The federal officers arrived weeks ago. But since the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, their numbers have swelled — and people here say the weight of it all is inescapable. Federal officers are flooding the sidewalks of their neighborhoods, honks and whistles sound when they are near and, occasionally, the smell of chemical agents wafts by.
The scale, the sustained intensity and the aggression demonstrated by law enforcement deployed here appears to be greater than immigration enforcement operations that took place in other blue cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina, all of which are larger than Minneapolis in land mass and population.
The officers are in unmarked cars idling on neighborhood streets. They are going door to door, residents said. They are seen inside stores and in retail parking lots, including at the Target in Richfield, south of Minneapolis, the day after Good was killed.
Residents’ videos of violent arrests are proliferating on social media, including one of a woman dragged from her car. Some videos provided to NBC News by activists show officers smashing car windows or spraying chemicals point-blank into the faces of residents.
“It feels like an invasion,” said a woman who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. She was protesting at the Whipple federal detention facility at 7 a.m. on a frigid, 12-degree morning. The woman, a restaurant owner, said she closed her business temporarily because she was trying to protect her employees who were immigrants. “It feels very much like a Nazi Germany situation to me. It needs to stop, and people need to know what’s going on.”
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