Over 60 Minnesota CEOs sign Chamber of Commerce open letter calling for de-escalation of Operation Metro Surge

On January 25, 2026, more than 60 chief executives of Minnesota-based companies signed an open letter posted to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce website calling for an “immediate deescalation of tensions” and urging state, local, and federal officials to “work together to find real solutions.” The letter followed the second of two fatal shootings of US citizens by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge — the DHS immigration enforcement surge that had flooded the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro with some 2,000 agents. Signatories included 3M CEO William Brown, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening, Target incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke, and UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley — leaders of the state’s largest publicly traded employers.

The letter’s language was conspicuously cautious. It named no agency, assigned no responsibility for the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and framed the crisis as a generalized failure of “tensions” requiring multi-stakeholder cooperation rather than as a federal operation that had killed civilians. Early public reaction on the Chamber’s own Facebook page was largely negative, with commenters calling the statement “hollow,” “weak,” and a corporate version of “thoughts and prayers.”

The structural significance lies less in the letter’s content than in the fact of its existence. When a state’s flagship corporations — firms whose CEOs typically avoid any commentary on federal enforcement — feel compelled to issue even a hedged collective statement, it marks a defection point: the operation’s costs have begun to register on the institutions that ordinarily supply the political class its legitimacy and its donors. The Chamber of Commerce, an organ of business consensus rather than dissent, becoming the vehicle for that statement signals that Operation Metro Surge had breached the threshold at which capital ordinarily stays silent. The hedging itself maps the limit of that defection — institutional self-interest pushing toward de-escalation while institutional caution refuses to name the actor responsible.