ICE surge in Minneapolis parallels California gang database debacle

A government agency compiles a list of names. The criteria to be on the list: your address, your skin color, who you were seen talking to. No conviction required. Then you, your family and your children are monitored. Your home is entered and searched without proper warrants. 

This sounds like Minneapolis in 2026, but I’m actually describing Oakland in 2010 under a legal tool called a gang injunction. Now we are seeing this playbook adopted nationwide and the consequences are deadly.

The gang injunction used in Oakland was a civil restraining order imposed on entire groups of people without criminal convictions. It was deployed on my block, against people I knew. I watched my community endure the consequences for years, and I helped found an organization to fight it. We sued and defeated it in Oakland, but to my dismay, we are now seeing this oppressive and highly flawed tactic replicated across the country.

The justification then, as now, was public safety. Back then, the city attorney named 40 men with suspected gang ties in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood in the injunction, imposing curfews, banning association and criminalizing their presence in their own neighborhoods. 

But the list was not built on evidence of criminal activity. It was built on a database called CalGang, which at its peak contained more than 200,000 names overwhelmingly of Black and Latino people. 

The same way ICE is going beyond its mission and sweeping up U.S. citizens, Native Americans and workers with legal status in Minneapolis, CalGang swept up people who had no business being on any list.

A state audit found 42 young people whose names were added to the list when they were babies; 28 of them were listed as “admitting to being gang members.” 

Three LAPD officers were charged with felonies for fabricating entries. When ACLU attorneys forced Los Angeles to review the 9,000 names on its gang injunction list, the city removed more than 7,000, admitting it had no evidence they were active gang members. 

Skin color and a zip code

Thousands of people had their rights restricted based on nothing but skin color and a zip code.

People like Abel Manzo, a 25-year-old licensed barber who co-owned a shop in Fruitvale. He was listed after a probation officer spotted him wearing a red T-shirt. He was later arrested for a probation violation after briefly attending the funeral of a friend’s son. He testified in court that he had no gang ties. The injunction meant he could not visit family at night. His business suffered. His life was upended by a designation he had no meaningful way to challenge.

The gang injunctions failed by every measure. Of 40 Fruitvale defendants, only eight were arrested in the designated zone and none for violating the injunction. The city spent millions in the name of public safety, but violent crime actually rose in north Oakland after the injunction took effect. 

The injunctions did not target the right people because they were never designed to. They targeted a race of people and called it law enforcement.

The same pattern has played out in Minneapolis. In December 2025, Operation Metro Surge deployed about 3,000 armed federal agents to the Twin Cities, supposedly to address fraud in government programs involving members of the Somali-American community. Of the thousands arrested, only 23 were Somali, and none were connected to the fraud cases.

Agents encircled schools and followed buses. A leaked memo authorized federal agents to enter homes with administrative warrants  — not the typical judicial warrants signed by a judge as required by law. The people detained included restaurant workers, hotel employees, Target cashiers, including some Native Americans and U.S. citizens. 

The common thread was not criminal history. It was skin color.

Two U.S. citizens protesting the violence are dead. Renee Good, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent after she dropped her son at school. Alex Pretti, a VA hospital nurse, was killed while filming agents during a protest. 

Agents also detained at least nine children, including a 5-year-old taken from his father in their driveway still wearing his Spider-Man backpack. 

Built on racial profiling

Both discriminatory systems were directly connected. From 2006 to 2016, ICE had direct access to CalGang, using it in immigration proceedings. A state audit later found it to be rife with errors and fabrications. 

A database built on racial profiling in California became a foundation for a lethal immigration enforcement apparatus.

Border Czar Tom Homan recently announced Operation Metro Surge is ending and agents are being withdrawn from Minnesota. But he made it clear officers will be “assigned elsewhere.” The occupation is not ending; it’s moving. 

Every city in the country should be asking, “Are we next?”

It took years of organizing to defeat Oakland’s gang injunctions, the first community-led effort to do so in the nation. We didn’t accomplish it by being quiet. We didn’t accomplish it by waiting for someone else to act. We built enough power to make continuation politically impossible. Minneapolis proved the same thing; community resistance forced the federal government to back down. 

Thousands of workers, parents, citizens and community members have been swept up, not for what they did but for how they look. And people are dead because they refused to look away. We cannot let their deaths be in vain. 

Get out there. Organize. Push back. That is how we defeated the gang injunction. That is how Minneapolis ended the surge. That is how we restore our rights.