Trump-appointed judge says ICE has a ‘policy’ of racial profiling: ‘Evidence is compelling and troubling’
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.
