President Trump has reshuffled the leadership of his immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota in the face of wide-spread anger over two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by federal agents. Operation commander Gregory Bovino is out, and Trump is sending Border Czar Tom Homan to take over.
But it's not clear changes at the top can solve a more basic problem: the immigration agents flooding the Twin Cities are generally less experienced in urban policing and crowd control than other police.
"The skills that these federal immigration agents are bringing to these cities are a complete mismatch for what we actually need," says Irene Vega, an associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine. "That's not what their job has been, historically, and I just think it's a very dangerous situation."
Vega studied the attitudes of Customs and Border Protection officers regarding use of force, a project that involved interviewing more than 90 officers. The CBP appears to make up the largest contingent of the roughly 3,000 agents deployed to Minnesota.
"They saw themselves as very different," she says. "They would tell me that they were trained to hike in the desert. They often told me about arresting 10, 15 people who were very compliant."
She says the isolation of the border region influenced the officers' calculus about use of force. She recalls one officer who explained that in the desert, he doesn't have the option to duck into an alley for cover.
"And so he said, 'I'm going to have to do what I have to do,'" Vega says.
Over the years, CBP has come under pressure to rein in its officers' use of deadly force along the border. Incidents of officers shooting at people for throwing rocks came under special scrutiny, and an external review in 2013.
"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."
The report recommended equipping CBP officers with less-lethal weapons such as pepper spray, a requirement that was added to the agency's handbook in 2014.
Now, in Minneapolis, CBP has come to rely heavily on sprays and other chemical irritants to push back protesters and observers. In some cases, such as the moments leading up to the fatal shooting on Saturday of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, the use of pepper spray appeared to inflame confrontations.
"There's a duty of obligation that you have in policing, if you incapacitate someone," says Leon Taylor. He's a retired Baltimore police officer, who also served as a military peace keeper in the Balkans He and other former police have been discussing the scenes coming out of Minnesota.
"If [a pepper-sprayed person] stumbles out into traffic and gets run over and killed, that's on me. There's a duty of care."
He says the videos appear to show federal officers escalating conflicts, instead of defusing them.
"They live in a toxic environment of their own creation that has nothing to do with policing," Taylor says, and he blames the message from high-level officials – such as Vice President Vance – that they have "immunity."
"If they told these guys instead, before they turned them loose, that you have an absolute responsibility, instead of absolute immunity… it starts with the mindset about what you are doing," he says.
David "Kawika" Lau was a senior instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, which trains CBP and other federal agents. He says in the years after the external report on CBP use of force there was an increased emphasis on teaching de-escalation techniques – training he helped to shape.
"We teach them emotional intelligence, self-regulation, self-awareness. Because you can't bring calm to any situation if you yourself are not calm," Lau says.
But he cautions that those techniques are meant to defuse one-on-one confrontations. He's not sure how well CBP is prepared for the raucous crowds in the Twin Cities.
"They may have some training and expertise in urban operations," Lau says. "But that is not what that position [CBP officer] was designed to do. Therefore, that's not what the training is designed to produce."
Federal immigration agencies say they're being forced into an unfamiliar role. CBP commissioner Rodney Scott told Fox News over the weekend, "The primary training was to go out and arrest suspects, which is already dangerous. This entire environment, where the community is encouraged by local leaders to come out and actually prevent you from making a felony arrest, it's a new dynamic. We're trying to evolve to it."
Minnesota leaders have largely encouraged protesters to be peaceful; they have not explicitly called for people to prevent immigration arrests.
But federal officials say that's still the effect, as protesters tail immigration agents and try to warn people at risk of arrest. And these officers may now be more inclined to respond to such protesters as law-breakers: A recent Attorney General memo on "domestic terrorism" lists potential charges, including "impeding" federal officers, and "seditious conspiracy to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States."
Minnesota officials say the feds' approach to urban law enforcement has distracted them from their immigration enforcement mission. On Sunday, Governor Tim Walz said federal agents had neglected to take into custody a non-citizen with a serious criminal record as he was released from a jail outside the metro area.
"They're too busy up here, doing what they did yesterday [the Pretti shooting] to go pick up someone who actually should be removed from this country," he said.
"It's their job to do immigration and customs enforcement. It's law enforcement's job to do law enforcement in Minnesota," Walz said.
On Monday, as the political backlash against the federal presence in Minnesota grew, Walz had what he called a "productive call" with President Trump. He said the president told him he would consider reducing the number of federal officers in Minnesota.
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