Minneapolis police participation with Homeland Security Task Force raises concerns
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
Months before several thousand federal agents would descend on Minneapolis, dozens of city police officers worked with the regional Homeland Security Task Force. City officials didn’t disclose details of the ongoing investigations the officers have been assigned to, but they said it’s not related to civil immigration enforcement.
While federal and local law enforcement collaborations are common, some say the optics surrounding the timing of this previously undisclosed task force are concerning given the federal government’s treatment of Minneapolis residents during this winter’s surge.
According to a document obtained by MPR News, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara signed an agreement with the FBI seeking reimbursement for overtime expenses for 63 Minneapolis police officers who participated in the task force. The agreement, which authorized payment of $30,000 to the city, was finalized days after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents.
Mayor Jacob Frey was not available for an interview about the collaboration, but he said in a short statement that the city has long worked with federal agencies to pursue people who commit serious violent crimes, and that “jumping to conclusions” about the investigation harmed vulnerable communities.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
But in Minneapolis, a city where federal agents shot three residents and routinely released false or misleading information about their activities over the winter, there’s deep suspicion of the local police department’s relationship with the federal agencies.
University of St. Thomas School of Law Professor Rachel Moran said she understands that it’s not unusual for the city to collaborate with the federal government, but that sometimes “officers are less accountable to the residents of the community they're supposed to be serving when they are working at the behest of the federal government.”
“The FBI is one of the agencies that has been obstructing local officials’ access to evidence of potential crimes committed by ICE agents, so it seems like a pretty bad time to be cooperating with them,” Moran said.
Minneapolis police are still under a state consent decree that was instituted after George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Department leaders in the intervening years have regularly highlighted their efforts to rebuild trust with city residents.
“I just don’t think it’s wise for the police in Minneapolis, given their public position that they are working hard to earn back the trust of Minneapolis residents, to be involved in a partnership that has actively contributed to harming the city,” Moran said.
Minneapolis officials did not say when or if the Minneapolis police collaboration with the Homeland Security Task Force is scheduled to conclude.
‘We don’t negotiate. We dismantle.’
The federal government last week launched a new website for the Homeland Security Task Force. The lead image on the site is a phalanx of armed agents wearing police vests, camouflage and gas masks with the header, “We don’t negotiate. We dismantle.”
On the website, the agency says there are now task forces covering every state, with one of the more than two dozen “core headquarters” in the Twin Cities area. The website says the task forces don’t enforce civil immigration laws, but the task forces have faced scrutiny for actions critics said largely seemed to target immigrants, including a raid on a cockfighting operation last June that the agency said netted “55 illegal aliens.”
The task forces were created under an executive order in January 2025, in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, under the heading "Protecting the American People Against Invasion."
The order outlines the creation of local and federal collaborations to combat criminal cartels and transnational criminal organizations. It also explicitly states that the task forces will “dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States."
The first public mention of a Homeland Security Task Force in Minnesota came after a controversial raid on a restaurant in south Minneapolis last summer, which federal officials characterized as “Minnesota’s first under the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) umbrella.”
Critics of the federal government’s immigration enforcement actions argued that Minneapolis police violated the city’s separation agreement by assisting federal agents, including ICE, who were at the scene. An audit later found that Minneapolis police didn’t assist directly in that investigation and didn’t violate the city’s policy banning employees, including police officers, from enforcing federal immigration laws, but it found issues with how city leaders communicated with members of the Minneapolis City Council.
The FBI declined to comment on whether any criminal charges resulted from the Lake Street raid, but the restaurant owner was later convicted on immigration charges for illegally re-entering the country.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent Matthew Vogel said in a statement that the Regional Homeland Security Task Force for Minnesota includes the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as local law enforcement partners. He said they focus on criminal investigations and “not civil immigration enforcement.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from MPR News about the longevity or focus of the Homeland Security Task Force in Minnesota.
In a statement, Minneapolis Office of Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette said the Homeland Security Task Force involving Minneapolis police has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and does not violate the city’s separation ordinance that bans city employees from enforcing federal immigration laws. He said joint law enforcement investigations into drugs, human trafficking and illegal weapons are a critical part of keeping residents safe.
“We will continue to work to target and eradicate dangerous criminal activity in our city, while maintaining a clear line against any participation in immigration enforcement,” Barnette said.
Agreements with Trump administration should be ‘closely scrutinized’
The federal surge into Minnesota this winter hit Minneapolis neighborhoods especially hard, with masked agents routinely targeting immigrants at workplaces and on city streets. Although the Department of Homeland Security frequently said they were targeting people who committed crimes, or the “worst of the worst,” MPR News reporting found that three-quarters of those arrested had no criminal record.
An MPR News analysis of available data shows that at least 3,700 people were arrested during the operations in the state, almost half of whom have already been deported. The presence of heavily-armed ICE and other federal agents on Minneapolis streets also led to frequent violent confrontations with residents and observers, including numerous instances where agents used less-lethal weaponry on residents and three cases where agents shot people, including the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in January.
Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne said any city partnership with federal law enforcement agencies should be closely scrutinized in light of the agencies’ actions in Minnesota this winter. Top officials in the Trump administration mischaracterized all three shooting incidents in Minneapolis involving federal agents. The FBI has refused to share evidence or cooperate with state investigators in Pretti and Good’s killings or the non-fatal shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
“Although there's a history of partnership with federal law enforcement agencies over many administrations, that particular administration has murdered our residents,” Payne said. “The way that they disrespected Renee Good and Alex Pretti's names and the lies that they told leads me to not trust anything that comes out of this federal government, and I have a lot of questions about why we would be signing a document in partnership with them.”
Minneapolis Communications Director Scott Wasserman said in a statement that city officials understand the “challenging optics here, but public safety comes first.” He attributed drops in violent crime across the city partly to these partnerships.
"Given what we saw this past winter, it’s understandable that residents and community members have concerns,” Wasserman said. "The City of Minneapolis is here to serve our community, and we’ve been very clear that transparency, accountability and our separation ordinance come first — especially when federal agencies have fallen short of our values."
Chief O’Hara said in a statement that the “active and ongoing criminal investigation, which involves narcotics and violence, was months in the making and long preceded Operation Metro Surge.” O’Hara and other city leaders repeatedly criticized federal agencies during the surge for terrifying residents and undermining trust in law enforcement. The chief said the timing of the reimbursement signing “occurred through the normal course of business.”
Since George Floyd’s killing, the Minneapolis Police Department has been seeking to rebuild staffing levels. After the deaths of Mariah Samuels and Allison Lussier, whose families accused the police department of failing to protect them after they reported domestic abusers to police, O’Hara said the “ugly truth” is that police have been forced to triage investigations into violent incidents due to understaffing.
Payne questioned whether the controls that are in place to approve collaborations like the Homeland Security Task Force are adequate. The overtime agreement between the MPD and FBI only accounted for about $30,000, so it likely didn’t trigger any additional oversight from the city council or mayor.
“That has been a constant theme every single time that the chief addresses the city council,” Payne said. “So, it begs the question: Who are the extra people that we have to donate overtime hours to this task force of dubious goals? We don't have extra people to be engaged in these types of activities, so that’s a whole other area of scrutiny that we have to look at as well.”
Minneapolis’ Wasserman said in a statement that the city collaborated on “high-level criminal investigations that can prevent more serious crime, not to reduce day-to-day service for residents and community members.”
“As with any scheduling, participation in any task force is structured in order to avoid pulling resources from core patrol needs, often working alongside existing operations,” Wasserman said. “These task forces bring together resources from federal and state agencies that we simply do not have on our own.”
Attorney Ed Shaw, who represented some protesters charged with impeding law enforcement — charges that were eventually dropped — acknowledges that local law enforcement were put in a challenging situation during the surge. But he said local authorities need to be responsive to concerns from constituents about the nature of collaborations with federal law enforcement and transparent about who approved and then chose to continue the collaborations despite the federal surge.
“You have people being dragged out of cars, windows smashed, seat belts cut, schools raided — behavior that just is beyond the pale of any kind of decent law enforcement behavior,” Shaw said. “This isn't working with the FBI under normal circumstances to get terrorists or gangsters or whatever — this is working for people who are clearly acting like thugs.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement that the city “does not — and will never — enforce federal immigration law, and that any claims that Minneapolis police are assisting in immigration enforcement are false.
“We won’t expose an active criminal investigation to correct this willful mischaracterization, but it’s unfortunate that speculation like this detracts from the work of keeping people safe,” Frey said.
