On The Ground In Minneapolis

0:07Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration on Monday to end the surge of immigration and enforcement officers in the state. A thousand more ICE officers are set to be deployed to Minnesota in the coming days. That's on top of 2 ,000 federal agents reportedly in the area already. These moves come after days of protests in response to the fatal shooting of Renee Macklin-Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week. Since then, the agency's officers have continued to ramp up raids and use increasingly aggressive tactics. Today, we talk to people on the ground in Minneapolis. What are they seeing in their city?

0:43And what might the way forward look like? But first, after the break, we're joined by Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O 'Hara. For weeks, he warned of the combustible situation in his city, saying tensions between ICE agents and Twin City residents could end in tragedy. He joins us to talk about public safety in Minneapolis and what comes next to restore the peace in his city. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with more in a moment. Stay with us.

1:14Chief O 'Hara, welcome to 1A. Thank you for having me. Chief, you've been making the rounds on media, holding press conferences, warning that the tensions between ICE officers and Minneapolis residents could end in a situation like we saw on Wednesday. Is the shooting death of Renee Macklingood what you'd imagined? I mean, it's what I have feared would happen. And I just thank God that the second half of what I had feared did not come true. And that is that this tragedy would be the spark of 2020 in this city all over again. Would any deployment of federal officers have triggered these concerns?

1:58Or is there something specific about what you're seeing that concerns you? Of course, as long as the ICE has existed as a law enforcement agency, immigration enforcement has been happening in the state of Minnesota. So it is clearly not that immigration enforcement is happening. It's the manner in which this is occurring. It is causing a lot of confusion, a lot of frustration. There's very clearly a large population of the community that are protesting against what they are seeing. There's a lot of questionable tactics that are being employed. And as I've been stating for weeks, it's a situation that I think is both placing the federal law enforcement officers and our community at risk.

2:55At this point, I'm sure you've watched the videos of the shooting of Renee Macklin Good. The investigation is ongoing, but in your professional opinion, was the ICE officer following best practices in terms of tactics and training in that interaction? I tell you, in the most basic sense, conducting traffic stops, the training has been for many years in this country that the best practices are to, number one, never put yourself in the path of a vehicle. And number two, to try and de-escalate as much as possible. And there's very simple things that an officer does to de-escalate situations in traffic stops.

3:43And that is introducing yourself, telling the individual your name, your rank, the agency that you work for, explaining why you were conducting the stop, answering any questions that the person asks. I didn't see any of that happening. And also, it's not clear to me if the agents that were there understood what each other was trying to accomplish there. You had one person saying to get out of the car. Presumably at some point they had simply wanted the person to move the car that was blocking the roadway. So there's a whole lot of questions that need to be answered. Well, since Macklingood's death, we've seen protests pour into the streets of Minneapolis.

4:30And I want to play you a voicemail we got from one of those protesters describing her experience at the hands of ICE agents over the weekend. I mean, it's a bit long, but it's worth a listen. Hi, everyone. I'm a resident of Minneapolis, and I just have to share with everyone listening to this that the rollout of full-blown American fascism has begun. My city is ground zero, and we are fully under federal occupation. Armed agents march down the same streets where our children go to school. They pepper spray students and handcuff the adults tasked with caring for them. masked men show up at our daycare centers and demand access to the children inside.

5:15They speed through our streets in unmarked cars. They go up to my neighbors of color demanding to see their ID and proof of citizenship. They indiscriminately assault and detain immigrants, observers, and citizens. They're here to wait in war while we're just trying to live our lives. at the emergency peaceful protest in response to the murder of our neighbor Renee Good the agents didn't really get the memo about the peaceful part hundreds of them lined up prepared with firearms and gas masks while we stood there with our whistles and our signs the agents threw protesters to the ground and shot us with pepper balls and yanked people from the crowd I saw multiple agents drag civilians across the asphalt behind their lines.

6:08One of the agents pulled out his real firearm and aimed it at me from point-blank range while I had my hands open and out to my sides. They deployed tear gas grenades. Protesters were keeled over coughing, running. The smoke was everywhere. An agent shoved me to the ground, putting my face right in front of the canister. My mouth became inundated with smoke. My throat was burning and my eyes were leaking. I grabbed the grenade and I hurled it as far behind the protest as I could, away from the agents and away from the protesters. I remember staggering away, coughing harder than I can ever remember in my life.

6:52And in that moment, I thought I would asphyxiate. I thought I might actually die. Chief, you're seeing the protests in your city. There are also community patrols made up of volunteers. These have sprung up in Minneapolis and other cities. Their aim is to track and protest federal immigration enforcement. The Trump administration says they're breaking the law. But from your perspective, as the chief of police, do these individuals have the right to do what they're doing? So it's very clear that in the United States, people have a First Amendment right to observe, record, and object to government activity.

7:36The line is, you must do so lawfully. You must do so peacefully. And so I think at times that line is crossed. However, what has happened in the city of Minneapolis, particularly last week, when we had thousands and thousands of people protesting, is that that was largely peaceful. Is that through all of this, I think at one protest, clearly became an unlawful assembly. We made about 30 arrests. And then the next day, we had a very large protest, the largest in many years in our city. and I believe there was only one arrest and that was for someone spray painting graffiti along one of our main business corridors.

8:20So in terms of what is happening in the city around First Amendment activity, it has largely remained lawful and peaceful. However, there are times that are happening around enforcement activity that is just completely chaotic. The scene's unfolding right now as we're speaking. There was a scene yesterday very close to where this individual was shot and killed by federal law enforcement, where federal law enforcement became involved in a car accident with civilian vehicles, and a large crowd emerged. And there was gas and less lethal force deployed. And we are making an attempt to try and investigate the accident that occurred.

9:09You say making an attempt. Is the federal government cooperating with your attempts to investigate? So I don't have specific information available right now on yesterday's accident. We are simply being overwhelmed with the volume of 911 calls that we are receiving around immigration enforcement activities. This is a still dramatically depleted police department from what had been normal to patrol the city and prevent crime prior to 2020. We're still down by about a third. So we still have our job to do. And at the same time, we're being completely overwhelmed with 911 calls related to immigration enforcement activity and the chaos that that is creating on the streets of this community.

10:00You mentioned 2020. That's the year George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. And there were protests in your city following that. Briefly, Chief, do you feel like there is a clear enough delineation between the responsibilities your department has and the actions of federal officers who are on the street right now? I do think it's always been clear. They have a role to play enforcing federal law. We have a role to play being the city police enforcing the state and local laws here in the city of Minneapolis. Is that being honored, however? Well, I think the problem is the political narratives around what is happening, a lot of the extreme rhetoric, and the chaos that's occurring on the street.

10:52So a lot of times what's happening is there's very chaotic situations on the street of the city involving immigration enforcement activity, and the local police is called. It's been the case for many years, and it's almost bizarre to me that some folks politically suggest that we should be doing their job for them, as they are very clearly not going to help us with investigating domestic violence and doing the other things that police in the city need to do. And to be clear, when you say other folks, do you mean federal representatives saying the police should be helping them with immigration enforcement?

11:30Anyone who suggests that local police should be doing the job of immigration enforcement or helping immigration enforcement to occur. And so when it comes to what's happening right now in Minneapolis, do you feel like agents, federal agents, are respecting the fact that there is a role they play, but there's a separate role police officers play? Or are they engaging in the types of actions that would be under your purview? Well, they're conducting their enforcement actions in a manner that is at best questionable and is causing chaos and unrest in the streets. So what do you say to Minneapolis residents right now who don't feel safe, may be interested in exercising their First Amendment rights, but feel like it's not safe to do so?

12:22I would ask anyone who wants to exercise their First Amendment rights to please do so peaceably and lawfully. And please know that the Minneapolis Police Department is continuing to work around the clock to try and keep everyone in this community safe, to try and prevent an incident from occurring that might trigger the destruction and all of the harm that happened here not that long ago. Chief, long-term, what are your concerns for your city in the aftermath? I mean, right now I'm just concerned about keeping the peace and maintaining some sense of normalcy. And long-term, I pray that we get through this without having yet another tragedy.

13:08It's entirely predictable, and it's also entirely preventable. That's Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O 'Hara. Chief, thanks for making time for us today. We appreciate it. Thank you. Stay with us. Back with more in a moment.

13:28Now let's turn to more voices from Minneapolis, including Matt Sepik. He's a correspondent for MPR News. Matt, welcome back to the program. Good to be here again. Also, Zainab Mohamed. She's the Democratic Minnesota State Senator representing South Minneapolis. Senator, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. And David Schultz. He's a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamlin University in St. Paul. David, welcome. Thank you for having me. I should add that we reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to invite a representative on the program. They did not respond.

14:03Senator Mohamed, I want to start with you. As I said, you represent South Minneapolis. What are you hearing from your constituents since this crackdown began? Yeah, my constituents are fearful. They are afraid of what's happening. They are seeing their neighbors be abducted in the middle of the streets. Just yesterday, there was a woman who was waiting for her bus at the bus stop and a car pulled up and four agents got out of that car with a, all of them with ski masks on and just grabbed her. Didn't ask her for ID, grabbed her, put her in the car. And so people in my community, in my district, my constituents are deeply afraid.

14:38They don't know what's happening. They don't know why things feel like it's, that it keeps escalating. So there's a lot of fear in the Arab right now. You're Somali-American, and many of your constituents are also of Somali descent. What are you hearing from that community specifically about what it's like to live in the city right now? Yeah, I'm Somali-American. I actually don't represent a lot of Somali people in my district, just a small population. But I do. The district next to me is the largest Somali community here in the U.S. It's Cedar Riverside. The community just feels very hopeless.

15:12There's a lot of despair in the air. They feel angry. They feel like people are picking on them. And you have random people across the nation who are showing up to random businesses that are owned by Somali people just to get clicks and videos to go viral. And folks just feel really intimidated. And it's coming from everywhere. Kids who are currently in school, their parents are afraid of these kids getting bullied. There are women who wear scarves in our community who are afraid of going outside of the Twin Cities because they don't know what that will lead to. And so I think the Somali community here just feels very abandoned by the federal government and feels like that they're being a target.

15:52Matt, I want to take a step back and ask, talk about how this immigration crackdown in Minneapolis started and why. The Trump administration's focus on Minnesota didn't really begin with immigration at all, but with fraud scandals that rocked the state over the last few years. And you've been covering these cases since the beginning. Just briefly remind us what's happened. Well, there is a very real fraud scandal that has been happening here that really began during the pandemic and came to light in 2022 when the FBI raided a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future in about two dozen other locations, homes, other nonprofits and businesses connected to that.

16:33As has been proven in court through guilty pleas and two trials over the past two years, this group of defendants and 78 people have been charged since 2022 stole$300 million from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs. These are programs run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and overseen on the state level by the Minnesota Department of Education. They did this by submitting phony reimbursement requests for millions and millions of meals that were never served. The ringleader of that scam, Amy Bach, a 45-year-old white woman, is in jail awaiting sentencing and faces decades in prison. But the vast majority of the defendants in this case, including many who've pleaded guilty and have been convicted at trial, are Somali-American.

17:30And that has created the perfect pretext for the Trump administration to cast shade on the entire community and denigrate the entire community of 80-plus thousand people. Of course, it goes without saying that the vast majority of them had absolutely nothing to do with this. And that investigation has since spread to Medicaid fraud, which it appears will be a much larger problem. And the administration has been coming after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz about that. Of course, the news last week before Ms. Good was killed was that Governor Walz announced that he would not seek a third term in large part because of this fraud scandal that he may not ultimately be responsible for, but certainly happened on his watch.

18:25Well, David, as we just heard there from Matt, 80 ,000 plus people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, mostly in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It's estimated that only a small percentage are undocumented. So help us understand whether the Trump administration is able to legally make a connection between these fraud cases and what ISIS called the largest operation in its history. Well, a lot of what's going on here is, again, we start with, as Matt pointed out here, we do have some legitimate questions about fraud. But also, in some sense, what's happening here is Minnesota is being targeted. And Minnesota is being targeted by the Trump administration for a variety of reasons.

19:07One of them is the fact that our governor was the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party two elections ago or a presidential election a couple of years ago. And as we know, Donald Trump does not look favorably upon people who have opposed him. So to some extent, there's a very personal animus here, and many of us were predicting that all along that this was going to be a very difficult year for Waltz if he were running for governor, even if not running for governor for the state of Minnesota. And so we're partly being targeted. But also what's important to understand here is in many ways Minnesota is actually a great microcosm of all the political tensions going on in America.

19:48It's the political tensions between the Democratic and Republican Party within the state in terms of how the state is divided. It is also, I'll say, the political tensions between the national government versus state governments in terms of their respective spheres of power. So what's happening here is a lot of playing that out. But also Minnesota has just been thrust into the news for lots of reasons beyond its control. You know, five years, six years ago was George Floyd. earlier this year. It was the assassination of a state representative. We had a shooting at the Nemsian Catholic Church. So issues of guns, violence, state-federal tensions, political divides all playing out.

20:28But at the end of the day, what we're really seeing here right now is the Trump administration picking on the state of Minnesota because of its partisan leanings. We're speaking to David Schultz of Hamline University, also with us Zainab Mohamed, a Democratic state senator in Minnesota, and Matt Sepik of NPR News. Senator Mohamed, we talked about these fraud cases in Minnesota. What is the conversation within the Somali community in Minnesota about this situation? Yeah, I mean, fraud is real, like David said. I think for Somali people in Minnesota, they see the fraud, and it's committed by less than 80 people in our community.

21:11But the truth is, the conversation Somali people are having internally is the fact that Somali people are real victims of fraud as well. They are the same as everybody else. They are as taxpayers and as people who need services. They deserve, they feel like that right now that they're being scapegoated by the federal government, by conservative media, and they want solutions to the issue because they need these services. They also are taxpayers. So that's the real conversation happening in the community. How do we move the conversation forward? How do we figure out ways to bring integrity back to the system and trust?

21:49Because trust has been lost at this point. But also, how do we protect our community members so that we're not all paying the price for the damage that's done by few people in our community? And the truth is, you know, no matter what people say, fraud happens everywhere. It has no race, no religion, no ethnicity. And the fact that we're connecting it to a very small, tiny community, I think it's unfair. And rightfully so, the community is angry about that. You're also a lawmaker, though. So what are you and other Minnesota leaders doing to rebuild that trust and address the fraud, trying to ensure that it doesn't happen again?

22:29Yeah. So for me in my office, I've been working a lot with our lawmakers, both in our legislative body, both in the House and the Senate. And I think what's clear is that we know that fraud is happening. It has been investigated. We clearly have seen charges come from the federal government as well as the attorney general's office. So what we don't have is an investigatory problem. What we do have is loopholes in the system. And we have to close those loopholes so that criminals do not take advantage of the system. That is what I'm working on. Those are the policies I will be bringing forward come February 17th, the first day of session.

23:08But I think when it comes to the conversation that's being had in the media, it is often viewed as that Minnesotans are not investigating fraud, that the government isn't investigating fraud. The reason people know about fraud and why it's in the media, it's because the government has been investigated. It's because there are charges. It's because people are already put in prison for it. But we do need to close the loopholes so that we know that criminals in the future do not take advantage of it. That's the work that I will be doing this next session and the work that I hope both my colleagues on the Republican and the Democrat side would come to the table and work on.

23:42Well, on Monday, the Minnesota Attorney General's office sued the Trump administration in an effort to block the surge of ICE agents in the state. Here's what Attorney General Keith Ellison had to say when he announced the lawsuit. We allege that the obvious targeting of Minnesota for our diversity, for our democracy, and our differences of opinion with the federal government is a violation of the Constitution and of federal law. We allege that the surge reckless impact on our schools, on our local law enforcement is a violation of the 10th Amendment and the sovereign laws and powers of the Constitution grants to states.

24:21David, explain more about the argument Allison and Minnesota are making. Okay, he's making three sets of arguments here. The first argument he's making here is that by the targeting of Somalis and other persons of color in the state of Minnesota, he's making an argument saying that the federal government is violating the Equal Protection Clause, basically targeting people on the basis of race. But isn't this something the Supreme Court already spoke to? Exactly. And that's part of the issue. That's why I'm not sure that's the strongest argument. A second argument, which we didn't get in the clip here, is he's saying that the state's being targeted because of its partisan leanings.

25:02And that's probably true. However, that's not going to be a strong argument in terms of, at least for this current Supreme Court. The strongest argument, and I think where they could have even strengthened it even more, is on the 10th Amendment argument here. because what the Supreme Court has said in the past, and I'll give you the most famous case in a minute here, is that the U.S. government cannot compel or coerce states to do certain types of things. It can suggest, but it can't coerce. The most famous case was the one involving Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, where the federal government said that if you expand Medicaid coverage, we'll give you money, but if you don't do it, we'll penalize you.

25:43And the Roberts court said, uh-uh, you cannot force states, tell states to do with states. And I think the strongest argument here that Keith Ellison, the attorney general, is making is that the federal government is trying to coerce the state, force it to bend to its will, whether it's with the ICE agents or, now I'm going to expand it here, with all its efforts to cut off funding for a whole bunch of different programs because of fraud. It's basically trying to, what, compel the state into submission. And that, I think, is an incredibly strong argument because what's happening is, and I think Chief Police O 'Hara was bringing this up here, the state's being forced to react to what the federal government's doing.

26:24It's happened to make expenditures that it wouldn't have to do. Its ability to provide and protect the health, safety, and welfare of its people is being upended. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation in a moment. Stay with us.

26:43Let's get back to our discussion with this message we got from Will in Minneapolis, who says, My daughter attends high school in Minneapolis. After officers tackled a teacher and pepper-sprayed students at Roosevelt High School when school let out last week, school was canceled for her for the remainder of the week. My 12-year-old son was scared to go back to school and couldn't fall asleep. He was terrified masked men would show up at his school and take away his teachers. But we also got this from John, who says, Why are ICE officers being asked to de-escalate all the time? Protesters are yelling, screaming, verbal abuse, honking.

27:13Are these de-escalating matters? Protesters are throwing ice and snowballs. Are these de-escalating matters? Protesters are shooting fireworks. Are these de-escalating matters? Protesters are blocking traffic. Are these de-escalating matters? To me and many people I know, we all think the protesters are escalating issues, not ice. David, as we mentioned earlier, the state of Minnesota, the attorney general has issued, the Trump administration to try to push ICE out of the state. These legal cases can take some time, but as you're hearing the fact that tensions are ratcheting up in Minnesota, how quickly can this court case move forward?