Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployments to American cities are a central part of President Trump's immigration crackdown. Yet, according to data analyzed by NPR — and interviews with law enforcement and city officials — these actions stretched local police departments thin, disrupted businesses and left city budgets struggling to absorb the fallout.
In Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the immigration enforcement surge resulted in ballooning overtime costs for local police. In Portland, Ore., decreased police manpower contributed to longer call response times.
Amid what the Trump administration has dubbed Operation Metro Surge, businesses in cities like Bloomington and St. Paul, Minn., lost revenue, experienced unrest, and were similarly left with high bills.
What unifies these ICE actions is they were all sustained over several weeks, in communities where local law enforcement isn't authorized to assist with federal immigration efforts. Still, these deployments resulted in knock-on effects that required the use of local police to bring about or preserve order.
Police overtime surged as departments were forced to deploy officers for demonstrations, extra patrols, security around federal facilities and emergency responses tied to the raids — often at overtime pay rates.
In cities already struggling with staffing shortages, like Los Angeles and Minneapolis, those extra hours quickly added up.
In Los Angeles, where the financial situation is already dire, LAPD overtime spending climbed to $41 million in June 2025, when immigration raids sparked weeks of protests — well above the department's typical monthly range of $18 to $30 million, according to the city controller's office.
In Minneapolis, the police department reported more than $6 million in overtime and standby pay in less than a month, from Jan. 7 to Feb. 8, according to the city's police chief. That's more than double the city's entire annual police overtime budget of $2.3 million.
The full financial picture is still not fully known. City leaders are reviewing their budgets and expect costs to continue to go up.
In response to NPR's questions about how the immigration crackdown has affected city budgets, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, provided a statement and included source links: "Illegal aliens cost American taxpayers over $150 billion in 2023 alone and expenditures for benefits provided to the illegal aliens who entered during the Biden surge will add $177 billion in mandatory federal spending through 2034."
NPR has not independently verified these figures.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to NPR's questions for this story.
What happened in Los Angeles?
In early June 2025, ICE agents began a series of aggressive immigration sweeps in Southern California.
"The first three weeks of it, we were really balancing and teetering on martial law," LA councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez told NPR. She said the city didn't expect "such a heavy-handed and militarized and war-like response from the federal government to people expressing their First Amendment rights."
The LAPD spent around $17 million between June 8 and 16 responding to the anti-ICE protests that broke out that month. Close to $12 million of that went to overtime costs, according to a report from the LA City Administrative Office.
These figures do not include the costs of potential lawsuits or liability claims from residents and protesters injured during the demonstrations, and from aggressive policing by the LAPD that the city expects to face, Hernandez said.
To meet these financial needs, the city has had to tap into its reserve funds.
In response to questions from NPR, the LAPD did not provide any information about what types of activities officers were engaged in when they incurred the overtime hours.
The city controller's office pointed NPR to the public database of city funding for more information. But the data lacked specifics. Overtime costs for the LAPD for the entire month of June 2025 ballooned to more than $40 million. Overtime hovered between $22 to a little over $33 million from January 2025 through May 2025.
The LAPD, the country's third-largest police department, has struggled with short staffing – contributing to the need to spend millions on overtime in prior years, according to the LAist.
LA Mayor Karen Bass did not answer questions about the financial repercussions on the city from the police response to the raids or on local businesses.
Portland's story: 'We are understaffed, under-resourced'
Not long after the unrest in Los Angeles, Portland Police Bureau Chief Robert Day says protesters and federal agents began to converge on the city's ICE facility in June.
"The bulk of our overtime investment, and demands on our time have been at the [federal ICE] facility," Day told NPR.
Like LA, Portland's police department has dealt with staffing shortages for years.
From June until November 2025, Portland police officers were staffed at the ICE facility nearly every day, according to the city data provided to NPR. There were other times when officers were actively monitoring but weren't at the facility.
In 2025, the Portland Police Bureau recorded 38,213 overtime hours categorized as "event response," according to data provided to NPR. For context, Portland police racked up 19,166 overtime hours for event response for all of 2024.
The overtime hours accrued in 2025 are nearly half of what was accrued when police responded to major protests in 2020 and 2021 following the death of George Floyd. Those protests lasted months, and the at-times chaotic demonstrations damaged property and sometimes turned violent.
Police worked between 70,000 to more than 80,000 hours of overtime to respond to those events, according to the data.
Local law enforcement's role at the ICE facility this summer and fall was to maintain order. Protests got out of hand at times. "The facility was badly damaged. It was heavily attacked. Windows broken and graffiti," Day said.
During now-outgoing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's October visit, Portland police were tasked with providing even more security to the center – 456 officers, resulting in close to 3,000 hours of overtime hours worked, according to data provided to NPR, and equating to "a few hundred thousand bucks," according to Day.
"Cops were working long days, long weeks, over an extended period of time," Day said. "We are understaffed, under-resourced, and the rest of the city suffers because of that."
In the summer and fall, that meant calls for service took much longer, according to Day. "Our average response time to priority calls has grown to 17,18 minutes … and it should be more like six to eight," he confirmed.
Minneapolis police report PTSD symptoms
At the peak of the immigration enforcement surge, there were around 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents in the Minneapolis area. There are only around 600 cops in the Minneapolis Police Department, and statewide, there are around 10,000 law enforcement officers.
"I cannot imagine any other city going through the intensity and the sheer amount of chaos that happened here. It was terrible," Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told NPR. "Minneapolis is a small city. This is not Chicago. It's not LA, I don't think it would be possible for them to overwhelm those cities in the way that this city was really overwhelmed by that surge."
There is still a presence of ICE agents in the city, but far fewer than at its peak.
Early on, O'Hara made big changes to respond to the deployments of federal agents to Minneapolis. He changed operational procedures and created a full-time position for a lieutenant to be available to monitor ICE-related calls. He also staffed the department's operation center with civilian community service officers to help monitor social media and the city's camera feed to see action in the streets in real time, he explained.
By early January, O'Hara was instructing all sworn officers to be in uniform at all times while on duty.
"I was afraid there was going to be a need for an emergency situation that would require a massive deployment. And the next day is when Renee Good was killed," he told NPR. "From that moment, until about a day or two after the third shooting that we had when Mr. Pretti died, I would say it just continued to escalate."
When the police were responding to and protecting active crime scenes in the aftermath of the shootings, ICE agents continued with immigration stops and arrests. In response, demonstrations of thousands in opposition to the raids continued.
Minneapolis police had to respond to all of it.
O'Hara compared that chaos to the unrest after the 2020 killing of Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to major protests and riots.
After Good's death, all days off for officers were canceled. Police were tasked with handling marches, protests at hotels and monitoring vigil sites. Specialized units were activated and police generally tried to maintain order.
As a result, overtime costs skyrocketed. O'Hara said the department spent about $6.4 million on overtime costs from Jan. 7 through Feb. 8.
"It was, honestly, an overwhelming situation that for most of it, it felt like there was just no end in sight," he said.
By the third week of January, O'Hara said he received reports that officers were experiencing symptoms of PTSD, "which scared me," he said.
The 2020 Floyd protests had a huge impact on the department – so much so it led to a mass exodus of officers reporting symptoms of PTSD. "As emotionally charged as things were on the street, it was difficult for them. It took them back to the feelings and things that they had experienced in 2020. That was really tough for a lot of the cops."
O'Hara continued, talking about staffing concerns: "It was my fear that we were going to wind up having this cycle again and just wind up losing more people. Unlike in 2020…there's absolutely no buffer. We're at bare bones here."
With police pulled to respond to keep public order, officers were being pulled off of active investigations. Crimes weren't being solved or investigated as quickly as they could have, he added.
The financial cost of the deployment to the city as a whole is also pronounced. Minneapolis issued a report on Feb. 13 that estimated the total economic fallout in one month during these operations was more than $203 million.
The report lists a host of consequences from the raids, including residents detained, job losses and business closures.
"The impact was both extraordinary and it was devastating for those months, while this invasion was taking place," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told NPR. "People were afraid to go out. Afraid to go to the grocery store. Terrified that their families were going to get ripped apart."
He said, "ICE is clearly to blame."
NPR asked the White House to respond to this criticism.
Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said in her statement: "When will NPR ask sanctuary cities if they will reimburse the American people for expenses incurred by illegal aliens? Or if they will apologize to the victims of violent criminal illegal aliens?"
Chief O'Hara said the problem was not that immigration enforcement was happening. The problem is the "unsafe and questionable methods" of the federal agents and "questionable leadership."
Noem, the head of DHS at the time of this surge, was recently fired in part because of the political fallout from these operations.
Consequences of ICE deployment spread beyond city borders
St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota and close neighbor to Minneapolis, loaned some officers to Minneapolis to deal with the crush of Operation Metro Surge, according to Rebecca Noecker, the president of St. Paul's City Council.
"This was a problem that we did not make and it's a problem we don't have the resources to solve," said Noecker.
Following the shooting of Macklin Good in Minneapolis, St. Paul police spent $46,000 in overtime in just one day to assist the neighboring police department, Noecker said.
From Jan. 7 to Feb. 5 St. Paul police shared with NPR that 4,679.75 employee overtime hours were worked in response to Operation Metro Surge. That cost $372,341.38. They didn't tell NPR how many officers worked the additional hours or provide additional data beyond early 2026.
"The line between physically intervening with ICE to keep protesters safe and physically intervening with ICE in a way that prevents a lawful enforcement action is a really fine one," Noecker said. "What I heard mostly from our police was: 'We're really in an impossible situation.'"
Noecker says the numbers her city is seeing now are not the end of the story. She expects these bills to go up.
In nearby Bloomington, Minnesota, 10 minutes south of Minneapolis, the city's police Chief Booker Hodges told NPR protests against ICE spilled into his community. He said, for example, demonstrations broke out in front of hotels where it was rumored that ICE agents were staying.
In January, when the White House deployed federal law enforcement to Minneapolis "all hell broke loose," Hodges said.
Border Patrol and other federal agents were seen following residents to nearby schools, which triggered emergency calls to the department. There were also racial profiling incidents targeting the city's large Latino and Somali population, Hodges told NPR.
He also said officers of color were subjected to racist abuse by anti-ICE protesters.
Hodges said his officers were exhausted, but that his department is fully staffed so didn't require as much overtime as other agencies.
His department spent more than $32,000 in overtime costs in response to immigration protests and activities, he told NPR. That covered 60 police officers and totaled 415.5 hours.
The work for these officers involved extra patrols in retail and at the city's more than four dozen hotels. It also required the deployment of the department's Public Order Group (a group trained to respond to public disorder). It was deployed once all of last year. This year, as of mid February, the group was deployed four times.
He would like to see reimbursement from the federal government, but said, "it's pointless to even ask them for it."
He says time would be better spent pushing for comprehensive immigration reform: "Because even though the surge has ended here, the laws that allowed it to take place are still in place."
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