On the morning of January 24, Christos Greek Restaurant Off Site Link owner Gus Parpas was heading into work to prepare for the lunch rush when he got a phone call from one of his staff members.
There had been another shooting involving federal agents – this one less than a block away at Nicollet and 27th Ave. Hundreds of people were starting to show up in the area. More ICE agents were swarming the streets. And things were getting more tense by the minute.
Christos didn’t open that day. It stayed closed through the weekend. Eventually, the staff learned the person who was killed – Alex Pretti – was one of their regular customers.
“He was a nice young man,” recalled Carol Parpas, Christos’ co-owner and Gus’ wife. “He would come here often. So, to know what happened to him is so upsetting.”
Like other Eat Street restaurants, Christos is figuring out what recovery after the peak of Operation Metro Surge looks like. Many businesses and nonprofits are navigating similar circumstances – how to best help their neighbors and communities devastated by the surge and its aftermath.
Lake Street Council: “We really deepened our relationships”
If going through COVID-19 and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 taught Allison Sharkey anything, it’s that responding to a crisis takes teamwork. Sharkey, executive director of the Lake Street Council Off Site Link, says she and her staff have leaned heavily on the partnerships they formed six years ago to respond to the ICE surge and help its member businesses.
“It was pretty easy for us to pick up the phone, work together again, and be very clear with each other about what role everyone was going to play,” says Sharkey (pictured left). “We’re working together quite closely now on strategy and sharing information so that each neighborhood isn’t inventing its own wheel about how to serve people and how to get financial resources out the door.”
These groups are also encouraging more outside groups to support the recovery efforts. Many individuals and foundations have donated to the Lake Street Council. And the Minneapolis City Council recently approved a $7 million relief package for small businesses.
Sharkey says she’d like to see more corporate leaders get involved in these efforts. Her team is also encouraging state lawmakers to pass small business relief. But, without help from the federal government, Sharkey worries that this recovery process will be more difficult.
“You just can’t reach that level of support that’s really needed without help from the state and federal government,” she says.
A Resilient Community
Still, Sharkey credits the business community, especially along Lake Street, for its resilience, creativity, and tenacity. Nearly all the Council’s member businesses, including Sunrise Banks, have either reopened or plan to reopen soon. And some have launched their own campaigns to help their customers and neighbors.
For businesses still struggling, Sharkey wants them to know the Lake Street Council is here to help.
“People were coming to our office in tears, with so much anxiety about their rent or bills being due,” she says. “They were having to make difficult decisions about what to spend their limited money on. So, to have banks or landlords be flexible with them is going to help a lot of people maintain their business and stay in their home.”
Source MN, Inc. – “How can we bring hope and opportunity?”
Source MN Off Site Link runs a variety of service programs to help underserved people and families in south Minneapolis. This includes a food shelf, a drop-in women’s center, a weekly community meal, Bible study gatherings and English language classes. Jessica Wohler, co-founder and director of staff care at Source (right in photo), says since the ICE surge began in late 2025, they have supported more than 1,000 families per week.
“We felt the impact of the ICE surge the first week of December,” Wohler says. “We began delivering food to our clients who didn’t feel safe leaving their homes. At the time, we thought things would calm down by Christmas.”
Wohler says the staff had to pivot again when more federal agents arrived in Minneapolis in January.
The headquarters for Source is two blocks away from where Alex Pretti was killed. Their food shelf was operating the morning of the shooting. Wohler adds that more than a dozen families they have worked with have seen family members arrested during the surge. Several have since been released.
Mally Rosas, one of the center’s Latino outreach associates (left in photo), says despite being in the middle of much of the immigration enforcement activity, she has seen beauty emerge in people coming together to support each other.
“When you’re sitting back and you’re looking at it, it’s terrible on so many levels, and yet, there seems to be healing,” she says.
“It will take a while to get there,” says Wohler. “But I think in the end, there will be beauty in ways that we could never have imagined.”
Christos Restaurant – “The whole strength of this community is unbelievable”
“We got a lot of community support,” says Gus Parpas about the days and weeks after the ICE surge peaked along Eat Street. He says his restaurant’s business model – which includes catering and takeout orders – helped prevent Christos from experiencing large losses.
“We’re actually up about 12 percent from this time last year,” says Parpas.
Parpas says he has talked to his team at Sunrise Banks about how things are going at both Christos and the neighborhood, in general. He adds he received calls from people living out of state after seeing his restaurant on CNN. They offered to order hundreds of dollars’ worth of food for both demonstrators in the neighborhood and families who didn’t feel safe leaving their homes.
Because Christos is doing well, Parpas says he is encouraging the support organized for local restaurants – such as the Salt Cure Fund from the Minneapolis Foundation – be directed to other restaurants that have seen much larger drops in business.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us as a community here,” says Parpas. “It’s going to take everybody to chip in.”
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This article originally appeared in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal Off Site Link.