Sergio Amezcua arrived at the house carrying two boxes filled with groceries, but the man inside was afraid to come to the door. A blue sedan parked outside seemed suspicious.
“Don’t come out,” Mr. Amezcua, speaking in Spanish, told the man by phone. “Let me check the car first.”
The car was empty, and Mr. Amezcua saw no signs of federal agents in the area. So the man appeared at the door, expressing gratitude for the food, and Mr. Amezcua, a pastor, prayed over him.
As thousands of federal agents have flooded streets in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to round up and deport undocumented immigrants, Mr. Amezcua, 46, has mobilized his church and organized free grocery deliveries to help people stay safely inside their homes.
An effort that started with a couple of hundred deliveries a week quickly swelled into a vast operation involving thousands of volunteers, who have signed up at the church to pack boxes with donated grocery items and make deliveries.
Mr. Amezcua said that, so far, the church had received almost 25,000 requests for grocery deliveries through an online request form. Since the program started, he said, there have been 14,000 deliveries.
Mr. Amezcua’s church, Dios Habla Hoy in south Minneapolis, offers services in English and Spanish to roughly 500 members. It organized a similar effort during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that was smaller in scale.
“To us, as Latinos in Minnesota, this is worse than Covid,” he said of the enforcement surge. “This is a bigger pandemic.”
“Our community is traumatized,” he added. “People that are born here are traumatized.”
Falling snow and freezing temperatures on Friday afternoon seemed to do little to slow the busy scene in the church’s parking lot.
A steady stream of volunteer drivers rolled into the lot, where their cars were loaded with grocery boxes that had been stacked on shipping pallets. Other people arrived to drop off donations.
Inside the church lobby, dozens of volunteers filled cardboard boxes with chicken, milk, fruit, paper towels, potatoes, flowers and, in some cases, hygiene products. A human chain snaked out the church doors to move the boxes to the staging area in the parking lot.
More volunteers crammed into the church sanctuary, waiting in lines to sign up to make deliveries. Some had their children in tow.
Mr. Amezcua said that volunteers were vetted to make sure they had driver’s licenses and to try to prevent infiltration by federal agents. Once they are registered, volunteers are given an orientation on how to make deliveries and what to do if they encounter the authorities.
Germaine Grueneberg, a Minneapolis resident, was standing in line at the volunteer sign-up on Friday afternoon.
“I think the desperation is palpable right now, and we need to do something,” Ms. Grueneberg said. “I’m lucky enough to have the privilege of a comfortable home, being able to buy my own food and go out and feel somewhat safe, for the most part, and it’s about time that we support our neighbors.”
Molly Kenny, a recent retiree, started volunteering last month to make deliveries, and she eventually took on a bigger role helping Mr. Amezcua run the program.
“We’re literally building this as we go, and every day is a little bit different, so it really requires all of us to be super fluid and patient,” Ms. Kenny said.
Much of the food is packed off-site and supplied to the church by food bank organizations. Some of it is packed at the church.
The need is greater than the church can meet, Mr. Amezcua said, so he is focusing on expanding the effort and hopes to open up more food delivery hubs in other parts of the city. With no end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in sight, he said, the organizers are preparing for a long haul.
The pastor’s cellphone has been buzzing relentlessly since the federal surge began. He gets texts and calls from his staff about people showing up at the church to donate money or help out — and, just as often, he said, from church members alerting him about close calls with ICE or seeking information about sightings.
When the pastor was out making deliveries on Friday, a church member called him for help getting his car registration renewed because he was afraid to go to the Department of Driver and Vehicle Services office to do it in person.
Mr. Amezcua, who immigrated to the United States from the state of Sinaloa in Mexico, described himself as a conservative and said that when he first heard that ICE was coming to Minneapolis, he was not concerned. Agents would target people with criminal records, he thought, and then they would be gone after a couple of weeks.
But the firsthand accounts he started hearing from community members about ICE’s aggressive tactics and its apparent targeting of nonwhite people changed his view, he said. Businesses, especially those serving or employing immigrants, have been decimated, he said.
“This is literally racism in the name of patriotism — and a conservative guy is telling you that,” he said. “I feel betrayed by Donald Trump.”
Trump administration officials have denied that agents target people based on their race.
Tensions have run high around the city, he said. Community observers patrol the streets and stand near businesses, keeping watch for any unmarked vehicle that might be carrying federal agents.
The pastor, who drives a lifted pickup truck with tinted windows, said he himself had been mistaken for a federal agent while on the road.
“This is where they showed me the finger,” he said, as he drove by a shopping center filled with Latino businesses on Friday. “They thought I was an ICE agent.”
So when he drove back to the church grounds and saw two women peering into his truck from a stopped car, he got out to reassure them that he was the church’s pastor.
Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.
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