FEW THINGS make police officers more uncomfortable than criticising other police officers. Yet when Mark Bruley, the chief of police in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, stepped up to the microphone at a press conference on January 20th, his distress was clear. He did not want to criticise all federal police, he stressed. But he then came to the point. Residents of his city, including American citizens, are being stopped and hassled on the street “for no cause” by federal agents. He called this a civil-rights violation; all of those who have complained are not white. It “has to stop”, he said.
According to his account, one of his own police officers was stopped while off-duty. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents boxed her car in. With their weapons drawn they then demanded her immigration paperwork (though she is a citizen). When she tried to record the incident, an agent knocked her phone out of her hand. The situation was only defused when they discovered she was a cop. They then left, although without apologising. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” said Mr Bruley. “But in fact, many of the chiefs standing behind me have had similar incidents with their off-duty officers.”
His remarks, alongside those of perhaps a dozen Minneapolis area police chiefs, were a measure of how “Operation Metro Surge”, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Twin Cities, has spiralled out of control. Since December some 3,000 federal agents have deployed to the city—dwarfing the scale of previous efforts in Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans. The result has been at least 3,000 arrests, according to the Department of Homeland Security, accompanied by a cascade of ugly videos. On January 7th a protester, Renee Good, was shot repeatedly in her car by an ICE agent wielding his mobile phone as well as his pistol.
According to polling by YouGov published on January 14th, 70% of Americans saw footage of Ms Good being killed. Over half now view ICE unfavourably. Speaking at Davos on January 21st even Donald Trump seemed to recognise this. “We are actually helping Minnesota so much but they don’t appreciate it,” he said. The day before he called the killing of Ms Good a “tragedy”. He then expressed hope that her father, who he said had previously voted for him, would remain a “tremendous Trump fan”. Mr Trump had previously called Ms Good a “professional agitator”; Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, called her a “domestic terrorist”.
Even before the killing, opposition in the city was growing fast. As they did in Chicago in the autumn, thousands of city residents have organised to exchange information about raids. One group runs a daily live dispatch radio to direct protesters to follow federal agents, blow whistles and film. Other residents deliver food to immigrants hiding indoors and drive children with undocumented parents to school. Several school districts have started offering remote learning. Posters in business windows say that ICE agents are not welcome without a warrant.
These tactics appear to be hampering federal agents. At a press conference on January 20th Greg Bovino, a senior border patrol officer who has made himself the remorseless face of recent immigration operations, acknowledged their effectiveness. Protesters, whom he called “anarchists”, “rioters” and “agitators”, “are a bit better organised”, he said. It makes for “a difficult operating environment”. He complained that his agents are even being stopped from buying coffees. When it came to the many American citizens arrested he argued they were to blame, for being “near, at or involved in” protests.
Yet privately some state Republicans are nervous that the tactics ICE is using are undermining their cause. Before the operation started, Democrats in Minnesota were under pressure because of a sprawling fraud scandal in which the state failed to make rudimentary checks on the recipients of government money. Seemingly as a result, on January 5th Tim Walz, the state governor, dropped his re-election bid. The Trump administration has attempted to link the scandal to immigration—many of the accused are of Somali ethnicity. But even Mr Trump has complained on Truth Social that nobody is paying attention to the fraud allegations any longer.
Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, has his own theory for what is going on. “I speculate that what happened is that somebody high up in the Trump administration said ‘go to Minneapolis and arrest and deport a bunch of Somalis’.” But the vast majority of Somalis in Minneapolis are American citizens, he says, and so they are coming up empty. As a result federal agents are running around picking on protesters and people who look a bit foreign, many of whom turn out to be citizens.
What happens now? The fraud investigation seems likely to stall. On January 13th the lead federal prosecutor, Joe Thompson, was among six prosecutors who resigned, apparently after being instructed to investigate the wife of Ms Good. And yet the deportation programme shows no sign of stopping. The Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to six Democratic officials in the state, including Mr Walz and Mr Frey, as part of an investigation into whether they improperly interfered with ICE. On January 21st a federal appeals court lifted restrictions on the use of tear gas on protesters. It is hardly a sign of retreat. ■
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