Minnesota’s suburbs are an election battleground. Trump’s immigration surge is unpopular there.

Minnesotans living in the Twin Cities and its surrounding suburbs are in near lockstep in their disapproval of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state, reporting in a new poll that they believe the federal government has overreached and immigration agents’ tactics have gone too far.

The findings also show political independents’ opinions align more closely with those of Democrats. They could be an early warning that President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge might hinder Minnesota Republicans’ chances of winning control of the governor’s office for the first time in 20 years and flipping the closely divided Minnesota Legislature.

“Everything he was doing to make America great I was cool with up until he started messing with the immigrants,” said Andre Lewis, 32, who lives in White Bear Lake.

He has voted for Trump in the past and appreciated the president’s approach to foreign policy. While Lewis doesn’t regret his past votes, he isn’t sure which party he’ll support this fall.

(See full results for each poll question, a demographic breakdown of the respondents, a statement detailing the methodology and a map of the poll’s regions.)

Lewis, who responded to the poll, noted he’s Black and has experienced racism and feels for immigrants targeted by the Trump administration.

“They’re still human beings just like us,” Lewis said, “no matter if they’ve got a green card, a visa or a passport or whatever they’ve got. ... I don’t like how ICE is here in Minneapolis doing what they want, shooting people, killing people.”

Two-thirds of Minnesotans said they believed ICE’s tactics have gone too far. Those numbers climb to 82% in the Twin Cities and 71% in the suburbs — defined as the counties of Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott and Washington minus the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In the suburbs, 63% of people said they weren’t confident that the federal government would conduct a fair and transparent investigation into the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January.

The poll was conducted between Jan. 27 and Feb. 6 and included a sample of 1,229 Minnesota adults aged 18 or older. The poll’s margin of sampling error is estimated to be plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Tom Tadlock, 70, of New Hope, said he’s an independent voter but leans conservative and supported Trump in 2024. He thinks immigration agents have gone about the operation in Minnesota the “wrong way.”

“They should just stop,” Tadlock said, “come back and get their warrants, and then go in and get the people they’re after instead of just blanketing a neighborhood.”

House DFL Leader Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids, represents a purple suburban district and said the “organic, grassroots” organizing seen in communities across Minnesota since the immigration surge began isn’t going to disappear.

“Those people are activated now, and they are going to continue to be activated in their communities,” Stephenson said. “That is going to have an impact long past the time that ICE leaves Minnesota.”

House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said voters demonstrated in 2024 that “one-party Democrat control was not what they wanted anymore,” noting they sent an equal number of Republicans and Democrats to the House.

“We have excellent representatives that are in their seats right now,“ Demuth said. ”We have great candidates in the seats that we’re focused on. And we will continue bringing that common sense message of affordability, ending fraud, safety into those areas.”

The battleground this fall for control of the narrowly divided Minnesota Legislature is expected to be largely in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. The immigration crackdown’s unpopularity is evident as a growing number of suburban GOP legislators speak out about — or cautiously critique — ICE.

“It is nuanced, and there are some constitutional rights being violated right now, I can tell you that, and it’s not OK,” Kreun said.

Kreun was elected to his first term in 2022 with 53% of the vote. But one of the two House districts in the bounds of his Senate seat is held by a Democrat.

Sen. Julia Coleman – who also represents a suburban Senate district with a partisan split – called on Trump to “pull agents back temporarily and re-evaluate tactics” while pressing Walz to work with legislators on policies to cooperate in the deportations of “criminal offenders.”

Coleman said she decided to write to Trump after starting to hear firsthand accounts of “brutality or potential constitutional violations.”

“The chaos that it was causing really had me concerned,” she said. She wasn’t sure the operation would endanger her seat, saying residents of her district look for independent-minded candidates who can work across the aisle.

“I’m extremely disgusted of this administration and what they’ve been doing,” Brown said, adding that he believed Republicans would lose young voters and Hispanic voters.

He said the ICE surge “will probably have me vote in ways that I would never vote because I never want to see this happen again.”

Democrats are targeting some suburban Republicans over support of ICE, including Sen. Karin Housley, who represents Stillwater, Forest Lake and parts of the St. Croix Valley. She won her district by more than 5 percentage points in 2022, but Kamala Harris beat Trump there two years later.

On a conservative radio show, Housley said in January she wouldn’t trust local officials to fairly investigate the shooting death of Good. A Senate DFL attack ad says Housley “sides with ICE over MN police.”

In late January, Housley posted a statement on Facebook saying Senate Republicans “have tried to find pragmatic ways to support federal efforts to remove dangerous individuals who are here illegally, while upholding the Constitution and protecting the rights of citizens to peacefully make their voices heard without fear of retribution.”

While Limmer won re-election handily in 2022, Democrats have targeted it in the past.

Kristy Janigo, of Maple Grove, describes herself as a “centrist Democrat” and is running for Limmer’s seat. She said the November elections are a long way away, but she’s seeing an outpouring of support for immigrants in the district she hopes to represent.