Single mothers lost months of income hiding from ICE — and now can’t afford to renew immigration papers

It was a frigid January morning in Minneapolis. Alexa quietly stepped outside her apartment to heat her car for her baby, who was waiting inside in her crib. They immediately spotted her. At the edge of the complex, the doors of a van carrying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swung open. They sprinted toward her. She remembers the guns they held, and how the sight of them caused her to drop her lunchbox in the snow, turn on the spot and run as fast as she ever had back into the safety of her apartment, back to her daughter. When she shut the door, she didn’t leave again for nearly three months. She couldn’t work. Those months drained every penny she had saved. When her own money ran out, she had no one to turn to. A year prior, her partner died in a car accident while she was eight months pregnant, leaving her with no other family in the United States. As she kept an eye on the ICE agents outside of her window, she turned to Minneapolis’ robust mutual aid networks run by volunteers who delivered groceries, formula and diapers to her door. When ICE finally started to withdraw from the city in April, Alexa, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her privacy, finally ventured out. She started picking up odd jobs again and life returned to some sense of normalcy. Until it came time to renew her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application about two months ago. Alexa arrived alone in the United States from Honduras when she was 14 years old, which qualified her for DACA. For years, that policy has protected her from deportation and granted her permission to work. That work permit has been her lifeline over 12 years, and every two years she has faithfully renewed it. With no savings, she had to decide between paying her rent to keep her baby and her 5-year-old housed, or paying the application fee — $555 — plus nearly $800 in attorneys fees she usually pays to ensure the application is done correctly. She chose rent. But without her work authorization, Alexa can’t find a better job or regain any stability. She picks up any odd job that comes her way — cleaning hotel rooms, cooking and selling food — to gather up enough to renew her permit. “I only work and work, and I can’t do anything else because I need to recover economically. I am the only one who is here with my daughter,” Alexa said in Spanish. “This is how many of us are.” In the months since the end of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which claimed the lives of two American citizens and saw hundreds of people with no criminal background detained, the immigrant families who hid in their homes are still reeling from the long-term effects of months of employment and income loss. One of the most pressing now: Interruptions in their immigration status or delays in paperwork that have kept them stuck in a cycle of uncertainty for nearly eight months. Bri, a Minneapolis single mother who has single-handedly been running a mutual aid network for months, said about 52 people have contacted her seeking help covering their DACA fees. Nearly all of them are single mothers like Alexa. “I have a lot of families, single moms, people from my community that are reaching out asking if I know who can get help,” said Bri, whose name The 19th changed for her safety. “A lot of families don’t have $500 lying around right now.” At the start of the year, Bri amassed about $250,000 in donations to help get breastmilk donations to babies whose mothers had been detained, as well as other needs. That money helped 174 families with rent assistance and other bills. But “the need is just so high right now,” Bri said, and she’s now out of funds. Across the state, demand at food shelves and the number of eviction filings are set to hit all-time highs in 2026. In Minneapolis, the city estimates that immigrant workers with limited English proficiency lost $152 million in wages from December to March alone. Bri has started a new GoFundMe , but no funds have trickled in yet. She’s been referring people to other local organizations, but those too are running out of money and having a harder time drawing donations or volunteers . The support that flooded into Minneapolis at the start of the year has abated , but the problems have not. Around town, people are on certain street corners with their tools waiting for someone to drive by and give them a job. Restaurants aren’t as full. Kids aren’t out at parks as much as they used to be. Church pews go unfilled on Sundays. Recently, two people were taken by ICE out of a front yard where they were cutting grass. Single mothers, who work at higher rates than other mothers because they rely on the income to support their children, are already more likely to be low-income, facing higher rates of food and housing insecurity . Even three months of work disruption could put them in a precarious position, at risk of losing their housing and not having enough to feed their children. Karen Clara, the social services director at the St. Louis Park Emergency Program, a local social services agency, said the organization has been using donations that came in at the start of the year to cover rent assistance for more than 200 families, and recently more people have been asking about aid with immigration paperwork filing fees. They’ve continued offering the rent assistance as a way to open people up to use other funds to cover filing fees, she said. But the group is down to their last $5,000. “I’ve been having mostly a lot of conversations with people to try to troubleshoot and think about letting them know our funding is running out. ‘How are things looking? Are you able to maybe join with another family member who is in the area to save money with rent? How are jobs working?’” Clara said. Tracy Roy, the legal director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said part of the problem for DACA families is there is almost no way to waive the filing fees, even for those with little to no income. On top of that, those who filed at the start of the year are seeing processing times as long as eight months in some cases, Roy said. The Trump administration was sued last month for delays in processing DACA renewal applications, which are usually fulfilled within four to eight weeks but now can take three months or more. For the single moms who are left to raise children after a male partner is deported, which is common among the people she sees, Clara said, there is now fear of deportation. When they come in, Clara said, she “can see the hesitancy on their faces.” “We’re a few months out from when things have kind of calmed down, but it’s a lot of trauma that’s gonna have to be worked through,” she said. “There’s going to be long-lasting financial effects. There are families who are torn apart.” Ensuring they can maintain their immigrant status, she said, is “priority level number one.” Jazmin, a single mother of two girls in Minneapolis, is preparing for her DACA to lapse in September. She was fired from her job at Target at the start of the year when she stopped going to work as ICE descended on the city. She’s back at work now, but was demoted, and her last day will be September 18 unless she can renew her DACA by September 20, when it’s set to lapse. In the meantime, she’s playing catch-up on an even slimmer budget and trying to squirrel away anything she can for her DACA renewal. With attorney fees, it will cost her about $1,300. Jazmin has renewed the application numerous times since she got DACA in 2015 — she’s been in the United States since she was 5 years old — but this is the first time it may lapse. “All of this is a nightmare that we all hope will end soon,” said Jazmin, who The 19th is identifying only by her first name. As a precaution, she appointed someone to care for her girls should she get deported. With no family in the United States, she selected one of her daughters’ teachers. “I felt like a horrible mother that day, because how could I sign my kids away to a teacher? But in that moment it was for their safety,” she said. “I felt like I failed them.” Roy said the situation for many families exemplifies how ICE operations like Metro Surge could destabilize families’ lives for years — even for those who avoided deportation. The attacks on immigrant families “haven’t stopped just because they’ve gotten quieter,” she said. ICE is still detaining people. For now, her organization has been able to cover immigration paperwork filing fees for all the families who have come to them asking for help — about 100 this year — and the organization does not charge any legal fees to help with applications. But there is little legal recourse for those who are in limbo waiting to receive their permits as delays continue. And eventually, their funds, which came in through donations largely at the start of the year, will dry up. “It is something we are talking about internally, is how we can continue to do this if we don’t have a steady stream of donations,” Roy said.