(NewsNation) — The narrative surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in cities such as Minneapolis falls largely along political lines, despite a growing number of Americans expressing displeasure with the tactics being used by federal agents and officers.
More than 3,300 arrests have been made by Immigration and Customs and Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis over the past six weeks. Yet, in the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer Jan. 7, a recent AP/NORC poll shows that 61% of Americans do not back President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Despite that, federal immigration officials continue to defend the tactics of federal agents and officers, who have clashed with protesters and elected officials since mid-2025 in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and now Minneapolis.
U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said Friday that agents remain unabated by opposition from demonstrators and elected officials. Protests have intensified in Minneapolis since Good’s death, while the Department of Justice has targeted Minnesota’s governor, Minneapolis’ mayor and other lawmakers, alleging they have obstructed the work of federal agents.
As with previous enforcement operations, the Department of Homeland Security has routinely touted searching for “the worst of the worst” as part of a targeted enforcement operation. But Minnesota elected officials have joined other Democrats in California and Illinois in accusing federal officials of terrorizing local communities with tear gas, pepper balls and including innocents amont their thousands of arrests.
“It’s not about safety, it’s not about reducing crime,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told NewsNation’s “CUOMO” this week. “If it were, then there are very important mechanisms where we would work together to do that. It’s not even about immigration. This is political retribution that we are seeing there. This is some sort of form of retaliation.”
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the White House have rejected such notions. DHS officials argue that the unwillingness of leaders in Democrat-led cities, including Minneapolis, is behind the need for tear gas and other nonlethal munitions used by federal agents and officers against protesters across the United States.
Vice President JD Vance told supporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that policies prohibiting state and local law enforcement from assisting federal agents have created more obstacles for federal officers already facing a difficult job.
Vance and Bovino have blamed the rhetoric used by Democrats for the surge of growing opposition, as both have defended the agents’ tactics that federal immigration officials insist are lawful and ethical in their effort to take violent criminals.
“For us, every day is about public safety, not politics,” ICE senior associate director of the agency’s Enforcement Removal Operations team, Marcos Charles, told reporters Friday, accusing politicians and protesters of spreading a false narrative about “who we are, what we do and who we arrest.”
Data is helping grow the divide on immigration enforcement
Graeme Blair, a professor of political science at UCLA and the co-director of the Deportation Data Project, understands the split in public opinion on immigration enforcement.
Although Trump’s border crackdown factored greatly into capturing the White House in 2024, Blair said what Americans have seen unfold since has turned the tide.
Internal government data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that untargeted arrests in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis have grown substantially since Trump took office in 2025.
Whereas past administrations were targeting migrants who were released from jails and prisons on criminal charges or those who had previous criminal convictions, data shows that federal agents working under the Trump administration are targeting people “who look like immigrants”, Blair told NewsNation.
That has led to migrants with no criminal backgrounds being arrested, data shows, as well as U.S. citizens being detained in immigration enforcement operations, the UCLA professor said. The Data Project found that of the 220,000 people arrested by ICE between January and October of last year, 75,000 had no criminal records.
Other data gathered by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows that 26% of the more than 65,000 in ICE detention have criminal convictions while 26% have pending criminal charges.
“Americans have a lot of different views about what immigration enforcement should look like,” Blair, the UCLA professor, told NewsNation. “But very few think it should look like it does today: arrest and detention of people based on the color of their skin alone, including young children and American citizens.”
Despite that, Bovino has repeatedly rejected accusations of racial profiling, telling NewsNation last week that arrests are not made based on color, creed or religion. Vance said Thursday that claims of profiling would be investigated by federal officials if substantiated, but insisted the practice is not taking place.
“This is not a group that is going around and looking for people who violated the law based on skin color,” Vance said. “They’re looking for people who violated the actual law, the immigration laws of this country.”
Federal officials call for more cooperation in ‘sanctuary’ cities
Pushing back against policies prohibiting state and local law enforcement from enforcing federal immigration laws has come from several voices, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Noem accused Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson of being “obstructionists” in the effort of federal agents trying to arrest criminal migrants. Trump later said that both Democrats “should be jailed” for standing in the way of his plan to have migrants convicted of dangerous crimes removed from the country.
“They’re deciding that dangerous criminals that are murderers, rapists, money launderers, have committed assaults, and that are trafficking children are more important than the families who live in the communities,” Noem said last summer.
Federal agents made more than 3,300 arrests in two months last fall in the Chicago area, where Bovino and federal agents used tear gas, pepper balls and other methods in clashes with protesters. Bovino routinely criticized Johnson and Pritzker for harboring dangerous criminals and pointed to city and state ordinances that kept local police from assisting federal agents when met with crowds of protesters.
However, despite ordinances that keep the Chicago Police Department and others in the greater Chicago area from participating in immigration enforcement, city cops did respond to a request from a motorist who was accused of pursuing federal agents.
In a social media post in December, Bovino praised two local departments for their assistance to federal agents, which raised concerns that each police force had violated their respective city’s laws. Chicago’s mayor accused Bovino of lying about the cooperation he received, pointing to what Johnson called a pattern of untruthfulness on the border commander’s part.
This week, Bovino accused Minneapolis police of being “missing in action” after he said the department ignored calls for assistance from federal agents.
A Minneapolis police spokesperson told NewsNation on Thursday that the department employs a full-time person to monitor 911 calls involving federal agents. The spokesperson said that on the day in question, the department had no record of any such calls for assistance.
Frey told “CUOMO” this week that the city will not cooperate with ICE or any other federal immigration agency in enforcing immigration laws. Frey told “CUOMO” he wants city police officers focusing on safety and arresting violent criminals.
Charles, the senior director of ICE ERO, acknowledged this week that the Minnesota Department of Corrections has cooperated in honoring ICE detainers for inmates who are being targeted by the agency. However, he said that cooperation has not extended to county jails, which he says has prevented ICE from taking migrant criminals into custody.
Frey characterized Minneapolis as an “anti-murder” and “anti-rape” city in the NewsNation interview, citing significant drops in violent crimes over the past year. However, he said that because of a lack of trust between the city and federal officials, he was not willing to make any sort of deal with the feds to cooperate.
Instead, Frey told NewsNation that the city would continue to push back against the surge of federal agents, more of which could be coming if necessary, DHS officials have said.
“We are not going to be intimidated in this city,” Frey said this week. “You’re not going to intimidate us by weaponizing the Department of Justice, you’re not going to intimidate us with another 1,500 troops … with the threat they’re going to come in and invade our city even further.”
