Police and ICE Agents Are on a Collision Course

Updated on January 24 at 4:33 p.m. ET

In 2023, the Department of Justice released a blistering report on the patterns and practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. The police force responsible for George Floyd’s death three years earlier, the DOJ wrote, regularly “uses unreasonable deadly force,” “unlawfully retaliates against people who observe and record their activities,” and “fails to adequately discipline police misconduct.” The department also engaged in the “inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive” practice of shooting at moving cars. In one case, an officer who had the time and space to move out of the path of an escaping vehicle instead fired four shots at it. The officer’s use of force, the report said, “was reckless and unreasonable.”

The Justice Department this month opted against conducting an investigation into the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed after an ICE officer fired shots into her moving Honda Pilot. The government is instead reportedly pushing to probe the actions of Good’s wife, who recorded the incident on her phone. For local police in Minneapolis—who have spent much of the past five years aiming to overhaul their tactics and restore community trust by embracing an ethos of deescalation—watching thousands of federal agents rush into their city with a very different mandate has been disorienting, current and former law-enforcement officials told me.