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For days, Luis Ramirez said he had an uneasy feeling after seeing men dressed as utility workers outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis. He said the men wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, and he said a search for the Wisconsin-based electrician listed on the vehicle doors did not turn up results. On Tuesday, he said the pair returned to the lot, and he filmed his confrontation as the men, whose faces he said were hidden, approached him while appearing to wear heavy tactical gear beneath their yellow vests.
In the video, Ramirez said, “This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to come sit here and watch my business.” The report said a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about whether the men were federal immigration officers.
As the immigration crackdown in Minnesota continues, legal observers and officials said they have received a growing number of reports describing federal agents impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers and, in some cases, anti-ICE activists. The report said not all of the incidents have been verified, but that the allegations have increased fears in a state already on edge, and have added to legal groups’ concerns about changes to immigration enforcement tactics nationwide.
Naureen Shah, director of immigration advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the impersonation accounts raise the stakes for public trust. She said, “If you have people afraid that the electrical worker outside their house might be ICE, you’re inviting public distrust and confusion on a much more dangerous level,” and she added, “This is what you do if you’re trying to control a populace, not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”
Shah and attorneys said deception has appeared in immigration enforcement before, including disguises and other ruses that they said immigration authorities use to gain entry to homes without a warrant. They said such tactics became more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, and pointed to a U.S. constitutional challenge by the ACLU that included allegations about agents posing as local law enforcement during home raids. A recent settlement in Los Angeles, the report said, restricted the practice there, while attorneys said ICE deceptions remain legal elsewhere.
Several accounts from Minnesota describe what they said has changed about the tactics in the current period, with some observers framing the approach as more visible. Shah said the reported Minnesota operations would appear to be “a more extreme degree than we’ve seen in the past,” including because they appear to be happening in plain sight. One explanation given in the reporting is that the tactics may respond to Minnesota’s network of citizen observers who try to flag agents before arrests.
Activists told The Associated Press they have seen agents leaving the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis—described as the city’s central hub of ICE activity—in vehicles marked in unusual ways. The report said activists described seeing dashboards with stuffed animals or Mexican flag decals on bumpers, and said they also frequently spotted pickups with lumber or tools in their beds. In recent weeks, the report said federal agents have repeatedly shown up to construction sites dressed as workers, according to Jose Alvillar, a lead organizer for the local immigrant rights group Unidos MN.
Alvillar told the AP he has seen an increase in what he called “cowboy tactics,” though he said the raids he described had not resulted in arrests. He said, “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is dressing up as one.”
Other reports described alleged use of license plates. Since the start of the operation in Minnesota, local officials—including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz—said ICE agents had been seen swapping license plates or using bogus ones, which the report said violates state law. Candice Metrailer, an antiques dealer in south Minneapolis, said she believed she saw such an attempt firsthand on Jan. 13, when she said a man called to ask whether her store sold license plates. She said she answered, and shortly afterward, two men in street clothes entered the shop and began looking through her collection of vintage plates.
Metrailer said one of the men asked for “any recent ones” and that an alarm bell went off. She said she stepped outside while the men kept browsing and then saw an idling Ford Explorer with blacked out windows. She said she memorized the license plate, then plugged it into a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles linked to immigration enforcement; the report said the database showed an identical Ford with the same plates had been photographed leaving the federal building seven times and had been reported at the scene of an immigration arrest weeks earlier.
When one of the men approached the register holding what she said was a white Minnesota plate, Metrailer said she told him her store had a new policy against selling the items. She said she reported the incident to Minnesota’s attorney general, and the report said a DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Supporters of the immigration crackdown said the presence of ICE-tracking activists in Minneapolis has pushed federal agents to adopt new methods to avoid detection. Scott Mechkowski, a former deputy director of ICE enforcement and operations in New York City, said, “Of course agents are adapting their tactics so that they’re a step ahead,” and he said, “We’ve never seen this level of obstruction and interference.” In the report, Mechkowski also said that in nearly three decades in immigration enforcement he had not seen ICE agent disguising themselves as uniformed workers when making arrests.
The report also said that earlier this summer, a DHS spokesperson confirmed a man wearing a high-visibility construction vest was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. It said in Oregon, a natural gas company published guidance the previous month on how customers could identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.
After the encounter, Ramirez said he has been on high alert for undercover agents. He told the AP that he recently stopped a locksmith he feared might be a federal agent before quickly learning the person was a local resident. He said, “Everybody is on edge about these guys, man,” adding, “It feels like they’re everywhere.”