A St. Paul woman who is a U.S. citizen was illegally detained last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, she said Wednesday at a news conference at the Minnesota Capitol.
Nasra Ahmed, 23, said she had stepped out of her St. Paul apartment on Jan. 14 when several ICE officers surrounded her and demanded her identification.
State Rep. Samakab Hussein, a St. Paul Democrat who was also at Wednesday’s news conference, said similar calls about such ICE activity are flowing in from the community.
“This needs to stop,” he added.
A video recorded by Nasra’s neighbors shows more than a dozen officers surrounding and handcuffing her, then forcing her into their vehicle.
Nasra said the agents escalated the situation while she was trying to produce her ID, pinning her down, handcuffing her, and shoving her into the vehicle, bruising her face. She said the agents injured her by pressing their knees and elbows into her back. She said they called her a racial slur as they handcuffed her.
She was taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, then transferred to the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River.
“I’m not a criminal, but they shackled my legs and handcuffed me as if I were a criminal,” she said.
She broke down in tears as she shared her experience. “This is a scar that I will carry for the rest of my life,” she said.
When Nasra was detained, her aunt called her father, Mohamed Ahmed, and told him his daughter had been taken by ICE.
Mohamed said Wednesday that his daughter’s detainment was not immigration enforcement but rather an operation targeting Somali Americans.
Upon learning that she had been detained, he tried to find her with Hussein’s help. They called Ramsey County, which told them to try the Whipple Building, but she had been transferred to Elk River before they could do so.
“I couldn’t get any information about her for a whole 24 hours,” Mohamed Ahmed said on Wednesday.
Once her family learned where Nasra was being held, her father took her passport and birth certificate to the jail to prove she is a U.S. citizen.
A bandage covered the right side of Nasra’s face at the news conference. “Everything hurts,” she said, pointing to her face, neck, legs and wrists.
She said she was told she sustained a concussion when the agents slammed her onto the floor.
Nasra is among many U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants who have been unlawfully detained in Minnesota since December. In January, the federal government increased the number of ICE and Border Patrol agents working in Minnesota to about 3,000, leading to even more widespread stops, interrogations and detentions.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said that hundreds more ICE agents may be sent to Minnesota.
As tension between protesters and ICE agents has grown across the Twin Cities, President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy military force against Minnesotans.
Nasra said that being American is much more than ICE’s racial assumptions. “I’m Somali, but also American,” she said.
