ICE Russia report adds to fears in Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he saw outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.

They were wearing high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noticed even as he parked in his vehicle. His search for a Wisconsin-based electrician on a car door returned no results.

On Tuesday, as their Nissan backed into the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his confrontation with the two men, who appeared to be wearing heavy tactical gear under their yellow vests, hiding their faces.

“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: rent these vehicles with fake tags to sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez yells in the video.

Spokesmen for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to inquiries about whether the men were federal immigration officials. But encounters like Ramirez’s have become increasingly common.

As a sweeping immigration crackdown continues in Minnesota, legal observers and officials say they’ve received reports of federal agents impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers and, in some cases, anti-ICE activists.

Not all of those incidents have been proven, but they have fueled fears in an already on edge state, adding to legal groups’ concerns about the Trump administration’s dramatic transformation of nationwide immigration enforcement strategies.

“If you have people fearing that an electrician outside their home might be ICE, you’re creating public mistrust and confusion at a very dangerous level,” said Naureen Shah, director of immigration advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If you’re trying to control the public, that’s what you do when you’re not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”

A ‘more extreme degree’ of deception

In the past, immigration officials have sometimes used disguises and other tricks, which they call ruses, to gain entry to homes without warrants.

The tactics have become more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, lawyers said, prompting an ACLU lawsuit accusing immigration agents of violating the U.S. Constitution by posing as local law enforcement during home raids. A recent settlement restricted the practice to Los Angeles. But ICE fraud remains legal elsewhere in the country.

Still, the reported covert operations in Minnesota “seem to be of a more extreme degree than we’ve seen in the past,” Shah said, in part because they appear to be taking place in plain sight.

While past moves were intended to deceive immigration targets, the current tactics may also be a response to Minnesota’s broader networks of civilian observers seeking to draw the attention of federal agents before arresting them.

At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the central hub of ICE activity in the city, activists told The Associated Press that they saw agents leaving in vehicles with stuffed animals on their dashboards or Mexican flag decals on their bumpers. Pickups with lumber or tools in their beds were also frequently seen.

In recent weeks, federal agents have repeatedly shown up at construction sites wearing workers’ uniforms, according to Jose Alviler, chief organizer of Unidos MN, a local immigrant rights group.

“We’ve seen an increase in cowboy tactics,” he said, though no arrests have been made in raids. “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is masquerading as one.”

Using old plates

Since operations began in Minnesota, local officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, have said ICE agents have exchanged license plates or used fake ones, a violation of state law.

Candice Metreler, an antiques dealer in South Minneapolis, believes she has seen such an effort firsthand.

On Jan. 13, she received a call from a man who identified himself as a collector, asking if her store sold license plates. She said she did. A few minutes later, two men dressed in street clothes entered the shop and began looking through his collection of old plates.

“One of them says, ‘Hey, do you have any recent ones?'” Metreler recalled. “Immediately, alarm bells went off in my head.”

As the men browsed, the Metroler came out. A few doors down from the store, he saw an idling Ford Explorer with blacked-out windows. She memorized its license plate, then quickly plugged it into a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles associated with immigration enforcement.

The database shows a Ford with the same plates was photographed seven times from the Whipple building and was reported at the scene of an immigration arrest weeks ago.

When a man approached the register with white Minnesota plates, Mettler said she told him the store had a new policy against selling the items.

Metreler said she reported the incident to the Minnesota attorney general. A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Response to disruption

Supporters of the immigration crackdown say the volunteer army of ICE-tracking workers in Minneapolis has forced federal agents to adopt new methods to avoid detection.

“Obviously agents are adapting their tactics so they’re one step ahead,” said Scott Mechkowski, former deputy director of ICE enforcement and operations in New York City. “We have never seen this level of disruption and interference.”

In nearly three decades in immigration enforcement, Mechkowski said he has never seen an ICE agent disguise himself as a uniformed worker during an arrest.

Earlier this summer, a DHS spokesperson confirmed that a man wearing a high-visibility construction vest was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. In Oregon, a natural gas company published guidance last month on how customers can identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.

In the days after his encounter, Ramirez, a restaurant worker, said he was on high alert for undercover agents. He recently stopped a locksmith who he feared might be a federal agent, before quickly realizing he was a local resident.

“Everybody’s on edge about these guys, man,” Ramirez said. “It seems like they’re everywhere.”