ST. PETER, Minn. — Mercedes checked her phone again, waiting for her husband to call from the detention center.

Forty-one days earlier, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had detained Paco as he walked to his car. Mercedes said she had watched from the window of their mobile home as agents handcuffed him.

Paco was undocumented but had no criminal record, she said.

Mercedes, who is also undocumented, has hardly left home since. Hiding inside, Paco’s possessions are all around, each item prompting a memory of him and their life together.

In their bedroom, she keeps a table with a bottle of his cologne, his shampoo and his Bible. In the corner there’s a piggy bank, filled with money Mercedes and Paco were saving for their daughter’s quinceañera.

Eight days after Paco’s arrest, Mercedes found some of his clothing in the gap between his side of the bed and the wall. He kept shorts and a t-shirt there for sleeping, and Mercedes realized she could still smell his scent on them. She cried and then put the clothes back where he had left them.

“I imagine that, I don’t know — I’m crazy — I imagine he’s going to come through that door,” Mercedes said in Spanish.

Since Operation Metro Surge began in December, federal immigration agents have detained and deported people across Minnesota and in some border communities, dwarfing enforcement in other states. The exact number is unclear, but ICE claims, without evidence, to have detained 11,000 immigrants living in Minnesota illegally since President Donald Trump returned to office last year.

What is clear: Each person plucked from their day-to-day existence left a whole life behind. There are shoes by the front door and an empty bed. There’s a car in the driveway and a job undone. There are pets that need feeding, bills that keep arriving and leases with months left to pay.

Given the scale and speed of detentions and deportations during the past few months, it’s often a scramble to figure out where someone is being held, much less how to contact their landlord or renew their vehicle tabs.

When family members or roommates aren’t available to guard belongings and manage logistics, neighbors and community organizations have often stepped in, locating a car abandoned during an arrest or fundraising a month’s rent.

“There’s always a level of chaos when somebody gets detained, because it is this heightened state where our clients or their family members are like, ‘Oh my God, this big thing just happened,’” said Camila Pacheco-Fores, a staff attorney with the Immigration Law Project at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. “But it’s just, truthfully, completely out of control over the last couple of months.”

Bills keep coming

Mercedes and Paco’s story is one of many, though few speak out about it. Immigrants, documented and not, and the people who help them often fear repercussion and decline to share their full names for protection.

In Prescott, Wis., just across the Minnesota border, it took about a week for American friends of a detained Ecuadorian couple to figure out where ICE had sent them.

After a month in Texas, the two are now with family in Ecuador, where their friends plan to deliver their belongings: clothes, phones, passports. The friends, who requested anonymity, have also taken over some of the couple’s bills and made plans to sell their car.

They’d started clearing out the couple’s apartment once it became clear the couple wouldn’t be returning.

On a recent weekday morning, there was little evidence of the life once lived in the apartment: a red and green Christmas garland still hanging above the kitchen window; a key hook by the door that read, in Spanish, “My beautiful Ecuador.”

A Twin Cities landlord said her longtime tenant disappeared in January, shortly after she collected his monthly rent check. He gave her $100 as a Christmas present that day, she said.

“I can still see his face,” the landlord said.

The man’s roommates are still living in the apartment they shared, but because they’ve been afraid to work since he was detained, she stopped charging them rent.

When a landlord isn’t willing to give a deported tenant a break, Minnesota law offers some protections.

Landlords can’t force someone out of their apartment if they’re detained or deported, but they can sue for eviction if the tenant doesn’t pay rent, according to a deportation preparedness manual the Volunteer Lawyers Network (VLN) published last year. If a tenant abandons a property, the landlord must store and care for that person’s possessions for 28 days.

If the court approves an eviction, the county sheriff’s office can remove people and property from the unit. But it can take months to reach that point, according to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, which has not seen an uptick in eviction cases since Operation Metro Surge began.

Like rent, other bills and debts don’t disappear after a detention or deportation. A deported person can continue to own property in the U.S., for example, but will face foreclosure if they stop paying their mortgage.

Unpaid debts can be reported to credit reporting agencies, according to VLN, and in Minnesota, creditors usually have up to six years to sue for nonpayment.

Losing a breadwinner

Even a short detention can be catastrophic for a household, said Pacheco-Fores, the immigration attorney. She said agents have frequently detained household breadwinners on their way to work.

“Not only do you have this trauma of your family member, someone in your household, being taken away from you ... you also have a loss of income. You also potentially have legal fees that you need to pay,” she said. “And all of a sudden, that means maybe you don’t have enough to pay rent that month.”

In the Twin Cities, immigration officers detained Brenda’s husband, Osmin, on his way to his painting job during the early days of Operation Metro Surge. To support herself and her toddler son, Dylan, she started working nights at a laundromat while her brother provided child care. Then, in February, agents detained her brother while he was running errands.

Neither of the men had a criminal record, she said.

Brenda, who like her husband and brother is undocumented, now wakes up at 2:30 a.m., drops Dylan off with his grandfather or a friend and starts work at 5 a.m.

It’s hard to head out so early in the cold, she said. And since his father was taken, Dylan has started waking up in the night, crying.

“I think the people who suffer the most are the children,” she said in Spanish. “He asks for his father, and what can I say?”

When he was detained, Osmin thought he would be released, Brenda said, so he held onto his car keys. But a week later, he was deported to his native El Salvador. She has since sent him a box of clothes and gotten a new set of keys.

There are signs of him throughout the family’s suburban mobile home. His shoes are on a rack opposite the front door. Vats of paint for his job are stacked in a corner, and a Palm Sunday cross is affixed to the door with orange painter’s tape.

On Brenda’s phone, Dylan toggles between children’s videos on YouTube and a video of himself as a baby playing with his father.

It’s been a struggle getting by on her own, Brenda said. Bills are tough to manage; rent alone is $1,200 a month.

“When I go to work, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid something will happen, and my son will be left alone.”

Still, she plans to stay put. Dylan is a citizen, and despite everything that’s happened, she’d rather be in Minnesota than return to Mexico.

Though a recent weekday afternoon was sunny, the inside of the mobile home was dark. Above the couch, the word “home” was printed in English on drawn curtains.

‘It won’t be the same anymore’

Cristina Ralios thought of her uncle as she walked past his car with the busted window.

Cristina, a 17-year-old high school senior, lives in the same St. Peter mobile home park as Mercedes. She said federal agents detained her uncle the morning of Jan. 15, and in the process, smashed the rear passenger window of his prized Ford Explorer.

Her uncle had a valid work permit, no criminal record and now awaits his day before a judge in Texas, Ralios said. He immigrated from Guatemala nearly two decades ago and raised three daughters, with one more on the way.

The family found the Ford Explorer abandoned after her uncle was detained, Ralios said, with the keys missing and his lunchbox still in the cab.

Her uncle had been so proud when he bought the car with money he earned working at a Le Sueur dairy company, Ralios said.

“We’re going to get this car fixed, we’re going to get him out of there, and then he’s going to come back home, and then he’s going to have his brand new car,” she said.

In her mobile home, Mercedes kept waiting for Paco to call. She searched for his clothes, the ones with his scent on them. But in the gap between his side of the bed and the wall, she could not find them. Mercedes wondered if their 11-year-old daughter, who does not like seeing her mother cry, had hidden them.

She said her daughter wants everything to return to normal, for her father to come back and for the family to go to the mall or the zoo together again. But Mercedes said she has been losing hope that can happen, even if Paco somehow gets released and can come back to Minnesota.

“It won’t be the same anymore,” she said.

____

Elizabeth Flores of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.

____

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.