Meet the man pledging to donate $16 million to help Minneapolis residents pay rent post-ICE surge

It was a frigid Tuesday night in mid-January when John Wilson went to deliver laundry to a Columbia Heights family in hiding because of Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown that brought more than 4,000 federal agents to Minnesota.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been staking out laundromats, so volunteers would pick up laundry, wash it and return it to families.

Wilson followed an assigned protocol: Drive around the block to make sure no agents were lurking, check for surveillance drones and only then park to make the delivery. A man tepidly walked out of a duplex to accept the two bags of laundry along with some diapers, candy and cash.

“You could see he was nervous,” Wilson said of the man.

He then saw a woman inside the duplex. Two kids in pajamas popped their heads out of the door. The panic-stricken family was too afraid to go outside for fear of being detained by the government.

“I thought, ‘What is wrong with us?’” Wilson said. “You have to see it; then you can’t unsee it.”

That moment — and others he experienced during the 12-week immigration operation — was part of what convinced Wilson that more needed to be done. And he was in a position to help.

Using statewide figures and estimates from local groups, Wilson calculated that helping 5,500 households pay their rent through June would cost about $32 million.

“When I started digging around to figure out how we put money into this game and figure out how to get the money the people in need, it was a real mess,” he said.

His bold vow: Offer half of what was needed for that total amount for rental assistance — $16 million — and lobby others to come up with the other half.

Wilson isn’t well known locally, but his company, Wilson Wolf Manufacturing, has become a worldwide player in cell and gene therapy, and is currently valued at nearly $1 billion.

In 2023, he sold a nearly 20% stake in the company for $257 million and created the Wilson Foundation, which has about $80 million in cash.

When he was 11, his family endured a setback after his father suffered a serious head injury in an accident. And for much of his early life, Wilson lived in rentals, mostly in a large apartment complex in St. Anthony nestled between northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“It just left a mark on me,” he said. “So when this thing happens, I want to get involved and I want to do something, because I could see rent was going to be a problem.”

After college, as he interned at Honeywell, his mother saw an ad for a company working on a device to grow cancer-killing cells for the National Cancer Institute. She told him she had a “really good feeling” that he should try to get the job.

Wilson said it wasn’t like his mother to say something like that, and he told her she was crazy. “She hounded me because I didn’t want to do it,” Wilson said.

A year later, he applied for the job and got it. The company was trying to make a machine to grow the cells. The immunotherapy field was pioneered by one of Wilson’s heroes, Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute.

In the early 2000s, he started his own immunotherapy company. Not long afterward, it patented a device called G-Rex, now used worldwide for cutting-edge cancer treatments in the field of cell and gene therapy.

Wilson Wolf Manufacturing took off. A few years ago, the company outgrew its old, cluttered building and built a sleek, new headquarters accented with teal and warm walnut touches in New Brighton, just minutes from where Wilson grew up.

But he prefers to hang out in the less fancy, old building 10 minutes away, where he still keeps a razor and a bed.

Now 66, Wilson showed up for a recent interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue jeans.

Although he has three college degrees, he said he doesn’t care much about education. He focuses on tenacity: Of his staff of 26, only eight have degrees.

In short, the company specializes in taking complicated processes and making them simple. Wilson used the same approach to figure out the best way to help the community deal with the fallout from Operation Metro Surge, which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has called the nation’s largest immigration crackdown in history.

Wilson feels uncomfortable being in the spotlight for his recent efforts. The people who stood up to ICE and helped each other, he said, are the “unsung heroes ... the most phenomenal cross-section of humanity that you can imagine” organizing to help each other.

His focus on rental assistance was inspired by a group in nearby Columbia Heights, a suburb repeatedly targeted by federal agents. The network of people helping each other, one of many unnamed “mutual aid” groups, used its donations to keep as many people in their homes for as long as possible.

Nick Zeimet, a social work professor at Bethel University, said the Columbia Heights group has received about 500 requests for rent assistance. Rather than fully cover rent for only some of the people, it helped all of them pay at least half their rent.

The group partnered with an established nonprofit in order to receive donations from Wilson’s foundation.

He said he likes the way the group matches donors with families so they know who they are helping. So far, that effort has paid nearly half a million dollars in rent assistance. Stand with Minnesota also helped connect people willing to donate frequent-flyer miles to those needing flights home from detention centers.

No large foundations were addressing rent needs, Fairbanks said, but Wilson “just immediately stood up and put up money.”

“If he wasn’t doing what he was doing,” she said, “there would be significantly more families facing eviction right now.”

Wilson estimates his donations will soon approach $4 million.

In January, Wilson unsuccessfully tried to crash Bruce Springsteen’s benefit concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis in an attempt to get information to the musician about donating to rent assistance.

Wilson, who said he’s seen Springsteen 25 times, later told a woman what happened. She laughed and suggested he call Minneapolis Council Member Jamison Whiting.

Whiting, it turns out, was working with Mayor Jacob Frey on the issue of rental assistance. Earlier this year, the City Council had allocated $1 million toward a county program aiding low-income people on the verge of eviction, and that very day, Frey planned to propose that the city double its commitment.

As part of his goal to spend up to $16 million on rental assistance, Wilson has offered to match anyone who donates up to $3 million. He told Whiting he’d match the city’s funding.

City Council leaders — frustrated with the mayor’s refusal to support pausing evictions in the city — now say they will propose $2.8 million instead of $1 million.