‘Operation Metro Surge’ to end in Minnesota
Here & Now Anytime
NPR
4.1 • 953 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Then, the Trump administration has locked up hundreds of children in its mass deportation campaign in conditions their parents describe as cold, crowded and unsanitary. ProPublica reporter Mica Rosenberg received letters and videos from dozens of detainees — half of them kids — at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, and shares more.
And, this week, the airspace over El Paso, Texas, shut down briefly. Was a party balloon sighting the cause? And did border officials shoot it down with a Pentagon-supplied laser without first coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration? The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe breaks down what happened.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, |
| 0:09.3 | why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:20.5 | WBUR Podcasts, Boston. |
| 0:25.9 | I'm not going to remove everybody on the state order of officers, but like I said, and Operation Metro Service is ending. |
| 0:34.6 | Borders are Tom Homan says the administration is wrapping up its special operation in Minnesota. |
| 0:40.6 | But ICE is not leaving the Twin Cities. |
| 0:53.4 | It's Thursday, February 12th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR. |
| 0:58.6 | I'm Chris Bentley. |
| 1:02.5 | Today on the show, the government has locked up thousands of immigrant children, some for months at a time. |
| 1:10.0 | One nine-year-old Colombian girl drew a portrait of herself and her mother in their government-issued |
| 1:15.4 | uniforms. I think they're trying to process it in the way that they can as kids. Life in immigration |
| 1:21.3 | detention. Also, we'll get some insight into those special security reasons the government gave for temporarily |
| 1:28.4 | grounding flights at the El Paso airport before they abruptly lifted the order. |
| 1:34.5 | Long story short, sounds like a communications breakdown over the use of an anti-drone laser |
| 1:39.9 | that ended up shooting down a party balloon. |
| 1:43.7 | What you're seeing here is, I think, a difference of opinion between the FAA and the other that ended up shooting down a party balloon. |
| 1:54.0 | What you're seeing here is, I think, a difference of opinion between the FAA and the other departments here on what it took to kind of check all the boxes to start using this weapon. |
| 2:03.6 | Before we get to that story, though, the 10-week surge of federal immigration enforcement agents in Minnesota may be coming to a close. |
| 2:08.2 | Tom Homan, who's in charge of border policy for the Trump administration, |
| 2:13.6 | announced that Operation Metro Surge in and around the Twin Cities will end. |
| 2:19.6 | For more on what that means, we called up Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Baxed. Here's his conversation with Indira Lakshmanan. So Borders are home and says he will stay in the Twin Cities |
| 2:25.1 | as the operation draws down. What is the timeline for that drawdown? And are there already fewer |
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