Elected leaders in the city of Minneapolis held their weekly update to brief the public on how federal immigration operations are impacting residents, and providing some stark examples off the chaos happening within these operations.
State Senator Scott Dibble (DFL) says a hearing earlier this week shed light on the legal chaos surrounding recent ICE detentions.
"Even lawyers working on this every day do not know how many people have been taken into detention, where they are, whether they have legal status, or where they are going," Dibble explained.
On Tuesday, a government lawyer, Julie Le, told a judge that her job “sucks” during a court hearing stemming from the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. Le has since been removed from her Justice Department post, but it highlights the overwhelming situation prosecutors find themselves in.
Dibble provided detail to some of the testimony from a Senate subcommittee hearing and says an independent journalist actually applied for a job with ICE, and was immediately offered a position without having to complete any paperwork or a background check.
"She said, what is extremely disturbing is that there is apparently no accountability from the start of this process to the end," Dibble says. "ICE does not know who is on these streets. We do not know if there are people with domestic violence felonies carrying guns in our community."
Dibble says lawmakers from other states who have come to Minnesota to lend their support are also speaking out.
He adds one of them from what is considered the "red" state of Montana warned him Minnesota won't be the only state impacted, and that the federal government is using Minnesota as a guide for how far they can go.