As Minneapolis continues to reel from the fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents on the morning of January 24, the international spotlight is firmly fixed on the heavily armed and masked operatives who have spearheaded the Trump administration’s violent immigration sweeps.
At the heart of the deployment in Minnesota, as well as the chaotic clashes with communities in Southern California and Illinois, are hundreds of agents that operate within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection: ICE’s two Special Response Teams (SRT), CBP’s one SRT, and the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). These paramilitary tactical units behave not like local police, but instead like special forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other far-flung battlefields from the Forever Wars of the past quarter century.
Amid the widespread, hostile confrontations with concerned citizens in Minneapolis, the unusually aggressive conduct of the Department of Homeland Security’s tactical teams have led to two killings: ICE SRT agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good on January 7, while CBP SRT agent Raymundo Gutierrez was identified by ProPublica as one of the two masked feds who shot and killed Pretti.
The brutal tactics of SRT and BORTAC units seem to have spread into ICE and CBP as a whole. Over the last year, these DHS agencies have morphed into a masked, seemingly unaccountable force that detains children, separates families, blows open doors, snatches teachers and parents from schools and day care centers, and kills unarmed protesters who were simply voicing dissent or recording the mayhem. In 16 shootings involving Department of Homeland Security personnel since July, none have faced state or federal charges, according to The Washington Post.
Now, following Good and Pretti’s killings, the future of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota is now in flux. Gregory Bovino, who led Border Patrol sweeping operations in Minnesota, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other Democratic-run cities and claimed Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement,” has been sent back to his previous post in California. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border czar,” took the reins from Bovino in Minnesota, vowing to conduct “targeted enforcement operations” while continuing to pressure the state’s law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration authorities despite laws preventing this support.
“I didn't ask them to be immigration officers,” Homan said late last month, referring to Minnesota police. “I'm asking them to be cops working with cops to help us take criminal aliens off the street."
If ICE and CBP’s SRT and BORTAC units continue to be involved, however, it is unlikely they’ll operate like most regular “cops” at all.
The tactics used by SRT and BORTAC vastly differ from those of local police or sheriffs. They use explosives to breach the doors of homes. Team members are equipped with full tactical gear, military-style helmets, assault rifles, and heavy-duty crowd-control weapons like pepper balls, foam launchers, and flash-bang grenades. They have deployed less lethal munitions and chemical dispersants with little or no warning. Federal agents have charged into crowds without dispersal orders, dogpiling people who often are doing nothing more than observing or yelling their disapproval at the feds. And like in overseas battlefields or counter-narcotics missions abroad, DHS agents appear to have been told that they no longer need judicial warrants before breaking into private homes or making arrests, per an ICE memo released in a whistleblower report and guidance reportedly issued by the Department of Justice.
Moreover, the teams are currently being deployed in situations they were previously restricted from taking part in, such as routine warrant service, per a set of SRT operations guidelines leaked to Unicorn Riot in 2019.