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Videos From Minnesota Show How Aggressive ICE Has Gotten During Arrests and Encounters With Protesters
Federal immigration agents have broken windows and dragged occupants out of their vehicles. They have forcefully tackled people to the ground. They have pushed and shoved protesters, and deployed pepper spray directly in their faces.
For weeks, residents have documented the scenes unfolding as federal agents pursue President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. The videos have circulated widely and intensified outrage and fear among many Minnesotans.
Marty Kurcias, 76, who was protesting at the airport on Friday, said the aggressive treatment he has seen of Minnesotans was jarring. “It can’t go on like this,” he said, adding, “We don’t abide by cruelty or violence.”
Trump administration officials have defended the tactics as necessary in the face of widespread protests. But the heavy-handed use of force has drawn mounting scrutiny.
The New York Times reviewed dozens of videos taken in recent weeks and identified multiple aggressive tactics that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents used during immigration arrests and in encounters with protesters.
Officers forcibly entered homes without a judge’s warrant.
On Sunday, federal agents were seen dragging a man from his home in St. Paul. The man was later identified as ChongLy Scott Thao, a Hmong immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record, according to his family. Mr. Thao and his family said that the armed agents did not present a warrant or allow him to show identification at the time of arrest.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Mr. Thao refused to be fingerprinted or facially identified and that he had matched the description of two sex offenders they were seeking.
An internal memo, leaked by a whistle-blower group, showed that ICE officials had drafted guidance saying that their officers could enter homes without a judicial warrant and that they could rely instead on administrative warrants that are issued by a government agency and do not go through the federal court system.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the department, acknowledged that officers had relied on administrative warrants to enter homes to conduct arrests.
John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, said the practice of entering homes without a judicial warrant would be a significant departure from decades-old ICE policies and procedures.
They interrogated people because of their ethnicity or accents.
Administration officials have repeatedly said that the operations in Minnesota have targeted violent criminals and people who pose a serious threat to the community. But immigration agents have confronted and interrogated people because of what they assumed their race or ethnicity to be.
A video posted on social media and additional footage provided to The New York Times show one man, Ramon Menera, questioned by immigration agents who told him they were asking for documentation because of his accent.
Mr. Menera told The Times that he is a U.S. citizen and that the agents released him after he provided them with his passport card.
In July, a federal judge prohibited immigration agents in the Los Angeles area from targeting people based on assumptions about their race or ethnicity, but the Supreme Court lifted the order in September.
They broke windows and dragged occupants from their cars.
Immigration agents are taking sharp measures to detain and arrest people. That includes people who do not appear to be a danger to the community and in some cases people who are not the targets of immigration enforcement operations at all.
A widely shared video taken in Minneapolis shows immigration agents dragging a woman, later identified as Aliya Rahman, from her car, after one agent shattered the window on the passenger side.
The Homeland Security department later said that the woman was an “agitator” who ignored multiple commands to move her vehicle away from the scene. Ms. Rahman told CNN that she was not there to protest, and that she had received conflicting commands.
Another video shows one agent breaking the window of a car after a man inside refuses to open the door. Multiple agents then tackle the man, later identified as Orbin Mauricio Henriquez Serrano, to the ground.
Shattering a window and pulling someone out of their car can escalate an encounter significantly, said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. It would be suitable only in a situation in which the federal agents had probable cause to suspect that the target had committed a violent crime like murder, rape or robbery, he said.
It was not immediately clear whether the man fit that description. The Homeland Security Department said only that he was an undocumented immigrant from Honduras who failed to obey officers’ orders.
They used force on people who were already restrained.
The Times found multiple instances of several agents tackling someone to the ground and proceeding to handle that person aggressively, in one instance placing a knee on the person’s neck.
In another case, video shows five immigration agents holding a man to the ground as one agent repeatedly strikes the man in the face with his knee.
A strike to the head is generally considered deadly force, justified only to defend against imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person, said Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law. “There was nothing in that video that indicated that was the situation,” she said.
The available video does not show what led up to the encounter. Ms. McLaughlin said in a statement to The Times that the man had violently resisted arrest. She added that officers are trained to use the minimum necessary amount of force.
They met protesters with force.
Immigration agents have increasingly clashed with protesters in recent weeks after a federal officer shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, on Jan. 7. Protesters have gathered in small groups and in large crowds, honking car horns, blowing whistles and yelling at and filming ICE agents. Immigration agents have been filmed exchanging insults and jeers with the protesters.
Videos showed multiple cases when agents were quick to use physical force with protesters, shoving or tackling them. In one instance, an agent gets out of a car, walks up to a protester who is standing in front of the agent’s car and shoves him into the middle of the street.
Ms. Lopez said that the First Amendment gives people the broad right to protest, record and yell things, even profanity, at officers.
In a statement to The Times, Ms. McLaughlin characterized the protesters as “rioters and terrorists,” and said that they had assaulted law enforcement and vandalized federal vehicles.
They deployed chemical irritants at close range.
Videos also documented multiple occasions when, in confrontations with protesters, immigration agents deployed chemical irritants with little to no warning — firing directly in people’s faces.
A federal judge in Minneapolis cited several episodes of “gratuitous deployment of pepper spray” in a ruling last week that ordered agents not to retaliate against peaceful protesters. A federal appeals court temporarily lifted those restrictions on Wednesday.
In a video of a protest taken on Jan. 7 near where Ms. Good was killed, federal agents can be seen on multiple occasions hitting protesters in the face with pepper spray and other irritants at close range. Earlier in the video, one of the protesters throws a snow ball at one of the agents, and some protesters are blocking an agent’s vehicle.
They continued to operate with anonymity.
In many of the videos The Times reviewed, immigration agents drove in unmarked cars, and wore ski masks, neck gaiters or other face coverings. Many also wore a cap and shades, further obscuring their identities, a practice that has been common in immigration operations across the country.
Federal officials have said that face coverings protect the agents and their families from retaliation, such as having their home address or contact information shared online.
But the practice runs counter to protocols for most other law enforcement personnel, like police officers whose uniforms include badge numbers. And critics have suggested that the agents have been emboldened to act with impunity, knowing that their identities are hidden and that it would be difficult to hold them accountable.
Additional contributions by Haohsiang Ko, Chris Campbell and Annalee Mather.
The location and route of the tunnel system for the hydropower dam are indicative, as official designs have not been made public. While the route shown is approximate, it follows an elevation change consistent with the proposed plans for the facility.
Mehebub Sahana, an environmental geographer at Manchester University, and Ye Huang, a researcher at Global Energy Monitor, assessed possible locations for the facility and reviewed satellite imagery to determine whether recent construction activity was linked to the project.
Images of major infrastructure projects included at the top of the story, in the order in which they appear: China News Service/Getty Images; CFOTO/Sipa USA; Xinhua/Shutterstock; CFOTO/Sipa USA; Reuters; Xinhua/Shutterstock; CFOTO/Sipa USA; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Shutterstock. Videos from ski resorts in Xinjiang were sourced from China’s Xiaohongshu social media platform.
The EEOC was established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address entrenched discrimination in employment.
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In 1966, the newly-established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a rule to tackle entrenched discrimination on the job.
Every year, companies with a hundred or more workers would turn over to the government information about the race, ethnicity, sex and job categories of their employees.
This EEO-1 data, as it’s known, has helped the federal agency figure out where people of color and women are not getting hired or promoted. Over decades, the EEOC’s work has led to settlements worth billions.
Now, as part of a realignment of civil rights enforcement under President Trump, the EEOC is seeking to end its annual data collection while also getting rid of a 1979 regulation that allowed employers to take certain steps to address race and gender imbalances revealed by the data.
Together, the moves would mark an about-face in the civil rights agency’s efforts to fulfill its mission.
Andrea Lucas, the Trump-appointed chair of the EEOC, did not respond to NPR’s questions about the two proposals, which have been submitted to the White House for review.
But in interviews and public remarks, Lucas has repeatedly warned that programs or policies aimed at helping specific groups, such as Black people or women, are unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if they exclude others.
“Regardless of what has happened before, the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop,” Lucas said at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit earlier this month. “I think that that’s a more beautiful vision of our country, and I think it’s consistent with the text of the statute.”
A roadmap for addressing discrimination
The 1979 regulation the EEOC seeks to rescind was issued with this very dilemma in mind: Can a company remedy discrimination by giving special consideration to those who were deprived of opportunities in the past?
The answer back then was yes. The agency gave the go-ahead for mentoring programs and even hiring targets.
“The EEOC says you can take some of these voluntary efforts, even though they will be race- or gender-conscious,” says Chai Feldblum, who served on the commission during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “This is the EEOC giving employers the roadmap of how they can take race and gender into account in a positive way and not violate the law.”
The guidelines, issued in January 1979, made clear that companies first had to document a problem, and then come up with a reasonable and time-limited plan for how to increase the number of minorities or women in their ranks.
Five months later, the Supreme Court embraced that roadmap. In a 5-2 decision known as Weber, the court found that an affirmative action plan to remedy past discrimination was lawful provided it did not “unnecessarily trammel the interests of white employees” and that it was temporary.
In 1987, the court issued another decision, known as Johnson, extending protection to efforts aimed at helping women.
Now known as the Weber-Johnson standard, it’s still the law regardless of what happens with the EEOC’s 1979 regulation, says Feldblum. But for how long, she’s not sure.
“I think the Supreme Court is just waiting for a case that might allow them to overturn those two important cases,” she says.
How data has helped root out discrimination
The more imminent change, assuming the EEOC’s proposals go forward, is the demise of the agency’s annual collection of employee demographics. Usually, the data collection begins in late spring. So far this year, there’s been no word of it.
Since the 1960s, the EEOC has recovered billions of dollars for workers who have suffered discrimination on the job, and in many cases, EEO-1 data played a key role.
“It’s one of the first things that you can look at as you’re trying to learn more,” says Karla Gilbride, who served as the EEOC’s general counsel during the Biden administration.
Protecting U.S. workers from unlawful discrimination — already a hard task — could become significantly harder if the government no longer has that data within arm’s reach, Gilbride says. Having to subpoena data would make enforcement far more laborious and less efficient.
A lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops
Consider the lawsuit against Bass Pro Shops, first filed in 2011.
The EEOC alleged the company, formally known as Bass Pro Outdoor World, discriminated against Black and Hispanic job applicants by not hiring them — not just at one store, but across the country, even in places with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
“Store by store by store, sort of the same idea, where you had areas that had a significant number of Blacks and Latinos, and either zero or very few at the stores,” says David Lopez, who was the EEOC’s general counsel at the time and now leads the Civil Rights, Migration and Workplace Law Initiative at Arizona State University.
A Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World retail store in Irvine, Calif.
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The EEOC saw that pattern because it had Bass Pro’s demographic data on file. Government investigators could easily compare the outdoor gear shop to other retailers in the same counties. They could also compare Bass Pro’s workforce to the available pool of workers in the surrounding areas.
While the data by itself could not prove discrimination, Lopez says it was a green light to agency investigators to dig further.
“Because they had a reason to investigate, they were able to discover that there were managerial comments that were reflective of discriminatory animus, that they were looking for a certain type of person,” says Lopez.
Someone who was white, according to the government’s complaint.
Bass Pro called the allegations “threadbare” and accused the government of merely relying on “a handful of isolated incidents of alleged inappropriate behavior.”
EEOC investigators later bolstered their case, identifying implicated managers and job applicants by name and compiling a list of dozens of Bass Pro stores with a low representation of Black and Hispanic employees.
Finally, in 2017, the company settled for $10.5 million. Bass Pro did not admit to any wrongdoing, but agreed to appoint a diversity director and to make good-faith efforts to recruit and hire non-white candidates.
Lopez considered the settlement a big win, one of many he oversaw in his time at the EEOC that were built on data.
“You can have a hunch, but there’s nothing like the cold, hard numbers,” he says.
Agency chair says data has been misused
Early indications of the EEOC’s plan to stop gathering data came a year ago.
In announcing the opening of the 2025 data collection period, Lucas posted a message warning employers of their obligations under federal civil rights law.
“You must not use the information collected and reported in your organization’s EEO-1 Component 1 report to justify treating employees differently based on their race, sex, or other protected characteristic,” she wrote.
In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Lucas explained her missive. She said a number of companies have been misusing the data — including in ways that have hurt white people and men.
Lucas believes the only people who should know the gender and race of a company’s employees are its lawyers and human resources staff. Instead, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, a number of companies published their demographic data as part of public commitments to address the lack of diversity within their ranks.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair Andrea Lucas has served on the commission since 2020, appointed by President Trump.
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Elizabeth Gillis/NPR
Subsequently, she contends, companies began making decisions about whom to hire, promote and interview for jobs based on sex or race, noting some even gave hiring managers financial incentives to hit diversity targets.
That use of demographic data crosses the line, she says. “All it has to do is motivate — in whole or in part — your decision making, and you’re into unlawful territory.”
Lucas declined to single out any company by name, citing the confidentiality of agency investigations. But according to court documents, the EEOC has accused Nike and The New York Times of discrimination against white employees and job applicants. The two companies are among many that published their demographic data along with their diversity-related goals for several years.
A focus on data in select cases
Paradoxically, Lucas has at times talked up the importance of data.
“There is no other way to protect victims of harassment and discrimination unless you collect information about them,” she said while speaking in April at a conference at Harvard organized by the Brandeis Center, an independent civil rights organization.
In that instance, she was defending the EEOC’s subpoena, requiring the University of Pennsylvania to turn over employee information that the agency doesn’t routinely collect: the names, addresses and phone numbers of Jewish employees who may have witnessed antisemitic acts on campus.
The university has, so far, refused to comply with the subpoena, noting in court filings that it echoes terrifying periods of history for Jewish communities.
“Driving a car without a dashboard”
The profound changes underway at the EEOC have kept David Cohen busy. The president of the management consulting firm DCI Consulting has fielded many calls from confused clients, wondering whether the work they’ve been doing to promote equal opportunity should continue.
For now, he’s telling clients that keeping track of their employee demographics is a smart business move, whether the government requires it or not.
Without it, he says, a company has no way of knowing if it has a problem — whether it’s recruiting from too narrow a pool, or has a bad manager somewhere, or is screening out qualified candidates for no good reason.
“It’s like you’re driving a car without a dashboard. You have no idea what’s going [on]. Am I speeding? Am I not speeding? Is my check-engine light on?” he says. “You have nothing.”
He’s been reminding clients that while priorities have shifted at the EEOC, federal civil rights laws haven’t changed.
“Stay within the law, and you will be okay,” he says.
new video loaded: Another Night of Violent Protests Outside a Newark ICE Detention Center
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transcript
Another Night of Violent Protests Outside a Newark ICE Detention Center
Protesters and the police clashed again outside of an ICE detention center in New Jersey on Saturday night.
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