This entry includes five social-media videos that MPR News, which is a statewide news outlet covering Minnesota, produced and published during the federal government’s immigration-enforcement surge in Minnesota in late 2025 and early 2026. The Department of Homeland Security called its action in Minnesota the biggest immigration enforcement operation ever.
Each video was produced by MPR News staff. Four were recorded by MPR News; one is UGC from a witness to the killing of Alex Pretti, which MPR News obtained firsthand in person from the witness and then added production elements to with the goal of bringing clarity to audiences as well as giving a content warning so as not to traumatize people scrolling.
All MPR News videos are posted on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. For this submission, we submitted the link where each video performed the best, so that you may see its engagement and comments.
Minnesota became a focus of international attention on Jan. 7, 2026, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, so that’s where our entry begins. Our journalists were already on the ground – photojournalist Ben Hovland lives blocks from where Good was killed, so when he was documenting the scene moments after the shooting, someone recognized him as a neighbor and journalist, invited him to her porch, and told him she witnessed the shooting and trusted him to share her story. He’d met her once before, so he knew she was no chaos agent. His interview with Emily Heller moments after she saw Good’s killing is our first entry.
Reporter Feven Gerezgiher was preparing for work when federal agents killed Alex Pretti outside her south Minneapolis apartment. While covering the scene, she told colleagues she wanted to find a witness. Stella Carlson heard their conversation and said she was one. Carlson gave Gerezgiher and Hovland the video she took and we published it. Days later they interviewed her on camera in our headquarters.
Another example of continuing coverage is our interview with the father of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who went viral after he was detained while wearing a blue hat. Reporter Regina Medina interviewed Adrian Conejo Arias in Spanish—and remotely at his request. We captioned it in English and Spanish so audiences who speak either language could hear him in his own words.
After working for weeks to speak with Gov. Tim Walz about the surge, he agreed to a same-day interview on All Things Considered. Host Clay Masters broke the news to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on air and livestream that then-Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said he and some agents would leave the state. We clipped his reaction and posted immediately.
While some of the Instagram entries are collaborative posts with NPR, MPR News always conceptualizes and produces the content, and we pitch NPR to see if they’d like us to invite them as a collaborator to amplify our audience. NPR did not produce or shape this content in any way.
