The first sign of an impending nightmare for 20-year-old Jose Roberto Ramirez came just after 11 a.m. on Thursday in the suburban town of Robbinsdale, just outside Minneapolis.
According to Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began following his vehicle. What he alleges followed next was a violent, random arrest and detainment.
It happened roughly 10 miles away from where an unarmed mother and U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, 37, was killed the day prior.
Good, who was trying to flee a street where a federal immigration raid was occurring when an ICE agent fatally shot her, was almost immediately labeled a “domestic terrorist” by Kristi Noem and other top Trump administration officials.
Ramirez recounted that, on Thursday, he stopped for a red light behind a Ford Explorer. When the signal turned green, the Explorer did not move.
“It just stood there,” Ramirez told the Daily Beast on Friday. “I just stood there for a while.”
The Explorer had tinted windows, but when Ramirez finally pulled around the other vehicle, he could see that it was occupied by men in tactical gear. He surmised they were with ICE. The shooting of Good, who left behind an orphaned six-year-old, had occupied national headlines for the previous 24 hours.
“We made eye contact,” Ramirez recalled.
Ramirez is American, born of mixed ancestry—part Mexican, part Native American of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Ramirez figured ICE agents would view him as a non-white person in a BMW and grew nervous. He saw in his rear-view mirror that the Explorer had begun to move behind him. He called his aunt, Shawntia Sosa-Clara, who lives in the immediate area.
Ramirez was still on the phone with Sosa-Clara, saying he was afraid he was being followed by ICE, when a traffic signal up ahead began to change.
“I make it past the green light, and it turns red for them,” he recalled. Ramirez then saw that the Explorer kept coming, turning on the vehicle’s emergency lights as they passed through the intersection.
“Then they turn their lights off,” Ramirez said. “All of a sudden, I see them right up behind me. Then I see them put their masks up. So I was like, ‘Oh yeah, auntie, they’re gonna stop me.’”
Ramirez and Sosa-Clara quickly agreed to meet in the parking lot of a nearby Hy-Vee supermarket. He pulled in, and the Explorer was right behind him. The agents jumped out and drew their service weapons.
“Pointing their guns,” Ramirez remembers. “They’re screaming.”
Sosa-Clara arrived in her Nissan moments later, and Ramirez said the agents also pointed their weapons at her. She had already called the Robbinsdale police on her way to meet Ramirez to inform the department that her nephew was being followed by ICE. A police car appeared, stopping across the parking lot. The ICE agents approached the police officers and exchanged a few words.
In the meantime, Ramirez hurried into his aunt’s Nissan, its interior all pink, a feather hanging as a sacred object from her rearview mirror. She was recording on Facebook Live as the agents returned. “You got ID?” one of the agents asked.
“Yes, he has an ID,” the aunt said, then she instructed Ramirez, “Get your ID.”
Ramirez had anticipated this. He had taken out his driver’s license as he was getting out of the BMW, but he had misplaced it in the sudden panic. His aunt tried to placate the agents while he searched for it.
“We’re citizens!” she said. “We’re Native!”
She was asserting that her roots long predate the first European arrivals in North America, and that she and Ramirez have ties to the only ethnic group that cannot be called “immigrants.”
“He’s my nephew!” she added.
She went on to express an increasingly common feeling about ICE.
“They’re really mean people,” she said to her nephew about the agents as they surrounded the car. “They have no heart. They aren’t human. They’re not even human.”
The sentiment was rare during the years when President Barack Obama was known as the “Deporter-in-Chief.” The Obama administration deported roughly three million people, a record for a modern president at that time. Under the second Trump administration, the president declared he would beat Obama’s numbers and deliver the largest mass deportations in U.S. history—a promise he has not yet met.
But beyond metrics, even while overseeing a record number of deportations, Obama was not calling immigrants “vermin” and “garbage,” as Trump has frequently done since he first began campaigning for president more than 10 years ago.
And ICE agents were not uniformly wearing masks.
As the encounter continued, one of the agents appeared to use a cellphone to scan Ramirez’s face. ICE has been employing facial recognition software to identify undocumented immigrants.
“Let them scan your face,” Sosa-Clara told Ramirez.
Ramirez had raised his own cell phone to record the agents. He told the Beast that one of them knocked it from his hand, punching him in the face in the process.
“Why did you hit him?” the aunt exclaimed. “No! No! No!”
A captain with the local police later told the Daily Beast that footage either from his officer’s body cameras or a squad car camera shows Ramirez punching an ICE agent. Ramirez and the aunt both insist that the agents were the only ones who punched. The Facebook video does not clearly show any punches. It does show Ramirez being grabbed by the neck as he was being removed from the Nissan.
“Get the f— out of the car!” an agent can be heard saying.
Ramirez asserts that the agents struck him repeatedly in the head as he was dragged from the car. He said the agents threw him against a Tesla charging station and then handcuffed him. The cuffs dug painfully into his wrists, and he asked the agents to loosen them.
“They made it tighter,” Ramirez remembered.
Ramirez was loaded into the back of the Explorer and was driven at a considerable speed to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the city where Ramirez was born. He told the Daily Beast that during this car ride, the agents in the vehicle made light of the fatal shooting of Renee Good the day before. They said Ramirez was sure to meet family members in detention, that he was going to prison, and that his life was over.
“They are saying, ‘The boys are in town. We’re gonna light the city on fire!’” Ramirez told the Daily Beast. “A whole bunch of that crazy stuff.”
At the facility, the agents scanned Ramirez’s face twice more with no apparent result. He was then shackled, fingerprinted, and photographed. While being booked, Ramirez saw a group of Hispanic men who had been arrested in winter attire. Ramirez assumed they were snow shovelers trying to earn a few bucks in the icy streets.
The Trump administration funneled 2,000 ICE agents into Minnesota after a welfare scandal rocked the state and drew the close attention of the president. In December, Trump posted on Truth Social about the Somali community in Minnesota.
“Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness,” Trump, 79, wrote. “Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
While detained, Ramirez overheard an agent say they did not even bother to go after Somalis.
“I heard in the conversation [the agents] were saying like, ‘We’re not even targeting like Black Somalis, we’re going to target Hispanics,’” Ramirez recalled.
Ramirez says he was put in a cell with two other U.S. citizens, protesters accused of assaulting ICE agents. They were packed shoulder to shoulder in an adjacent pen.
“They don’t even have a place to sit,” Ramirez said. “They were just kind of like standing, just people crying, some holding in tears and trying to stay strong.”
After six hours, Ramirez came to what he hopes will be the end of his nightmare run-in with the federal agency. “They gave me my stuff, they took off my shackles, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re getting released on pending charges’,” Ramirez said.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment. Any charges are still pending at the time of this writing.
The agents made a mistake when returning Ramirez’s property. “They gave me somebody else’s car keys,” Ramirez recalled. “I gave them back.”
He had been experiencing an increasingly urgent need to use the restroom, but that was not an option in detention. He asked if he could use one before he left the building. The agents told him to use the Porta-potty outside. It was locked.
Fortunately, his mother, aunt, and several cousins were waiting to give him hugs. They all then went home, in the city where he was born, in a land where their ancestors lived for thousands of years, long before there even was a country called America to be made great.
The post Yet Another ICE Nightmare Unfolds Miles Away From Fatal Shooting appeared first on The Daily Beast.
