LONG PRAIRIE, Minn. — Weekends used to start in Manuel Tejeda-Mendez’ barber chair, customers stopping in for an after-work haircut before heading out to enjoy their Friday night.

The weekly ritual brought those customers to Long Prairie’s Central Avenue, the main street in this rural Minnesota town. Along that corridor are about a dozen immigrant-owned small businesses that illustrate the area’s shifting population, serving new arrivals and longtime residents alike.

But in the months since thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended on Minnesota, business has slowed. Though the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge primarily targeted the Twin Cities, rural communities — from dairy farms to small-town main drags — have felt the effects.

Long Prairie is about a two-hour drive northwest of Minneapolis, a dot in a stretch of farm country where pickup trucks mix with Amish horse-drawn buggies on two-lane highways.

On a recent weekday afternoon, several immigrant business owners on Central Avenue said their customers have been afraid to visit. Some closed temporarily at the height of the federal surge, and although they’ve reopened, survival remains uncertain.

“It’s an economic chain. If the bar doesn’t open, customers don’t want to get their hair cut because they’re not going anywhere; if no one throws a party, the grocery store doesn’t open,” Tejeda-Mendez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, said in Spanish.

About one in five Long Prairie residents are foreign born, census data show, and about six in 10 students enrolled in the local school district are Hispanic or Latino, according to the state.

As in the larger cities, the crackdown’s impact in Greater Minnesota still is being calculated. But there’s no question rural areas took a hit, said Southwest Initiative Foundation President Scott Marquardt speaking to the Minnesota Senate Jobs and Economic Development Committee Feb. 25.

Legislators are weighing recovery aid for affected businesses across the state.

“Immigrant- and refugee-owned businesses, and other businesses impacted, have redefined and reimagined many of our rural main streets,” Marquardt said. “There is significant loss of working capital, loss of revenue, and that’s impacting the families up and down the commercial corridors, the main streets in these rural areas, the ag businesses that support them and everywhere else.”

The 1980s farm crisis scarred Long Prairie. Census data shows the current population remains poorer and is aging faster than the state as a whole.

As in communities throughout Minnesota, new arrivals to Long Prairie — primarily immigrants from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as well as U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico — are driving population growth. Jobs at the beef-packing plant draw many people to the area, and some go on to open local businesses.

The demographic shift hasn’t come without friction. Politically, Todd County is solidly red, with more than 70% of voters casting ballots for President Donald Trump in the past three presidential elections. In downtown Long Prairie, a local bar has for years displayed a sign calling for border security and a stop to the immigrant “invasion.”

In 2024, plans for company-owned apartments for Long Prairie Packing Plant workers drew vocal opposition after unanimous City Council approval. The mayor and city manager eventually quit amid the controversy.

In many ways, though, Long Prairie has embraced its newest residents. The town holds an annual summertime Latino Festival. A Dominican restaurant that opened in October has become a go-to spot. And at the library, books in Spanish are on the first shelf that patrons see when they come through the door.

Nearly half of Central Avenue businesses are immigrant-owned. Although some have been there more than a decade, the vast majority of new entrepreneurs are immigrants. Several have undertaken renovations at long-vacant buildings, said Luan Thomas-Brunkhorst, Long Prairie Chamber director.

“They definitely had the gumption, the courage, to take on some of these big, monumental projects,” she said.

It’s not clear how long it will take downtown businesses to recover lost revenue, much less make big investments again.

Gio Garcia, who works at the family-owned Mi Pueblito market and restaurant, said what was once $1,500 in daily restaurant revenue has dropped to $500 amid the escalated immigration enforcement.

A Dominican grocery store owner, who asked to remain anonymous, said sales had been down $3,000 a week for the past three months.

“The businesses around here — we need help,” he said in Spanish.

If things don’t change, his own business might only last a year, he said: “I’m afraid we’ll have to close, to be honest.”

Down the street, Tejeda-Mendez, the barber, gave a haircut to a young boy, the only customer in the shop. Many clients still are calling to ask if it’s safe to come in, he said.

This summer, Tejeda-Mendez said, he’s hopeful the shop will be back to business as usual. Long Prairie is a world away from his native Dominican Republic, but he and other immigrants want to be there, he said.

“I like the tranquility here,” Tejeda-Mendez said. “Whenever new people come, I ask them if they like it here, and everyone says yes.”

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