Federal immigration officers lack urban training for ongoing Minneapolis operation
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President Trump has reshuffled the leadership of his immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota in the face of wide-spread anger over two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by federal agents. Operation commander Gregory Bovino is out, and Trump is sending “border czar” Tom Homan to take over.
But it’s not clear changes at the top can solve a more basic problem: the immigration agents flooding the Twin Cities are generally less experienced in urban policing and crowd control than other police.
“The skills that these federal immigration agents are bringing to these cities are a complete mismatch for what we actually need,” says Irene Vega, an associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine. “That’s not what their job has been, historically, and I just think it’s a very dangerous situation.”
Vega studied the attitudes of Customs and Border Protection officers regarding use of force, a project that involved interviewing more than 90 officers. The CBP appears to make up the largest contingent of the roughly 3,000 agents deployed to Minnesota.
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“They saw themselves as very different,” she says. “They would tell me that they were trained to hike in the desert. They often told me about arresting 10, 15 people who were very compliant.”
She says the isolation of the border region influenced the officers’ calculus about use of force. She recalls one officer who explained that in the desert, he doesn’t have the option to duck into an alley for cover.
“And so he said, ‘I’m going to have to do what I have to do,’” Vega says.
— Martin Kaste, NPR
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