Three progressive Minneapolis City Council members are quietly working to strengthen the city’s 22-year-old separation ordinance that limits coordination between the city’s police department and federal immigration authorities, hoping to set a national standard for pushback against what they say is illegal overreach by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies.
“We want to make sure that we are not doing the work of a federal government that seeks to kidnap our neighbors without due process,” City Council Member Aurin Chowdhury said in an interview with MinnPost.
Chowdhury is working on the measure with Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai and fellow member Jason Chavez, in consultation with the Minneapolis City Attorney’s office, she said. A city spokesperson declined to comment on the discussions.
While Chowdhury said she and fellow members are still working on specifics, advocates for a stronger ordinance are calling for measures like no information sharing between the city and federal agencies, and punitive measures for local law enforcement agents who violate the ordinance.
Related: Frey, Carter prepare for National Guard deployment they hope will not come
The effort comes as President Donald Trump targets “sanctuary” cities like Los Angeles and Chicago that have local ordinances safeguarding the rights of noncitizen residents, regardless of immigration status. In Minnesota, 20 counties and two cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, have been designated by the Department of Homeland Security as “sanctuary jurisdictions.”
Talk of strengthening the city’s separation ordinance ramped up following a June 3 federal search of a Lake Street business. Hundreds of people showed up to protest it, believing it was an immigration raid. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara defended the presence of MPD officers on the scene, saying they were called in for crowd control.
What MPD says about the separation ordinance
Responding to a City Council request in May for information about MPD’s practices around the separation ordinance, MPD said it had issued a special order in February prohibiting officers from “engaging in federal immigration enforcement activities.” The Minneapolis City Auditor’s after-action review of the June 3 raid found MPD followed the city’s existing separation ordinance despite allowing agents to move freely around the crowd.
But Chowdhury said the review also revealed “inadequate” communication between City Hall and local council members about the extent of MPD involvement in the raid.
“What was also shown in the after-action review is that the separation ordinance needs to be strengthened because it is outdated, created before ICE was even an entity,” she said.
In a constituent update Friday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the city’s separation ordinance is already among the country’s strongest.
“Minneapolis has strictly upheld its Separation Ordinance … ensuring that City employees – including police officers and firefighters – are prohibited from participating in civil immigration enforcement,” the update said.
Related: Minnesota sheriff’s departments seek to cooperate with ICE
Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and legal ethicist who served in the administration of former President George W. Bush, shares Minneapolis officials’ and activists’ concerns about federal overreach.
“I strongly oppose [ICE agents] wearing masks,” he said, adding that doing so could run afoul of 19th-century laws targeting the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror in the post-Civil War South. He argued that the last thing an understaffed Minneapolis Police Department needs right now is to be yoked into supporting a powerful federal agency that has seen its budget increase threefold this year.
“Minneapolis can say they’re a sanctuary city, but if there’s a legal basis for someone to be detained, there’s nothing they can do about it,” Painter said.
Still, local groups like the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee want the city to do more. At an Oct. 16 news conference attended by mayoral candidates Sen. Omar Fateh, DeWayne Davis and Jazz Hampton, MIRAC representatives laid out four specific demands of the city: no information-sharing between local law enforcement and federal agencies; no local law enforcement participation in federal enforcement, even in supportive roles like crowd control; a requirement that federal agents show their faces and wear official badges with name plates; and “punitive measures” up to and including termination for personnel or agencies violating the separation ordinance.
Related: Under ICE contracts, Minnesota entities have leased gun ranges, sold ammo and provided myriad goods and services
But Painter said the Constitution is clear that the federal power to enforce immigration law overrides state or local jurisdiction. In other words, a stronger separation ordinance won’t prevent ICE from doing what it wants in Minneapolis or anywhere else.
Speaking in Minneapolis on Oct. 24, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Minnesota could expect “dozens of new agents and federal officers” in coming weeks as part of ongoing hiring to ramp up immigration enforcement.
MIRAC member Erika Zurawski said her organization is meeting with City Council members next week.
“We recognize that our demands go above and beyond what other cities are doing … we are demanding Minneapolis lead the way,” Zurawski said.
Chowdhury agrees that Minneapolis should set the standard for how big, multicultural cities stand up to the Trump administration. But while she acknowledged “the urgency of the moment,” she declined to say when a draft ordinance could come before the City Council.
“We are going to take the time to get it right,” she said. “We want to make sure we have accounted for everything.”
The post Minneapolis council members taking on update of city’s separation ordinance appeared first on MinnPost.
