A scathing ACLU lawsuit accuses federal immigration officials of waging a racial profiling campaign of “enormous scale” as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on Minnesota, likening the tactics of Homeland Security agents to actions of a police state.
The class action lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, accuses agencies like DHS, ICE and the Border Patrol of “violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans on the basis of nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status,” with a sharp focus on “Somalis and Latinos, who are targeted for stops and arrests based on racial profiling motivated by bias.”
The lawsuit highlights the experiences of a group of American citizens who allege they were severely abused by federal agents.
Mubashir Khalif Hussen, 20, was having lunch on Dec. 10 when a pair of federal agents in an unmarked car grabbed him and pushed him into a restaurant, then dragged him back out into the snow, where agents allegedly put him in a headlock, according to the complaint.
“Mr. Hussen repeatedly informed the officers that he was a U.S. citizen and repeatedly asked the officers to let him grab his jacket with his phone so he could show them a photo of his passport,” the complaint alleges. “The officers refused to let him back into the building to retrieve his driver’s license or his phone and placed him in the back of the unmarked car.”
Hussen’s supervisor showed officers a copy of his passport, which officers also ignored, the complaint alleges.
During the encounter, agents allegedly repeatedly demanded to scan Hussen’s face, later taking him to a second location and then taking him to an ICE field office at Fort Snelling, where he was released without charge or placed in immigration proceedings.
The officers concluded the meeting by releasing Hussen into “the December cold and telling him to walk the seven miles from the field office back to where they had held him,” the complaint alleges. He was later picked up by his family.
“Because of his Somali identity, Mr. Hussen is terrified of being arrested and detained again,” the complaint adds.
In an unrelated encounter, officers later pepper-sprayed Hussen in the face after he recorded federal agents on his phone from a public sidewalk, the complaint alleges.
The independent has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on Minnesota, which began in December shortly after the president called the state’s large Somali population “garbage,” has been controversial from the start.
Things escalated earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, and again this week when a federal agent shot a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg during a traffic stop.
The operation was met with widespread peaceful protests, as well as scattered incidents of violence.
The president has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would use active-duty military or federalized National Guard troops to quell the unrest. The Trump administration has said the Minnesota operation, which is expected to include more than 2,000 agents, is the largest immigration operation in U.S. history.
The president’s military immigration operations across the country have been followed by accusations that agents are using racial profiling, random checks and authoritarian tactics to carry out arrests.
The government is pushing for its sweeps, which have mostly taken place resulted in the arrest of individuals without criminal convictionsare targeted.
The White House says military deployments are needed on reservations that do not force local police and prisons to support federal immigration enforcement.
#citizen #suing #FBI #threw #unmarked #car #crackdown #migrants #Minnesota