Vance calls for more local cooperation for ICE surge, defends agents' tactics
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Vice President JD Vance on Thursday called for more cooperation with state, local and federal officials as a way to “tone down the temperature a little bit, reduce the chaos” and still enforce the nation’s immigration laws during the current federal surge in the Twin Cities, but then blamed Minnesota officials for the problems and defended the tactics of federal agents.
Vance spoke to reporters in Minneapolis following an event the White House described as a roundtable with local leaders and community members “focused on restoring law and order in Minnesota.”
He said the surge by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not an attempt to send a message to the state’s Democratic political leaders and that the federal government was only there to enforce immigration law.
Echoing criticisms made earlier in the day by Gregory Bovino, commander-at-large of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Vance said that Minneapolis police have been told to “stand down” and not respond to federal agents who call them for help.
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He referenced a story that Bovino told earlier about off-duty ICE agents needing to call in a federal tactical team to extract them from a local restaurant because they’d been locked in by a “mob” after Minneapolis police didn’t respond.
Vance said one of the reasons there are so many federal agents in Minnesota is because they’re needed as backup to protect other federal agents.
He said agents only employ tactics such as tear gas and pepper spray when “violence is committed against officers” but that belies videos taken at the scene of incidents around the Twin Cities where tear gas and pepper spray were deployed on people who were not attacking officers.
“Do we want these arrests to be so chaotic? No we don’t,” he said of ICE actions. “If we have a little cooperation from local and state officials, I think the chaos would go way down in this community.”
Despite Vance’s calls for state, local and federal officials to work together, the federal government has pushed out the state Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Macklin Good by an ICE agent.
On Thursday, the BCA said the FBI was also not cooperating with the state investigation into an incident last week where an ICE agent shot a man in the leg.
Local police have also criticized ICE for not telling local authorities when an operation is imminent and have accused federal officers of racially profiling people of color at stops, including an off-duty Brooklyn Park police officer who ended up boxed in by ICE at a traffic stop with guns pointed at her and demands to see her papers, according to the Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley.
Local police “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,” he said earlier this week. “It pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop."
“Can we please find a pathway forward … without scaring the hell out of our community members?” added Axel Henry, the St. Paul police chief. People are “scared to death, afraid to go outside,” he added, not because they’re legal status is in question “but they’re seeing what's happening and don’t want to take that risk.”
And on Thursday, a top official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday acknowledged publicly for the first time since the Twin Cities immigration enforcement surge began that the state government is handing over people in state prisons wanted by ICE.
The comments from Marcos Charles, the head of ICE enforcement and removal operations, stand in contrast to the rhetoric ICE has used in recent weeks as it’s sought to blame state and local officials for not cooperating to remove what federal officials describe as the “worst of the worst” criminals.
Despite his calls to meet the federal government half way, Vance said Thursday that the chaos that’s gripped the Twin Cities the past six weeks “is the inevitable consequence of a state and local government that has decided they’re not going to cooperate.”
He called the reaction in the Twin Cities to the surge “weird” and a “very Minneapolis-specific response.”
