Minneapolis — For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he saw outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.
He observed that they were wearing high-visibility vests and white hard hats, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for a Wisconsin electrician advertised on car doors yielded no results.
On Tuesday, when the Nissan returned to the parking lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, They filmed his confrontation With the two men, who hide their faces when he approaches and appear to be wearing heavy tactical gear under their yellow vests.
“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to inquiries about whether the men were federal immigration officers. But encounters like Ramirez’s are becoming increasingly common.
as A massive crackdown on immigration In Minnesota, legal observers and officials say they have received a growing number of reports of federal agents posing as construction workers, delivery drivers and, in some cases, anti-ICE activists.
Not all of these incidents have been verified, but they have increased fears in the country Already on the edgeWhich increases legal groups’ concerns about the Trump administration A dramatic reshaping of immigration enforcement tactics At the national level.
“If you have people who fear that the electrician outside their home is ICE, you are creating public mistrust and confusion on a much more serious level,” said Noreen Shah, director of immigration advocacy at the ACLU. “That’s what you do if you’re trying to control a population, not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”
In the past, immigration authorities have sometimes used disguises and other deception, which is what they call tricks, To enter homes without a warrant.
Such tactics became more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, the lawyers said, prompting the ACLU to file a lawsuit accusing immigration agents of violating the U.S. Constitution by posing as local law enforcement during home raids. Modern colony Restrict this practice in Los Angeles. But ICE scams remain legal elsewhere in the country.
However, the covert operations reported in Minnesota may appear to be “more extreme than we’ve seen in the past,” Shah said, in part because they appear to be happening in plain sight.
While past scams were intended to deceive immigration targets, current tactics may also be a response Minnesota’s sprawling networks of citizen observers Which sought to draw attention to federal agents before they made arrests.
At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the central hub of ICE activity in the city, activists told The Associated Press they saw agents leaving in vehicles with stuffed animals on their dashboards or Mexican flag decals on their bumpers. Small trucks containing wood or tools in their beds were also frequently spotted.
In recent weeks, federal agents have repeatedly shown up at construction sites dressed as workers, according to Jose Alvelar, lead organizer for the local immigrant rights group, Unidos MN.
“We have seen an increase in cowboy tactics,” he said, though he noted that the raids had not resulted in arrests. “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is wearing his clothes.”
Since the operation began in Minnesota, local officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, have said ICE agents have been seen exchanging license plates or using counterfeit ones, Violation of state law.
Candice Mitreller, an antiques dealer in south Minneapolis, believes she has witnessed such an attempt herself.
On January 13, she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as a plate collector and asked her if her store sold license plates. She said she did. A few minutes later, two men in street clothes entered the store and began looking through her collection of old paintings.
“Someone says, ‘Hey, do you have any recent ones?’” “Immediately, an alarm bell went off in my head,” recalls Mitreller.
Mitriller stepped outside while the men continued browsing. A few doors away from the store, she saw a Ford Explorer parked with its windows tinted. She saved her license plate, then quickly connected it to a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles linked to immigration enforcement.
The database shows that a similar Ford with the same plates had been photographed leaving the Whipple building seven times and had been reported at the scene of immigration detention weeks earlier.
When one of the men approached the register holding a white Minnesota plate, Mitriller said she told him the store had a new policy against selling the items.
Mitreller said she reported the incident to the Minnesota Attorney General. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Supporters of the immigration crackdown say the volunteer army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement tracker activists in Minneapolis has forced federal agents to adopt new tactics to avoid detection.
“Agents of course adapt their tactics to be one step ahead,” said Scott Mischkowski, former deputy director of ICE Enforcement and Operations in New York City. “We have never seen this level of obstruction and interference.”
In nearly three decades of working in immigration enforcement, Mischkowski said he also has never seen ICE agents disguised as uniformed workers while making arrests.
Earlier this summer, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said certain The man wearing a high-visibility construction jacket was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. In Oregon, Natural Gas Co Published guidance last month about how agents identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.
In the days after his encounter, Ramirez, the restaurant worker, said he was on high alert in anticipation of the undercover agents. He recently stopped a locksmith he feared was a federal agent, before quickly realizing he was a local resident.
“Everybody’s on edge about these guys, man,” Ramirez said. “It’s like they’re everywhere.”