Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

It has been a few weeks since the Trump administration announced that ICE's Operation Metro surge would start to wind down in Minnesota.

But the state is still dealing with the economic fallout of ice activity, particularly

in Minneapolis and the greater Twin Cities area.

We are going to talk about that economic fallout today, and it just so happens that I'm

actually here in St. Paul right now, and I'm joined live in person by Dana Ferguson, political correspondent for

NPR News. Dana joined us back in January to talk about how ICE operations were affecting the

community, and she's back today to tell us more. Hey, Dana. Hi, welcome to Minnesota. Thank you. It's so

nice to meet you, like, IRL. Thank you. It's so great. You have been just so busy covering the political community and economic fallout of ICE operations in the city. So first of all, shout out to you and your team. Thank you. For covering this really challenging story. But it has been a couple months since you were on Make Me Smart. How are you holding

up? I think in doing a little bit better, we've had a little bit more of our weekend time,

granted back after we were on a rotation as reporters of being on call or working weekends,

six-day weeks, seven-day weeks of just constant news cycle. So getting a little bit of reprieve, which is very welcome.

Is the drawdown really a drawdown? Like, are you seeing a difference?

I think it has come down. I don't, I think there's still skepticism in the community about whether it's as significant as federal officials have said, questions about whether it's really at that

170-150 agent number that they've talked about. Around the community, there's still folks out

who are seeing ice operations and still feeling concerns about their neighbors about themselves

and changing some of their habits.

You're saying that the federal government is saying there's only 170 ice agents here now?

They've said that's what they were hoping to draw down to sometime in March,

and it's not 100% clear that we're there just yet.

How are the Twin Cities faring in terms of the economy? I mean, I know it was a huge hit when things were sort of at their peak, but I mean, what have you been hearing and seeing since then?

Yeah, there are still a lot of sort of uncalculated numbers. We got a state financial assessment a couple weeks back, and they said it might take weeks, if not months,

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