GOP Candidate Chris Madel Quits Minnesota Governor Race, Calls Operation Metro Surge an 'Unmitigated Disaster'

On January 26, 2026, Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for the GOP nomination for Minnesota governor, announced in a video posted to X that he was ending his campaign. Madel cited national Republicans’ handling of immigration enforcement in the state, declaring that he “cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” Though he had originally supported ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, Madel called the operation “an unmitigated disaster” in the video, arguing it had “expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.” He added that national Republican actions had made it “nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”

A criminal defense attorney by trade, Madel had a direct personal connection to the operation’s most violent episode: he had helped ICE officer Jonathan Ross with the paperwork to obtain Department of Justice legal representation in the event Ross was sued or criminally charged. Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good earlier in January, an event that sparked a surge of protests across the Twin Cities. Madel’s role as Ross’s legal counsel makes his public break with the operation he had once championed all the more notable.

The structural significance of Madel’s withdrawal is the coalition cost it exposes. A Republican candidate, himself enmeshed in the legal defense of the operation’s enforcers, breaking publicly and on the record is a measurable fracture in the partisan coalition required to sustain mass-enforcement operations. Operation Metro Surge did not merely draw opposition from the political out-party; it drove a member of the in-party to abandon a statewide bid and name the federal posture toward Minnesota as “retribution” that was “unconstitutional.” When the operation’s own would-be allies treat it as a political liability and a constitutional offense, the cost of the enforcement surge is registering inside the governing coalition, not only outside it.