MINNEAPOLIS — From high school students to elected officials, residents in Minnesota are pushing back against the growing deployment of federal immigration officers in their neighborhoods, leading to days of confrontations and protests.
Resident Neph Sudduth stopped to choke back tears as she witnessed immigration officers roaming around her neighborhood, just a few blocks from the site where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good last week, and clashing with protesters.
“They will hurt you for real! They will hurt you for real!” she shouted at anti-ICE demonstrators, urging them to move away from the officers’ vehicles. Just then, an immigration officer rolled down his window, extended his arm and sprayed a protester point-blank in the face with a chemical agent.
“How dare they come back to this neighborhood,” Sudduth told NBC News. “How forgone you have to be morally to come back here and stand up and do that with your faces covered?”
ICE agents detain a woman after pulling her from a car Tuesday in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that she planned to send more agents to Minnesota this week to quell protesters and continue to enforce immigration policies. President Donald Trump defended the Minnesota operation Tuesday, saying, “We have taken out killers, rapists and drug dealers, people from mental institutions that came in illegally.” ICE has posted on social media about the arrests of people accused of sex crimes and who they allege are in the country illegally.
Cary Wang, a medic who is part of 50/51, a nonpartisan grassroots group, provided medical help Tuesday to several people who were affected by chemical agents deployed by immigration officers.
“I think it’s part of their strategy to intimidate and show that they’re immune to any type of repercussions,” Wang said. “The fact that they’re ramping up their enforcement officers — that they’re bringing more here when they already know it’s a volatile situation — it just doesn’t seem that they’re looking for things to cool down. It looks like they’re actually trying to escalate things.”
The highly charged confrontations between protesters and immigration enforcement have been captured in various clips on social media, including posts showing agents asking people at an electric vehicle charging station if they are citizens and another in which protesters curse and scream as an agent appears to kneel on a man’s neck as officers arrest him.
The videos and images contribute to a picture of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations as they fan out across the country, triggering pushback from residents in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina.
In Minneapolis on Tuesday, resistance to the presence of federal agents was represented by the smell of tear gas, which lingered in the air of a neighborhood following a clash between community members and immigration officers who said they were conducting an operation in the area.
Residents and witnesses told NBC News they came out with whistles to alert others about the operation and act as observers while others began protesting. That’s when, they say, officers began deploying pepper spray and throwing tear gas canisters, which were still on the ground Tuesday afternoon.
ICE agents detain an observer Tuesday after they arrested two people from a residence in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
Sam Luhmann, who saw the incident, said he spotted a large number of armed immigration officers in the area “pounding on doors” and arresting a few people.
Then, “they started tackling protesters” and deployed what he believed to be tear gas and pepper balls, Luhmann told NBC News. “It seemed like a war.”
Luhmann, 16, of Chicago, drove to Minneapolis with his older brother after Good was fatally shot. He said they wanted to help community members monitor immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis the same way they did when immigration officers were deployed to Chicago last year under “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Many of the clashes are taking place just blocks from where Good was killed.
Community observers and protesters gathered after immigration officers rear-ended his car, said Christian Molina, 40. Molina told NBC News officers were asking him whether he was in the country legally.
“Luckily, they didn’t hurt me or shoot at me. But what if they did?” said Molina, a U.S. citizen and father of four. He added that he wasn’t doing anything wrong when officers went after him.
“There’s no reason for them to just look at you and try to just chase you.”
DHS did not comment on the incident involving Molina.
The crowd that gathered around Molina was later hit with tear gas and pepper spray.
South of Minneapolis, in Richfield, Border Patrol agents stopped at a Target store Thursday and arrested two U.S. citizens, Democratic state Rep. Michael Howard said.
“Yesterday in Richfield, federal agents, including Greg Bovino, senior commander of US Border Patrol, entered Target without a warrant, physically assaulted, and arrested two Target employees, both who are U.S. citizens. Madness,” Howard wrote in a news release Friday.
Angela Oberfoell, who witnessed the arrests of her co-workers at Target, told NBC News the experience was “traumatic.”
Oberfoell also provided NBC News with a video she recorded of the incident. It shows workers in disbelief and customers confronting Bovino and other Border Patrol agents.
Another video of the second employee arrested showed the moment Border Patrol agents followed the employee as he recorded the agents and yelled “f— you” before the agent tackled the employee to the ground at the store’s entrance.
DHS said of the arrest captured in that video, “This individual was arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers under 18 U.S.C 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers.”
Howard said that both of the Target workers have been released but that they “sustained injuries and untold trauma while their rights were trampled for no reason whatsoever.”
“We continue to call on ICE to GET OUT of Minnesota,” he added.
Officials in Minnesota sued the federal government Monday to stop the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota.
Shaquille Brewster and Natasha Korecki reported from Minneapolis and Nicole Acevedo from New York.
Shaquille Brewster
Shaquille Brewster is a political reporter for NBC News and MSNBC.
The video below has horrific clips of ICE assaulting bystanders and protestors. One clip showed the ICE gang thugs breaking down a door and entering a home like they think they are a special forcer unit in Fallujah Iraq. They seem to be acting like street gangs or drug cartel members as they just attack anyone that displeases them. They are not police nor professional but they act as though only they have rights. Hugs
I want to thank Ali for sending me this link. I really hope this causes some real soul searching with in some of these people as they sure need to. I saw these documents show on The Majority Report but I was not sure how correct it was because then I saw horrific actions, beatings, and gang thug behavior from ICE. Hugs
For more leaked documents (and to help me continue reporting on them), PLEASE become a paid subscriber!
In the wake of an ICE officer’s killing of Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security is rolling out “Operation Metro Surge,” flooding Minneapolis with hundreds of additional federal agents — only to realize it doesn’t actually have the confidence to match the bravado.
While homeland secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration preen about justifying last week’s shooting and trumpet their war on “domestic terrorism,” DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments. According to documents leaked to me, not only is the Department seeking “volunteers” for the apparently unpopular mission, it is urging its agents to maintain a low profile and comply with the use of force policies.
Border Patrol memo leaked to me
On Friday, DHS sought volunteers to deploy to Minneapolis, in part due to opposition within the ranks, according to border patrol agents and other homeland security workers who have reached out to me.
“Please begin canvassing your personnel for volunteers,” a memo sent by the Border Patrol’s Acting Assistant Chief Joshua Andrew Post on Friday.
The memo outlines a request for 300 additional personnel — 200 Border Patrol Agents (BPAs) and 100 Processing Coordinators (BPPCs) — to be funneled into “Operation Metro Surge” by Sunday, January 11.
Leaked Border Patrol memo
A Border Patrol agent familiar with the discussions said the volunteer push reflects real unease in the ranks about the Good shooting in Minneapolis and the related surge.
“We do have personnel but some just don’t want to go,” the agent told me.
Asked about the hunt for volunteers, DHS and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to my request for comment.
“There might be some immature knuckleheads who think they are out there trying to capture Nicolas Maduro, but most field officers see a clear need for deescalation,” a high level career official at Homeland Security headquarters in Washington also told me. “There is genuine fear that indeed ICE’s heavy handedness and the rhetoric from Washington is more creating a condition where the officers’ lives are in danger rather than the other way around.”
Within hours of the shooting, Noem held a press conference declaring Renee Good had carried out “an act of domestic terrorism” when she “attempted to run a law enforcement officer over,” as Noem put it.
“There is a video and she just lied,” the Border Patrol agent said of Noem’s characterization of the incident.
The senior DHS official adds that an increasing number of homeland security workers are concerned about the public backlash. “The claim is that recruiting is up, but there is also dread that the gung-ho types that ICE and the Border Patrol are bringing in have a propensity towards confrontation and even violence.”
Today, Border Patrol Tactical Commander Greg Bovino circulated a “legal refresher” for agents in the field including on the use of force — not a move that screams certainty about their conduct. And the Department has sent memos to volunteers for Minneapolis warning about their “operational security,” covering everything from removing any signs of law enforcement affiliation when they are around their hotels to turning off location settings on their phones so that they can’t be tracked.
The guidance also reminds agents that things like profanity, insults and rude gestures directed at them are not illegal (though “incitement” is).
Legal refresher
Legal refresher
Legal refresher
Legal refresher
Legal refresher
“It sounds like they’re entering a war zone,” says senior intelligence official, who has been involved in discussions about calming the waters around ICE deployments. “Telling a bunch of 20-somethings to be prepared for war — and terrorism — creates the very condition officials are cautioning about.”
The Border Patrol agent said that while a significant minority of his colleagues agree with him, they are not comfortable speaking out given the political climate.
The agent also warned that the voluntary deployments, despite being symptomatic of splits within the agency, could further inflame the situation in Minneapolis.
“Key word is it’s on a ‘voluntary’ basis,” the Border Patrol said. “If no experienced senior agents step up, they send the new guys straight out of the academy. Not a good idea.”
He continued: “In a nutshell, it’s ‘Us versus them’ on steroids and I think some Border Patrol agents are more willing to use force and not feel restrained when you got DHS leadership lying to cover for them. For example, Kristi Noem lying her ass off on what happened is like saying to the federal agents on the ground: ‘Go ahead and do whatever you have to do. We got your back. We will find a way to justify it.’”
Help me cover the largest federal crackdown on immigration ever by becoming a paid subscriber — there’s A LOT more to this story
The Majority report team talk about this kid who mouthed off to ICE guys and gets beaten, kidnaped, beaten again, then dumped over a mile way in a Walmart parking lot. This is not police behavior these are gang thugs terrorizing people. They are no different than any other criminal gang. Hugs
ICE white supremacist gang thugs getting even more agressive attacking people. They no longer care about skin color. The gang has reverted to gang tactics of intimidation. They think might makes them right. The ones with the guns are in charge is what they have been taught. And the administration is OK with this as it helps their cause to have a frightened public unwilling to stand up to them. They are covering their faces because they understand they are breaking the laws and that if a police officer tried this they would be in prison. They know that Stephen Miller will not always be there to protect them. And tRump can not pardon people found guilty of state crimes. In this clip a woman rushes into another woman’s home. The police dispatch incorrectly tells her she must hand the woman over and she almost does, but then gains courage as ICE thugs draw closer on her property. Her neighbors come out and give her strength and support. Hugs
