MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he saw outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.
They wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noted, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for the Wisconsin-based electrician advertised on car doors yielded no results.
On Tuesday, when their Nissan returned to the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his encounter with the two men, who hide their faces as he approaches and are seen wearing heavy tactical gear under their yellow vests.
“This is where our taxpayers’ money goes: renting these vehicles with false tags to come sit here and see my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about whether the men were federal immigration officials. But encounters like Ramirez’s have become increasingly common.
As Minnesota’s major immigration crackdown continues, legal observers and officials say they have received an increasing number of reports of federal agents impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers and in some cases anti-ICE activists.
Not all of those incidents have been verified, but they have heightened fears in a state already on edge, adding to legal groups’ concerns about the Trump administration’s dramatic overhaul of immigration enforcement tactics nationwide.
“If you have people fearing that the electrician outside their home could be ICE, you’re inviting public mistrust and confusion on a much more dangerous level,” said Naureen Shah, the director of immigration advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s what you do if you’re trying to control a people, you’re not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”
A ‘more extreme degree’ of deception
In the past, immigration authorities have sometimes used disguises and other deceptions, which they call ruses, to enter homes without a warrant.
The tactics became more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, lawyers said, leading to an ACLU lawsuit accusing immigration agents of violating the U.S. Constitution by posing as local law enforcement during home raids. A recent settlement limited the practice to Los Angeles. But ICE decoys remain legal elsewhere in the country.
Still, the covert operations reported in Minnesota appear to be “a degree more extreme than we’ve seen in the past,” Shah said, in part because they appear to be taking place in plain sight.
Where past tactics were aimed at deceiving immigration targets, the current tactics may also be a response to the widespread networks of Minnesota citizen observers who have tried to draw the attention of federal agents before making arrests.
At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the central city center of ICE activity, activists told The Associated Press they had seen agents leave in vehicles with stuffed animals on their dashboards or Mexican flag decals on their bumpers. Pickups with wood or tools in their beds were also often spotted.
In recent weeks, federal agents have repeatedly shown up to construction sites dressed as workers, according to Jose Alvillar, lead organizer for the local immigrant rights group, Unidos MN.
“We’ve seen an increase in cowboy tactics,” he said, although he noted that the raids had not resulted in arrests. “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is pretending to be one.”
Using vintage plates
Since the start of the operation in Minnesota, local officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, have said ICE agents have been seen changing license plates or using fake ones, a violation of state law.
Candice Metrailer, an antiques dealer in south Minneapolis, believes she has seen such an attempt firsthand.
On January 13, she received a call from a man who identified himself as a collector, asking if her shop sold license plates. She said he did. A few minutes later, two men in street clothes entered the shop and began searching through her collection of vintage dishes.
“One of them says, ‘Hey, do you have any recent ones?'” Metrailer recalled. “Immediately, an alarm bell rang in my head.”
Metrailer went outside while the men continued to browse. A few doors down from the shop, she saw a Ford Explorer idling with blacked out windows. She memorized her license plate, then quickly plugged it into a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles linked to immigration enforcement.
The database shows that an identical Ford with the same plates had been photographed leaving the Whipple building seven times and reported at the scene of an immigration arrest weeks earlier.
When one of the men approached the register holding a white Minnesota plate, Metrailer said she told him the store had a new policy against selling the items.
Metrailer said it had reported the incident to the Minnesota attorney general. A DHS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Reaction to obstruction
Supporters of immigration crackdowns say the volunteer army of activists following ICE in Minneapolis has forced federal agents to adopt new methods to avoid detection.
“Of course agents are adapting their tactics to be one step ahead,” said Scott Mechkowski, ICE’s former deputy director of enforcement and operations in New York City. “We have never seen this level of obstruction and interference.”
In nearly three decades in immigration enforcement, Mechkowski said he hasn’t even seen an ICE agent disguise himself as a uniformed operative while making arrests.
Earlier this summer, a DHS spokesperson confirmed that a man wearing a high-visibility construction vest was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. In Oregon, a natural gas company published guidance last month on how customers can identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.
In the days after his encounter, Ramirez, the restaurant worker, said he was on high alert for undercover agents. He recently stopped a locksmith who feared he might be a federal agent, before quickly realizing he was a local resident.
“Everybody’s on edge about these guys, man,” Ramirez said. “They feel like they’re everywhere.”