A scathing ACLU lawsuit accuses federal immigration officials of carrying out a racial profiling campaign of “massive scale” as part of the ongoing Trump administration crackdown on Minnesota, comparing Homeland Security agents’ tactics to actions from a police state.
The class-action suit, filed Thursday in federal court, accuses agencies like DHS, ICE and the Border Patrol of “violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status,” with a pointed emphasis on “Somali and Latino people, who are being targeted for stops and arrests based on racial profiling motivated by prejudice.”
The suit highlights the experiences of a group of U.S. citizens who allege they suffered major mistreatment at the hands of federal agents.
Mubashir Khalif Hussen, 20, was out getting lunch on December 10 when a pair of federal agents in an unmarked car grabbed him and pushed him into a restaurant, then hauled him back out into the snow, where agents allegedly put him in a headlock, according to the suit.
“Mr. Hussen repeatedly informed the officers he was a U.S. citizen and repeatedly asked the agents to let him get his coat with his phone, so he could show them a picture of his passport card,” the suit claims. “The agents refused to let him back into the building to retrieve his driver’s license or his phone and put him in the back of the unmarked car.”
Hussen’s supervisor showed agents a copy of his passport card, which the agents also ignored, the complaint alleges.
Throughout the encounter, agents allegedly repeatedly demanded to scan Hussen’s face, and later drove him to a second location, then took him to an ICE field office at Fort Snelling, where he was released without charges or being put into immigration proceedings.
The agents concluded the encounter by releasing Hussen out into “the December cold and telling him to walk the seven miles from the field office back to where they detained him,” the complaint claims. He was later picked up by his family.
“Due to his Somali identity, Mr. Hussen is terrified of being arrested and detained again,” the suit adds.
In an unrelated encounter, agents later pepper-sprayed Hussen in the face after he recorded federal officers with his phone from a public sidewalk, the suit claims.
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 beginning.
Things escalated earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, and ratcheted up again this week when a federal agent shot a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg during a traffic stop.
The operation has been met with widespread peaceful protests, as well as scattered incidents of violence.
The president has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would deploy active duty military or federalized National Guard troops to quell the unrest. The Trump administration has said the Minnesota operation, which is slated to feature more than 2,000 agents, is the largest immigration operation in U.S. history.
The president’s military-style immigration operations across the country have been trailed by allegations that agents are using racial profiling, random sweeps, and authoritarian tactics to conduct stops.
The administration insists its sweeps, which have mostly resulted in the arrest of individuals without criminal convictions, are targeted.
The White House argues that military-style deployments are needed in sanctuary jurisdictions that don’t force local police and jails to assist federal immigration enforcement.
