The Minneapolis police chief is criticizing federal immigration agents after a confrontation with protesters and an attempted arrest of a woman in which an officer knelt on her back as she lay on a snowbank and then tried to drag her into a car.
Tensions We’ve been on the rise in Minneapolis-St. Paul area where federal authorities continue to migrate campaign Focused on the area Somali communitythe largest in the country.
Video of the confrontation Monday in a Minneapolis neighborhood showed people yelling at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to release the woman, claiming she was pregnant and couldn’t breathe. After kneeling on her, one of the officers later pulled the woman by one arm onto her back towards the car.
“Let her go! Let her go!” Onlookers screamed as the agent dragged the woman at an intersection near a Somali commercial area. The woman was left.
City police were called to the standoff by a federal agent who said officers needed help, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a news conference Tuesday.
When police arrived, they did not witness violence against federal officers and left in an attempt to calm the situation, O’Hara said. He added that “other law enforcement agencies” may have been using “questionable methods.”
“We’ve trained our officers over the last five years very extensively in de-escalation,” O’Hara said. “But unfortunately that is not the case, and that is not what we often see from other agencies in the city.”
Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said federal officers were targeting a vehicle when protesters “threw rocks and chunks of ice, assaulted officers, and used pepper spray” against the officers. The officers suffered multiple injuries, including cuts, McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that two people have been charged with assaulting federal officers and remain in custody.
McLaughlin said officers tried to arrest the woman in the video because she “ran an ICE vehicle and tried to vandalize it,” but officers abandoned the arrest after they were overrun by protesters.
Hodan Hassan, a former Minnesota state legislator, said she believes ICE’s tactics are becoming more harsh, such as the Minneapolis-St. Urination process is ongoing.
“The first week, they weren’t very aggressive. They were blocking people. The second week, we saw them being really aggressive,” she said.
The clash took place in south Minneapolis, just a few miles away George Floyd He was killed by a city police officer who knelt on his neck. The scenes of that death shook the country and launched a nationwide racial justice movement and demands for police reform.