US citizens in Minnesota share their stories of ICE detainments, intimidation
On Sunday, Mark Goldberg said he and his wife began following what they believed was a suspicious car in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota: a car with Florida license plates and tinted windows.
Given the overwhelming amount of ICE activity across Minnesota, Goldberg wanted to see what the vehicle may have been up to.
He said they followed just a few cars behind before pulling into the same shopping center parking lot on Robert Street. That's when Goldberg said two ICE agents got out of their own vehicle, walked across the lot and tried to open Goldberg's car door.
"They told us to roll down the window and or get out of the car and we said, 'No, we are not going to do that,'" Goldberg said.
He said once they threatened to call the police, the agents went back to their cars — but the interaction didn't end there. Goldberg said that the ICE vehicle followed them, circling their car "in an attempt to intimidate us."
While Goldberg went home that day, WCCO is documenting other instances where ICE are detaining American citizens looking to act as legal observers.
On Sunday in Minneapolis, Patty O'Keefe said that she and a friend were following ICE agents before those agents pepper sprayed their car and smashed their windows.
O'Keefe said from there, she and her friend were placed in separate cars. What sticks with her is the comments she said an ICE agent made about Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.
"The driver of the car said, 'You guys got to stop obstructing us, that's why that lesbian b**** is dead,'" O'Keefe told CBS Mornings.
O'Keefe spoke at a press conference hosted by Minneapolis city leaders on Wednesday. She said that she spent hours at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, able to hear agonized cries coming from others, which she said included children.
O'Keefe said it was difficult juxtaposing that with the "small talk" she could overhear between federal agents nearby.
"I luckily got to come home from that detention center, and most of the people there did not," O'Keefe said. "This is craziness. It needs to come to an end."
Ryan Ecklund said he began following an ICE vehicle from a grocery store in Woodbury, Minnesota, documenting the experience from his phone. Eventually, a second ICE vehicle joins, allowing the two cars to box Ecklund in.
He describes five agents coming to his car, pulling him and putting him on the ground. He had visible bruises around his face that he attributes to the arrest. He said he then spent the next 10 hours in detainment at the Whipple Building. He said that no one read him his Miranda rights for about three hours and that once he was released, he was not charged.
"I had told the officers who detained me multiple times as they were putting me to the ground, which is on video, that I was a U.S. citizen and that they're not allowed to attempt to remove me from my vehicle and that I hadn't done anything wrong," Ecklund said.
In both O'Keefe and Ecklund's cases, ICE began their respective detentions by verbally accusing them of breaking the law. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said that the simple act of following a law enforcement vehicle and observing is not illegal, so long as other traffic laws are not broken in the process.
"No tailgating, speeding, running red lights, aggressive or reckless maneuvers," O'Hara said.