Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told residents to call 911 on anyone wearing a mask trying to detain individuals amid concerns that President Donald Trump would target Somali immigrants in the city.
At a Tuesday press conference alongside Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other local officials, O’Hara complained that Trump’s enforcement of immigration law using unmarked, unmasked officers against illegal immigrants was creating a climate of fear in the city. Responding to a question originally posed to Frey as to how the city can meaningfully hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials accountable if they believe they are breaking the law, O’Hara referenced reports of locals calling 911 when witnessing the detention of people by masked individuals they weren’t sure were law enforcement or not.
The police chief encouraged locals to call 911 when such situations were unfolding after earlier stressing that local law enforcement would never cooperate with federal law enforcement on immigration enforcement.
“We have experienced reports in this city … where people call to say that there’s folks that are masked, that they’re not sure if they’re law enforcement, that they may be kidnapping people. We have had those reports,” he said. “I want to be clear to the community — the community should know that if you see something like that, that that is legitimate, that you don’t know if someone is law enforcement, you should call 911, and you should provide as much information as possible.”
To try and justify his concern, O’Hara referred to the assassination of state lawmakers in June, allegedly carried out by Vance Boelter while wearing a silicon mask and police outfit.
“So please, that’s something everyone should report and that we will immediately respond to and we will document — whether it’s somebody’s not sure if there’s a kidnapping happening, somebody’s not sure if there’s law enforcement present or not, and that’s something else,” O’Hara added. “That is additional policy requirements that we are implementing — we will document and report these types of things anytime that we hear it and remind our officers of their duty to intervene.”
The police chief then went a step further, arguing that police should intervene even in cases where they believe the rights of the targeted individual are being violated.
“So if there is anything that is, you know, a violation of someone’s human rights or civil rights, excessive force or anything like that, they absolutely have a duty to intervene as police officers,” O’Hara concluded.
In his own answer, Frey cast doubt on the legitimacy of ICE operations by saying it would be “inevitable” that they would detain U.S. citizens.
“I feel that it will be a practical inevitability that when people are arrested by federal immigration agents, they’re going to get the wrong people. They’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to screw it up so badly that they’re not just violating habeas corpus, but they are taking away the rights of American citizens,” he said.
Trump has set his sights on illegal Somali immigrants in Minnesota after a bombshell report from City Journal regarding widespread fraud by the Somali community, fraud that allegedly involved the funneling of government funds to the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab.
“And when you look at what he’s done with Somalia, with Somalia, which is barely a country, you know … they have nothing. They just run around killing each other. There’s no structure,” Trump said at a Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar, who I don’t know at all, but I always watch her. For years, I’ve watched her complain about our Constitution.”
