MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Already shaken by the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration officer, Minnesota’s Twin Cities on Sunday braced for what many expect will be a new normal over the next few weeks as the Department of Homeland Security carries out what it called its largest enforcement operation ever.
In one Minneapolis neighborhood filled with single-family homes, protesters confronted federal agents and attempted to disrupt their operations by blowing car horns and whistles and banging on drums.
There was some pushing and several people were hit with chemical spray just before agents banged down the door of one home on Sunday. They later took one person away in handcuffs.
“We’re seeing a lot of immigration enforcement across Minneapolis and across the state, federal agents just swarming around our neighborhoods,” said Jason Chavez, a Minneapolis city councilmember. “They’ve definitely been out here.”
Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants who represents an area with a growing immigrant population, said he is closely monitoring and gathering information from chat groups about where residents are seeing agents operating.
While the enforcement activity continues, two of the state’s leading Democrats said on Sunday that the investigation into shooting death of Renee Good shouldn’t be overseen solely by the federal government.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith both said in separate interviews Sunday that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.
“How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiassed investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw — what they think happened,” Smith said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents and that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem dismissed complaints from Minnesota officials about local agencies being denied any participation in the investigation during an interview with CNN.
“We do work with locals when they work with us,” she said, criticizing the Minneapolis mayor and others for not assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.
Frey and Noem each pointed fingers at the other for their rhetoric after Good’s killing, and each pushed their own firm conclusions about what video of the incident shows. The mayor stood by his assertions that videos show “a federal agent recklessly abusing power that ended up in somebody’s dying.”
“Let’s have the investigation in the hands of someone that isn’t biased,” Frey said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The killing of Good on Wednesday by an ICE officer and the shooting of two people by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, led to dozens of protests across the country over the weekend.
Thousands of people marched in Minneapolis on Saturday where Homeland Security called its deployment of immigration officers in the Twin Cities its biggest ever immigration enforcement operation.
Associated Press journalists Thomas Strong in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.
