.g., dedicated office hours or discussion sections) for these students to earn participation points.
Graduate Students
Graduate students are students, teaching assistants and, increasingly, union members. Thus, the challenges of addressing graduate student needs in this circumstance are different than for undergraduates.
- Different demographics. The graduate student population in the US is more international than the undergraduate student population. Thus, a higher percentage of graduate students may be concerned about coming to campus as opposed to undergraduates. Graduate students are also more likely to live off campus. One partial and imperfect solution to this problem is for graduate students to carpool if they are driving to campus. But this solution creates a financial burden for the students who drive them. Here, a “graduate carpool fund” can be helpful, if not straightforward to create; it may require personal financial contributions from faculty if departmental funds cannot be used for this purpose.
- Graduate classes. Given these possibly different demographics of undergraduate and graduate populations, the trade-offs between virtual and in-person class modalities are different, but no less serious. On one hand, graduate classes tend to be much smaller and more manageable on a virtual platform like zoom. On the other hand, international students’ visas often require in-person classes.
- Graduate teaching assistants. Again, given the distinct possibilities that graduate students are more likely than undergraduates to be international students and/or students of color (and therefore especially concerned about the possibility of being detained), graduate teaching assistants may be reluctant to come to campus to teach. Individual faculty members will have to decide how and whether to enforce university rules regarding TA presence on campus; here, any graduate student union contracts may also matter. If significant numbers of undergraduates are also online, an online discussion section may be a good (if temporary) solution.
Faculty, Instructors, and Staff
Like students, faculty, instructors, and staff may also face safety concerns in coming to campus. Unlike students, faculty, instructors, and staff are more responsible for creating a safe learning environment. Doing so, however, is often complicated by personal circumstances and the constraints of operating under diminishing budgets.
- Academic staff can play a crucial role in addressing these circumstances. They are likely to be in touch with staff from other departments and are often more attentive to university communications than faculty and instructors. They can be especially helpful in collecting and providing guidance, including guidance for how to respond if federal immigration officials are on campus or attempt to enter classrooms. Staff are greatly concerned for the welfare of students, faculty and instructors, and other staff.
- Adjunct instructors. The presence of federal immigration officers can induce a sense of panic that leads people in leadership positions to default to sending critical information via listserves that may not include adjunct instructors. Adjuncts may therefore be struggling to navigate these challenging circumstances with little support. If, for example, a department convenes a group of instructors teaching large courses that are especially difficult to deal with, it is important to include adjunct instructors in these meetings.
- Personal circumstances. Finally, like students, staff, adjuncts, and faculty may confront personal safety concerns of their own during large federal immigration operations. Even if they are not directly concerned for their own safety, they (as well as students) may be working alongside community members to support others. They also may be supporting their own families by, for example, taking shifts at schools or day cares to ensure the safety of their children, or having to care for children at home due to unexpected school closures associated with such operations.
Conclusion
Spring 2026 was an extremely stressful semester. Giving grace to others is crucial to navigating these kinds of circumstances. The ways in which communities came together in the Twin Cities to support neighbors and stand up for each other was inspiring but also exhausting. Through the end of the term, parents were still taking shifts at schools, volunteers were still delivering food to affected families, and community members in yellow safety vests continued to patrol immigrant neighborhoods. Winter is long in Minnesota. But the snow and ice finally melted by the end of the semester. My hope is that this essay is not useful to others because it won’t be necessary. But, just in case….
Tanisha M. Fazal is Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, climate change, and armed conflict.
Endnotes
[1] I am not white and was also concerned for my own safety. My spouse drove me to work the first day I went back in person, and a colleague drove me home.
References
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