Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison marched into a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday and used his opening statement to level an extraordinary charge: that federal immigration agents are responsible for two of the three homicides recorded in Minneapolis this year.

The claim landed hours after border czar Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge — the federal immigration enforcement campaign that consumed Minnesota politics for months — was ending.

The timing was not subtle. As reported by Newsmax, Ellison has spent the duration of the operation fighting it in court, in the press, and now on Capitol Hill. Thursday's testimony was the capstone of a political offensive that treated the enforcement of federal immigration law as an act of aggression against the state of Minnesota.

What Ellison Actually Said — And What He Left Out

Ellison's opening statement was built around a single statistic designed to reframe the entire operation. He said that "2 of the 3 homicides committed in Minneapolis in 2026 have come at the hands of federal immigration agents."

He was referencing the fatal shootings of two anti-ICE activists — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — who were killed by federal agents during enforcement actions. The specifics of those encounters remain thin. No detailed circumstances, no dates, no descriptions of what occurred during the operations that led to the shootings have been publicly laid out. That's a significant gap, and Ellison did not fill it.

What he did instead was classify the deaths as "homicides" — a word that does real rhetorical work. It frames federal officers carrying out enforcement operations as killers, full stop. It collapses the distinction between a law enforcement action and a criminal act before anyone has examined the facts. And it does so from the witness chair of a Senate committee, where the accusation carries institutional weight whether or not the underlying evidence supports it.

Meanwhile, Operation Metro Surge produced more than 4,000 arrests of individuals federal officials described as criminal illegal aliens. Ellison mentioned none of them. The attorney general of a state where those arrests took place apparently found zero seconds in his opening statement to acknowledge the crimes those individuals are alleged to have committed against his own constituents.

The Operation Ellison Tried to Kill

Operation Metro Surge drew nationwide attention and no small amount of local upheaval during its months of operation in Minnesota. Ellison and unnamed local officials filed lawsuits alleging the deployment violated constitutional protections and Minnesota's sovereignty — an argument a federal judge recently rejected, declining to halt the operation while litigation proceeded.

That ruling is worth pausing on. Ellison threw the full weight of the attorney general's office at this operation and lost in federal court. The judge let it continue. And it continued to produce arrests — over 4,000 of them.

Homan's announcement Thursday that the surge was ending came with a notable detail: coordination with state and local law enforcement had improved. A significant drawdown was already underway. The operation didn't end because Ellison sued it to death. It wound down because it accomplished what it set out to do.

The Hearing Got Personal

The Senate hearing also featured a sharp exchange between Ellison and Sen. Josh Hawley, who questioned the attorney general about alleged state fraud allegations. The details of those allegations were not elaborated on during the hearing, but the exchange escalated fast. Hawley told Ellison directly: "You should resign!"

Ellison fired back:

"You should resign — I was thinking the same thing about you."

It was the kind of moment that generates clips and gets posted to X within minutes — which it did, via C-SPAN. But beneath the theatrics, there's a real question embedded in Hawley's challenge: What exactly is the attorney general's office doing for Minnesotans while its top official wages a public war against the federal enforcement of immigration law?

A Pattern That Goes Beyond Minnesota

Ellison's testimony fits a template that conservative audiences have seen deployed in city after city and state after state. The sequence goes like this:

• The federal government enforces immigration law in a jurisdiction that refuses to do so.
• Local officials resist, sue, and publicly condemn the operation.
• When enforcement actions produce tragic outcomes, those same officials cite the tragedies as evidence that the enforcement should never have happened.
• The underlying illegal immigration — and the crimes committed by those who entered the country unlawfully — vanish from the conversation entirely.

It is a closed loop. Refuse to cooperate, ensure that enforcement becomes more difficult and more confrontational, then point to the difficulty and confrontation as proof that enforcement is the problem. The people who made the situation more dangerous get to cite the danger as their vindication.

What 4,000 Arrests Mean

The number that Ellison never mentioned on Thursday deserves attention. More than 4,000 people arrested during Operation Metro Surge — individuals federal officials identified as criminal illegal aliens. That is not an abstraction. Those are people who were in Minnesota illegally and who had, according to federal authorities, committed crimes beyond their illegal entry.

Every one of those 4,000 arrests represents a community that was exposed to someone who should not have been there. Everyone represents a law enforcement action that state and local officials could have facilitated but chose to resist. Ellison filed lawsuits to stop these arrests. A federal judge said the operation could proceed. And it did.

Republicans have pointed to Minneapolis's higher violent crime rates as context for why the operation was necessary. Ellison apparently believes the real threat to Minneapolis was the agents trying to reduce that crime.

Where This Goes

The lawsuits Ellison filed are still working through the courts, even as the operation they targeted winds down. The political battle, however, is far from over. Ellison's Senate testimony was a signal that the deaths of Good and Pretti will be wielded as a cudgel against federal immigration enforcement for as long as it remains useful.

The question for Minnesota — and for every jurisdiction where this fight is playing out — is straightforward. When your attorney general spends months trying to block the arrest of criminal illegal aliens, and then goes to Washington to accuse the agents who made those arrests of murder, whose side is he on?

Four thousand arrests say the operation worked. Keith Ellison never mentioned a single one.