Onlooker Jennifer Davila, who works in the community, said it already had been on edge because of raids. It’s tight-knit, and ”if something happens, we know about it,” she said.
”They had a white van, a black van and a tank. For a raid, that’s pretty excessive,” Davila said. ”And then coming into a brown community and doing this, because we have all kinds of immigrants, not just Latinos.”
While the mayor said there were no arrests, a few protesters were at least temporarily detained as tensions grew between the crowd and the law enforcement officers. A Minnesota Public Radio photographer was pepper-sprayed and had his camera broken.
A Facebook post from the sheriff’s office said it ”partnered with federal agencies on a criminal investigation and part of that investigation included the execution of multiple search warrants at multiple locations in the metro area.”
Frey said the police department’s only role was helping with crowd control, and that the department was not involved in ”anything related to immigration enforcement.” Both the police department and sheriff’s offices have policies against cooperating with immigration enforcement actions.
The sheriff’s office said that in conducting criminal investigations, ”We work with federal partners regularly.” A local FBI spokesperson, Diana Freedman, declined in a text message to provide details about the operation.
