Hours after the co-owner of a St. Paul toy store criticized the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities during a national television interview, workers there said a pair of federal agents suddenly showed up to announce an audit of employee records.
In another case, protesters observing Immigration and Customs Enforcement movement said officers called them by name, and even led them back to their own home. To the protesters, the incident felt like a bold attempt to silence dissent.
Since “Operation Metro Surge” began in early December, immigration authorities have arrested some 3,000 people in Minneapolis, St. Paul and surrounding areas. The enforcement blitz has drawn criticism, especially of federal agents from ICE and the Border Patrol violently reacting to protests, including the shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But residents in the Twin Cities and other areas where ICE has been cracking down recently say that some of the retaliation they’ve faced has come without a finger being laid on them.
“We’re talking about subtle transactions of intimidation here,” said Kalfani Ture, a senior fellow at Yale’s Urban Ethnography Project and a former police officer. He said the shootings of Good and Pretti were dramatic shows of force. “Repression doesn’t always operate in the dramatic. It often operates in the mundane.”
In the case of Mischief Toys, ABC News reported that workers at the St. Paul toy store used a 3D printer to make thousands of free whistles for people to alert others of the presence of immigration agents. Co-owner Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall told ABC News that it was a form of nonviolent protest and that demand soared after Good was killed. “Everyone is looking for anything they can do to help their community right now,” she said, adding, “ICE is doing far more to hurt our community than immigrants ever have, and I can’t overstate how much our entire community is being terrorized by ICE right now.”
And then the federal agents came to the store. Department of Homeland Security officials confirmed that it had opened an investigation into the store.
“There is an active HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] investigation involving this business that has nothing to do with this owner’s political views,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent.
She went on to call the claims that the investigation was in retaliation for Adelsheim-Marshall’s comments “a flagrant attempt to further demonize our law enforcement officers who are already facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them.”
Mike Cutler spent three decades at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE and other Homeland Security units. Since he retired as a senior special agent, he has been a consultant on immigration enforcement and testified before Congress. Cutler said he doubted there was a retaliatory audit because it would diverge from how the agency operated in the past.
“It seems like a fantasy, because if I had engaged in that kind of activity, I would have been at risk of being suspended, or more likely, losing my job,” said Cutler. “We never, ever, ever even thought of doing something like that.”
In another incident in Minneapolis, hospital officials at Hennepin County Medical Center publicly criticized ICE agents for showing up at a patient’s bedside without a warrant. Two days later, on Jan. 8, federal agents sent hospital administrators a letter announcing a similar audit.
Since then, immigration officers have continued showing up at the hospital, causing some workers to fear that their presence could dissuade people from seeking care and spark a public health crisis.
Several other people who said they set out to observe ICE agents found themselves under surveillance instead.
In early January, the day before an ICE agent shot and killed Good, a St. Paul woman and her husband tried to follow a caravan of ICE officers to see where they were going. The couple told Minnesota Public Radio that ICE agents soon surrounded their vehicle. One of them came up to the car and greeted the woman by her name, suggesting they had used her license plate to identify her.
The couple said that when they continued trying to observe the caravan, it headed to the street where they live. The couple told the radio station that they believed federal agents obtained their address to dissuade them from continuing to observe.
“Following or observing or reporting on federal agencies or federal activities is not a criminal activity — it's protected First Amendment activity,” John Boehler, policy counsel with ACLU of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio.
On Jan. 11 in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, outside of St. Paul, a man and his wife stayed a few cars behind a car with Florida plates that they thought looked suspicious. When they pulled into the same parking lot as the car, they later told CBS News, two ICE agents got out, knocked on their window, and demanded they roll the window down or get out of their car. When the couple said they refused and threatened to call local police, the agents got back in their car, but then followed the couple.
All another woman had to do was drive past an ICE vehicle for immigration agents to pull her over. They demanded she present immigration paperwork and knocked her phone out of her hand when she tried to record them, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley told Minnesota’s Sahan Journal.
It turned out the woman didn’t have any immigration paperwork because she is a U.S. citizen. The woman, who Bruley described as a woman of color, was also an off-duty Brooklyn Park police officer, who Bruley said felt forced to disclose that she was an officer after the agents drew their guns on her. A Homeland Security spokesperson told the Sahan Journal in an email that the agency had no record of federal agents having pulled over a police officer.
In response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Minnesota and others, a U.S. District Court judge ordered federal agents to stop arresting, retaliating against, pepper-spraying and detaining people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity.” The judge noted that a variety of federal government conduct during the surge would “chill a person of ordinary firmness from engaging in further protected activity. That conduct includes the drawing and pointing of weapons; the use of pepper spray and other non-lethal munitions; actual and threatened arrest and detainment of protesters and observers; and other intimidation tactics.” In one incident from early December, lead plaintiff Susan Tincher — a U.S. citizen who has lived in Minneapolis for 30 years — claims that agents cut off her wedding ring while shackling her and then held her for hours in a cell before releasing her without charges.
In a Jan. 27 statement from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency said it was in Minneapolis “to protect Minnesotans from criminal illegal aliens and get these criminals out of their neighborhoods.”
“Instead of thanking our law enforcement, sanctuary politicians have repeatedly villainized and dehumanized our law enforcement — even comparing them to the Nazi Gestapo,” the statement said. ”Despite these smears, our law enforcement continue to risk their lives in the face of unprecedented violence and threats against them to get criminal illegal aliens off the streets.”
Reports have surfaced of similar tactics by immigration officers elsewhere.
In the days after Pretti’s killing, a pair of protesters in Maine told The Atlantic that ICE agents showed up at their home after they had attended a protest. “This is a warning,” they said the agents told them. “We know where you live.”
Nicholas Natividad, a New Mexico State University professor in Las Cruces who studies human rights on the southern border, said if U.S. citizens are experiencing this kind of behavior, he couldn’t imagine what migrants are going through in detention facilities outside the public eye.
“This moment doesn’t reveal isolated abuses,” said Natividad. “It reveals a larger structure that produces dehumanizing outcomes through policy, bureaucracy and force, whether at the border or increasingly inland.”
Leonardo Martinez is an organizer with VC Defensa, an immigrant rights advocacy group of volunteers that’s been tracking federal immigration enforcement activity over the past year in Ventura County, California. He said non-lethal incidents of “aggressive arrogance” by immigration officers are routine and, increasingly, personal.
Martinez said VC Defensa members closely follow ICE agents and loudly alert residents of their presence, which they believe is a freedom that’s constitutionally protected. In response, he said, ICE agents have pointed large guns at observers, broken windows, sprayed bear spray into the vents of their cars, and threatened to come after their relatives, whom they call by name.
Martinez, 42, said agents haven’t yet shown up at his home.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t in the future,” he said. “They know where everybody lives.”
