Police Who Once Backed ICE’s Mission Are Losing Faith in Its Tactics
In Minnesota and places where agents are deployed en masse, law-enforcement leaders are challenging whether they are adhering to the stated mission. ICE says operations are lawful and targeted.
Jan. 24, 2026
The Wall Street JournalAfter a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
State crime investigators then took the unusual step of securing a search warrant signed by a judge, a rare move for a shooting in public, but they were still blocked by federal officers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans told reporters Saturday.
It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The conflict over control of a crime scene is emblematic of rising tensions that have been building well before Saturday between some local and federal law enforcement as Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts high-profile operations across the country, from “Metro Surge” in Minnesota to “Catch of the Day,” now under way in Maine.
Nowhere is more tense than Minnesota, where 3,000 federal agents are on the ground in what the Department of Homeland Security has called its biggest operation yet, but friction is cropping up in a number of communities where ICE has deployed en masse over the past year.
Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.
In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records.
It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.
But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.
“I’m not anti-ICE by any stroke of the imagination, but they’ve moved the goal posts,” Joyce, the sheriff of Cumberland County, and a self-described moderate Democrat, said.
Many police leaders say they still support combating illegal immigration and believe the troubling actions stem from a minority of officers, but they say these problems undermine their efforts to put a human face on law enforcement on the ground.
Federal authorities have defended their tactics. “Our operations are lawful. They’re targeted and they’re focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community,” Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said Tuesday at a news conference in Minnesota. ICE collaborates with local and state law enforcement across the country to deport criminal migrants, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.
A shift
As recently as early December, federal agents identifying themselves as “DHS investigators” would arrive at the Faribault, Minn., police station lobby to inform a supervisor about individuals with criminal records they were targeting.
“At first, the narrative certainly fit that they were targeting people with significant criminal history,” Chief John Sherwin said in an interview earlier this week. “Since the New Year, they’re not sharing with us who they’re going after.”
Four times in the past month, his officers have responded to 911 calls that turned out to be ICE operations. In one instance, a caller reported being “about to get shot”—police arrived to find ICE agents.
Recently, a call came in from a mobile-home neighborhood about cars honking and driving in circles. Sherwin drove there in an unmarked car and stopped beside a vehicle with dark windows and a Texas license plate. The driver identified himself as border patrol and said his cover was blown by citizens recognizing him and he was leaving.
A resident then posted Sherwin’s license plate on Facebook and falsely identified it as an ICE vehicle.
“I’m literally right down the middle,” said Sherwin, an appointed police chief who isn’t registered to vote with a party. “I can see both sides, and I feel caught in the middle.”
Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.
Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.
At a separate news conference the same day, Bovino rejected the criticism about federal agents, saying, “Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.” Bovino didn’t directly address the Brooklyn Park allegations when asked about them.
Police chiefs say the operations are affecting years of community trust-building. Sherwin said calls to police for domestic violence and other issues from heavily immigrant parts of Faribault have “all but stopped.”
The criticism comes from police leaders including Democrats in urban areas as well as some Republicans in more rural areas.
Some chiefs are scaling back their partnerships with federal immigration authorities. In western New York state, the Niagara County sheriff, a Republican, said in recent days that his agency will no longer hold people detained by ICE unless there is a criminal charge or judicial warrant.
“We will only assist ICE with individuals we know in this county with a criminal nexus,” Sheriff Michael Filicetti said.
Like the Maine sheriff, Franklin County Sheriff A.J. Smith, a Florida Republican, has voiced frustration with what he called communication problems with ICE.
He publicly criticized ICE over incidents including one in which unmarked cars and “men with guns in the yard” unnerved residents and his office had no idea it was an ICE operation.
“How can you not trust us?” he said at a November news conference. “We have to know what they’re doing.”
‘I hope it’s wrong’
In Maine, Joyce said the corrections officer hadn’t hidden the fact he was a migrant. He was hired in February 2025 after careful examination of his employment eligibility and a vetting process that included a criminal-background check and a polygraph, according to Joyce.
Homeland Security on Saturday said the man, originally from Angola, was an “illegal alien” who crossed the southern border in 2019.
“A law breaker being employed as a corrections officer at a county jail is shocking. This takes sanctuary city to a whole new level,” McLaughlin said.
Joyce, however, said the man had a work permit valid until 2029 and no criminal history.
Joyce believes ICE is retroactively building a case against the corrections officer to justify the traffic stop, saying immigration officials never raised concerns about the officer’s legal status with him before the arrest.
“Why wouldn’t they have just come and said, ‘Hey, you know, we’ve got some issues with this guy?’ ” Joyce said. His county has long held immigrant detainees for the federal government at the local jail.
Joyce said he would “never hire a known illegal immigrant,” noting he recently rejected three applicants who couldn’t prove they were authorized to work in the U.S.
He questioned whether federal agents had abandoned their stated priorities of prioritizing criminals.
“Every indication we’ve found is that this was a squeaky-clean individual,” Joyce said. “I come to a conclusion, I hope it’s wrong, that if you’re not a card-carrying U.S. citizen in this country, then everybody is illegal.”
Write to Jack Morphet at jack.morphet@wsj.com and Kris Maher at Kris.Maher@wsj.com