The Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, announced a lawsuit on Monday against the federal government, seeking to end the surge of ICE agents in the state.
The lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials comes in the aftermath of an ICE agent fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good behind the wheel of her vehicle last week, leading to protests across the city and the country.
“We allege that DHS’s use of excessive and lethal force, their warrantless, racist arrests, their targeting of our courts, our churches, houses of worship and schools are a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act on arbitrary and capricious federal actions. And we ask that the courts will end the surge of thousands of DHS agents in Minnesota,” Ellison said during a press conference.
“The deployment of thousands of armed DHS agents to Minnesota has done our state serious harm. This is in essence a federal invasion of the Twin Cities and Minnesota, and it must stop,” he said, noting the shutdown of schools and the closure of local businesses. “This surge has made us less safe.”
The assistant attorney general Brian Carter said a motion for a temporary restraining order would be filed on Monday ahead of the lawsuit.
Ellison described the federal agents as poorly trained and contrasted them with the training of Minneapolis police, noting that local police had had to respond to 20 instances of ICE agents’ apparent abduction of Minneapolis residents.
“They’re making unconstitutional arrests and using excessive force,” Ellison said. “DHS agents have barged into restaurants, asking to access secure areas. And when asked to present a warrant, which is required by law, they respond: ‘We don’t need one.’ This has to stop. Let’s be clear, this should have never started.”
Illinois filed a similar federal lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday over what the Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, called DHS’s “dangerous use of force”. The Illinois lawsuit asks the court to block US Customs and Border Protection from conducting civil immigration enforcement in the state while seeking to curb tactics such as the use of teargas, trespassing on private property and the concealing of license plates to mask official operations.
In Ellison’s press conference, AC Thompson of PBS Frontline asked if the Minnesota lawsuit was aimed at restraining the use of crowd control weapons. “My whole crew got pepper sprayed today by federal agents,” Thompson said. “Are you aiming to do anything about them?”
Ellison encouraged Thompson to file a complaint and “make sure people know what happened to you and your crew … The press is protected by the first amendment and is vitally important in this moment when freedom of the press and every first amendment right is under a threat.”
Ellison noted that Minnesota’s noncitizen immigrant population was just 1.5%, “which is half the national average. Our state’s percentage is lower than Utah, Texas, and Florida’s,” he said, suggesting that the Trump administration had targeted Minnesota out of political bias.
Ellison also alluded to Minnesota and its Somali immigrant population coming under vitriolic attacks from the White House and rightwing media after a series of social services fraud cases drew conservative attention in recent weeks.
“Donald Trump doesn’t seem to like our state very much,” Ellison added.
The Twin Cities’ response to a surge of thousands of federal agents has taxed the law enforcement capacity of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, each of which has about 600 police officers, said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis.
“We don’t use the word invasion lightly,” he said. “The stated reason of this federal government for bringing in this full invasion of ICE and Border Control is not safety. If it were safety, there would be other mechanisms to achieve safety.
“If this were about fraud, then you’d see an invasion perhaps of accountants. But that’s not what you see. What you see is people being indiscriminately taken off our streets.”
Kaohly Her, the mayor of Saint Paul and a Hmong-American immigrant, also spoke at the conference and said she was now carrying her passport card and ID with her all the time.
“Because I don’t know when I’m going to be detained, when I’m going to be approached,” she said. “The fact is that the tactics don’t even at this point really matter right? It’s the fact that we are being attacked as American citizens right now.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
