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Federal immigration agents tackled and arrested a Somali American man in Minneapolis on Tuesday and detained him for about two hours for no apparent reason other than his ethnicity. The man who was arrested said that the agents had trouble finding the 

 at Ft. Snelling while driving him there. 

The 20-year-old was not suspected of any crime, and described his ordeal during a Wednesday news conference alongside Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who each denounced the agents’ actions. 

Mubashir, 20, declined to share his last name out of fear for his and his family’s safety, but he gave a detailed account of the incident to reporters, who also viewed video that city officials shared recorded on a business’ security camera and a bystander’s mobile phone. 

Mubashir, who moved to the United States as a small boy and became a naturalized American citizen, said that he stepped onto a sidewalk near 4th Street and Cedar Avenue during his lunch break when two masked men approached him. The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood is the heart of the city’s Somali American community. 

Sensing trouble, he ducked into a restaurant. They followed him inside, dragged him out and forcibly arrested him. The agents handcuffed Mubashir, took him across 4th Street and pushed him onto his knees in the snow. One put him in a choke hold. 

“I have my ID!” Mubashir shouted repeatedly, as heard on the video. The agents do not respond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_r4onlnRAA

He added that the agents never identified themselves as ICE, and he feared that they could have been anyone. In the video, one agent is seen wearing a vest marked “POLICE FEDERAL OFFICER” the other’s is marked “POLICE ICE.”

Mubashir said that the agents put him in an unmarked SUV and asked to take his picture. 

“I declined, because how will a picture prove I’m a U.S. citizen?” Mubashir said. “I told him I have my passport, it’s in my phone. Can I open it and show you? He declined. I told him can I give you my name and my date of birth. He declined.” 

Mubashir said that the agents detained him in their vehicle for about an hour after he refused to consent to a photo. Mubashir said that they also tried to take his fingerprints but their digital reader wouldn’t work, so they drove toward Fort Snelling, where ICE has a detention facility, but they appeared unfamiliar with the area.

“While they were driving me all the way there, they were wasting time,” Mubashir said. “They kept going back on the same highway. I told them, ‘Are you guys lost?’ They said, ‘This is our first time taking someone in.’ They had their maps out and everything, and they were trying to intimidate me.” 

Mubashir said that when they finally arrived at the Whipple Federal Building, the agents took him out of the vehicle and made him stand in the cold unless he consented to a face scan, so he finally did. He said that the face scanner appeared not to work either, so they took him inside the federal building. Mubashir said that they refused his request for water or to warm his hands.

Once inside, a staff member finally allowed him to turn on his phone and show his ID before releasing him. His parents picked him up. 

Mayor Jacob Frey, who’s an attorney, said that the agents’ actions were blatantly unconstitutional.

“What we saw by these ICE agents that clearly did not know what they were doing was violence and unwillingness to hear the simple truth, which he was repeating again and again, which is, ‘I’m an American citizen.’”

Police Chief Brian O’Hara called it embarrassing to the law enforcement profession that the agents were wearing vests that said ‘POLICE.’

“Random efforts, including individuals who are American citizens are being stopped because they appear to be Latino or because they appear to be Somali, is wrong,” O’Hara said.

MPR News contacted ICE by email Wednesday afternoon to ask about the reason for Mubashir’s arrest and the agents’ treatment of him. 

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Matt Sepic

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Federal immigration agents tackled and arrested a Somali American man in Minneapolis on Tuesday and detained him for about two hours for no apparent reason other than his ethnicity.

ICE agents tackle, arrest American citizen in Minneapolis

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