On ICE’s bad policing in Minneapolis
By a Minneapolis Police Officer and Peter Moskos
What is happening in Minneapolis is not simply federal overreach combined with public backlash, but a system that pairs aggressive immigration enforcement with poor leadership, inviting street-level confrontation until something breaks.
Both of us struggle with federal ICE and Border Patrol activity in Minneapolis and the understandable resulting backlash. We are hardly knee-jerk police haters. One of us currently serves as a Minneapolis police officer. The other is a professor of criminal justice and former Baltimore City police officer.
For more than a decade, public attention has been focused on police abuses—real, perceived, and occasionally invented. Many of these have come to a head in the ICE deployments across the country, most pointedly (and bloodily) in Minneapolis. Can we learn anything from the furious action and reaction? We think we can — both about the excesses of law enforcement and the appropriateness of different types of protest.
Immigration enforcement can be conducted in ways that protect hard-working families, regardless of legal status. Criminals, also regardless of legal status, should be arrested and, after due process and if here illegally, deported. Protest can be both obstructive and productive. Organized civil disobedience has a long history of advancing both justice and peace. Chaos in the streets does not.
Having three officer-involved shootings in the scope of a month in a city of this size is unheard of. Two of those were fatal shootings of individuals without significant prior criminal history. Whatever the legalities and morality of the individual incidents, something else is also wrong.
The diagnosis offered by nearly everyone — including Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz — is that the ICE and CBP agents were sent to Minneapolis to terrorize its residents, as though this is an inevitable outgrowth of the surge in federal enforcement. They say agents themselves are being rewarded for racism and violence and were probably selected for those qualities. They’re sadistic thugs sent here to hurt people and they’re only too happy to oblige.
The left wants this to be a simple story — and certainly anyone diagnosing the video of the two fatal encounters will find many of things the ICE officers did wrong. That said, bad officer-involved shootings do not happen because officers are monsters thirsting for innocent blood. They happen, usually, because a confrontation spirals out of control. Officers placed in stressful situations make bad choices, especially without proper training.
There are profound problems with the way ICE is trained, led and deployed. Standards are too low. Guardrails are few and far between. Quotas incentivize bad behavior. And a bounty system is antithetical to the very notion of professional policing. Still, there’s something else at work here: agents and citizens are locked into a kind of mutual pathology, one that leads to escalation even were tactics much better.
Before he killed Good, Ross had been badly injured, dragged by a car, in a confrontation that should never have occurred. The a was driven car driven by Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, an undocumented immigrant charged in 2022 with sexually abusing a teenage relative.
At the time, ICE had requested that local officials hold Munoz-Guatamala in jail based on a federal detainer, but that request was denied in accordance with guidance from the state AG office. If the federal government asks a county to hold a man because there is probable cause to believe he raped a family member, the county should do so. The decision to release Muñoz-Guatemala led to an avoidable and violent confrontation.
Law enforcement officers must be held to high standards. But human beings remain human beings, and sustained pressure breaks people down over time. That is not a defense of bad policing; it is an explanation necessary for prevention.
Step back and consider the environment these agents are operating in. The city is mobilized against them. Officers are followed and surrounded wherever they go. They are working long days and weeks, deployed far from home, and separated from their families. Perhaps with the exception of some recently hired ICE agents, they didn’t sign up for this.
Protesting is a sacred American right — but rights come with responsibilities. Dancing around the line between protest and obstruction can be fun and exciting. But for the cops it’s not a game. ICE operates in convoys precisely because their movements are so closely followed by protestors. They don’t trust that crowds will remain peaceful because every now and then, they don’t.
When a furious population is met with a badly trained, poorly prepared group of agents like these ICE agents, something is bound to go wrong. By deploying personnel with unclear objectives, loose rules of engagement and inadequate training, the leadership of ICE and CBP is failing not only the citizens of Minneapolis but also their own agents.
The DHS memo regarding the use of administrative warrants flies in the face of all prior guidance we’re aware of. Line-level supervision seems to be almost completely absent. These leadership failures contribute to the kinds of confrontations that all too easily escalate into chaos.
Tactically, roles should be tightly defined. If an officer is assigned to perimeter security, that is their job. If an arrest is to be made, that decision should come from the convoy leader and be carried out by a designated arrest team. Where is that convoy leader? ICE lacks leadership. And why can’t six agents take one person into custody.
In the Pretti video, we see an agent exit a black SUV, get confronted, and end up completely alone for roughly 30 seconds, pushing people across the street. Pretti becomes involved at the end of that push. The agent finds himself separated from his partners in a three-versus-one confrontation of his own creation. What, exactly, is the officer trying to do? Where is his supervisor? Let us hope the supervisor is not him.
Similarly, before Good was fatally shot, who made the decision to arrest her? Was it the agent standing next to her car door? There is no visible leadership at the street level. Agents are being sent out, told to “get arrests,” given a financial incentive to do so, and then set up for failure. Failure is what we are seeing.
Morally speaking, the federal government bears responsibility for managing these confrontations—but protesters are responsible for their own actions. When they wish to observe and record federal agents, as is their right, they should do so from a reasonable distance and not six inches away, in the middle of the street. If their wish to obstruct, which is not their right but part of the American tradition of civil disobedience, protesters should have clear goals and be ready to be arrested with only passive resistance.
The chaos is not yet as bad as 2020, but have we already forgotten the protests and riots? How lethal and destructive they were? How long lasting the consequences are? And how little they accomplished? And now it’s like some people want to relive them.
From the administration’s perspective, the surge/crackdown has failed on its own terms. The government could deport every single undocumented immigrant in the Twin Cities and it wouldn’t make a noticeable difference in the country generally. The entire state of Minnesota is estimated to have maybe a hundred thousand illegal immigrants. PEW research center estimated that there were about 14 million such residents in the country. So even if every such resident in the state lived in the Twin Cities metro, and even if all of them were deported, what have you accomplished? Of course Federal authorities are nowhere near a hundred thousand arrests, much less deportations. Many of the arrests they have made are getting tossed by the immigration court judges that typically give immigration authorities substantial deference!
Immigration enforcement started with the claim to get the “worst of the worst.” Local authorities — and the public more broadly — should embrace this part. But the Feds have overreached in detaining citizens and immigrants without warrants who are not criminals, much less the “worst of the worst.”
Meanwhile, there are no easy answers. If the goal is to draw down the current level of illegal residents in the US, we would need to pass legislation that would actually require companies to hire legal workers and provide a working e-verify system to do so, then hammer companies that violated the rules. Cities, both for their own sake and to mollify a president who enjoys cutting deals and humiliating his opponents, could pull back parts of the sanctuary cities laws that protect criminal immigrants from deportation.
Trump and federal agents operating in Minneapolis are losing the public trust. Even police officers we speak to, generally conservative and Republican, are turning against what they see happening. There is no shortage of crime for the Minneapolis police department to investigate. There are overtime slots going unfilled on almost every patrol shift in every precinct. The clearance rate for auto theft, one of the crimes that serves as a public safety barometer, is incredibly low because officers trained to investigate serious crimes are being pulled in every other direction.
Ultimately ICE’s mission is a political choice. Sanctuary cities (an admittedly varied and vague term) were not originally on the side of protecting actual criminals. To broaden “sanctuary” to include violent felons is entirely a self-inflicted political wound for the left. Preventing federal authorities from detaining criminals who are also here illegally is both bad policy, and it poked the MAGA bear, contributing to ICE using more aggressive and confrontational means.
Those who oppose the actions of the presidential administration should not squander the moral high ground. In the short term tolerating unjust policies is a tough pill for the left to swallow, but gaining public support to protect democratic governance and the rule of law may depend on it. Bad policy can ultimately be overturned only at the ballot box. Changing that requires winning elections. The alternative is too dark to contemplate.
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Ed note: I tried and failed to get this published in various journals and newspapers. And then the news cycle moved on. A few objected to a piece with an anonymous co-author. Come on now. You’d think having a piece co-written by an active cop would be selling point. It’s not like active cops can get permission to publish a piece like this. (For what it’s worth, it’s one of the [if not the only] piece I’ve ever written that I couldn’t get published somewhere.)
