MN Police Chief Intervenes To Free A US Citizen Arrested By Federal Officers
from the good-guy-with-a-gun dept
No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let’s just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration’s bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio:
MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday to prevent federal immigration agents from taking a local resident into detention, although the city of St. Peter denied the intervention in a statement Saturday.
It’s believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago.
It won’t be the last. But it’s sure to anger the administration, which has already made it clear it thinks local officials are to blame for the two people federal officers have murdered in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.
The person federal officers ran off the road, threatened at gun point, dragged out of the car, and arrested was someone who was merely observing what they were doing. It was one woman in one car and yet federal officers felt compelled to box her in and approach her with weapons drawn. They treated this like a felony stop, as though they were in the process of apprehending a known violent criminal, rather than one person armed with a dash cam and a cellphone.
She wasn’t doing anything illegal. She was doing what anyone could have done: recorded law enforcement officers performing their public duties. Just because ICE et al would prefer to go about their business unobserved (hence the rented cars, dummy license plates, and face masks) doesn’t make being seen by others an illegal act.
Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to tell others to call 911 on her behalf. Federal officers arrested her and drove her towards the Whipple Federal Building, presumably in hopes of getting her on the next plane to wherever the fuck before she had a chance to contact anyone.
But her 911 call derailed this:
“I couldn’t hear what was being said, but within 30 seconds after they hung up, they exited on, an exit that goes into Le Sueur… and then turned around, didn’t say anything to me, and started heading back towards St. Peter.”
The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.
Shortly after that, Chief Grochow drove her home from the St. Peter police station, where the federal officers had left her.
This is frightening stuff. If her husband hadn’t managed to talk to an attorney and if that attorney hadn’t reached out to the police chief, this US citizen might still be sitting in an ICE detention center.
And if that’s not frightening enough, there’s this coda, which makes it clear this administration is willing to punish anyone who won’t immediately try to lick the boots pressed to their necks:
MPR News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident. A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman’s name, date of birth and “A-number,” or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them.
What the fuck. This isn’t normal. This is a rogue administration that answers to no one and has made it clear to the federal officers who serve it (rather than the public they’re supposed to be serving) that they’ll never be punished for behaving like violent, lawless thugs. Many more people are going to be brutalized, if not actually killed, by this government simply because they refuse to ignore what ICE, etc. are doing.
Filed Under: cbp, dhs, ice, mass deportation, matt grochow, st peter, trump administration
Comments on “MN Police Chief Intervenes To Free A US Citizen Arrested By Federal Officers”
I do hope the military stops taking orders from the orange Adolf. It’s about time they put their actions where their words are: to protect the constitution.
You don’t know any black people, huh?
I have seen it said that she was supposedly driving, erratically, at excessive speeds, and running red lights and stop signs before they pulled her over. I haven’t seen any proof of this, but that is the story that is being spread.
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And is there a reason you’re helping to spread it without evidence?
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So, DHS is Department of Highway Safety now?
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And, even if true, that would have put her under ICE jurisdiction how?
Re: A story from ..
A bunch of liars said this. They have zero credibility and anything they say should be immediately discarded without reliable corroboration.
So it didn’t happen. The video doesn’t show that.
According to her. She absolutely could have been obstructing them, which IS illegal, and yes, they can arrest you for that. Whether that’s worth doing can vary with the facts on the ground.
You’re using “detention” to make it seem analogous to detaining an illegal alien for deportation, and it absolutely is not that. It’s an arrest, for a crime.
It absolutely is, actually.
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That’s because they are.
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Is it a dopamine rush? You don’t trust the administration’s propaganda mouthpieces to spread the message wide enough? You’re cursed by a witch to be an oppositionally defiant asshole?
What grand motivation drives you to just blanket defend every action the feds take as if you’ll die if you let an article pass unopposed, regardless of how little knowledge or substance you have on the matter?
Just statistically not every single action any administration takes is going to be legal.
I tell you what, just tell us what you think the administration has gotten wrong and besides that, we’ll just assume you think everything else from the torment nexus to the orphan crushing machine is perfectly legal and normal, and then you won’t even have to bother returning.
Hell, we can script a chatbot that can reasonably predict your bullshit.
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ICE aren’t cops and they have zero jurisdiction over citizens. Put it back in your pants, fascist.
Gunpoint Abduction Victim Rescued
Perpetrators remain at large, armed and dangerous.
"Federal officers arrested her"
You are willing to admit this?
I dont think we have seen the opath they take yet.
Which may be Very important, as we KNOW they are not taught the Laws they are SUPPOOSED to not Cross.
Welcome to the Police State. It’s been in preparation ever since the start of the Patriot Act. Earlier administrations found it quite handy, and now you can see it in all its glory.
In Minnesota, would the person filming have been legally in the wrong for using force to defend themselves? If a group of masked & hooded men jump out of a red Mazda with guns drawn at your face, what can you even do?
Also, what rental agencies are supplying these vehicles? Maybe they’ve already been named & shamed, but not enough. Every business and individual that has assisted in this atrocity needs to be socially excommunicated, at minimum. We will not forget, and we will not forgive. In 2050 I want to hear people saying “oh don’t use that company, they were Republicans.”
Ah, so other LEOs can intervene.
Now if some state would grow enough spine to deploy the National Guard themselves (and i guess hope they do not get co-opted) to, i don’t know, guard the nation from illegal paramilitary thugs, that’d be great.
It’s perfectly ‘normal’ for a regime whose only guiding light is ‘I do what I want’. As I’ve said many times before [i]this isn’t an administration[/i] and people need to stop hoping it will act like one; ‘administration’ implies a system of rules and processes.
What you have is rule by whim and decree from the mad king down. And it needs to be opposed on that basis.
The pussyfooting that your nominal opposition leaders are doing right now is sickening; anybody whose response to the sturmtruppen is ‘we want the sturmtruppen to be slightly nicer’ is not reliably in the fight against the fascist takeover currently in progress.
I’ve asked this before, and I’ve never gotten a direct answer. What legal distinction should exist between and citizen and a noncitizen? Or, should there be no distinction at all?
Re: bill of rights makes not much distinction at all
The Bill of Rights does not make any such distinction on its face. There are mentions of the ``rights of the people” which should be protected.
It was understood at the time that people referred to white land-owning males, but that was not generally in the text. It has since been argued that the definion of ``people” should be expanded to include women and persons who were not white or who did not own land. Citizenship has not historically been included implicitly as a barrier to personhood.
US 1st Amendment provides prohibitions to congress and refers to the ``right of the people to peaceably assembly and to petition”.
US 2nd Amendment provides for the ``right of the people” to have weapons.
US 3rd Amendment does require land ownership, in that the consent of the owner is required or else the government may not quarter soldiers in their houses.
US 4th Amendment refers to the ``right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”. Nothing in there distinguishes rented houses from owned houses.
US 5th Amendment contains implicit ownership requirement in ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”, though that is not a land ownership requirement in that personalty may also be taken for public use.
None of the others have citizenship requirements, either.
(yes, preview w/o javascript is still broken in the [not-so-]new techdirt platform)
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Thank you for this reply!
So, if everybody should be treated the same, why IS there a legal distinction between citizen and non-citizen? Can’t we just make every living person on Earth a citizen of the USA?
I guess what I’m getting at is what distinction does the different titles conference to the individuals? If there is absolutely no difference at all under the law, then why do we have the distinction at all? What is its utility?
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Aren’t you a lawyer? Then you should know that a citizen has obligations and allegiance to the country which in turn confer political rights which is something noncitizens don’t have or are entitled to, other than that there aren’t much of legal differences to which rights they are entitled except those specifically dealing with noncitizens rights to stay in a country.
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This rhetorical device where you ask dumb questions is not clever. You’re leaving it too wide open like you’re waiting for people to walk into a trap so you can pretend to make a valid point based only on someone else’s stated position, thus putting them on the defensive where you likely expect they will make a mistake you can exploit.
Different random people will have different opinions as to why there’s a distinction or should or shouldn’t be, but there’s also a factual one you could research regarding the perspective of the legislators who actually decided, in additional to many quite exhaustive academic texts and papers regarding political philosophy and history.
Are you asking for opinions of individuals, in which case you’re just randomly interviewing people on the street despite them not having the power to enforce the law or change it…? Or are you expecting people to do the legwork regarding research you likely should have already done if you had actually gone to law school?
I’m very sad that discourse in our world has gotten so terrible that no one can recognize a genuine request to engage in conversation.
So I’ll start first. I believe that a citizen of a country should first and foremost be entitled to the right to participate in self-governance. In other words, citizens should vote; non-citizens should not. Secondly, I believe that whatever social contract is implied between me and the citizens of the same country in which I am a citizen, should not require me to make non-citizens third-party beneficiaries. In other words, I shouldn’t have to pay taxes so that a non-citizen can get social services. Remember, please, that these are just examples, so don’t attack the specifics–attack the principle I’m trying to explication. There are, of course, some de minimus benefits that would accrue to a non-citizen in a robust society–such as roads, sweets, water services, etc. I can’t, and wouldn’t want to, stop a non-citizen from drinking water out if a public water fountain.
I think that a citizen can never be excluded from his/her country, under any circumstances. That includes naturalized citizens. If we thought highly-enough of them to make them citizens, then they are citizens. No distinction between citizens, sua generis and citizens, de jure.
Here’s where I think the controversy will begin. I think that a non-citizen can be excluded from entry into a country on whatever terms that country chooses. A non-citizen can be expelled from a country on whatever terms that country chooses. If the non-citizen refuses to leave, then I believe he/she can be forced to leave.
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If anyone here thought you were actually trying to engage in genuine conversation instead of trying to JAQ off or prove some point about “The Tolerant Left” by being all polite and civil while talking about supporting inhumane policies so you can make yourself look like “a good person”, maybe we’d try harder to be nice to you. Hell, I disagree with Arianity quite a bit, but I generally try to avoid treating them like shit because I know they’re here for an actual conversation. They’re not trying to lay a trap and spring it by surprise.
Also, most of your shit is agreeable on its face, but when you’re saying shit like…
…you’re giving away your game. The issue has less to do with the broad strokes positions you claim to hold and far more to do with your avowed support for masked thugs with guns kidnapping brown people and trafficking them to concentration camps with conditions so terrible that “concentration camps” is the only appropriate name for them. You support the violence of ICE, you support the violent and inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump, and you’re not here for anything but the satisfaction of proving that “The Tolerant Left” is exactly what assholes like Ben Shapiro and people brainwashed by the billionaire pedo psyop that is /pol/ say it is.
You want a conversation? Stop JAQing off, stop being insincere, and start being geniunely fucking curious. If you can’t do that, don’t expect a conversation when you’re absolutely not here for one.
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The horror! You found out! I actually meant what I said in the last paragraph I in the post above.
Okay. Again. Thank you for raging at me and refusing to engage. Do you have disagreement with any of the things I wrote above? Maybe I wrote them disingenuously, but can you tell me if you disagree with it anyway?
I also think rules should be written down and followed when it comes to the removal of non-citizens. If the rules have been followed and a decision made according to those rules that a particular non-citizen should be expelled, then I believe that decision should be enforced. It should be enforced in as humane a manner as possible. Ideally, if that non-citizen is in custody somewhere when that decision is made, the non-citizen should not be released from that custody, regardless of who is the custodial agency.
So, for those who believe ICE is evil, etc., do we have any disagreement thus far? Please, no personal attacks, because we can all I agree that I’m a terrible person. How about my ideas, though? Where should this distinction be modified to make me less of an evil ogre?
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See, this is exactly why nobody thinks you’re here for a conversation and everybody knows your act is all an attempt to play some “I’m just an innocent and undereducated flyover state person why won’t anyone be nice to me UwU” game. You want to play that game? Go to 4chan. But we’re not idiots around here, son.
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The thing is, this is goat-fucking. It doesn’t matter if you are being sincere or not because your implication is that there’s nothing wrong with you coldly discussing human rights abuses as if they are excusable as long as you pretend you have some calm, logical justification. It’s actually worse if you’re sincere because it means sociopathy rather than just dumb attempts at trolling.
Except “raging” is engaging. There’s content in the “rage.” And remaining dispassionate on perhaps the most high stakes human issues isn’t a virtue. A calm genocidal fascist is still a genocidal fascist. Being calm about moral atrocities doesn’t make you rational.
Rules have been written down and aren’t being followed when it comes to human rights abuses, due process violations, court orders as part of checks and balances and coequel branches of government.
By whom and by which process? There are multiple processes and statuses and different people deciding. People who have been following legal procedures have been deported. People who had refugee and asylum statuses had their statuses revoked, not out of any considerations following proper due process or violations of procedures, but because of blanket xenophobic prejudices by the administration seeking to fill quotas based on inflated propaganda numbers.
How would you currently judge ICE and CBP’s humane enforcement on a scale of 1 – 10, 1 being Nazi death camps and 10 being private plane flights to Epstein’s Island? Have you watched the news at all in the last year? If you don’t already think that the federal government’s abuses have gone too far (we know you don’t, because, as Stephen has quoted, you think it hasn’t gone far enough), at what point do you think it could go too far such that the law shouldn’t be enforced because the government appears incapable of enforcing it without committing atrocities? Does it have to be swastika-flying concentration camps, and only if Trump names them concentration camps instead of Proud American Detention Freedom Centers™? Where is your line?
What if holding the non-citizen child means they’ll be exposed to a highly contagious deadly disease and therefore the custody is commiserate with indiscriminate manslaughter? It’s okay to let them die because they were born on the wrong side of a line? Oopsies? It’s not like we want to spend tax money making sure we’re not spreading diseases? Did the immigrant child pay their copay and insurance premiums? How can billionaires profit off of this?
Absolutely. You’re being myopic. You’re minimizing the far worse crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing (and again, this is not hyperbolic), of human and constitutional rights abuses, all for the sake of supposedly addressing the significantly less awful non-crime of remaining in the country without official permission. This is why you can never purport to be reasonable and be believed.
“I’m only suggesting that it’s okay that we gleefully brutalize and abduct people, including sick children, and quite possibly greatly and directly contribute to their actual fucking deaths, because they’re here without my personal permission. Why would you be so unreasonable as to suggest I’m a bad person?”
Personally making awful statements warrants personally getting criticized for your awful statements.
“Please don’t respond with the appropriate response to my actually evil statements.”
Wrong approach entirely. That you’re trying or pretending to try to engage on ideas instead of just having an ounce of empathy for fellow human beings is indicative of your primary issue. You can’t reason yourself into or out of this because you are a subjective being with inherent biases you’re not ready to let go of, so your supposedly “rational” and “logical” thoughts will always be tainted by those biases. And your sealioning and JAQing off methods indicate that you think you’re clever and smart, which goes with the whole supposed lawyer thing, so you likely think you can just be clever enough to rationalize your beliefs. Conservatives typically have higher levels of disgust for outgroups and are more likely to have fear and insecurity as motivations. You also likely have other trauma and psychological issues that can’t be diagnosed via random comments on an internet forum that also play into the biases that will inherently taint what you see as cold logic and rational thinking. You do actually fool yourself into believing what you want.
It’s a classic, and I don’t know if the anecdote is true, but there was a tweet years ago that stated, “During my research I interviewed a guy who said he was a libertarian until he did MDMA and realized that other people have feelings.”
What you need is not more logic. You need emotional intelligence. And the kneejerk conservative response to this would probably be to misunderstand and assume I’m saying you need to be more emotional and clearly that means I’m saying you have to be less intelligent to have empathy. But it’s actually the opposite (because, you know, real life is always more complicated than pithy phrases and gut feeling “logic”). I’m saying that you need to have the greater insight and intelligence to realize that your emotions, however suppressed on the surface, are actually affecting your “logic” and you’re not as coldly rational as you think you are. And, hey, if you want to find some shrooms and go on a trip of self discovery and meet god inside your brain and realize you’re actually a selfish asshole, awesome.
A good framing is to ask yourself why you’re myopically focused on undocumented immigration when there are so many more, so far worse atrocities occurring in society. Do immigrants actively abuse you every day? Did an immigrant seduce your crush? Lead a rival gang to victory in a dance off with your gang? Why as a lawyer who statistically is likely to earn more and have a more comfortable life than the average American are you of all people more concerned about them than other people with far greater vulnerabilities? What did they ever do to you?
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I’ll say this: You don’t pay taxes so other people can benefit, you pay taxes so you personally can benefit from living in a functional society. This is a concept that seems to be alien to most Americans who get incensed when tax money is spent in a way they find unfair, ie the think someone else is undeservedly benefitting from the taxes they paid.
That’s not controversial in the slightest, that you think so means you don’t actually understand what the real controversy is: The government is ignoring and breaking the law, not upholding it and there are people like you who are cheering them on while unable to understand why other people find that reprehensible. It’s very disturbing that none of you can’t see how it destroys democracy and the rule of law and how it is replacing them with might makes right.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Do you think you’re the first person to try sealioning? Do you think you’re first person we’ve ever seen try it here?
You’re falsely pretending as if others should be expected or required to engage with you as you expect rather than be free to engage how they choose. Why should your disingenuous pearl clutching be respected while the actually warranted outrage at human rights abuses should be muted? Why are you pretending you get to control how other people engage?
This is already the case, legally. So, bold stance there.
This is the right wing libertarian bullshit writ large. “I don’t want my taxes to pay for ______.” They’re not your taxes. They’re our taxes, as a collective nation. You get to control any charity you want to donate. Taxes aren’t charity. I don’t want my taxes to pay for the military, but I don’t get free license to beat up veterans just because I’m upset we drone strike children in other countries to make billionaires wealthier. And it’s not just immigrants. You might not want your taxes to go to people who are poorer than you also. You might hold them in disgust and think their poverty is a sign of a moral failure and they deserve what they experience in life. But the nature of a large complex society is that you benefit and have benefited from other people paying taxes since before you were born. You can’t possibly pay back the synergistic benefit that others have collectively provided for you. You daily use infrastructure paid for by taxes. But you’re just paying your taxes. There is no requirement that you make non-citizen third-party beneficiaries. Is the government requiring you to provide pro bono services to non-citizens? You’re not helping them out at all, beyond any inadvertent collective actions that are merely byproducts of a complicated society.
This connection between “I pay taxes” and “these people I don’t like benefit from taxes” therefore “I’m paying for them to benefit” is myopic. Average salary for lawyers in the US is about $150k/yr based on random googling. You’ll probably not tell us your income, so we’ll just go with that as an estimate. That’s higher than the average American, but even then, you do not make enough to pay enough in taxes to help much of anyone. Taxes are a collective pool of money. The entire value of them is that everyone pays ostensibly what they can afford (or much less if they’re billionaires with accountants and lobbyists on payroll) and then everyone in society can benefit from them. Ironically, non-citizens, and the poor who I’ll just assume you don’t like also, benefit the least from taxes. In fact, undocumented workers and non-citizens often pay into taxes that pay for services that they legally cannot and functionally do not directly benefit from. They literally pay into social security they cannot draw from.
In other words, non-citizens shouldn’t have to pay taxes so that selfish assholes can get social benefits, but they do.
Nope. The examples you choose are indicative of your mindset. They are fair game. You don’t get to set rules for how people engage.
You’re getting into semantics here. Roads are a social service. So you just contradicted yourself. I’m all for handing out candy, but maybe we’re liable for dentistry services too then. Streets are a social good too though.
But to get around all this sociopathic compartmentalization again, which bible verses support the idea that you should shun foreigners and force them out the country at all? Why would you purport to be a Christian and then hold dissonant beliefs?
Do you think that a citizen should not be forced to return to their country if they have a reasonable expectation that they would be subject to human rights abuses if they did return?
Nope, already there.
The country or just the worst people in the country that happen to come to power, who have no respect for the law as written, only their propagandized and selfish interpretation of the law, typically understood through 2 minutes hate sessions rather than any academic or legal reading of the actual law? Does the administration get to make up lies in order to justify illegal deportations and ignore court orders and specifically act quickly in hopes of getting ahead of anticipated court orders?
And if the person in question is a citizen, but you don’t know if they are or aren’t, and you stop them and demand “papers please” and they present them, and you say you don’t care, and you brutalize them, and you scrape their faces against the concrete, and you hold their bare hands down in the sub-zero frozen snow, and you detain them for hours in inhumane conditions, is your opinion about non-citizens validated somehow?