Minnesota’s top cops have told how their officers of color are often racially profiled by armed federal immigration agents during aggressive traffic stops.
Amid fears that the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge is trampling civil rights, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley relayed the shocking experience of one female off-duty officer from his department, who was boxed in by vehicles driven by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
They then approached with guns drawn and demanded immigration “paperwork” to prove she could be in the United States. “She’s a U.S. citizen, and clearly would not have any paperwork,” he told reporters at a Tuesday news conference.
When the officer tried to record the confrontation, an agent knocked her phone from her hand, Bruley said. Only after she identified herself as law enforcement did the agents “immediately” back off and drive away.
Every off-duty officer targeted by ICE in Brooklyn Park over the past two weeks has been a person of color, he added.
“I wish I could tell you that this was an isolated incident,” Bruley said. “If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day.”
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, who became the county’s first Black woman sheriff in 2023, said she is now hearing about American citizens being stopped “solely because of the color of their skin” and warned the tactics are shredding trust in law enforcement.
“We demand lawful policing that respects human dignity,” Witt said, stressing that the surge is battering both community members and already exhausted local officers.
St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry said that while TV images show “very, very angry groups… out protesting,” the people police chiefs deal with are those ”that are scared to death, that are afraid to go outside.” People, he added, are “getting stopped by the way that they look, and they don’t want to take that risk.”
Bruley insisted that none of the chiefs were calling for the abolition of immigration enforcement. “What you won’t hear from any of us today is rhetoric of ‘abolish ICE’ or that there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement,” he said. “The truth is, immigration enforcement is necessary for national security and for local security, but how it’s done is extremely important.”
He said he convened the news conference to spotlight what he described as a “small group” of federal agents whose conduct has alarmed local police.
Their complaints come as thousands of DHS personnel have poured into Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge. The Trump administration initiative began in December 2025 and has been billed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out. State officials say more than 2,000 immigration officers are now operating in the state.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, along with Minneapolis and St. Paul, filed a federal lawsuit last week seeking to halt the operation, accusing DHS of unleashing “armed and masked” agents to stage militarized raids at locations including schools and hospitals in violation of the Constitution.
Public fury exploded on Jan. 7, when ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, during a Minneapolis immigration raid protest. One week later, an ICE agent wounded an undocumented Venezuelan man, shooting him in the leg during a traffic-stop arrest in north Minneapolis.
Homeland Security officials have repeatedly denied that agents are racially profiling residents, saying officers are only asking people near enforcement scenes for identification.
A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast that the agency could not find any record of ICE or Border Patrol stopping and questioning a police officer, but that it would continue to look into the claims.
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