Three top Minnesota police officials on Tuesday criticized the tactics that federal agents have used during their immigration crackdown and described a region where residents, including those with legal status, were scared to venture outside.
Two of the officials said they knew of United States citizens, including a police officer and city workers, who had been stopped and questioned by immigration agents. And they expressed concern that the Trump administration’s surge of some 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota was undermining residents’ trust in law enforcement and disrupting daily life.
“Can we find a way to make sure that we can do these things without scaring the hell out of our community members and freaking everyone out?” Chief Axel Henry of the St. Paul Police Department asked at a news conference. He added that many people in his city “are scared to death” and “afraid to go outside.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately provide a statement in response.
The news conference, which also included Sheriff Dawanna S. Witt of Hennepin County and Chief Mark Bruley of the Brooklyn Park police, revealed escalating tensions between federal officials and Minnesota law enforcement leaders.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly criticized state and local policies that limit coordination with immigration agents. On Tuesday, the Justice Department issued subpoenas to at least five Democratic officials in Minnesota — including Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis and Mayor Kaohly Her of St. Paul — related to their policies on immigration enforcement efforts in the state, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Walz dismissed the investigation in a statement as a “partisan distraction.”
“Minnesotans are more concerned with safety and peace than baseless legal tactics aimed at intimidating public servants standing shoulder to shoulder with their community,” the governor said in a statement.
Elected leaders in Minnesota have repeatedly called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to leave the state, and a lawsuit filed by the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul claims that the surge is unconstitutional.
The Trump administration has defended its work in Minnesota as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration and root out fraud in state social service programs. In a court filing on Monday, the administration said that more than 3,000 people who were in the country illegally had been arrested during the campaign. Many of those people, federal officials said, had been convicted of serious crimes.
But in their news conference, the local police officials criticized what they described as heavy-handed tactics from federal agents.
“We demand more from our federal government — more professionalism, more accountability, more humanity,” said Sheriff Witt, who said she was especially concerned about claims of racial profiling by federal agents. “We demand lawful policing that respects human dignity.”
Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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