Drone sightings drove surveillance fears as ICE surged in Minnesota
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A whirring sound outside her window woke Erin from her sleep one early February evening. Peering from her second-floor bedroom, she saw a drone hovering about ten feet away in her backyard.
As she scrambled to unlock her phone, the drone flew off, leaving her unable to document what she saw, but convinced the drone’s visit was no accident.
Erin had been active in opposing ICE for months before the drone appeared at her home, and figured the federal government already knew who she was. But she was so enraged by what she perceived as being targeted that her wife made her stay home from work that day.
Erin, who asked to be identified by her first name to avoid retaliation from the federal government, would love to be proven wrong in her theory that ICE is controlling the drones, but she doesn’t “believe for a second that’s the case.”
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“All that will do for me is make me go harder,” Erin said of feeling monitored by the government. “That’s not going to back me off.”
While the immigration raids may have receded in the weeks since federal immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, it’s unclear who is controlling these drones or why. The federal government won’t confirm or deny using drones for surveillance in Minnesota. Local law enforcement agencies say the drones aren’t theirs.
“In a democracy, it ultimately should be up to the communities what kinds of powers they want police to have over them,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy and drones expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nationally, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a number of suits against law enforcement agencies for aerial surveillance, including a 2021 case to obtain documents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection about their use of drones to monitor protesters and a 2023 case against a town in Michigan that used drones to photograph a person’s home.
Still, data privacy laws created in the 1970s are largely inadequate to today’s technology.
“We need to know how they’re being used,” Stanley said of drones and the government. “The secrecy and the opaqueness is also illegitimate and is really a big part of the problem.”
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the new federal Executive Office for Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems did not respond to requests for information on their use of drones in Minnesota.
‘Ope, the drones are back tonight’
Erin had never seen a drone in her neighborhood before the surge. Since then, she has recorded footage of at least 16 possible drone sightings, which she shared with MPR News.
Other observers in the Twin Cities have documented dozens of other possible sightings, cross-referencing them with aircraft flight plans to be sure that they weren’t mistaking planes for drones.
Stanley said it’s difficult to speculate about the government’s intentions if it is flying drones around the Twin Cities, but that laws and policies grounded in the the Constitution are supposed to keep authorities in check.
“Anybody in government cannot fly a drone where somebody has a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Stanley said. “Flying next to somebody's window and peering in their house almost certainly would violate somebody's reasonable expectation of privacy — that is the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.”
But observers who already felt targeted by ICE agents employing license plate readers and facial scanners, suspect the sudden appearance of drones over their homes during the surge isn’t a coincidence.
In early January, the Trump administration also announced “the launch of a new office dedicated to rapidly procuring and deploying drone and counter-drone technologies” with an initial $115 million dollar investment.
Hanna Terwilliger said drones have flown over her south Minneapolis neighborhood since the end of January, just a few days after the Federal Aviation Administration controversially banned private drones from flying over U.S. Department of Homeland Security operations or convoys.
“Everyone in the neighborhood was like, ‘Oh, I see them by Roosevelt High School, I see them flying on 42nd street,’” Terwilliger said. “People keep track in the neighborhood chats, “Ope, the drones are back tonight.’”
Terwilliger said she never felt unsafe in her neighborhood until she started noticing the drones and worrying about how the government could be using them.
“I am a young white woman. They’re not out for me,” Terwilliger said. “But the fact that they can build this database of information about where everybody is, where cars are parked, at night, who’s coming and going, that’s just a huge invasion of privacy’ and everybody should be worried about this.”
About two weeks ago, Justin McGuire was driving with his partner to drop off supplies at a home in the northern Minneapolis suburbs where a family was distributing groceries to people in hiding from ICE but who weren’t documenting ICE raids or protesting.
As McGuire approached the home, around 9 p.m., they saw a drone hovering about 20 feet above the house. McGuire backed in to get a better view. When the homeowner opened the garage door and stepped into the driveway, the drone took off.
McGuire said the homeowner was spooked when he told him about the drone that had just flown off. McGuire said it’s unnerving not to know for sure who is controlling these aircraft and for what purpose.
“It’s very reminiscent of 1984, and that surveillance state — that’s very much what it feels like they’re trying to achieve,” McGuire said. “It’s up to all of us to recognize that and push against it, because I don‘t think that is the country that any of us want to live in.”
MPR News has previously reported that ICE may have used private data to intimidate observers and activists.
Homeland Security has operated with little oversight from the courts and Congress, and seems to have been disregarding laws, its own policies and even the Constitution over the last year, said Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School.
“What this administration is doing with the powers that are nominally referred to as immigration enforcement bears no relation to the enforcement of our immigration laws,” Glaberson said. “Instead, it’s this incredibly lawless, unaccountable apparatus that’s being weaponized to police dissent and to target, regardless of citizenship status, people that it sees as enemies.”
‘Drone o’clock’ time
The Minnesota Department of Transportation advises law enforcement agencies operating in the state that they’re not exempt from federal aviation regulations, but that Minnesota doesn’t have any state restrictions on how law enforcement can operate drones.
Minneapolis council member Aurin Chowdhury said Minneapolis police told her they were not connected to any of the 18 drone sightings reported to her office. Still she said many of her constituents worry they’ve been subject to air surveillance by ICE.
A spokesperson for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office told MPR News that none of those sightings were tied to the sheriff’s department and that they don’t use drones in that manner. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety told MPR News that the drones in question weren’t connected to the state either.
Heather Cope started noticing multiple drones flying in complex patterns over her Minneapolis neighborhood in January.
“It almost seems like it’s a small airplane, but too small for people,” Cope said. “But the thing that clicked with me when I actually saw one, and I was like, that is totally a drone, was how it flies. It would fly heading west and then all of the sudden it would just cut south.”
Cope said she has been followed by ICE vehicles and had her photo taken by agents, after which she noticed vehicles with license plates associated with ICE on her street.
She said talking about government drones feels a little like “tin foil hat” time, but that using aerial surveillance for intimidation would be consistent with the federal government’s previous actions in the state.
“I don’t know what the full technology is, but it feels super violating to have things just like hovering over your neighborhood and over your house,” Cope said.
Observers shared videos and photos with MPR News that they believe show drone activity. Still, it’s difficult to say anything definitive when the footage is shot at night, said Faine Greenwood, a specialist in civilian drone technology.
Most drones are required to emit a remote identification signal, but Greenwood said it’s not clear the federal government is complying.
Observers have downloaded apps that are supposed to be able to pick up those IDs and haven’t received any info when querying for the ID signals. But Greenwood said phone apps have generally been unreliable, although there are other tools available.
“Our drone laws don’t really put a ton of impediments on the federal government using drones for these purposes,” Greenwood said. “There’s very little in our laws around drone privacy or drone data security.”
The drones and the message they send are problematic in the current political environment regardless of who’s flying them, Greenwood added.
“It functions on multiple levels of psychological intimidation,” they said. “Maybe this is going to lead to a more galvanizing moment for people about putting controls on how the federal government uses drones, because it’s egregious.”
Weeks later, Erin still isn’t sure what to think about the drone that hovered in her back yard in early February but has taken to sitting on her front step each day at twilight — a time she and her fellow observers call “drone o’clock” — to listen for the hum of drones to capture video of blinking objects moving east to west just over the treeline over her neighborhood.
Before going to bed now, Erin said she takes all the locks off her phone and sets it on her bedroom window.
