Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a stern warning to his officers on Thursday: Intervene when you see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using unlawful force or lose your job.
“If unlawful force is being used by any law enforcement officer against any person in this city and one of our officers is there, absolutely, I expect them to intervene, or they’ll be fired,” O’Hara said when asked how his officers should respond to excessive force by ICE agents.
O’Hara noted that cases of “excessive” force that were “readily apparent” would merit officer intervention. A sergeant from O’Hara’s department later clarified that while Minneapolis Police Department officers may physically intervene in the case of unlawful force, they would stop short of arresting ICE agents.
Minnesota’s largest city is in the midst of an immigration crackdown. It comes after President Donald Trump used xenophobic language earlier this week to describe members of the state’s Somali diaspora, calling them “garbage.”
Minneapolis is the latest community in the crosshairs of Trump’s mass deportation plan. Los Angeles; Chicago; Charlotte, North Carolina; and now New Orleans are among the cities where federal agents have enacted Trump’s mass deportation plan. Along the way, federal agents have faced widespread allegations of racial profiling and excessive force, often supported by concerned citizens’ mountains of video evidence that depicts violent encounters. [Continue reading…]
The woman in medical scrubs who was forcibly yanked from her car while on her way to work in Key Largo, screaming she was a U.S. citizen, said Friday she had obeyed the federal agents’ commands to roll down her window and the story immigration officials told was “completely false.”
“To clarify, I did roll down my window the moment they pulled me over, and any claim saying that I refused to do so is completely false,” the woman wrote in a detailed statement about the incident to the Miami Herald. “In the video of the incident, you can clearly see my windows rolled down as they opened my door, which further proves that I complied from the start.”
The woman, who is a behavioral therapist and was dressed in green medical scrubs, was on her way to work when the masked agents dragged her from her car at about 9:15 a.m. Wednesday. They had pulled her over to the southbound lanes of U.S. 1 in front of the Pink Plaza shopping center at mile marker 103.4 in Key Largo.
She is just shy of 5 feet tall and weighs 85 pounds, she said.
“Before I could even reach for my driver’s license, the individuals surrounding my vehicle threatened to break my window, creating fear and pressure instead of allowing me a moment to comply. Their tone and actions made it extremely difficult to remain calm or feel safe.” [Continue reading…]