ICE surge tests relations between St. Cloud police, community
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An agreement forged two decades ago and credited with improving relations between the St. Cloud Police Department and community members is under renewed scrutiny amid tensions over the recent federal immigration crackdown.
About 100 people packed the St. Cloud City Hall council chambers Wednesday night for an annual meeting to review the community policing agreement.
The meeting grew animated at times, as St. Cloud Police Chief Jeff Oxton fielded questions about why his department didn’t do more to stop U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who may have violated laws or civil rights.
St. Cloud saw a large ICE presence in recent months, including a clash between hundreds of protesters and agents on Jan. 12 at a Somali mall. The increased ICE presence in St. Cloud has diminished, but it’s had lingering impacts on residents, businesses and schools.
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Oxton said unlike his experience working with other federal agencies such as the FBI, ICE didn’t inform him of its actions in St. Cloud. He said he’s heard from people on both sides of the issue, who thought his department either should be doing more or less to assist federal agents.
“I had some people saying you’re not doing enough, and I had some people saying you’re doing too much,” he said.
Members of the audience submitted written questions about why police didn’t arrest ICE agents for driving vehicles with tinted windows or missing license plates, violating traffic laws or wearing masks. Oxton said law enforcement is exempt from many of those laws.
“I’m saying this was a really difficult situation that I’ve never seen before,” he said. “We had federal authorities rolling in the town, doing things in ways they didn’t do it before, using some of the same things that are exemptions for law enforcement.”
The police chief touted his department’s role in helping maintain the peace during multiple protests of ICE actions in St. Cloud, with no damage or arrests. He said he helped community members by finding information about the whereabouts of loved ones who were arrested or detained.
Oxton said he’s also helped facilitate interviews with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General for residents who said they were assaulted by ICE.
St. Cloud’s community policing agreement was first created back in 2005, after a state report found that the city’s police officers were stopping and searching Black and Latino drivers at a higher rate than white drivers.
Police and community groups met nearly a dozen times and hammered out the agreement. It outlines the St. Cloud Police Department’s commitment to uphold fair and impartial policing, and recruit and retain officers of color. It also outlines a process for citizens to file complaints.
“In the beginning, it was police and the African American community,” said the Rev. James Alberts, pastor at Higher Ground Church of God in Christ in St. Cloud, who has been involved in the agreement since its inception. “That shifted, and through time, it’s been about immigration. It’s been about homelessness. It’s been about people with special needs.”
The agreement is written in English, Spanish and Somali. Every year, the police department holds a public meeting to review the document and discuss any concerns or needed changes.
It’s legally nonbinding. But both city leaders and community organizers have cited the agreement as a factor in improved relations between the police and community members.
Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, St. Cloud police called on community leaders to help calm unrest following false rumors on social media that police had shot a Black teenager.
“We’ve developed relationships with key people, and those relationships have stayed really strong,” Oxton said in an interview before Wednesday’s meeting. “And I think they’ve served us all well in coming together when times are tough, or we go through something unique.”
The agreement was revised in 2017, when immigration had become a contentious political issue. It states that the police department will cooperate with ICE as it would any other law enforcement agency. But police won’t arrest or detain someone solely for a suspected violation of immigration law, “except upon the request of or when assisting ICE.”
No action was taken at Wednesday’s meeting. But a subcommittee will meet to consider possible changes to the agreement.
Oxton said he’s willing to add some clarification about the police department’s role.
“I do think that we have successes for our community out of this,” he said. “I’m not erasing the pain, and I’m not erasing that it affected people badly. But I think we can also say that as a community, as a whole, we saw things that many places didn’t see that were positive.”
