A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has found “compelling and troubling evidence” that immigration officers are racially profiling immigrants and legal residents alike in violation of their constitutional rights.
A lawsuit from a group of Minnesota residents, including U.S. citizens, accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents of illegally targeting Somali and Latino communities with unconstitutional stops based solely on their race and ethnicity.
In an order on Monday night, Minnesota District Judge John Tostrud stopped just short of blocking Homeland Security officials from implementing those policies, largely because the Trump administration has announced a drawdown in the state.
But the judge laid out facts for the record in a damning 111-page decision that takes aim at ICE’s credibility and finds no justification for stopping and arresting plaintiffs and more than two dozen others who alleged unlawful searches and seizures during Trump’s Operation Metro Surge.
Federal immigration officials “adopted a policy” that allows agents to stop, search and arrest people “based solely on their race or ethnicity” — and without reasonable suspicion or probable cause that they had violated any immigration laws, according to Tostrud.
“The evidence from individual encounters is compelling and troubling,” he wrote.
While some arrests or seizures began as “investigatory stops,” officers ended up detaining people for an “unreasonably long time” or “used excessive force in conducting the stop,” he added.
The lead plaintiff, 20-year-old U.S. citizen, Mubashir Khalif Hussen, was walking to lunch in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis in December, when he was when he was stopped by multiple masked ICE agents.
He repeatedly told them “I’m a citizen” but agents refused to look at Hussen’s ID.
“That don’t matter,” agents told him in response, according to his testimony.
Hussen’s employer even showed up to the scene and tried to show officers a copy of his passport card through the ICE vehicle’s windshield, but officers ignored it, the judge wrote.
Only after he was held for several hours and shackled in a detention center was he able to show an agent a photo of his passport so he could be released.
The arresting officer never testified, “making it more difficult to assess the veracity of his account,” according to the judge, and his statement that he never saw the passport card “makes his account less credible.”
“It would have been impossible for someone in the SUV not to notice the man standing at the front of the vehicle, obstructing the vehicle’s path, showing the passport card copy,” he wrote.
Hussen’s arrest has left him and his family “terrified,” and he has had trouble sleeping since, the judge wrote. He is still in pain from the ordeal, and he avoids walking to grocery stores and a Minneapolis mall with many Somali shops, according to the judge.
While officers may have had reasonable suspicion to stop him, “probable cause was absent because he offered to show his driver’s license and a copy of his passport card on his phone,” the judge wrote.
The judge similarly scrutinized ICE’s behavior in more than 20 other incidents.
In all of those cases, “witnesses’ accounts and related evidence show these witnesses were detained by DHS officers and questioned about their immigration status based solely on their race or ethnicity, and that a reasonable person in the same situation would not have felt free to leave,” Judge Tostrud wrote.
DHS policies are “are both illegal and morally reprehensible,” according to Catherine Ahlin-Halverson, staff attorney with the ACLU of Minnesota, which is representing the plaintiffs.
“Federal agents’ conduct — sweeping up Minnesotans through racial profiling and unlawful arrests — is a grave violation of Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods,” she said in a statement after filing the lawsuit. “No one, including federal agents, is above the law.”
In September, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave federal agents permission to stop and detain a person based on their perceived ethnicity, spoken language or occupation.
That decision, according to immigrant advocates, has fueled racial profiling and arrests on the streets and at Home Depot parking lots and worksites to target immigrant laborers, among others.
Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the ruling, later backtracked on that decision in the footnotes of a separate ruling in December. There, he explicitly noted that officers “must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, who spearheaded militarized operations in several Democratic-led states and cities, was pulled out of Minnesota after agents under his command fatally shot two demonstrators.
Agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in January, just two weeks after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good. None of the agents involved in either incident have been criminally charged.
After growing public outrage and bipartisan political pressure, Trump deployed White House border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, and Bovino was sent back to his post at a Border Patrol branch in southern California near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump also forced out Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after facing bipartisan backlash for the shootings, among other controversies.
State and local officials in Minnesota are now investigating more than a dozen incidents in Minneapolis to determine whether federal officers violated any laws during the weeks-long surge.
