Federal immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis during recent protests have used crowd-control tactics that experts said raise concerns about training and public safety after the deadly shooting of a woman in her car last week, according to a report by the Associated Press. The report described agents pointing rifles at demonstrators and deploying chemical irritants early in confrontations, and it said agents broke vehicle windows and pulled occupants from cars. It also said agents scuffled with protesters and shoved them to the ground.
The government said the actions were necessary to protect officers from violent attacks, while the report said the encounters riled up protesters further as videos of the incidents were shared widely on social media. Experts warned that the approach runs counter to de-escalation standards and risks turning volatile demonstrations into deadly encounters.
The confrontations are taking place amid a major immigration enforcement surge ordered by the Trump administration in early December, the report said, sending more than 2,000 officers from the Department of Homeland Security into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The report said many of those involved are typically tasked with arrests, deportations and criminal investigations rather than managing volatile public demonstrations, and it described what experts characterized as a broader shift in how the federal government asserts authority during protests.
Tensions escalated after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman killed by an immigration agent last week, the report said. It said federal officials defended the killing as self-defense after they said Good weaponized her vehicle, and it said the shooting intensified protests and scrutiny of the federal response.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota asked a federal judge to intervene, filing a lawsuit on behalf of six residents seeking an emergency injunction to limit how federal agents operate during protests. The report said the requested restrictions include limits on the use of chemical agents, limits on pointing firearms at non-threatening individuals and restrictions on interference with lawful video recording.
“There’s so much about what’s happening now that is not a traditional approach to immigration apprehensions,” former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña said, according to the report. Saldaña said she could not speak to how the agency currently trains its officers and said that when she was director, officers received training on interacting with people who might be observing or filming an apprehension, but agents rarely had to deal with crowds or protests, the report said.
Ian Adams, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said the majority of crowd-management or protest training happens at the local level, often within larger police departments that have public order units. He added: “It’s highly unlikely that your typical ICE agent has a great deal of experience with public order tactics or control,” the report said. Adams also described how police tactics have evolved over decades, saying the instinct to meet protests with force can have blowback effects that make disorder worse, the report said.
The report also quoted Ed Maguire, a criminology professor at Arizona State University, who has written extensively about crowd-management and protest-related law enforcement training. Maguire said he had not seen the current training curriculum for ICE officers but that he reviewed recent training materials for federal officers and called it “horrifying.” The report quoted him saying, “You can’t even say this doesn’t meet best practices. That’s too high a bar. These don’t seem to meet generally accepted practices,” and he added, “We’re seeing routinely substandard law enforcement practices that would just never be accepted at the local level,” along with “Then there seems to be just an absence of standard accountability practices,” according to the report.
DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement that ICE officer candidates receive extensive training over eight weeks in courses that include conflict management and de-escalation. The report said McLaughlin stated that many candidates are military veterans and about 85% have previous law enforcement experience, and that candidates are subject to months of rigorous training and selection at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, including training in de-escalation tactics to firearms and driving. The report also said McLaughlin stated that Homeland Security Investigations candidates receive more than 100 days of specialized training.
The report said a nationwide standard for protest policing best practices does not exist and that practices vary across departments, including rules on chemical agents and how officers handle officers’ use of force near protected speech. It also quoted Humberto Cardounel, senior director of training and technical assistance at the National Policing Institute, saying, “Organizations and agencies aren’t always familiar with what their own policies are,” and it quoted him encouraging simulation by saying officers go through policies once in basic training and are expected to know how to comport themselves years later.
Adams said local police are often best suited for public order tasks because they have a relationship with the community that extends before and after incidents, describing a continuity that helps shape expectations among both officers and residents. He said: “I think at the heart of this is the challenge of calling what ICE is doing even policing,” the report said. He added that police agencies maintain community relationships that persist beyond any single incident.
Saldaña, in the report, said both sides had increased their aggression. She said, “You cannot put yourself in front of an armed officer, you cannot put your hands on them certainly. That is impeding law enforcement actions,” and she said, “At this point, I’m getting concerned on both sides — the aggression from law enforcement and the increasingly aggressive behavior from protesters,” according to the report.