Jan. 16 (UPI) — The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit on Thursday, accusing the Trump administration of violating the constitutional rights of Minnesotans who were unlawfully detained by federal immigration officers amid its immigration crackdown in the city.
Since December, thousands of heavily armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security agents have been deployed to Minnesota for Operation Metro Surge, which has seen them conduct neighborhood sweeps and arrests of immigrants the administration alleges have criminal convictions.
The operation has the city on edge and residents scared, according to officials, with two federal agent-involved shootings in a week, one that resulted in the death of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three .
The ACLU alleges that tactics used by the federal agents are unconstitutional. In the lawsuit filed Thursday, the civil rights lawyers accuse ICE and DHS officers of stopping people — primarily those perceived to be of Somali or Latino descent — to question them about their immigration statues without reasonable suspicion of removability.
They also allege that the federal agents are arresting residents without warrants and without probable cause, resulting in the detention of U.S. citizens.
And they are making warrantless arrests without probable cause to believe the person is a flight risk.
“Police cannot simply stop and arrest people based only on their appearance,” the ACLU lawyers said in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.
“Federal agents’ policies and practices are antithetical to bedrock legal protections that ensure residents of the United States can go about their daily lives without being snatched off the streets arbitrarily or due to the color of their skin.”
The ACLU is asking the courts to enjoin the Trump administration from employing these tactics.
Among the 11 plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit is 20-year-old Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a U.S. citizen from Somalia who grew up in the United States.
The court document states that masked ICE agents arrested him on Dec. 10, as he was walking to lunch.
When he realized he was being detained, he repeatedly stated that he was a U.S. citizen, but the agents allegedly refused to look at his identification and put him in an SUV and drove him to the Whipple Federal Building in south Minneapolis, where he was shackled and fingerprinted.
He was only released after showing a photo of his passport card to an individual at the building, his lawyers said.
“At no time did any officer ask me whether I was a citizen or if I had any immigration status,” Hussen said, according to a statement from the ACLU.
“They did not ask for any identifying information, nor did they ask about my ties to the community, how long I had lived in the Twin Cities, my family in Minnesota or anything else about my circumstances.”
A second plaintiff, 25-year-old U.S.-born Mahamed Eydarus was detained the same day as Hussen.
The lawsuit states that Eydarus, a personal care assistant, and his mother, also a U.S. citizen, were shoveling out his parking space on the street when masked federal agents who did not identify themselves surrounded them.
The agents allegedly demanded identification from Eydarus to ensure he was “not illegal.” They then demanded that his mother remove her niqab before separating Eydarus from her. The court document states an agent then asked why they were speaking a “foreign language” before leaving the scene.
Eydarus was left “scared” to go about his daily life in public, according to the lawsuit, stating “he fears being detained based on his Somali descent and appearance.”
“The government can’t stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause,” Kate Huddleston, senior staff attorney with ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
“These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principle of liberty and equality that remains a bedrock of our legal system and our country.”
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