A Police Chief's Rage Against Federal Immigration Raids

"It's crazy that the president is saying that," Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said, his voice rising with frustration. He was referring to Donald Trump's description of Somali residents in Minnesota as "garbage." The word "crazy" came up three times in our conversation—a telling repetition from a man pushed past his breaking point.

We were driving through South Minneapolis, past the emptied corridors of Karmel Mall, a hub of the Somali community that has become a ghost town since armed federal agents in tactical gear began swarming the city.

When Federal Force Meets Local Reality

Operation Metro Surge, which the Trump administration calls the largest immigration enforcement operation in history, has deployed over 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis alone. They outnumber local police 5-to-1—an overwhelming force that has created what O'Hara calls "a public safety emergency."

The federal government gave his department zero advance notice. "Communication has collapsed," O'Hara told me as we toured the department's command center, where officers frantically monitor multiple screens trying to make sense of operations happening in their own city without their knowledge.

The impact is immediate and personal. O'Hara's own officers—many of them people of color hired as part of post-George Floyd reforms—are being stopped while off duty. One officer in neighboring St. Paul has been detained twice.

The Shadow of George Floyd

O'Hara became chief in 2022, but he works in the long shadow of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd. "When I first got here, the stories people would tell me on both sides, from the residents and the cops... the violence was just being normalized," he said.

The irony isn't lost on him. For decades since the civil rights era, the federal government policed the police, ensuring oversight after brutality. Now the roles are reversed: federal authorities encourage aggressive tactics while local police try to maintain community trust.

"We're the police in the United States. We're expected to honor the dignity of all human beings, right?" The fact that he phrased this as a question, not a statement, reveals his uncertainty about what policing means in this moment.

Chaos in Real Time

When Vice President J.D. Vance accused Minneapolis police of abandoning federal agents under siege at a restaurant, O'Hara pulled the 911 records. The truth was mundane: a lieutenant had assessed the situation and was preparing to respond when protesters naturally dispersed.

"All of these keyboard warriors that don't know what they're talking about," O'Hara said. "It's just bullshit."

More troubling is what he's witnessed of federal tactics. He described video of agents shattering a woman's car window while she explained she needed to get to a doctor, then brandishing knives to cut her seatbelt. "It just looks like complete chaos," he said. "They have no experience. They don't know where they are."

Another Shooting, Another Breaking Point

When Renee Good was shot on January 7th, O'Hara felt tense but manageable. When Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents two and a half weeks later, something snapped.

"I was so outraged that I began physically shaking," he recalled. "I thought, 'This is going to be it. There's no way we can control this.'"

He immediately called the National Guard. The fact that Minneapolis didn't erupt in 2020-style unrest might owe something to the 7-degree weather that kept people indoors.

The Price of "Law and Order"

The federal crackdown has undermined its own stated goals. O'Hara's department had been working with federal prosecutors on hundreds of gang-related racketeering cases. Now those same prosecutors have resigned under pressure to investigate Good's widow, effectively ending cooperation on the welfare fraud cases that supposedly justified the entire operation.

"Remember," O'Hara said, "this was supposedly about fraud."

The Minneapolis experiment may be testing the very limits of American federalism—and the communities caught in between are paying the price.