• The Justice Department has charged 15 people in Minnesota with conspiring to impede immigration officers.
• The defendants are part of two Minneapolis-based antifa groups, federal officials said.
• Charges follow a period of heightened tensions and protests against an ICE crackdown in the state.

At a press conference in Minneapolis on Tuesday, June 16, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against 15 people for allegedly conspiring to impede or injure an officer during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement immigration crackdown in Minnesota from about January to June of 2026.

Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said the alleged conspiracy related to efforts by two Minneapolis-based antifa groups that violently opposed law enforcement. “Antifa” is a collective term for an assortment of groups in an anti-fascist movement, which President Donald Trump in September designated as a major terrorist organization.

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“These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did,” Rosen said.

“They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations,” he added. “The conspiracy was not to interfere by their voice, but to do it by force.”

Lawyers for the defendants weren’t immediately identifiable.

An indictment unsealed June 16 alleges the defendants tried to halt immigration enforcement operations with “hard blockades” such as wood, leaf blowers and vehicles to impede officer movement, and with “soft blockades” such as homemade shields to resist and wedge between officers.

One defendant, Kyle Wagner, is also charged with soliciting another person to commit a crime of violence. During the June 16 press conference, Rosen played a video that he said was of Wagner.

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“My name is Kyle, I’m antifa, and there’s so much rage in me that I’ve had to record this, like, 15 times, trying to get the message out,” the man in the video said.

“Not talking about peaceful protests anymore. We’re not talking about having polite conversations anymore,” the man said in the video, adding that he was speaking specifically to his followers.

“Get your f—— guns and stop these f—— people,” the man added.

Charges follow immigration crackdown and mass protests

In December, the Trump administration began a surge of thousands of federal agents to Minnesota as part of an immigration crackdown. That sparked heightened tensions in the state, with some locals organizing against the crackdown, including by using whistles to alert others to approaching immigration agents.

Interactions between federal immigration enforcement agents and protesters turned increasingly heated and even violent in January, after federal law enforcement shot and killed Minneapolis mother Renee Nicole Good while she was driving a car, and later shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, after tackling him and discovering a gun that, in videos of the incident, appeared to be secured in his waistband.

On Jan. 16, FBI Director Kash Patel posted on social media that the FBI was working around the clock to crack down on “violent rioters.”

In February, the Trump administration announced an end to the surge.

Since then, the Justice Department has brought charges against dozens of defendants for allegedly interfering with or assaulting federal agents during the surge, but about a third of those cases have been dismissed, according to an analysis by The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Asked about cases that have been dismissed or failed in some way at the June 16 press conference, U.S. Attorney Rosen stood by the cases his office has brought.

A skydiving instructor who had made over 6,800 jumps. A drummer who was meticulous about safety since falling in love with the sport that helped him sober up. A software engineer on the cusp of becoming a certified skydiving coach. A grandfather honoring his sister lost to cancer.

Family and friends of the 11 jumpers and pilot killed when their plane crashed shortly after taking off in Missouri said they loved their hobby — whether it was to find personal peace or to share a once-in-a-lifetime experience with others. They remembered the experienced skydivers as people who may have had regular jobs to pay their bills but free falling brought both the thrill and the serenity they craved.

Blake Thacker, 25, jumped for seven years since first skydiving on his 18th birthday. He was set to get his skydiving coach certification over the weekend, his mother Sherry said.

“Skydiving had given him the confidence to do other things in his life, to be successful and reach for things maybe he thought he wasn’t good enough to do,” she said.

Thacker was an aviation software engineer and his mother saw that same methodical safety-oriented focus in his hobby.

“He said, ’Mom the danger in skydiving is really not the diving it’s the plane,’” she recalled.

Plane crashed shortly after takeoff

The plane was barely off the ground Sunday — only about 100 feet (30 meters) in the air — when it made an abrupt left turn before crashing on a sunny day. It appeared to be losing power, witnesses said.

Skydive Kansas City operated the single-engine turboprop Pacific Aerospace 750XL built in 2010 out of an airport in the small town of Butler, roughly 65 miles (105 kilometers) south of Kansas City.

The plane arrived in Butler for the first time on June 5, according to data from FlightRadar24.com. Pictures of the aircraft posted on social media showed it still had advertising from Chattanooga Skydiving Co. Its flight history showed it had previously been flying for weeks at a time in Tennessee and Wisconsin.

A woman who answered the phone at the Chattanooga Skydiving Co. hung up Tuesday when a reporter identified himself.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating all factors leading to the crash including how much experience the pilot had with this model of plane and any mechanical or structural problems with the aircraft.

The 12 people killed were identified as Thacker, Kurt John Roy, Michael Shanahan, David Hershberger, Sai Karthik Varma Datla, Matthew Swope, Dustin McKinney, Jen Sharp, Marcus Miller, Nicholas Nash, William Fischer and Dane Cordes, according to the Bates County Coroner’s Office.

Skydiving helped one jumper get sober

McKinney’s wife said her husband was meticulous about safety when he jumped after his love for skydiving prompted him to get sober seven years ago.

“It feels like this is the only way that skydiving could have taken out Dustin, because it was such a freak accident,” Kathryn Nold said. “It was the most horrific thing. It’s still very surreal.”

McKinney, 44, worked at a furniture store and played drums in Kansas City-area bands. The father of two also had a part-time paying gig as a videographer for Skydive Kansas City.

“He could just immediately make people feel seen and warm and want to be around him, and I just feel infinitely lucky that we were the center of his world and able to experience that love from him that he gave so effortlessly to everyone,” Nold said of her high school sweetheart.

Honoring his sister by jumping

Shanahan took up skydiving just before his older sister Nikki died from breast cancer in 2016, his mother said Tuesday.

“He wanted to live his life and make it worth having fun, having a good time, doing something he enjoyed, and skydiving was something he had always wanted to do, unbeknownst to us,” Gloria Shanahan told The Associated Press.

Shanahan honored his sister by skydiving on her birthday, Mother’s Day and the anniversary of her death. He then visited her grave.

Shanahan, 54, jumped Saturday just for fun. He booked Sunday’s jump as a backup in case the weather was bad but decided to go ahead and jump both days anyway, his mother said.

“We do not regret that he did. He got to live the life that he wanted to,” she said.

Shanahan’s skydiving instructor was Hershberger, who was on the plane with him Sunday. The two had another bond. Hershberger taught violin to two of Shanahan’s grandchildren.

Hershberger, 54, also taught orchestra and played trumpet with the Kansas City Wind Symphony. His summers were spent at Skydive Kansas City, often harnessed to inexperienced jumpers exhilarated and nervous to cross something off their bucket lists.

Skydiving to find out more about yourself

Sharp, 55, took her first jump in 1989 when she was 18. Some 6,800 jumps later, she was a legendary instructor at the highest levels of the sport and the coach for Thacker’s certification.

On her blog, Sharp wrote about how she jumped into Denver’s Coors Field ballpark while dressed as the queen of England and loved to go tandem with people skydiving for the first time and to see them test their resolve, grow personally and just feel alive.

“Being trained by Jen Sharp was like taking piano lessons from Beethoven,” her friend Greg Upper told The Associated Press, calling Sharp a philosopher. “That’s how big of a deal she was.”

Swope, 39, worked in IT, but every weekend he was up in the sky as he searched for any bit of fun, especially something he could share with others, his best friend, Justin Williams, said.

“He loved it. He gets to take people on their once-in-a-lifetime adventure every weekend, multiple times a day,” Williams said.

After Swope’s death, Williams said, he’s terrified to go skydiving again but also knows he has to because his friend knew to truly live is to take risks.

“It’s scary to be in the door, but the moment you let go, it dissolves away and induces a state of presence that you will not find anywhere else,” Williams said of free falling. “You don’t worry about the future. You’re not sad about the past. You’re just present, and it’s the most peaceful experience.”

The skydiving industry says it has a strong safety record. The United States Parachute Association said that last year nearly 3.5 million jumps were completed and that 16 civilians died, the majority from human error.