Bystander video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents kneeing a man in the face several times while others restrain him in Minneapolis on Jan. 9, 2026. Violence as a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration enforcement is on the rise. (Screenshot from Monica Bicking’s video on Minnesota Reformer)
State leaders seeking to curb immigration officials’ increasingly violent arrest tactics in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to fight back.
They have promised civil rights legislation that could give alleged victims an alternative route to justice, ordered the creation of official courts to collect video and other recordings, or urged cities to reject requests to cooperate in raids. But for the most part, states that are looking for concrete ways to fight back are largely blocked.
Violence in immigration enforcement is increasing. The Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by an immigration agent in Minnesota was one of half a dozen Shootings since December. This month, an immigrant died in a detention center in Texas decided murder. And deaths from incarceration in the last year summed up at least 31, a two-decade high and more than the last four years combined.
There were those too Dozens of cases Over the past year, agents have used threatening and state-banned arrest maneuvers such as chokeholds that can result in respiratory failure.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and tactical vests were found to be firing pepper spray into the building faces from Protesterssmashing car windows without warning, Punching And kneeling People are held face down on the floor and used Battering rams on front doors and questioning people of color about their identity.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has defended many recorded incidents as legitimate uses of force against threatening people. And some Republican lawmakers have said they will work to strengthen ICE’s work within their borders.
Some lawmakers, legal experts and immigration advocates fear that a lack of federal oversight and the frail position of state governments could lead to more violence as President Donald Trump continues his push to arrest immigrants living in the United States illegally.
You cannot prosecute a murderer and an illegal immigration violator like a destitute nanny or a destitute landscaper with equal vigor.
– Muzaffar Chishti, Institute for Migration Policy
Previous administrations have prioritized arresting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who also have criminal records, but that is not the case in Trump’s second term.
“You can’t prosecute a murderer and an illegal immigration violator like a poor nanny or a poor landscaper with equal vigor. This administration has abandoned all discretion and all priorities, and you’re creating the narrative that you’re doing this patriotic, godly thing,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC
Chishti said there has been a rise in abusive tactics stemming from a number of federal policies. He pointed to the hefty utilize of inexperienced officers under intense pressure to make arrests, the military tactics designed to create spectacle and fear, and the harsh rhetoric that he said was aimed at stoking bellicose hostility toward immigrants and protesters.
More agents, more incidents
With Homeland Security, the number of ICE law enforcement officers has doubled in less than a year announce This month, 12,000 fresh agents were hired out of around 220,000 applicants. More and more agents have moved into cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. Their semi-automatic weapons, bulky vests and balaclavas often contrast with local police officers who wear name tags and sidearms.
Noem has insisted that ICE and other officials are the real victims of increasing violence, citing cases such as one on Jan. 14 when a man was shot in the leg by an ICE agent. She said in a news release that bystanders hit an officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle in Minneapolis as the officer tried to catch a fleeing suspect. Noem called it “an attempted assassination of federal law enforcement officers” in which “the officer, who was ambushed by three people, fired a defensive shot in defense of his life.”
Court records The report, released Jan. 20, included an officer’s account of only two assailants, the suspect and a friend who owned the car he was driving, and said the injured suspect tried to flee into the apartment building and that tear gas was used to force the men to surrender.
Noem, who claims On Monday it was announced that more than 10,000 immigrants have been arrested in Minnesota described Some people live illegally in the United States as “foreign invaders.” She called Good’s shooting self-defense against “an act of domestic terrorism.”
And in a press conference on Tuesday, Trump said told According to reporters, the deported people “make our criminals look like babies. They make our Hells Angels look like the sweetest people in the world.”
Such descriptions have become a tool to incite violence, Chishti said.
“When they say that they did God’s work with Renee Good, that she was a domestic terrorist, when you put it that way from the highest leadership of the agency, you’re basically sending a signal that there’s no accountability,” he said.
The Democrats are fighting back
State leaders who say they are concerned about violence are trying different approaches but cannot fully curb federal policies.
New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul said Citing Good’s shooting, state resources would not be used to assist in immigration raids. But local authorities in New York could still utilize other funds to facilitate with raids.
New Mexico’s Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for a limit on immigrant detention in the state, although two of the three existing detention centers there could remain in operation.
Colorado has started a fresh system for misconduct claims by federal agents, including ICE agents.
Some Republican-led states are taking the opposite approach Tennessee suggest legislation That would go beyond working with federal immigration authorities and enacting our own state immigration laws. If passed, it would test the limits of a 2012 Supreme Court decision that eliminated federal immigration enforcement based on a similar Arizona law.
Tennessee is following White House guidance in drafting the law, and other states are likely to follow suit. That would raise fresh civil rights concerns if states adopted some of the same tactics as the federal government.
“This is another way to unleash the states, not only to cooperate with the federal government, but also to have them agree to states adopting their own immigration enforcement, detention and deportation regimes,” said Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads the office a project Pursuit of federal immigration policy, speech in a Interview in May published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law.
The fight against federal measures is already tough, said Guttentag, who served in immigration policy positions under the Obama and Biden administrations.
“No single policy strategy can change this,” Guttentag told Stateline this week. “However, litigation has proven crucial and effective in curbing some of the most serious violations. The violence is a clear violation.”
It is tough to monitor a government that constantly pushes legal boundaries, Guttentag added.
“It’s like a ‘catch me if you can’ government. They adopt tactics and basically ask everyone to try to stop them.”
Two former federal prosecutors, Kristy Parker and Samantha Trepel, pleaded for state civil rights laws and investigations in a Jan. 14 letter op ed published in the Guardian with the headline “Cities and states must hold ICE accountable for violence. Federal authorities won’t do that.”
Accountability commissions – how one created by Illinois in October after ICE operations there — can facilitate, they wrote, preserve evidence and collect testimony in the face of federal obstructions, such as the blocking of a state investigation into Good’s death in Minnesota.
Possible civil rights laws
Another method mentioned by the former prosecutors: State civil rights legislation could theoretically Give people harmed by federal agents a hearing in state court under a legal concept called “Converse-1983.”
New York Governor Hochul has suggested such legislation. A similar Wisconsin measure died in July when the Republican majority on the Assembly Judiciary Committee refused to hold a hearing, said Democratic Rep. Andrew Hysell, the bill’s sponsor.
“It’s a positive approach to protecting our rights here in Wisconsin, our constitutional rights, because you can’t rely on the federal government to do that anymore,” Hysell said. “In the situations we have seen in Minnesota, the federal government is crossing the line into apparent violations of constitutional rights.”
However, the “converse-1983” idea has yet to be successfully used to sue a federal agent and may never succeed, said John Preis, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
“I would be shocked if the opposite was true – 1983 [lawsuits] went somewhere,” Preis said. “States are not allowed to pass laws that impede federal officials in doing their jobs. A reverse action from 1983 appears to do that.”
However, in some cases, such as the shooting of Renee Good, victims may be able to successfully sue the federal government without such a state law, Preis said. The The process is tough but the lawsuit could succeed if a violation of constitutional civil rights can be proven, he said. Lawyers for Good’s family announced Jan. 14 that they are considering a lawsuit.
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by State borderwhich is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes West Virginia Watch, and is a 501c(3) public charity supported by grants and a coalition of donors.
