When federal agents stopped in front of her red compact car, stepped out of their vehicle and headed toward Minneapolis resident Patty O’Keefe and her longtime friend Brandon Sigüenza, O’Keefe immediately thought of Renee Nicole Good, shot to death by an agent just days earlier.
Like Good and her wife, O’Keefe and Sigüenza are U.S. citizens. On Sunday morning, they were responding to an alert of a federal agent using pepper spray on a person observing them, O’Keefe told Sahan Journal.
The agents shot pepper spray into the vents of their car, then smashed the windows and arrested the two for obstruction, they said. They were released after eight hours without being charged. But their experience illustrates the chaos and cruelty of the federal immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities, and offers a rare look inside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices at the Bishop Henry Whipple Building, where hundreds of U.S. citizens and immigrants have been processed after being arrested the past several weeks.
The day before the arrests, three U.S. House members made a surprise visit to the Whipple Building to examine conditions for the detainees. Minnesota Democrats Kelly Morrison, Ilhan Omar and Angie Craig were allowed briefly inside the building and saw 20 people with no beds. Then federal officials abruptly stepped in to deny them further access.
“Most of those eight hours were incredibly boring, punctuated with moments of real scary horror as I saw the faces of people being detained,” Sigüenza told the Sahan Journal.
O’Keefe and Sigüenza had responded to an alert at 16th Avenue S. and E. 42nd Street, near Bethel Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis, and followed federal agents halfway down a block when the agents stopped and quickly exited their vehicles.
O’Keefe, 36, had followed federal agents in the past and attended training to be prepared for encounters with them, but she told the Sahan Journal that this was the first time she was arrested. For Sigüenza, 32, Sunday’s incident was his first time seeing and talking to federal agents in person and being arrested. The two both grew up in St. Louis Park and have known each other for years.
“I was glad that they were driving me around, a U.S. citizen, instead of being out in the community scaring people, potentially abducting people,” he said.
The agents began taunting her as soon as the pair was arrested and placed in separate unmarked SUVs, O’Keefe said. One of the federal agents took her photo without permission, calling her ugly and laughing. The same ICE agent who sprayed her vehicle told her, “stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” referring to Good.
O’Keefe said she reported those comments to several other agents while in detention, hoping someone would hold him accountable.
“I wanted them to know this is how they’re treating community members.”
But Sigüenza’s experience, which he related in a detailed Facebook post, also spoke to the chaos of ICE operations. When they drove him away, he said he asked that someone fasten his seatbelt, and was ignored. Agents refused to loosen his handcuffs, even though he was losing circulation, and the agent in the passenger seat realized his own drivers license was on the backseat next to Sigüenza. The agent “tried to surreptitiously grab it without me seeing it.”
At ICE headquarters, he wrote on Facebook, agents were unable to open doors, didn’t seem to know where they were going, couldn’t figure out how to use the building’s phones and complained about a lack of cell phone service. An agent who interviewed him complained about having to fill out a new form listing his possessions, and then put the wrong date on it.
O’Keefe and Sigüenza were held in small separate holding cells for male and female U.S citizens. Both said that while in detention, their requests for water or to use a toilet were repeatedly ignored. Finally, when she threatened to pee on the floor, an officer came, O’Keefe said.
Through a window, they witnessed many people tightly packed into a large holding cell, mostly Hispanic men, standing around.
“We knew we were going to be released and then we got hit with that realization like, we get to leave,” Sigüenza told the Sahan Journal. “We can plan for a future and these people, they don’t.”
Federal agents later brought in a Hispanic man and his shirt was “ripped open” after being arrested and pushed into a car, he said. Another man brought into his cell had a large cut on his forehead after several agents tackled and arrested him, he said. Neither man was offered medical assistance, he added.
“When we went to the bathroom, we were allowed to walk past people’s cells,” Sigüenza told the Sahan Journal. “I saw people with their heads in their hands, people with low energy that looked weak and tired. I heard screaming, I heard crying.”
“I distinctly remember seeing a desperate woman,” he wrote in his Facebook post. “She was staring at the ground with her head in her hands crying, hopeless, while her friend or family member sat on a bathroom seat observed by three men.”
The two said they were not allowed to talk to any of the detainees, didn’t know how long they had been there, whether they had had any contact with the outside world, or if they had been given food or water.
Both O’Keefe and Sigüenza were questioned by a few federal agents for about 20 minutes during the eight-hour long detention. Federal agents asked questions about why they were involved in monitoring ICE and names of groups or people organizing protests. They also wanted to know if any group or person had potential plans for violence against federal agents.
O’Keefe and Sigüenza said they refused to offer names and didn’t know of any plans.
Sigüenza said he eventually asked federal agents about what they were specifically looking for, and they responded with an offer. In exchange for money or legal protection for undocumented people that he knew, federal agents told him they wanted names of protest organizers or other undocumented people.
“It was a deal they offered me,” he said. “I was stunned.” He rejected their offer.
While in detention, O’Keefe said a few women were eventually brought in. Two of them were U.S. citizens and former U.S. Marines, she said, and they were also arrested after following federal agents. She saw one of the women with a swollen arm, twisted ankle and sharp cuts from broken glass on both arms from several agents pulling her out of the car that day. In an adjacent cell, O’Keefe said she heard many women erupt in sobs at one point in a different holding cell.
O’Keefe’s and Sigüenza’s married partners were notified of their detention and eventually they were released around 6 p.m. Sunday.
Sigüenza said in his Facebook post that his release was equally chaotic. He was refused use of a phone to call his wife to pick him up, he said, until an agent relented. Walking out, he was directed toward a protest area where tear gas was deployed five minutes later. Even though he was on the other side of the street, he was hit by a paint ball. And he helped a protester who was having an asthma attack find an inhaler.
