A Minnesota Police Chief Said ICE Was Harassing Residents. Here Are Some of Their Stories.

A month ago, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, held an extraordinary press conference where he accused federal immigration officers of racially profiling and harassing residents of the Twin Cities suburb, including one of his own officers.

At a January 20 press conference, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley, along with two other local law enforcement leaders, complained that federal immigration agents were stopping residents without cause and demanding they show paperwork proving they were in the country legally. They even stopped an off-duty Brooklyn Park police officer.

“When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork,” Bruley said, “of which she’s a U.S. citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork.”

“When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone in an attempt to record the incident,” Bruley continued. “The phone was knocked out of her hands.”

“The officers had their guns drawn during the situation,” Bruley said. “After the officer became so concerned, they were forced to identify themselves as a Brooklyn Park police officer in hopes of slowing the incident down.”

Bruley said the immigration officers then left “without an apology.” 

“If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day,” Bruley said.

Bruley’s comments made national news because they highlighted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) legally dubious tactics, and although those tactics have been condemned by civil liberties advocates, it was much more rare to hear local law enforcement directly criticize federal partners.

To try to see how many community members this had happened to, Reason filed a public records request with the Brooklyn Park Police Department for incident reports and complaints related to ICE enforcement in January. The Brooklyn Park Police Department produced 11 incident reports in response to the request. From those incident reports, Reason interviewed two Brooklyn Park residents who say they were harassed by federal immigration officers.

Lavyanna McCurty was in her car, pulling into an apartment complex on January 21 to visit her cousin, when she says the vehicle behind her hit her rear bumper. Scared, McCurty says she pulled into a parking spot, only to be boxed in by ICE agents.

The ICE officers were apparently looking for someone else at the complex, but McCurty couldn’t move her car. When she began honking her horn, the officers started knocking on her window and asking for her ID. 

McCurty says she only had her tribal ID on her. She says she is a member of the Red Lake Nation, a sovereign tribal nation. She says she didn’t want to show the officers her tribal ID because of recent reports of ICE detaining Native Americans, including at the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis.

Instead, McCurty says she got out of her car and started recording on her cellphone. “I’m a sovereign citizen,” she says she told the officers. “I’m Afro-Native American.”

“One of the other guys was like, ‘She looks Puerto Rican. Run her fucking name, run that bitch’s name,'” McCurty recalls.

“Once I told them I’m a Native American citizen, one of them made a joke—and he was serious too, because I can believe it,” McCurty continues. “He said he was gonna send me back to where I came from, basically talking about my reservation.”

McCurty says that when she complained that the agents had no right to hit her car, knock on her window, and ask for her ID, one of the agents responded, “I’ll knock on your window, bitch,” and walked over to her car and rapped on the window.

McCurty says she ran to her cousin’s apartment to call 911 and report that she was being harassed. She then returned outside to continue filming the officers.

Cellphone video taken by McCurty and shared with Reason showed the end of the encounter. In the approximately one-and-a-half-minute video, most of it only capturing audio, McCurty is profanely telling the officers that they should be more nonconfrontational and had no right to knock on her window. One officer can be heard trying to respond to her calmly, while in the background, another can be heard yelling back indistinctly. Eventually another officer is heard repeatedly yelling “let’s go” before several unmarked ICE vehicles drive away.

According to the Brooklyn Park police incident report, McCurty was advised to file a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations if she felt the agents had acted unprofessionally.

McCurty says the experience left her scared, angry, and sad. “I’m a female,” she says. “I’ve been in weird situations with men before, so it made me feel super unsafe and harassed. And then for them to joke around about it and laugh and think that it was funny—it was inappropriate.”

On the same day as McCurty’s encounter, Larry Nimpson was driving home from his parents’ house when he noticed a black SUV following him. Eventually, when the SUV wouldn’t stop following him, Nimpson turned into the Brooklyn Park police station.

It was when Nimpson hopped out of his car and saw the men in the SUV putting on “POLICE” vests, he says, that he realized they were ICE agents.

“This can’t be happening,” Nimpson thought. 

Nimpson says his family immigrated to the U.S. from Liberia, and that he is a legal permanent resident. Nevertheless, he had seen the stories and videos online of “people just being snatched away from their families,” he says, and his daughter’s fourth birthday had just been a few days ago.

“I was terrified,” he says.

Nimpson ran into the police station and asked the woman at the front desk for help, but there was nowhere to go in the lobby. The ICE officers arrived and demanded his name and ID. The only problem was that they were looking for a man named Anthony Nimpson, not Larry Nimpson.

“They were looking for my brother, I guess, or something like that, but I told them, ‘I’m not Anthony.'”

Two Brooklyn Park police officers also showed up in the lobby and advised Nimpson that his only option was to cooperate. The ICE officers handcuffed him, took photos and fingerprints, and walked him back to his car, where he could show them his permanent resident card.

Nimpson says one of the officers told him, “It’s against the law to not have [a permanent resident card] on you.” Once the ICE officers were satisfied that Nimpson wasn’t the man they were looking for, they left.

Nimpson says the encounter has made him wary of going outside.

“I’ve just pretty much still been trying to limit going outside since that situation, even though they’re saying that [ICE] isn’t as active as they were in the city,” he says. “I’m pretty cautious and trying to stay off the street. If I don’t have to go outside, basically what I’m saying is I’m in the house.”

Nimpson is not the only Liberian wrongly targeted by ICE in Brooklyn Park. Emmanuel Sackie, a Liberian-born U.S. citizen, was violently detained by ICE officers in January in another apparent case of mistaken identity.

“America is the place of dreams, equal opportunity, equal rights, but that is not how I was treated yesterday,” Sackie told CBS News. “I’ve been treated like an animal and it really hurt me.”

In another January 25 Brooklyn Park police incident report obtained by Reason, a woman reported that “she saw several unmarked ICE vehicles with no emergency lights box another vehicle in with what she said was very dangerous driving, before they detained someone.”

ICE officers were actually the complaining party in one January 18 Brooklyn Park police report obtained by Reason. According to the report, a Brooklyn Park officer responded to a call for service regarding “ICE being harassed.” The officer “made contact with parties and advised them of their rights.” No arrests or citations were issued.