In May of 2020, we saw a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, kill George Floyd while a crowd of observers captured video via cell phones. At the time, it seemed maddening nobody put down their cell phone cameras and tried to intervene. Floyd might still be alive today and Chauvin and officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane wouldn’t have been sentenced to years in prison for violating Floyd’s civil rights.
Like it or not, cell phone cameras are an unavoidable part of our everyday lives. If you have a cell phone, chances are you have the potential to record history, whether it’s a birthday celebration, your grandkids playing at the park or the school choir or band concert.
Or people being killed by federal agents.
Unless you just refuse to watch, by now you’ve seen the images of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents shooting and killing people trying to make an intolerable situation a little bit better. We know this thanks to people with their cell phone cameras. Thanks to the people using their cell phones recording history, our Twin Cities TV stations have done really good work showing the broader world what happened. Unlike the situation outside a convenience store at the intersection of E 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020, there was no time to intervene, no time for cooler heads to keep ICE agents from taking the lives of Minnesotans.
Renée Good and Alex Pretti should still be with us today.
The images from the streets in central Minneapolis show us what happened. On Jan. 7, Good was trying to turn her vehicle away from the ICE agent, not into him. Was she protesting the crackdown on immigrants? No doubt. Then arrest her, don’t kill her. Thanks to cell phone video, the so-called experts have offered varying opinions about whether he was properly positioned, about whether he was struck or rightfully feared for his life.
The video of Pretti being wrestled to the ground and ultimately shot several times by multiple agents Saturday morning, Jan. 24, shows he was trying to help a woman who had been sprayed by an ICE agent. The cell phone video local and network news outlets have received and aired indicates Pretti had been disarmed of the gun he had a legal right to be carrying under Minnesota’s conceal-carry law. In both cases, they were quickly identified as “domestic terrorists” by members of the Trump administration.
Using the dehumanizing language of law enforcement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would have you believe Pretti threatened the federal agents. She omitted important pieces of information. The video shows Pretti was trying to help someone, not threaten ICE agents.
And in both killings, Noem has indicated DHS will investigate whether its agents did anything wrong and there will be no cooperation with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Why? Like children on the playground, DHS reportedly ignored a judicial order to allow the BCA investigators access to the scene or information, because President Trump and Gov. Walz have differing views on dealing with illegal aliens.
DHS is arguably skilled at providing selective information. It says it is arresting the ‘worst of the worst,’ but news reports have indicated many of the people arrested are guilty of no other crime beyond being here illegally, a misdemeanor for a first-time offender and a felony for multiple offenses, according to the U.S. Code.
Lawyers have argued agents from DHS and ICE have denied people taken into custody the constitutional rights they are due. In St. Paul, an elderly Hmong man, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody by heavily-armed ICE agents. Cell phone video showed he was dangerously underdressed for the weather. The man was released after ICE confirmed his identity.
Operation Metro Surge has cost about $18 million a week, according to Northstar Policy Action. The Main Street Alliance reported Jan. 14 “Small business owners across Minnesota are experiencing significant economic harm due to Operation Metro Surge and ongoing ICE activity. The time for DHS to pull ICE out of Minnesota and reassess how to move forward on immigration is long overdue.