Metro-area law enforcement leaders say they’ve seen a pattern of federal agents accosting and racially profiling U.S. citizens in the course of the ongoing federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says it has sent roughly 3,000 agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Border Patrol to Minnesota to find and arrest undocumented immigrants. The agency on Monday claimed it had arrested 3,000 people in the past six weeks as part of “Operation Metro Surge.”
RELATED: Former ICE agent talks about the agency’s presence in the Twin Cities — and the actions of field agents
Twin Cities officials say federal agents now outnumber local law enforcement and do not give any prior warning about their activities.
During a news conference Tuesday at the Minnesota State Capitol, St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry, Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt and Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley reported that off-duty officers in their departments are being stopped by ICE and Border Patrol agents and being asked for proof of citizenship. All of those stopped were people of color, something Witt called “concrete examples of profiling.”
Bruley described an encounter in which one of his officers was “boxed in” by federal agents, who held her at gunpoint and demanded to see her papers. When the off-duty officer tried to record the stop with her phone, one of the agents knocked the device from her hand. The agents finally left when she identified herself as a Brooklyn Park police officer.
“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers, but what it did do is we know our officers know what the Constitution is, they know the difference between right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted. And that’s what they were,” Bruley said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”
RELATED: ‘It is making people scared and terrified’: MPD Chief O’Hara talks ICE operations in Minneapolis
Law enforcement leaders pleaded for federal agents to “find common ground” and cease immigration enforcement tactics that have swept up several U.S. citizens.
“The people that we’re dealing with as police chiefs are the people that are scared to death, that are afraid to go outside — not because their status is in question but because they’re hearing and they’re seeing that they know people are getting stopped by the way that they looked and they don’t want to take that risk,” Henry said.
The Brooklyn Park chief added that accountability for federal agents’ alleged abuses of power remains elusive because ICE officers cover their faces and don’t display badges to identify themselves. He was also skeptical of how closely DHS was supervising their field agents.
“There’s so many different groups that do not know what other groups are doing or who is out at any location,” Bruley said. “And so when you call ICE leadership or you call Border Patrol leadership or you call Homeland Security leadership, they’re unable to tell you what their people were doing that day.”
Bruley said he believes the racial profiling is being carried out by a small subset of federal agents. However, when a reporter pressed him on whether such stops could be a top-down directive, he conceded he did not have evidence aside from his conversations with individual agents.
RELATED: ACLU sues ICE, Border Patrol over ‘suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests and racial profiling’
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of American citizens who say they were detained because of their perceived ethnicity.
