IC and the FBI move on Minnesota, touching the offices of Governor Tim Walls and the state’s biggest mayors as more than 3,000 arrests stack up.

All tied to a surge ripping through the Somali community.

What started as a drug crackdown didn’t stay on the streets for long.

At first, federal agents were arresting dealers and pulling pills off the street, but the numbers only accelerated.

Seizures spiked, overdose deaths kept climbing, and the price of the drug collapsed to as low as $1 a pill, a sign that supply was now deeply embedded in the community.

Local law enforcement say they’ve never seen anything like it.

The price of is now having a major impact on the opioid crisis in the Twin Cities metro.

That’s when investigators realized Minnesota had become a critical distribution hub.

But who was in charge of that hub? As ICE and the FBI expanded their operations, arrests surged into the thousands and many of those were tied to distribution networks concentrated inside the Somali community.

But here’s the bizarre part.

As ICC went after the suspects, they were blocked by top Minnesota officials, including Governor Waltz and Mayor Frey, who appeared to be protecting the criminals.

They condemned the operation.

They told to leave and warned residents to resist and document arrests.

We have brought down crime very substantially in Minnesota.

We’ve taken out thousands of hard criminals, hardened, vicious, horrible criminals.

But Trump wasn’t backing down.

Instead, he sent and the FBI after those officials.

What they found blew this whole investigation wide open and revealed some shocking information about why Minnesota’s drug problem got this bad in the first place.

By the time ICE and the FBI stepped in, Minnesota was already flashing red.

It started with pills.

Street teams kept finding in places it hadn’t dominated before.

Not just during raids, but in routine stops, traffic poles, and small apartment searches shoved pockets and backpacks.

All of a sudden, it was everywhere.

They can um literally go all down the streets in Minneapolis and get it within 10 minutes.

But what happened next was what raised alarms for federal officials.

The price dropped.

Investigators started hearing the same thing from different corners of the state.

The synthetic drug was now selling for$1 to $2 a pill.

It’s becoming dangerously cheap at this point.

A long time Henipin County Sheriff’s narcotics investigator confirmed is going for $1 to $2 a pill in the metro.

That’s down from about $20 just a couple of years ago.

That drop from a $20 price point is not normal.

And cheap drugs don’t mean weak demand.

In fact, in most cases, they indicate easy access to supply.

For years now, it’s become a choice black market drug, and dealers have found easy ways of manufacturing it on the street.

An increased supply can only mean one thing.

A rise in overdose calls.

When investigators looked at the data, one trend stood out.

Overdose deaths were climbing fastest inside Minnesota’s Somali community, especially among young people.

They say young people are dying from overdoses at a record and heartbreaking rate.

While that doesn’t mean the community caused the crisis, it certainly doesn’t rule that out.

But it did mean the crisis had embedded itself there.

To get to the bottom of it, task forces were sent out into the streets.

So, what we’re doing today is called a byst operation.

And this gives us a second chance to recover and seize these narcotics after they’ve already entered the United States.

Here’s what typically happens in operations like that.

We are rusing the traffickers into meeting with our undercover.

Our undercover is acting as a drug trafficker himself and he’s acting as if he’s about to buy these bulk narcotics.

I’ve been uh working as an undercover for about 4 years.

I’m in communication with all these drug traffickers in Mexico and here in the United States.

My job is to set up the deals, set up a meet location.

Once the undercover establishes that these narcotics are there, he will say the bus word and the agents will converge onto the traffickers and make an arrest.

Soon enough, the same names, associates, and phone numbers started popping up.

These names popped up even at different street corners on different days with different officers.

What looked like random street busts started fitting together like a puzzle.

That’s when they got the full picture.

Minnesota wasn’t set up to be a pass through or a highway stop.

Investigators concluded Minnesota had become a distribution hub.

The purpose of this trafficker is to sell a bulk amount of narcotics uh that would later be distributed in smaller amounts uh by drug dealers.

Drugs weren’t just moving through the state.

They were actively being stored, broken down, repackaged, sold, and replaced.

And every time local agencies pulled one dealer off the street, another one filled the gap.

With the full picture, the mission changed.

ICE and the FBI were brought in to dismantle networks as part of Operation Metro Surge that hit Minnesota a few months ago.

Phones were mapped, money trails tracked, arrest records cross-cheed.

However, as arrests swept through Minnesota, investigators noticed patterns started forming around repeatal arrests tied to the same circles.

Week after week, arrests stacked up.

100, 500, a thousand.

By the time the operation reached full speed, more than 3,000 arrests were on the board, and Minnesota by that point wasn’t just fighting, it was drowning in it.

By the time the federal arrest numbers were released, Minnesota was at its breaking point.

Thousands of arrests were tallied in public briefings.

Even Trump chimed in, calling the arrests the worst of the worst, listing criminal histories and violent charges tied to the surge in the Twin Cities.

Boy, these are rough characters.

These are all criminal illegal aliens that in many cases they’re murderers.

They’re drug lords, drug dealers.

They’re the mentally insane.

There’s some of them who are brutal killers.

They’re mentally insane.

They’re killers, but they’re insane.

These are just in Minnesota.

But as the numbers climbed toward 3,000, something unexpected happened.

The people in power at the state and city level began pushing back with equal force.

The governor, the mayor of Minneapolis, even the mayor of St.

Paul, all publicly criticized federal tactics.

Now, they didn’t just criticize the arrests, but how they were being carried out.

They said the presence of IC agents was destabilizing communities, intimidating residents, and disrupting everyday life.

And at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at our schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing motans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.

In response, the federal government said this.

It was a very chaotic scene.

Uh we know that our ICE law enforcement are facing rampant violence against them.

A highly coordinated campaign.

Nobody was buying that.

It got so bad that local lawsuits were filed against ICE and the federal government.

Civil rights concerns were raised.

Riots and protests flared and federal authorities took notice mostly because they seemed to be encouraged by motan officials who released statements that began to look to the Department of Justice like obstruction.

Indeed, as hard as we will fight in the courts and at the ballot box, we cannot and will not let violence prevail.

You’re angry.

I’m angry.

Angry is not a strong enough word.

You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities.

So, carry your phone with you at all times.

And if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.

Around the same time the surge was making headlines, federal prosecutors hit back by opening a new front, a legal investigation into whether public statements and actions by Minnesota officials had unlawfully interfered with federal enforcement.

The US Department of Justice issued grand jury subpoenas to six Minnesota officials for allegedly obstructing an immigration enforcement investigation there.

Then the subpoenas arrived, first to the governor’s office, then to the mayor of Minneapolis, then to the mayor of St.

Paul and others were included too.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walls and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry confirming that they have received those subpoenas.

Four other individuals were also issued that summons, including the state’s attorney general.

These were orders to produce records, communications, and documents connected to the federal operation.

The investigation is looking into whether or not those officials obstructed a sweeping immigration operation through public statements that they made.

Federal prosecutors are focusing on the possible violation of a conspiracy statute.

Suddenly, the story shifted because once subpoenas are issued, the operation takes on a new shape.

Subpoenas give prosecutors the right to probe into the issue deeper, and what they found was certainly unexpected.

This is why both ICC and the FBI were surged to Minnesota that first.

The numbers that were coming out of the Twin Cities were scary to say the least.

Authorities are calling it the largest drug bust in Minnesota history.

We are taking you inside the state’s biggest bust ever.

Investigators say that the dealers used the hottest toy in town to smuggle the deadly drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that Minnesota saw a record number of pills seized in 2023, far higher than in neighboring states.

It’s like people are the walking dead out here.

DEA announcing Wednesday it seized a record 417,000 pills in Minnesota in 2023, more than twice the number of any other state in the region.

That was a 127% jump from the year before, and it made Minnesota one of the hardest hit states in the Midwest.

and it wasn’t slowing down.

Federal agents described the flow as an avalanche with pills showing up in metro neighborhoods, rural outposts, and even in seized packages mailed into the state.

The DEA’s Minnesota office says drug distributors are trying almost anything like mailing stuffed teddy bears to addresses in the metro.

But seizures alone didn’t stop the supply because while law enforcement were pulling them off the street, distributors were still pushing into it.

It is like an avalanche.

They’re they’re seeing our efforts and they’re they’re trying to counter that with with just sending more.

And what’s worse, around the same time the seizures went up, the price also went down.

That stood out to investigators because that level of price drop only happens when supply outpaces law enforcement pressure and distribution networks are deeply rooted.

That kind of cheap implies a distribution network is deeply rooted within the community.

And that could clearly be seen in the streets.

Police in Minnesota weren’t just seeing pills at traffic stops.

They were seeing them in neighborhoods, in hospital reports, and coming up again and again in overdose calls.

MDH says most involved.

The DEA says seven out of 10 pills they’ve seized contain potentially deadly doses.

It’s just getting worse.

Yeah.

That informed the hard conclusion that Minnesota was a central place where pills arrived and then spread outward into the surrounding region.

But with all the information they’ve gathered so far, will federal investigators be able to trace the supply chain right to where it was coming from? We’ll have to find out.

By the time federal investigators were tallying arrests, another story was unfolding in living rooms, prayer halls, and dinner tables across Minnesota.

Overdose reports showed something unsettling.

Wasn’t hitting Minnesota evenly.

It was tearing through specific neighborhoods faster than others.

And inside the Twin Cities, one community kept appearing in the same reports again and again.

Tonight, elders in the Somali community are also sounding an alarm about Somali elders began sounding the alarm.

They described the use and overdose deaths growing devastatingly and faster than anyone could keep up.

These weren’t criminals in the abstract.

They were sons, neighbors, classmates.

The reason why I’m sitting here is not only for my son.

It’s for all sons and all children of Minnesota.

In one telling moment, a Minneapolis mother described how her son seemed to have his whole life ahead of him.

A job offer, dreams, a future, only to die the same night he came home.

That day when he came home, he has applied for security job near the airport.

Says, “Here is the offer letter that I received.

I’m picking up the uniform tonight.

I’m starting the job tomorrow.

” And that same night is when he passed away.

And their voices weren’t isolated.

Data and community advocates showed disparities that were hard to ignore.

Somali motans were dying of opioid overdoses at more than twice the rate of other residents.

Motans of color have died at disproportionately high rates throughout the opioid epidemic.

But what made this stand out wasn’t just the number of deaths.

It was also the speed.

But as of 2021 in Minneapolis, the number of black residents dying of opioid related overdoses actually surpassed the number of white resident deaths.

Investigators noticed that fental use in the Somali community surged at once.

And when supply spikes that fast, it usually means access is close, very close to investigators.

That raised a hard question.

If was this cheap, if overdoses were clustering this tightly, and if arrests kept overlapping within the same social networks, then the supply might be embedded inside it.

That doesn’t mean everyone is involved.

Far from it.

Most families are victims, not participants.

The other kids who are using drugs that I know of and are sleeping outside, they’re neither death or alive.

They’re right in the middle.

But from an enforcement standpoint, embedded networks are the hardest to dismantle because they hide behind trust, language, family ties, and silence.

And silence mattered here.

Data specific to the city’s Somali community is tough to come by and likely under reportported.

Because in many families, overdoses were kept quiet because of stigma.

Islam strictly forbids drug use.

The stigma keeping families from reporting deaths as overdoses.

As a result, many overdoses went unreported or attributed to other causes so families could grieve without judgment.

That silence hid the scale of the problem.

Meanwhile, advocates on the streets were seeing it firsthand.

Community leaders were handing out Narcan and tea in public plazas, knowing that young people were slipping away in ways that official numbers couldn’t fully capture.

This wasn’t a statistic in a briefing.

It was a mother burying her child, a neighbor trying to save a friend, an elder watching a generation crumble.

By this point, investigators are focusing on the patterns emerging.

You see, they’re working with a set of competing theories.

Whether the surge is being driven by a small number of tightly connected distributors, whether trustbased networks allowed the supply to move faster and quieter than usual, and whether community level access explains why the drug spread so efficiently before enforcement caught up.

None of those theories have been charged.

None have been proven in court, but they’re shaping how the investigation moves forward.

Federal agencies are now comparing overdose data, arrest records, pricing trends, and communication networks side by side, trying to understand not just who moved the drugs, but how the system protected itself long enough to Go.