Federal immigration agents deployed in Minneapolis used aggressive crowd control tactics that became an overriding concern in the wake of the attack. Fatal shooting of a woman In her car last week.
They pointed guns at protesters and used chemical irritants early in the confrontations. They smashed the windows of the vehicles and pulled the passengers out of the cars. They clashed with the demonstrators and pushed them to the ground.
The government says these measures are necessary to protect officers from violent attacks. The confrontations, in turn, further angered the demonstrators, especially with videos of the incidents being widely shared on social media.
What is unfolding in Minneapolis reflects that Wider transformation In how the federal government asserts its authority during protests, relying on immigration agents and investigators to perform crowd management roles traditionally handled by local police who often have more training in public order tactics and calming large crowds.
Experts warn that this approach contravenes de-escalation standards and risks turning turbulent demonstrations into deadly confrontations.
The confrontations come in the middle A major boom in immigration enforcement The Trump administration ordered it in early December, sending more than 2,000 officers from across the Department of Homeland Security to… minneapolis st. Paul area. Many of the officers involved are typically assigned to arrests, deportations, and criminal investigations, not managing turbulent public demonstrations.
Tensions then escalated The fatal shooting of Renee Goodea 37-year-old woman was killed by an immigration agent last week, an incident that federal officials defended as self-defense after they said Goode armed her car.
Murder The protests intensified and auditing the federal response.
On Monday, the ACLU 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, including restrictions on the use of chemical agents, pointing firearms at non-threatening individuals and interfering with lawful video recording.
“There’s a lot going on right now that’s not a traditional approach to dealing with immigration concerns,” said Sarah Saldaña, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director.
Saldaña, who left the position in early 2017 as President Donald Trump’s first term began, said she couldn’t speak to how the agency currently trains its officers. When she was director, she said officers received training on how to interact with people who might be observing an arrest or photographing officers, but agents rarely had to deal with crowds or protests.
“This is something different,” she said. “You would hope that the agency would respond given the evolution of what is happening, as a result of the aggressive approach that was taken from the top.”
The majority of crowd or protest management training in policing happens at the local level — usually in larger police departments that have public order units, said Ian Adams, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina.
“It is very unlikely that your typical ICE agent will have a great deal of experience with or control of public order tactics,” Adams said.
ICE officer candidates receive intensive training over eight weeks in courses including conflict management and de-escalation, Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement. She said many of the candidates are military veterans and about 85% have prior law enforcement experience.
“All ICE candidates undergo months of rigorous training and selection at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where they are trained in everything from de-escalation tactics to firearms to leadership training. Homeland Security Investigations candidates receive more than 100 days of specialized training,” she said.
Ed Maguire, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University, has written extensively about crowd management and law enforcement training related to protests. He said that while he has not seen the current training curriculum for ICE officers, he has reviewed recent training materials for federal officers and called them “horrifying.”
Maguire said what he’s seeing in Minneapolis looks like a perfect storm of disastrous consequences.
“You can’t even say this doesn’t meet best practices. That’s a very high bar. And these practices don’t seem to meet generally accepted practices,” he said.
“We routinely witness substandard law enforcement practices that would never be tolerated at the local level,” he added. “Then there seems to be an absence of standard accountability practices.”
Adams noted that police department practices “evolved to understand that the instinct of the 1950s and 1960s to meet every protest with force has the opposite effect of actually making the chaos worse.”
He said police departments are now trying to open communications with organizers, set boundaries, and sometimes show respect within reason. There is an understanding that the use of unnecessary force within a crowd can have a domino effect that may cause escalation from protesters and officers.
Although the training of officers responding to civil unrest has transformed significantly over the past four decades, there is no national standard for best practices. For example, some departments prohibit officers from spraying pepper spray directly in the face of people engaging in constitutional speech. Others prohibit the use of tear gas or other chemicals in residential neighborhoods.
Regardless of the details, experts recommend that departments write policies that they review regularly.
“Organizations and agencies are not always aware of their own policies,” said Humberto Cardonel, Senior Director of Training and Technical Assistance at the National Police Institute.
“They go through this once in basic training, and then they expect (officers) to know how to act after two years, or after five years,” he said. “We encourage them to understand and know their training, but also to emulate their training.”
Adams said one reason local officers are the best choice for public order duties is because they have an agreement with the community.
“I think at the heart of this is the challenge of even calling what ICE does police,” he said.
“Police agencies have a relationship with their community that extends before and after any incident. Officers know we will be here no matter what happens, and the community knows no matter what happens today, those officers will be here tomorrow.”
Saldaña noted that both sides have increased their aggression.
“You can’t put yourself in front of an armed officer, and you certainly can’t put your hands on them. That hinders law enforcement actions,” she said.
“At this point, I am concerned on both sides — the aggression of law enforcement and increasingly aggressive behavior by protesters.”