Documentary team highlights the nuance of immigration enforcement in Twin Cities

As Operation Metro Surge shifts and slows, Not In Our Town continues its efforts to cover ICE’s long-term effects in Minnesota.

In the weeks after Operation Metro Surge ended, the media organizations that flocked to the Twin Cities soon turned their cameras and attention to other topics, searching for the next big story.

Not In Our Town, a California-based non-profit production company, stayed.

As immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities continues to evolve, the company is working to tell local communities’ stories a little differently in the surge’s wake. The result will be a documentary film accompanied by a media campaign examining how community efforts across Minnesota pushed federal agents out of the state.

Patrice O’Neill, Not in Our Town’s executive director, said the time and dedication demanded by documentary film production can provide much more nuance to difficult and complex topics, such as Operation Metro Surge.

“It’s a very different kind of reporting,” said O’Neill, a journalist and filmmaker who has guided the organization since its inception in 1995. “You have time to reflect. You have time to sort of gather more information as time goes on.”

For 30 years, the nonprofit’s documentary team has applied its craft across the United States, working with communities to stand up against hate crimes and foster unity in times when many are facing division.

O’Neill and her team began their organization’s journey alongside PBS by documenting the efforts of Billings, Montana, residents as the town fought for the safety of their neighbors against a series of hate crimes. 

Since then, they have documented community responses to anti-immigrant attacks on Long Island, communities fighting racism in Ohio and how students and community members face down bullying in schools across the country. 

O’Neill said she hopes the story they tell about Operation Metro Surge will provide some justice to Minnesota and the people who have suffered at the hands of ICE.

“I hope that people see our doc, people that maybe they wouldn’t see, and see something about the spirit of thousands of people who decide to stand up,” O’Neill said.

The Not In Our Town team has to contend with covering communities as outsiders in communities that have already faced hardship, O’Neill said. One of her biggest concerns is “helicopter journalism,” the idea of landing in a place of intense news and then leaving as soon as it dies down. This type of coverage, she said, can often exploit communities that need support the most. 

As someone covering a story from an organization in Oakland, California —  nearly 2,000 miles from Minneapolis — O’Neill said she understands any hesitancy community members might have toward her organization’s journalists. But Not In Our Town’s decades-long track record of coverage helps reassure community members of her team’s intent.

“I think we have relationships with almost every community we’ve ever covered over these 30 years,” O’Neill said. “People know us. It’s not like we’re going to do a story, put it on the air, and then go away. That relationship remains.”

One thing O’Neill has noticed throughout her coverage is how particularly courteous Minnesotans have been to all media outlets in the metro area. The “Minnesota Nice” connotation held true, she said.  

Thomas Sawano, a documentarian, joined Not In Our Town specifically for their coverage of ICE in Minneapolis. After graduating with a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025, he first experienced immigration enforcement heightened in his home of Los Angeles around June 2025. 

Now he is an associate producer on the documentary’s team, supporting the film’s development in both Oakland and Minneapolis. 

More recently, as ICE operations have wound down in the Twin Cities and moved to the suburbs, the job has changed, both Sawano and O’Neill said. Since the production team couldn’t return to Minneapolis until later in the spring, Sawano put out a call to University of Minnesota journalists for support.

Students, who he said could provide time and passion that other journalists couldn’t, helped document boots-on-the-ground coverage for the documentary. Those student perspectives, Sawano said, play a unique and important role in the work they’ve done so far.

In recent weeks, the documentary partnered with a handful of students and local filmmakers who have aided the reporting process by helping the team conduct interviews, film and produce the documentary. 

Sawano said he hopes the documentary he produces will get other communities mobilized and active.

“People will watch this documentary and say, ‘This is happening in Minneapolis, and this is the way people are getting organized. How do we do this in our community?’” Sawano said.