Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Minnesota is taking center stage and an intensifying standoff between states and the federal government.
My name is Keith Ellison. I'm the Attorney General for the State of Minnesota.
On Monday, Minnesota sued the federal government.
We're filing against the United States Department of Homeland Security to end the unlawful, unprecedented surge of the federal law enforcement agents into Minnesota because.
This has to stop.
Since the start of President Trump's second term, a growing number of immigration and customs enforcement officers have surged into big cities across the US. Ellison suit alleges in Minnesota, ICE agents have sown chaos and terror. It accuses aggressive and poorly trained officers of conducting warrantless searches and racist arrests and using excssive force. In Minneapolis. Last week, one of those ICE agents fatally shot Renee A Coole good,
a mother of three, in her car. Goods killing set off a firestorm of competing narratives from federal and local officials. She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run an law enforcement officer over.
They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense. Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is both.
Even as Minnesota tries to eject ICE with its lawsuit, the federal government says it's sending more ICE agents to the Minneapolis area. On the ground, ICE has been met with protests and with observers who track the officer's movements. The better equipped ICE forces outnumber local police, something local authorities say makes it harder for local police to maintain
public safety. What Minnesota is ground with is a new ICE, according to Bloomberg Immigration reporter Alicia Caldwell, who's covered the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for two decades.
So what we're seeing is this massive expansion.
Remember the Big Beautiful Bill provided one hundred and seventy five billion dollars over the next several years. Big chunk of that is for ICE. This is a full scale evolution of the agency.
From one perspective on this evolution, I spoke to a friend, Olivarees, a human rights lawyer and the vice president of Litigation and Legal Strategy at the National Immigration Law Center.
The way ICE and ICE agents are operating under this administration is unprecedented in its twenty two years of existence. Right, they had never conducted this scale of operations around the country.
What a friend says he's seeing in Minneapolis is ICE operating more boldly than it has in the past, with officers moving beyond their longtime brief.
The amount of MONE money that ICE has gotten is more than the GDP of many countries in the world. The prospect of what ICE is going to look like and what immigration enforcement is going to look like in this country, I don't think we have come to terms with that. It's hard to imagine what an agency ten times the size of ICE, in terms of resources, weapons, equipment, and the tension could mean for the American public.
Right.
I want to be clear that this is becoming of concern for immigrants and their families, but also for everybody regardless of immigration status.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today. On the show, how ICE's evolution under Trump's second term paved the way for violence in Minneapolis, How state and local officials are trying to get federal agents out of their cities, and what's next in the battle between state officials and ICE. The ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good on January seventh, was part of a surge of heavily armed federal troops that had been
deployed by the Trump administration to the Minneapolis area. Bloomberg's Alicia Caldwell says they began arriving in early December under what ICE called Operation Metro Search.
So it's being described as a twofold operation fraud within the Somali community, which the state recognizes in the state has been trying to address along with the federal government, as well as the broader immigration approach that they've taken across the country. We've seen it in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, New Orleans, Charlotte, and now it's Minneapolis's turn, if you will.
But this is different.
This is bigger, and this is much more expansive. They are describing it as the largest such operation of its kind, meaning just law enforcement. We've seen the National Guard elsewhere, but this is just law enforcement. It's accommodation of ICE, now Border Patrol and other federal agents from across the Department of Justice and elsewhere, sort of anybody with a gun, if you will.
By now, you know, I think a lot of people have seen what happened in Minneapolis, seen the shooting of Renee Good. But after the shooting, two very different accounts took shape of what happened and who is at fault. Can you lay out those different narratives for me?
Right?
So they're two star creep or views on this one is from the US government. They were very swift to say Renee Good was in the wrong. You know, her vehicle was blocking the road at some point, she seems to be waving cars on. But ice their perspective is she tried to run them over. Now, we've seen many many different angles, including a camera angle from the officer involved in the shooting, who actually shot multiple times into the vehicle. There's no video evidence that I've seen that
he is hit. Now, I says, hey, this guy was protecting his own he was protecting his life.
She did this, She tried to run them over.
The President of the United States actually accused her of viciously.
Running them over.
There isn't video of that from the other side, which is a growing chorus and a very loud chorus from the state government on down in the public. She was trying to leave her tires appeared to be turned. You know, we can't see directly into the driver's seat, but she appeared to try to turn, according to them and leave.
This dissonant response from federal and local officials has in part seated this conflict over who will actually run the investigation into Renee Goods killing.
Right.
Trump officials have said that the FBI has taken over the investigation of the shooting. The Minnesota body that would usually investigate the sort of case says that the Trump administration has blocked its access to materials and evidence from the investigation. So what's the latest in this standoff?
So the federal bearer of investigation has taken the lead this morning, there's been reports of resignations from the Department of Justice, from the Civil Rights Division because they are not apparently investigating, and that would normally be.
A pretty routine course of business.
And an officer involved shooting like this, and regardless of where you fall in the political spectrum, you have a US citizen who has deceased, the shooter, which is not in doubt is the United States government employee, a.
Federal law enforcement officer.
So traditionally you'd have multiple strands of investigation. The FBI is the lead. The Justice Department is in charge here. They have cut out, according to Minnesota officials, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which is their top law enforcement agency in the state.
Now that agency and state officials have.
Said they are in fact receiving credible information from witnesses from community members, which they've asked for. That said, they've been pretty open that without the assistance of the federal government, without forensics, without access to the vehicle and other details, it may be difficult to compile the type of evidence they would need to make it determination.
And another poll of the state local versus federal conflict is these lawsuits that were announced on Monday. State officials in Minnesota are filing a lawsuit against Christy Nome and Ice tell us who exactly is behind that suit and what they're seeking, But.
It's the state of Minnesota.
So the Attorney General, generally Keith Ellison, would run that lawsuit on behalf of the state of Minnesota, and the idea is to try to force them to either curtail their tactics or leave all together.
It seems like the state's argument here is that they don't need federal forces on the ground they didn't ask for federal forces on the ground. Federal forces are in some cases disrupting local law enforcement efforts. What is the federal government's argument for being there and in fact sending more troops to Minnesota.
Well, what they say they get to they have jurisdiction over the immigration laws wherever somebody may be suspect of being in the country unlawfully. Same with you know, the broader fraud allegations. They're making this very broad jurisdictional argument which is hard to you know, get around, right, they're the federal government. In other cities, the administration has said, hey, we're going in to curtail violent crime in addition to immigration, because the two are hand in hand, and they have
suggested they are arresting the worst of the worst. But you know, in that mix, what we have seen is a growing percentage of non criminal immigrants whose only offense is being in the country without authorization or even suspected of not being in the country without authorization.
After the break, how ICE's budget, recruitment process and tactics have changed under the second Trump administration and what comes next for the bolt up agency. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a relatively new agency for the US. It was created a little over two decades ago in the wake of nine to eleven. Its mandate is to enforce federal immigration laws, but Bloomberg's Alicia Caldwell says the agency has changed since then.
It's a completely different agency in many respects. So I've covered DHS and all its components since two thousand and five. And when I started, ICE was still getting its sea legs because it was an amalgamation of previous entities from the Department of Treasury, from the old I ands under the Department of Justice, and this whole mix of officers and agents trying to figure out its new mission. And
it's evolved during the first Trump administration. I went out with ICE and it was a very traditional sort of Sisyphian task. You have a list of one hundred people you want to find. You have vetted background on them, you know who they are, you know where they live theoretically or hopefully, you know where they work, and you try to go find them and you find very few of them because people aren't always readily available to open the door or willing to open the door. And that
was a big hang up for ICE. They couldn't go in your house. They can't go in your house without a judicial warrant.
As police can't either, right, I mean, no one can.
Right.
You just don't get to barge through people's doors.
And traditionally you don't just get to walk up to somebody on the street and say, hey, who are you, what's your immigration status? Border Patrol has expanded their use of their authority to do that. They get to do that within one hundred miles of the border. And now ICE is being far more aggressive. It used to be do not give chase. It's dangerous for you, it's dangerous for them.
Let's not do it.
Now we're giving chase that we're seeing smash windows, we're seeing, as we saw in Minneapolis, surrounding a car in this case, you know, and there's questions about whether the officer ever should have been in front of the vehicle at all. That's in fact against their own procedures and rules, and it's tactically not safe.
Does that reflect a change in protocol or is just a change in action.
It's a change in action because the rules haven't changed.
What has changed is ICE's level of funding. The Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated an additional one hundred and seventy billion dollars over four years for the administration's border and immigration cracked out.
It's never been even close to this.
It's expanded exponentially by the tens of billions of dollars. With the Trump administration took office, there was a budget allotment for about forty thousand attention beds and ten thousand or.
So RO officers.
They're looking to have twenty thousand RO officers and one hundred thousand beds. And they're making moves left and right. They're buying munitions, they're buying tactical gear, handcuffs, right restraints, all the things that would normally go into their business. They're spending a lot more money on now as they expand rapidly. This is the largest expansion we've ever seen of immigration enforcement.
Efriend Olivarez of the National Immigration Law Center says as the agency has rapidly expanded in size, it's also been deployed in American cities at a far greater scale.
They had never conducted this scale of operations. So the local officials with smaller teams with fewer resources, are trying to protect their residents, their constituents and maintain public order in the phase of these unprecedented operations by ICE.
ICE has the power to arrest, detain, to port people who are in this country illegally. But what we're seeing in places like Minneapolis is that these agents are coming into contact with a much broader swath of the population than they previously have. Right since protesters, bystanders and green card holders, how has the scope of the work expanded? Has it officially expanded? Are we just seeing a change in operations? Can you help me make sense of the shift.
You're absolutely right that the way ices operating has expanded beyond any reasonable way. But let's keep in mind the law has not changed, right, isis authority has not changed. They have the power in the authority to arrest people who are in the country unlawfully, to the poor people who should be deported. They don't have the authority to break down a door in a house without a warrant or probable cause, and they are doing that that is illegal, Like,
let's be clear, that's breaking and entering. Then if somebody demands to see that warrant, they're just ignoring them and pushing forward, banking on the fact that it's going to be hard for that individual to find a lawyer to do something about it. But no, the law has not changed with respect to the authority of ICE. It's gotten more money significantly by Congress, but the scope of if an authority has not changed.
I'm wondering how the shooting in Minneapolis has ramped up other cities and states attempts to limit ICE's power on the ground and to make more preemptive legislation here.
Yeah. So at the federal level, there are some bills that have been introduced, but they do not appear to have the political support to move forward. Some states, like California, for example, have enacted laws that prohibit federal agents and all law enforcement from wearing masks and require that they
identify themselves. Perhaps not unsurprisingly or not surprisingly, the Department of Justice now sued the state of California alleging that that law is unconstitutional, and that case is proceeding through the courts. But the Illinois as well has enacted laws and it's also been sued by the federal government trying to find ways to hold agents accountable when they violate the law.
What could happen right now to prevent another incident like this from occurring.
I think if the leaders of ICE and the HS and the federal government were to change their rhetoric and say, we do not want ICE murdering anybody, we don't want anybody else to die. We want to enforce immigration laws, but nobody should die. That would send a message to agents to de escalate any confrontation that they may encounter. But that's not what we're hearing from the leaders of
those agencies and those departments unfortunately. So I think that could help, right if the messaging from the higher ups changed, that could make it less likely than another tragedy unfolds.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash Podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.