He had just dropped his sisters off at school in Plymouth and was driving through north Minneapolis when Jose Roberto Ramirez noticed he was being tailed by SUVs with tinted windows and out-of-state number plates, two common signs civilians and community organizers use to identify Immigration Customs and Enforcement or Customs and Border Patrol cars.
That frightened him. Ramirez called his aunt to pick him up. Once in the car with her near a Hy-Vee store in Robbinsdale, more than a dozen federal agents, some pointing guns, surrounded them. In a video taken by his aunt, she can be seen saying, panic-stricken, “We’re citizens!” Ramirez was also recording the agents from within the car while trying to look for his I.D. when he said one of the agents reached in and punched him multiple times. Another agent hit his aunt.
A number of U.S. citizens such as Ramirez, a 20-year-old of Native American and Mexican descent, have reported being threatened, tackled on the streets, or detained by federal agents, part of a surge of ICE and Border Patrol activity across the Twin Cities coinciding with the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent in south Minneapolis last week.
Defense lawyers and detainees accuse the federal agents of racial profiling, focusing on Latinos and other people of color.
“Basically what we’re seeing is that immigration authorities are picking people up off the street based on race,” Anna Hall, community defense attorney at the Legal Rights Center told Sahan Journal.
Hall said that in many instances people were not asked for identification and detained without the opportunity to prove their citizenship. “The fact that someone is picked up seemingly for immigration purposes and then it turns out they’re a U.S. citizen has not prevented ICE from detaining them for several hours,” she said.
“My sense is that the tactic of ‘target brown person first, ask citizenship later’ is something that has really increased dramatically in the last two weeks,” Hall said “The cases that I’m aware of are situations where the person is not involved in protest activity, they aren’t involved in any kind of observation, they are sometimes walking down the street and get grabbed by immigration authorities.”
Or in Ramirez’s words, “It’s just racial profiling, because they just looked at me and then decided, ‘Oh, they’re gonna just start following me.”
In an interview with WCCO on Tuesday, the head of U.S. Border Patrol Gregory Bovino said that citizens and those with legal status have “no reason to be scared.” In October, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said no U.S. citizens had been arrested or detained. “Anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true,” she told reporters.
But citizens of color like Ramirez tell a different story. They’re scared, staying home and keeping a careful watch.
Sahan Journal reached out to DHS for comment but did not immediately hear back.
Liliana Zaragoza, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said that even just a stop without a reasonable suspicion that someone is violating immigration laws is unconstitutional because ICE and CBP have jurisdiction to enforce only immigration laws. “If that stopping is unconstitutional, anything that flows thereafter is as well,” she said.
Ramirez said he was held for about seven hours at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a day after Good’s shooting. His aunt was not detained.
“At first, I was resisting because I was scared, but then I was like, no, let me just let them because I don’t want [them] to end up having to shoot me or my auntie, because literally, the day before they shot that one lady,” he said. “I felt like I was getting kidnapped.”
At the Whipple Building, Ramirez said he was handcuffed and his feet shackled. He was injured from being punched and tackled while being arrested, but still was made to wait for investigative agents in a semi-enclosed garage for about two hours, standing the whole time. He was not given water or allowed to use a toilet, he said.
Ramirez was later taken to a cell with three others, also U.S. citizens. He was told by ICE agents that he would be taken to a different facility two hours away. “They said I wasn’t gonna get no bail, no nothing.”
On his way in, he saw cells where others were held, likely immigrants, but he wasn’t sure. “Those cells were all filthy. They’re all standing next to each other, full. They couldn’t even have space to sit down and lay down, standing next to each other,” he said.
When he was finally being released, Ramirez was told he would be charged with assaulting federal agents, which he denies. As of Monday, he said he wasn’t aware of any charges against him.
His mother and his aunt picked him up from Whipple at around 6:30 or 7 p.m. that day. “I was obviously really happy and grateful, you know, thank God I was able to get out. Because it sucks to be in those conditions. It sucks. It’s like you’re just trapped.”
In an interview with Sahan Journal, state Rep. Michael Howard, DFL-Richfield, shared the account of two teenage Latino U.S. citizens, who identified themselves as Jonathan and Christian in a video recorded by a bystander. Both of them worked outside a Target store in Richfield, and were tackled and detained by federal agents accompanied by Bovino on January 8. One of the workers was detained for a short amount of time, driven to another location and let out, and the other was detained for a considerable amount of time before being released, Rep. Howard said.
“On its face, it is an outrageous abuse of the legal rights of those two workers,” Howard said.
Ian Bratlie, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Minnesota, told Sahan Journal even though ICE officers are only instructed to enforce immigration law, “the Trump administration has shown support for federal agents’ actions against U.S. citizens, including ICE agent Jonathan Ross who shot and killed Good.”
In an interim order issued in September, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed federal immigration agents to resume certain immigration stops while litigation continues over alleged racial profiling. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” but said it may be considered alongside other factors. Civil rights advocates argue that the ruling effectively permits agents to rely on race, skin color, language, or appearance as part of a broader suspicion analysis — a standard they say increases the risk that U.S. citizens and lawful residents of color will be wrongly detained by ICE.
“It became very clear very quickly that federal agents across the country seem to get the memo, because all of a sudden their behavior really shifted after this decision, like they had the go ahead to racially profile,” Zaragoza said.
In Shakopee, at around the time Good was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last Wednesday morning, Luis Ramirez Orozco, also a Latino U.S. citizen, was detained by ICE agents. Orozco had shown up at a construction site five minutes from his family-owned store after being alerted by community members of ICE activity. When he arrived, several agents and some community members were already there.
He was questioned by an agent immediately after he pulled up. “I told him I wasn’t scared of him. I’m an American citizen,” Orozco said. He walked up to the second floor of the construction site without being stopped by any agents, and told the workers not to worry because they would have more community members arriving at the site soon.
The agents, two of whom he said were pointing guns at the workers, soon surrounded him and tackled him. “I was resisting a little bit because I didn’t know why they were trying to arrest me. I wanted them to tell me why I was going to jail first.” He said one of the agents “smashed my face on the ground [when] I was already laying on the ground. I was already handcuffed. My head still hurts from that,” Orozco said.
He was then taken to an agent’s car and told that he was being taken to jail. He refused their requests for his identification, saying he would identify himself when they arrived at the jail. “I kept asking them why I was going to jail, like, I need to know a reason to tell my lawyer why I’m in jail. And they couldn’t tell me anything,”
After driving him around for about 20 minutes, the agents dropped him off five minutes away from the construction site, he said.
Orozco, who later sought medical attention, said that his ribs were bruised and he had a concussion from his head being smashed on the floor. “They just pick you up and threaten you,” he said. “I was really scared, but I didn’t want to show them I was scared.”
“I guess one of the reasons they released me was because of what happened in Minneapolis,” he said, referring to the killing of Good.
Another detainee, Dennis Hernandez Ramirez said he was pulled over by and “roughed up” by at least four agents on Sunday, and held for more than 10 hours. Hernandez Ramirez, 32, is a Green Card holder who has lived in the U.S. for 25 years and moved to Minneapolis from North Carolina a month and a half ago for work.
He said the tight handcuffs cut his wrist. “One one of them held me down, even though I wasn’t moving, and made sure he thoroughly dug his elbow into my chest. Somebody else shoved their hand in their pocket, and then they pulled my head back and shoved their finger in my nose.” He speculated that the agents were trying to use a chemical to subdue him, but said he didn’t inhale it.
He was eventually taken to the Whipple Building where like Roberto Ramirez, was made to wait in a semi-enclosed garage before being taken to a holding cell with shackles on his feet, and told that he would be charged with assaulting officers. He said he feared he would be deported to Mexico, where he was born.
At one point, Hernandez Ramirez said agents from Homeland Security offered him money and legal protection to help them identify immigrants.
“Why would you guys threaten the hell out of me just to tell me, ‘hey, it’s gonna be fine if you help us?’ he wondered. “It made me feel very unsettled and kind of sick.”
Brandon Sigüenza, a U.S. citizen who also was detained on Sunday in the same cell as Hernandez Ramirez, said that agents who interviewed him made a similar offer.
Roberto Ramirez and his aunt said they have been staying home since their interaction with the federal agents. “It was scary, really scary,” Ramirez said, like something out of a movie.
Orozco said he had earlier barred federal agents from entering his store, and continues to have to keep a close watch.
Zaragoza and Bratlie of ACLU-MN encouraged the public to file reports with the ACLU-Minnesota if they suspect federal agents have violated their rights. “I think there’s a number of lawyers who are probably going to be filing lawsuits in the coming weeks on these kinds of issues,” Bratlie said.
Freelance reporter Nicolas Scibelli and Sahan immigration reporter Katelyn Vue contributed to this story.
