In 2023, the Department of Justice released a blistering report on the patterns and practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. The police force responsible for George Floyd’s death three years earlier, the DOJ wrote, regularly “uses unreasonable deadly force,” “unlawfully retaliates against people who observe and record their activities,” and “fails to adequately discipline police misconduct.” The department also engaged in the “inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive” practice of shooting at moving cars. In one case, an officer who had the time and space to move out of the path of an escaping vehicle instead fired four shots at it. The officer’s use of force, the report said, “was reckless and unreasonable.”
The Justice Department this month opted against conducting an investigation into the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed after an ICE officer fired shots into her moving Honda Pilot. The government is instead reportedly pushing to probe the actions of Good’s wife, who recorded the incident on her phone. For local police in Minneapolis—who have spent much of the past five years aiming to overhaul their tactics and restore community trust by embracing an ethos of deescalation—watching thousands of federal agents rush into their city with a very different mandate has been disorienting, current and former law-enforcement officials told me.
“Look at how much things change,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told me when I asked him about the 2023 DOJ report and the current federal operation. “Now we’re the ones trying to honor people’s rights, honor people’s ability to yell at us, to protest, to record the police and say nasty things without escalating, trying to protect people’s human dignity in interactions. It’s incredibly ironic.”
O’Hara has had little time to dwell on the irony, as his force of about 600 officers faces a crisis spurred by President Trump’s decision to deploy some 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis. In a city that has long been beset by strained relations between residents and law enforcement, the largest operation in the history of the Department of Homeland Security is upending what had begun to feel like a fragile truce.
Police now say they fear that Minneapolis may be on the verge of repeating the downward spiral that began in 2020, when a videotaped killing of an unarmed man by law enforcement led to mass protests that turned violent. A spike in crime and an exodus of hundreds of burned-out officers from the force followed. O’Hara told me that his effort to rebuild is being stymied by the “undisciplined,” “unsafe,” and “unprofessional” policing of federal agents who seem hell-bent on antagonizing anyone objecting to their presence in the city.
Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino complained on Thursday that Minneapolis police have been “missing in action,” failing to show up when protesters have amassed to hamper federal operations. Vice President Vance visited Minneapolis hours later and blamed local authorities for the chaos gripping the city.
It is rare for law-enforcement officers to turn on each other so publicly, and Minneapolis may represent the beginning of a broader rupture between local police—many of whom have years of experience dealing with the public—and federal officers bolstered by a corps of hastily trained recruits.
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“Folks, that’s bush-league policing,” Sheriff Kevin Joyce of Cumberland County, Maine, told reporters on Thursday after one of his corrections officers was arrested by a group of ICE agents, who left the man’s car open and unlocked on the street. “We don’t do that as law-enforcement officers.”
In Minnesota, police have also begun to speak out against the aggressive tactics that have become synonymous with Operation Metro Surge, the nickname for the federal deployment many residents have said has begun to feel like an invasion. Police chiefs from the Twin Cities and surrounding communities held a press conference this week to accuse ICE agents of unprofessional and unconstitutional practices. They asserted that their own off-duty officers had been accosted by masked federal officials and asked to prove that they were U.S. citizens. Area 911 switchboards are receiving dozens of daily calls related to the federal surge, both from residents seeking protection from federal agents and from ICE officials asking for help amid protests. The tension could increase if Trump follows through on his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and send active-duty troops into the city.
The Pentagon put 1,500 members of the 11th Airborne Division, based out of Fort Wainwright, Alaska, on prepare-to-deploy orders Sunday morning, with plans to possibly send them to Minnesota, a U.S. defense official told my colleague Nancy A. Youssef. This person also said that the U.S. Army has ordered several dozen additional active-duty military police based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and troops from the 4th Infantry Division in Fort Carson, Colorado, to prepare for a possible deployment to Minneapolis. The orders are the penultimate step to a Minnesota deployment, but the troops have not been ordered to go anywhere just yet. Vance said Thursday that Trump has not felt compelled to use the Insurrection Act so far and that the administration’s goal is to lower the temperature.
Tensions in Minneapolis have escalated significantly since January 7, when Ross shot and killed Good. The 37-year-old mother of three had stopped her car on a street when Ross and other ICE officers approached her. Video shows that she’d turned her steering wheel away from the officers in an apparent attempt to leave when the shots were fired. Trump-administration officials promptly accused Good of “domestic terrorism” and said she had been trying to run over Ross.
Despite videos and eyewitness accounts of the incident that contradict those claims, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News recently that no investigation into Ross’s actions would be conducted. That’s a break with precedent; fatal law-enforcement shootings are typically reviewed. Federal officials also boxed out Minnesota investigators from examining the evidence independently, a move that local activists have said amounts to a cover-up. In Minneapolis, where demonstrators saw the successful prosecutions of the officers who’d killed Floyd as the culmination of years of public pressure on a police force that often seemed impervious to accountability, the handling of the Good shooting feels like an unacceptable regression.
“The longer this takes to get answers around whether there will be accountability, the worse things will get,” Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local activist and the former head of the Minneapolis NAACP, told me last week. “ICE agents will continue to feel that they can attack people in our community with impunity.” On Sunday, Armstrong participated in a protest at a Minneapolis church where an ICE official apparently serves as a pastor. On Thursday, she was arrested by federal agents, and Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested that the protest broke a law protecting houses of worship. Armstrong’s attorney, Jordan Kushner, called the prosecution “a farce.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who called for Armstrong to be released immediately, has been warning that the federal officials’ aggressive tactics are creating a sense of chaos. Last week, he told reporters that some residents were asking local police to fight ICE officers on the street. “We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another,” he said, adding that the situation is “not sustainable.”
But in the current environment, the idea of cops and agents coming to blows may not be far-fetched. In Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis, an off-duty police officer was stopped by ICE agents while driving and was asked to show papers proving her legal right to be in the U.S., Police Chief Mark Bruley said recently. An agent knocked a phone out of her hand when she tried to record, he said. The federal officials, who had their guns drawn during the encounter, left only when the officer told them that she was also in law enforcement, Bruley said. He added that similar things had happened to several other officers on his force, and that “every one of these individuals is a person of color.” (DHS has said that there is no record of ICE or Border Patrol stopping and questioning an officer and that it does not racially profile.)
The corrections officer in Cumberland County, Maine, was roughed up by at least three federal agents as he shouted that he worked for the government, according to video of the arrest posted by the Portland Press Herald. Janeé Harteau, a former police chief in Minneapolis, told me that she had recently traveled from Florida to Minnesota to protect her daughter, a 27-year-old Hispanic U.S. citizen, from racial profiling by ICE. Her daughter had “grown up around cops” but now feared leaving her house after seeing videos of federal officials aggressively confronting minorities, Harteau said.
In 2021, Minneapolis officers began a training program called “Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement,” which teaches police how to intervene when their colleagues are abusing people. Shortly before Operation Metro Surge began, MPD revised its policy to clarify that officers who see federal agents using “clearly excessive force” against residents “shall verbally or physically intervene” as soon as they can do so safely.
In recent days, videos and images of actions by federal agents have circulated widely. The incidents include a woman being yanked from her car and carried away while saying she is disabled and trying to get to a doctor’s appointment, a U.S. citizen being pulled from his house in his underwear despite snowy conditions, and a man taken from his home after gun-toting officers used a battering ram on his door. (They did not produce a judicial warrant before entering, his lawyer said.) The front page of yesterday’s Minnesota Star Tribune features a photo of two agents pinning an activist down while another masked officer sprays an orange chemical irritant directly into the person’s face.
“Their tactics are unsound,” Harteau said. “I question their training, if any. We don’t train people to just push people, grab their phones, mace them because they’re standing on the corner talking or yelling.”
The Trump administration has responded by defending the federal operations as flawless and labeling critics as lawless agitators and supporters of domestic terrorism. Marcos Charles, a top ICE official, recently told CBS’s 60 Minutes that no one from his agency had been disciplined for any actions that have taken place during the operation. Trump and Vance have each softened their tone in recent days, acknowledging that some “mistakes” have been made by federal forces.
When I asked the White House about some of the complaints from local law-enforcement officials, the spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not address those concerns, instead pivoting to blame Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Frey for “lying about federal law enforcement operations” and “fueling divisions.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Vance said on Thursday that he had personally looked into some of the situations showing ICE personnel involved in questionable conduct and found that crucial context exonerating the officers was often missing. He blamed local leaders for not allowing Minneapolis police to assist with the federal surge.
“The reason why things have gotten so out of hand is because of a failure of cooperation between the state and local authorities and what these guys are trying to do,” he said, standing in front of 10 immigration agents. Although Vance said he had “some hope” that cooperation would improve in the coming weeks, there’s reason to believe that such optimism is misguided.
After interviewing dozens of Minneapolis residents, politicians, and police officers for our book about the life and legacy of George Floyd, my co-author, Robert Samuels, and I came to understand just how fraught the relationship between the community and MPD had become in the years leading up to the fiery summer of 2020. Long before the Justice Department documented the civil-rights abuses and unconstitutional policing practices MPD had become notorious for, we heard about them from residents. The city’s poorest and most ethnically diverse neighborhoods, where ICE is now conducting many of its deportation operations, tended to be the most likely to have stories of the cops roughing up people without justification.
Having heard so many accounts of residents who had endured or witnessed such abuse, I understood why so many protesters flooded the streets of Minneapolis in the hours after Floyd was killed. Some of them watched with a sense of satisfaction on May 28, 2020, as flames engulfed the building housing MPD’s Third Precinct, which was especially notorious for aggressive policing techniques that resemble the tactics ICE agents are now using. And in the years since, Minneapolis police have worked to address that anger and to change the culture of their department.
With crime settling at historic lows, local leaders are reluctant to return to the aggressive approaches that soured relations with the community. Bruley, the Brooklyn Park police chief, said that local officials have recently begun handing out pamphlets to residents showing them how to tell the difference between an ICE agent and a municipal officer—lest the federal deportation push tarnish “our brand of how hard we work to build trust.”
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Leaders in the Twin Cities are well aware that Operation Metro Surge will wind down at some point and that ICE, flush with billions of dollars from Congress and a mandate to hire thousands of new deportation officers, will shift its focus to another location. For O’Hara, whose police force lost roughly 300 officers after the George Floyd protests and continues to struggle with staffing and recruitment, the prospect of another conflagration in the streets stemming from ICE’s operation is unnerving.
“We’ve tried to heal, and we’ve tried to rebuild,” he told me. “I’m just afraid that we’re in that pandemic phase now, just waiting for the next time to go completely over the cliff. And we just cannot sustain if that happens again.”
Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting.
