Fear factor: Intimidation becomes a calling card as Twin Cities ICE surge widens
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Anna Brauch wanted to do something to help her neighbors the day after Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. So she stationed herself outside her favorite local bakery in the northeast corner of the city and told the bakery’s immigrant owner she’d be there if ICE came for them.
Instead, ICE came for her.
After running an errand, Brauch returned to the bakery and noticed a large white SUV parked in front of her on the street. Minutes later, Brauch said masked federal agents jumped out of the white SUV and another vehicle and ran toward her.
“I had my phone in one hand and my keys in my other hand, and they all started screaming, like, ‘Get her! She’s got a weapon! Get her!’” Brauch said. “I put my hands up and I said, ‘I don’t have anything!’ But I also had a whistle around my neck, and I blew the whistle so that the people in the bakery would know that ICE was there.”
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Brauch said agents shoved her to the wall, patted down and handcuffed her. Her spouse, who’d followed her to the bakery, tried to intervene and was also arrested.
“The whole way I’m saying, ‘I didn’t do anything. You can’t arrest me. Why are you taking me?’” Brauch said. “They’re just saying, ‘We don’t need a reason to take you. Shut up. You’re coming with us.’”
Six weeks into the immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities, observers say federal agents are employing violence more frequently and with little apparent restraint against citizens and noncitizens, and that stories like Brauch’s have become alarmingly common with some 3,000 federal agents now on the streets.
“They know that they will not be held accountable internally by their supervisors, by their commander in chief, and they also know that it will be very difficult to hold them accountable in the courts if we don't know their names,” said Anna Hall, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Legal Rights Center. “They’re acting with impunity, and they believe that they have the right to do that.”
This kind of response isn’t new to immigrants. The difference now, Hall said, is that many white people acting as ICE observers are also having their basic constitutional rights violated.
Hall said attorneys are seeing violations of basic rights not just in the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but across even the most rural parts of the state.
ICE did not respond to questions about Brauch’s experiences or the frequency with which agents are using force.
When asked about ICE tactics at a press conference on Thursday, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE agents are “following the law and running the operations according to training.”
‘Purpose-built to stoke fear’
Videos of federal agents violently detaining citizens have become a common sight on social media. Young people and even some public officials have had what appears to be unnecessary force used against them by federal agents.
A 17-year-old boy and citizen working at a Twin Cities Target was tackled by agents and bundled into a van only to be released later. A woman trying to get to a doctor’s appointment had her window smashed and was torn from her car. A seemingly unconscious man was carried limply by agents from his vehicle at a gas station.
MPR News has confirmed these and other recent reports of violence of what appears to be excessive use of force by ICE outside protest situations.
That includes an incident Sunday near Pillar Forum, a skate shop and coffee shop in northeast Minneapolis that also hosts rock ’n’ roll shows.
Owner Corey Bracken said an all-ages show featuring a trans singer was interrupted when agents detained two people coming out of a nearby Ecuadorian grocery store. About half the concertgoers went outside to observe, blow whistles and yell at the agents, Bracken said.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported the incident intensified after a federal agent pushed a young person, who pushed back. Bracken said agents doused the young people outside in pepper spray and struck at least two with batons before taking off with the detainees.
Ten minutes later, Bracken said “the ICE agents had circled back, pushed the two people that they had picked up out of their cars and then sped off again.”
Bracken and his staff canceled the rest of the show but stayed open for anyone who didn’t feel safe leaving right away.
“We’re not going to shut up about this. These are our core values,” Bracken said, noting his business has taken a hit because of fears of ICE. “We’ve kind of become a hub for people to organize the people that are protecting the streets.”
Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne was observing an ICE operation Monday on Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis when he saw a big truck full of agents surround a man at a bus stop.
While other observers gathered and blew whistles, Payne said he introduced himself to one of the agents and asked for his badge number, which the agent refused to disclose. When Payne was asked to step back, he said he complied.
“There was one agent who was running around, pointing his Taser at everyone, putting it in their face, putting it at their stomach, touching it to their chest, and just trying to be intimidating,” Payne said. “I was focusing on that officer, because it looked like this was an impulsive, untrained person who was ready to do something dangerous.”
That’s when another agent forcefully pushed Payne twice from behind. The agent also pushed a woman as the agents left.
“I’m introducing myself as the president of the City Council, and not that that title should give me special treatment but you would think that I should get the same treatment constitutionally that every citizen deserves,” Payne said. “If they’re willing to push me around, what are they willing to do to just anybody in our community?”
The man at the bus stop wasn’t detained because he’s a citizen. Payne said he’s observed lots of interactions with federal agents across the city since the surge started.
“They’re completely verbally abusive, they’re physically abusive,” Payne said. “They’re terroristic and their tactics seem to be purpose-built to stoke fear, not to actually maintain the peace and maintain safety.”
‘Un-American and obviously dangerous’
Observers say the size of the federal force in the Twin Cities — now many times larger than the combined police forces of Minneapolis and St. Paul — and the intentional lack of transparency have led to a belief among many agents that they are immune from any accountability.
In fact, Vice President JD Vance has said the agent who shot and killed Macklin Good has “absolute immunity” for their actions while on duty, a comment local officials say is not true. That belief, though, may transform how agents act if they believe there are few repercussions.
“The message that seems to be going down is to disregard every element of training, not just the core question of when use of force is justified, to disregard what they've been told by agency lawyers for decades and to just listen to [Trump],” said Scott Shuchart, an attorney who served as an assistant director for regulatory affairs at ICE during the Biden administration and an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
“It’s corrosive. It’s confusing. It’s un-American and it's obviously dangerous,” Shuchart said.
The scale of the federal operations now in Minnesota contributes to the problem, said Hall, who noted that the surge in Chicago involved only about 300 agents. She described the current climate on Twin Cities streets as a siege.
“It’s hard to go anywhere in Minneapolis right now without seeing ICE vehicles, ICE agents on the streets,” Hall said. “And so it really feels like we're being kind of taken over by the federal government right now.”
Hall said clients she works with have experienced a range of what she describes as “indiscriminate” use of force from federal agents. That’s included breaking car windows, knocking down doors without warrants and pepper spraying people as they drive by.
“We’ve seen reports of ICE agents rear ending people or getting into intentional car accidents with people in order to stop and detain them and then abandoning those cars on the roadways,” Hall said.
“As an attorney, I should be able to confidently advise my clients and community on what their constitutional rights are and how to exercise them, but the truth is that here in the Twin Cities right now, people’s Constitutional rights don't matter.”
Hall said many immigrant clients are now being denied access to their attorneys at the Whipple Federal Building near Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Detainees are typically held at the Whipple Building before being transferred to facilities across the state or, in many cases, across the country.
‘More violence from the feds’
The Whipple Building is where Brauch and her spouse were taken after their arrests.
Videos shared with MPR News show agents outside the bakery dragging a handcuffed Brauch — a 40-year-old artist who stands a slight 5 feet 4 inches tall — across the road. Agents attempted to stuff her into the backseat of an SUV. People on the streets were yelling, “She didn’t do anything.”
Brauch described a terrifying drive to the detention center. She said one of the agents strangled her and then painfully groped her breasts as they forced her into the vehicle.
In the car, Brauch said agents never put on her seat belt and were driving erratically. She said the agent in the passenger seat was ranting and insulting her in what Brauch described as an “uncontrollable rage.”
At one point, she said he reached into the back seat, grabbed her by the handcuffs, and used all his strength to yank her repeatedly around the back of the car.
She told him: “You're breaking my hands, you’re breaking my hands.”
He told her: “I don’t f--ing care. Shut the f-- up. Shut the f-- up.”
She said her hands were swollen and she couldn’t bend her fingers when they got to the detention center. “My hands were covered in blood, and there were red swollen marks all the way up my forearms and all the way down to my knuckles from cuts on my hands.”
At the Whipple Federal Building near Fort Snelling, she said agents came up to her every few minutes to ask who she was and her date of birth. No one seemed to be keeping records. They asked her to describe the agents who arrested her.
Brauch showed agents her injuries and said they promised to call her a medic, who never appeared during her two-hour long detention. Eventually, she said the agents called an ambulance, and after failing again to identify her arresting officer, took off her leg shackles and let the paramedics take her to the emergency room.
Brauch never saw or interacted with the agents before they went after her. She thinks it may have been the mural on her car, which says “Trans Rights are Human Rights,” that attracted their attention.
Brauch’s spouse was also released later that evening. Neither has been charged with a crime.
When Brauch was detained last week, friends jumped in to make sure her kids were taken care of. Her community raised thousands of dollars for the couple’s medical and legal expenses. And her entire roller derby team went searching for her dog Moji, who escaped Brauch’s car when Brauch was arrested and later spent the afternoon in a nearby salon.
Brauch said she feels grateful to be home and taken care of by friends and family. But she has braces on both hands, and has significant bruising up her arms. At a recent doctor’s appointment, she was told she has nerve and tissue damage and a possible fracture, and that more tests need to be done.
“My frustration and anger with the situation is for the community and for all of my neighbors,” Brauch said. “I’m frustrated that we can’t do more. I’m frustrated that every act of peaceful resistance from the community is met with more violence from the feds.”
