Minnesota GOP Senate candidate Michelle Tafoya has had nearly a year to take a solid stand on Donald Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which sent ICE and other federal agents into her state to seize immigrants, snatch children from parents, and murder two Minneapolis citizens, poet and mother Renée Good and nurse Alex Pretti. The former NFL sideline reporter has failed to do so, and now it’s Minnesota’s turn to weigh in on Tafoya. Her extreme and erratic stands on Metro Surge may well cost her the Senate race, against consistent surge critic Democratic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.

Just to recap: As the siege began in December, Tafoya defended it on her podcast. “Look, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a law enforcement group and they are trying to enforce the law and they’re trying to do it in cities that have major issues. They’ve determined that Minneapolis is one such city.” In her campaign rollout video, she included glowing footage of ICE operations. Maybe most outrageously, she blamed Good for her own murder.

“I’m sure you guys are seeing on the Internet this car that was driving right toward an agent,” she said the day Good died, on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. “You can’t run people over with a car. The car is a deadly weapon.” When multiple forensic examinations showed decisively that Good was driving her car away from Customs and Border Patrol agent Jonathan Ross, Tafoya shifted blame to Minnesota Democrats she claimed were leading people like Good, and later Pretti, to interfere with Metro Surge.

“They have created an environment where people think, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to go resist,’” she told The Will Cain Show. “‘I can’t just peacefully protest. I’ve gotta put my body, my car… This is what I have to do in order to stop this.’”

Pretti’s gruesome killing—video captured ICE agents shooting him multiple times in the back, while he knelt on a Nicollet Avenue sidewalk subdued by other agents—turned public opinion sharply against Metro Surge. So Tafoya calibrated, a little, applauding the departure of Department of Homeland Security director Kristi Noem and praising Trump for putting “border czar” Tom Homan in charge in February. But she quickly returned to blaming Minnesota Democrats, and protesters she repeatedly called “violent,” for the clashes in the streets of Minneapolis. And in her October debate with Flanagan, Tafoya bizarrely blamed Minnesota protesters, and Flanagan herself, for worsening Operation Metro Surge.

“This was not about peaceful protesting. This was about violence and criminal conduct. And she should know because she has participated in illegal protests in the past as well,” Tafoya said. Flanagan countered by noting that Tafoya accused Good of causing her own death, and Tafoya replied: “That is a hideous statement.” The debate moderator didn’t follow up.

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I began putting together this brief recap of Tafoya’s many defenses of Operation Metro Surge when I saw multiple reports that, at least 10 days before the election, Minneapolis’s early vote totals had already reached 101 percent of its early vote in the 2024 presidential election. The New York Times noted that the city was “the heart of Operation Metro Surge.” That seemed like bad news for Tafoya. A few days later a Times-Siena College poll showed Flanagan up 54-40 percent over her GOP challenger.

I caught up with Flanagan, while she was on a last-weekend bus tour of her state, to discuss the role she thought Operation Metro Surge was playing in her contest with Tafoya.

The early voting numbers, she told me, “are incredibly encouraging and hopeful. But what I also know is that it matches the energy that we are feeling on the ground. People are fired up to vote. I think this is the biggest opportunity that people who’ve been impacted by Donald Trump and Operation Metro Surge have, to push back on this administration, and to send folks to Washington, DC to be a check on the cruelty and chaos that we have experienced firsthand.”

Flanagan went on: “I think this has really been the arc of this campaign, right? From Operation Metro Surge, and how people showed up to march, and to feed their neighbors, and to drive kids home from school who weren’t even their kids. Then going to precinct caucuses, to becoming delegates to the state convention, to a 20-point win in the primary.” Flanagan beat Democratic rival Angie Craig, who has since endorsed her, by that much in August.

“And now headed into the general election, where Donald Trump has endorsed my opponent multiple times in the last couple of weeks.”

I asked Flanagan how she’d chart Tafoya’s evolution on Operation Metro Surge. “There’s no evolution,” she said flatly. “The thing you can count on her to do is be two faced. She has said that ICE should be called ‘NICE.’ She said that ICE treated children really, really well, in response to five year old Liam Conejo Ramos being detained.

“I just think that every time she opens her mouth to express outrage about this,” Flanagan continues, “she tells on herself, that she does not know the people of Minnesota, and frankly, they do not know her. What I witnessed in Operation Metro Surge: literally packing bags [of groceries] to feed my neighbors. It was marching in negative 30-below, bundled up with 50,000 people. It was simply telling the truth about what it is that we have experienced. For me, it was Christmas Eve, at Mass.” Flanagan attends the multiracial, bilingual, activist Catholic Church of the Ascension in north Minneapolis, whose Latino members were hard hit by Metro Surge.
”And there were maybe 40 people, when usually that night you can’t even get a seat, because people were so afraid.” She sounds increasingly fed up with Tafoya. “Give me a break, lady. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

But Flanagan insists that her base of support goes well beyond Minnesotans outraged by Operation Metro Surge. She had just finished an energetic tour of Indian Country, including her own home base of White Earth, where she’s an enrolled member of the Ojibwe tribe (her Irish Catholic mother signed her up, even though she’d separated from Flanagan’s father, the late Ojibwe leader Martin Manypenny). She ticked off the issues she says are propelling her campaign.

“We’ve done 340 events in 125 communities, and every single place I go, people talk about affordability, specifically around healthcare. 
This is the thing. that I hear about in every community, urban, rural, suburban. And I did not start off in this campaign supporting Medicare for all, but having these conversations with Minnesotans I was like, oh, this is what we have to fight for, and this is what we’ve got to do.” As we hang up, I ask Flanagan about Tafoya calling the NYT-Siena poll that showed her 14 points behind “an outlier.” She laughs.

“Listen, I’ve always run for office like I’m 10 points behind. I’m not taking anything for granted. We are gonna run it through the tape.” Her staff signals to both of us that it’s time to get back on the bus and continue her final-weekend travels, and we say goodbye.