If you think you understand what an ICE officer faces on the ground in Minneapolis, you’re wrong.
We spent the day with ICE officers in Minneapolis, where agents have been under siege for weeks. It was constant chaos.
Anti-ICE agitators in the Twin Cities have grown increasingly brazen since the death of Renee Good, a protester who was fatally shot by an ICE officer after apparently striking an agent with her car, causing him to bleed internally.
These protests have not distracted ICE from its mission, which has so far led to the arrest of roughly 10,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“It’s not deterring us, we’re still doing [arrests],” Samuel Olsen, the director of the agency’s St. Paul office, told The Daily Wire. “We’ve had to just adjust and ensure that we have enough people out.”
ICE’s targets that afternoon included illegal immigrants with drug convictions, assault charges, and convictions for driving while impaired. Some of the targets were released by local authorities who ignored ICE’s requests to hand them over to federal custody.
As we departed the ICE office, a “spotter” watched on a nearby street corner as he notified a “network of people that are throughout the city,” Olsen said. The first target was quickly “blown” after outsiders spotted ICE, making it difficult to catch the illegal immigrant in his element, a local restaurant in St. Paul. It was the second time officers tried to catch him after their cover was blown.
Still, Olsen said they wouldn’t give up on him.
“It looks like there’s people almost everywhere looking for our vehicles, and we were spotted in the lot,” Olsen said. “We’re going to probably move to the next target and then just kind of keep this one still.”
It was then on to the next arrest, but it wasn’t long after we headed that way that anti-ICE protesters began following close behind as they communicated with each other on radios.
As we neared the target’s apartment, dozens of protesters had amassed on nearly every corner. They gathered by the convoy of officers as they blew whistles and honked their horns to alert the neighborhood that ICE was there. Even a school bus driver passing by was blowing a whistle.
The officers decided they wouldn’t be stopped and walked in to knock on their target’s door, hoping to make a peaceful arrest.
All the while, anti-ICE activists screamed nonstop insults like “coward” and “no one wants you here” at the officers.
Still, the officers pushed through, but were unsuccessful in getting the target to answer the door. They couldn’t take any additional action because they didn’t have a judicial warrant.
As the officers tried to leave the area, several anti-ICE agitators blocked them in with their cars. The situation soon grew tense as one of the officers got out and shouted orders at the agitators to move their cars back.
“We’re blocked,” an officer said on the radio.
“This is bad back here guys,” another could be heard on the radio. “We’re surrounded back here.”
Amid the melee, one of the drivers, who was in a Tesla, hit one of the ICE officers’ cars before zooming off erratically. He later continued to follow the officers before he rolled down his window and shouted, “I’m illegal, come and get me.”
Assaults on ICE officers have become all too normal, surging more than 1,000%, while death threats against them have increased more than 8,000%.
In Minneapolis, protesters are showing up at nearly every raid.
Before, “it was very rare … now, we’re making arrests of agitators daily,” Olsen said.
“When we have to arrest a U.S. citizen, it really takes us away from our other mission.”
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