Two off-duty St. Paul police officers were pulled over by federal agents during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the police chief said Tuesday.
The same happened to an off-duty Brooklyn Park police officer who was stopped at gunpoint.
“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers, but … our officers know what the Constitution is,” said Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley. “They know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted and that’s what they were. If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”
Bruley, St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry and Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, speaking in the Minnesota Capitol rotunda Tuesday with law enforcement leaders at their side, emphasized there is a need for immigration enforcement. But they said they’re concerned that people are being profiled.
The two off-duty St. Paul officers were stopped separately in “traffic stops that were clearly outside the bounds of what federal agents are allowed to do,” Henry said.
‘Endless complaints’
For the last two weeks, the law enforcement community has “been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens,” Bruley said. “What we’re hearing is they’re being stopped in traffic stops or on the street with no cause” and being forced to produce paperwork to show they are here legally.
Bruley said they also “started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.”
A Brooklyn Park officer told Bruley she was stopped as she passed federal officers while she was off duty.
“When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork, of which she’s a U.S. citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork,” Bruely said. “When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone in an attempt to record the incident. The phone was knocked out of her hands. Prevented her from recording it.”
The feds had their guns drawn and “the officer became so concerned,” she felt forced to identify herself as a Brooklyn Park officer “in hopes of … deescalating the incident,” Bruley said. “The agents then immediately left after hearing this, making no other comments, no other apologies, just got in their vehicles and left.”
Bruley said he’s “reached out to anybody that’s willing to hear.”
“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,” he said. “… They like to give you a website to go file a complaint, but the complaint requires identity of the agents. The agents don’t have name tags on. They cover their face, they don’t have body cameras.”
DHS, ICE and Border Patrol spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Concern about eroding trust
Bruley said he saw a change in behavior that started about two weeks ago, when “the last surge of Border Patrol” arrived.
“Where it’s street-level jump outs or traffic stops, which the federal government is not allowed to do traffic stops,” he said. “… They need to have reasonable suspicion that somebody is here illegally for them to stop them, whether on the street or … stop them in a vehicle.”
He said he believes there “is a small group of agents within the surge in the metro area that are performing or acting this way. … I’ve received phone calls from ICE agents and HSI agents indicating this is not how they act, this is not what they do.”
Since George Floyd was killed in 2020 in Minneapolis, “local law enforcement has been doing the hard, necessary work to rebuild trust within our communities,” Sheriff Witt said “… What’s going on now is stifling that progress.”
Witt said she’s been seeing and hearing about people in Hennepin County who federal officers have “stopped, questioned and harassed solely because of the color of their skin.”
“When we we have concrete examples of profiling, we need to do the right thing,” she said. “We cannot let people in our communities think that our local law enforcement leadership is OK with the actions that we simply know are not just only wrong but illegal.”
St. Paul police chief: Finding ‘a pathway forward’
Elected officials have been meeting with local law enforcement from around the state on the subject.
Law enforcement is not “suggesting that there isn’t a legitimate, lawful authority to operate here as federal agents,” Henry said. “But we are trying to come together to say, ‘Can we please find a pathway forward? Can we find a way to make sure that we can do these things without scaring the hell out of our community members?’”
Police chiefs are hearing from people who are “afraid to go outside,” Henry said, and it’s not because they’re in the U.S. illegally, but because they “know people that are getting stopped” because of the way they look “and they don’t want to take that risk.”
Bruley called for more supervision over the surge in immigration enforcement, and Witt said there should be more accountability.
“We have to find common ground here,” Henry said. “… If American citizens are being grabbed or stopped or seized, this can’t happen. We have to make sure that everyone’s civil rights are intact. I truly want to believe that there isn’t anybody on either side of the political aisle that thinks that people’s civil rights aren’t important.”
