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'Where Were You Born?' ICE Conducting Show-Me-Your-Papers Stops in Minnesota Neighborhoods
"I was scared. I was devastated," said a Somali-American citizen who was accosted by ICE as part of what the agent called a "citizen check." No such thing exists in American law.
Jan 13, 2026
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents deployed to Minnesota are pulling many nonwhite residents aside and asking them to prove their citizenship, according to several reports and multiple videos posted to social media this week amid the Trump administration's surge of immigration agents to Minneapolis.
There is no federal law requiring US citizens to carry proof of their citizenship, and immigration agents are barred from carrying out indiscriminate searches unless they have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone is in the country without authorization.
And yet, one video, posted on Sunday by a Somali resident of Minneapolis, a US citizen named Nimco Omar, shows a group of agents accosting her and asking her to show her identification as part of what they said was a "citizen check."
Omar said she was on a walk when masked agents who "looked like soldiers" approached her and began questioning her.
The video shows one of the agents asking Omar, "Do you have an ID on you, ma'am?"
She replied: "I don't need an ID to walk around in my city. This is my city."
"OK, do you have some ID, then, please?" the officer asked. "If not, we're going to put you in the vehicle, and we're going to ID you."
Omar responded: "I am a US citizen. I don't need to carry around an ID in my home. This is my home."
After being repeatedly asked, "Where were you born?" Omar replied simply, "Minneapolis is my home."
The agent then told her: "We're doing an immigration check. We're doing a citizen check."
Another agent then pulled out his cellphone and, without asking, appeared to snap a picture of Omar, likely to run through a facial recognition application that ICE has used to verify the status of people it detains—including citizens.
Omar continued to hold her ground, telling the agents: "I’m a US citizen. I don’t have to identify myself. I belong here— and it doesn’t matter where I was born.” After failing to get an answer, the agents then walked away.
"I was scared. I was devastated. I never imagined that something like this could happen to me in the United States," Omar wrote in a social media post documenting the encounter. "As a community member who grew up here, who built a life here, and who calls Minnesota home, I want to be clear: This is not acceptable. This is not something we should ever normalize. This is not what the United States of America is supposed to look like."
The scene was just the latest report of immigration agents conducting what Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said was "unlawful racial profiling by DHS agents" in a lawsuit against the agency filed Monday by the state of Minnesota. Illinois filed a similar but separate suit Monday.
"We're doing a citizen check."
Since last week, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross was filmed fatally shooting 37-year-old Renee Good in a Minneapolis neighborhood—which Vice President JD Vance said in a press conference occurred during "door-to-door" sweeps by ICE in search of undocumented migrants—several other similar cases have been documented in which immigration agents have approached nonwhite US citizens demanding they prove their citizenship.
In another case, on the same day of Good's shooting, a Somali Uber driver was pulled over outside the Minneapolis airport and asked to prove his citizenship. One of the agents told the driver he did not believe the driver's claim to be a citizen because "I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me," and asked the man where he was born repeatedly.
It mirrored another case from December in which another Somali man, a US citizen identified only as Mubashir, was tackled to the ground by immigration agents who refused to accept his government-issued Real ID as proof of citizenship.
Outcry over that case prompted Gregory Bovino, the commander at large of the US Border Patrol, who has taken part in several stops and raids as part of the Trump administration's operation in Minneapolis, to falsely claim that US citizens "must carry immigration documents" under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
About 83% of Somalis living in the US are citizens, according to census data. However, Minneapolis' large Somali population—which has an even higher rate of US citizenship—has been used as a justification by President Donald Trump to flood the city with immigration agents. In recent months, the president has referred to Somalis as “garbage” and called for them all to be deported from the country.
But Somalis have not been the only targets of arbitrary "citizenship" checks in recent days.
Another video, filmed on the day of Good's shooting, showed agents pinning a Hispanic Target employee, 17-year-old Jonathan Aguilar Garcia, to the ground, along with another employee, after asking him whether he was a US citizen. Even after shouting multiple times that he was a citizen and showing his government ID, Garcia was reportedly taken to an undisclosed location for hours with no notice given to his family about where he was or when he'd return.
In another case, detailed in the Minnesota lawsuit, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents "approached a team of four Minneapolis Public Works employees, working in Minneapolis and wearing city uniforms and badges. The agents asked the three nonwhite city employees for identification and questioned each of them about their citizenship and place of birth. The agents did not ask to see any identification or ask any questions of the fourth employee, who was white."
Four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, who were homeless and living under a bridge, were also reportedly detained last week and have still not yet been located. The tribe's president has directed members to declare their tribal affiliation when encountering immigration officers, which makes them US citizens and therefore not subject to immigration enforcement.
"DHS said they were 'highly targeted' and go after 'the worst of the worst,'" said the Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security in a post on social media responding to agents' questioning of Omar. "In reality, DHS is indiscriminately profiling Black and brown American citizens.
They urged readers: "Protect yourself and your neighbors and film everything."
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6 Federal Prosecutors Resign as Trump DOJ Pushes for Investigation Into Renee Good's Wife
“We had whistles,” Becca Good said after her wife's killing. “They had guns.”
Jan 13, 2026
A top prosecutor in the US attorney's office in Minnesota who for years oversaw a major fraud investigation in the state was among six federal prosecutors who resigned Tuesday as the Trump administration demanded they investigate Becca Good, the widow of the Minneapolis resident who was killed by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last week.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command in the US attorney's office, had objected in recent days to the US Justice Department's (DOJ) refusal to investigate the killing of Renee Nicole Good as a civil rights matter. He also opposed the decision to cut off state investigators from probing Good's fatal shooting, which was carried out by an ICE agent who was one of several who had approached the front of her vehicle and reportedly given her conflicting orders.
On Tuesday, Thompson and several other prosecutors—including his deputy, Harry Jacob; chief of the violent and major crimes unit Thomas Calhoun-Lopez; and Melinda Williams—stepped down.
They declined to disclose to the New York Times the reason for their resignations. On top of the other DOJ decisions Thompson had objected to, senior Trump administration officials had begun pushing him and the other prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into Good's wife.
President Donald Trump and other top officials in the administration have relentlessly smeared Good and her widow in the wake of her killing—accusing them of domestic terrorism and rioting and, in the case of the president, suggesting they were to blame for her death because the couple was being "disrespectful" to the ICE agents.
Trump has presented no evidence as he's called the couple "professional agitators" who were being paid to observe ICE's enforcement actions in Minnesota, where the administration has surged thousands of agents largely to target the state's Somali population after Thompson's investigation uncovered fraud in Minnesota's social services system. The majority of those who have been charged are US citizens of Somali origin.
Brian O'Hara, the police chief in Minneapolis, suggested there was an irony to the fact that Thompson had resigned over the government's handling of Good's case.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” O'Hara told the Times.
As Trump pushes the narrative that Good was a "domestic terrorist"—a designation that would ordinarily not be used by officials before being confirmed by an investigation—the FBI is reportedly probing alleged ties Good had to "activist groups" that have been protesting Trump's mass deportation campaign, an operation that is opposed by a majority of Americans.
That probe comes months after Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo expanding the DOJ's definition of domestic terrorism to include actions like "impeding" law enforcement officers or doxxing them.
The DOJ is planning to investigate a number of activists who took part in community "neighborhood watch" activities aimed at alerting and protecting neighbors from ICE agents—the same kinds of actions taken by residents of Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina last year.
“We had whistles,” Becca Good said in a statement after her wife's killing, as the president accused them of trying to harm ICE agents. “They had guns.”
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'ICE Has Gone Rogue': Khanna Demands Arrest, Prosecution of Jonathan Ross for Murder of Renee Good
"We need to hold ICE accountable and we need to uphold human rights in ICE facilities. This is the time for Americans to speak up."
Jan 13, 2026
Rep. Ro Khanna on Monday called for the arrest and prosecution of the federal immigration officer who killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good last week.
In a video posted on social media, Khanna (D-Calif.) made the case for arresting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross, who has faced accusations of murder after he fatally shot the 37-year-old Good and left her 6-year-old son an orphan.
Khanna also said that the problems with ICE weren't merely from one trigger-happy agent.
"ICE has gone rogue," Khanna said. "We need accountability."
I am calling for the arrest and prosecution of the ICE agent that shot and killed Renee Good.
I am also calling on Congress to support my bill with @JasmineForUS to force ICE agents to wear body cameras, not wear masks, have visible identification, and ensure ICE has independent… pic.twitter.com/BmoufcF0fx
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 13, 2026
He then referenced legislation he had written with Rep. Jasmine Crocket (D-Texas) that would force ICE agents to wear body cameras and carry visible identification, and would also bar them from wearing masks to conceal their identities while conducting operations.
Khanna also described a recent trip he made to an immigration detention facility in California, where he said he witnessed deplorable treatment of detainees, including one man who reported having blood in his urine but who had not seen any medical professional for the past seven days.
"We need to hold ICE accountable and we need to uphold human rights in ICE facilities," he emphasized. "This is the time for Americans to speak up."
As Khanna called for greater ICE accountability, new videos emerged on Tuesday of chaos caused by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis.
In one video posted by extremism researcher Amanda Moore, federal agents can be seen smashing a woman's car windows, cutting her seat belt, and then dragging her out of the vehicle to be arrested.
Today at 34 & Park in Minneapolis, a woman tried to drive down the street where a protest had broken out in front of a home ICE was raiding, saying she had a doctor apt to get to. ICE agents busted out her windows, cut off her seatbelt, and pulled her out before arresting her. pic.twitter.com/Y9bDF1xfKW
— amanda moore 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) January 13, 2026
Status Coup News reporter JT Cestkowski shared footage of federal agents lobbing tear gas canisters and firing pepper balls at demonstrators, which he described as "an everyday occurrence in America."
Immigration agents again fired tear gas and pepper balls at Twin Cities area residents today while out raiding neighborhoods. This is now an everyday occurrence in America.
Video by @StatusCoup’s @JonFarinaPhoto pic.twitter.com/SbwPUsMbIA
— JT Cestkowski (@JTCestkowski) January 13, 2026
NPR national correspondent Sergio Martínez-Beltrán posted a video of immigration agents walking around a Minneapolis parking lot and demanding shoppers offer proof that they were legally in the US.
"The drivers were people of color," Martínez-Beltrán observed.
In Minneapolis federal agents are asking people for the immigration status. In this video you can see agents at a parking lot asking people charging their cars to show proof of their immigration status. The drivers were people of color. pic.twitter.com/y8tuI3G88O
— Sergio Martínez-Beltrán (@SergioMarBel) January 12, 2026
Despite multiple videos showing Minneapolis residents angrily confronting federal immigration officials, President Donald Trump dismissed the demonstrations as "fake" during what was supposed to have been a speech on the US economy.
"One of the reasons they're doing these fake riots—I mean they're just terrible," Trump said, referring to largely peaceful demonstrations in Minneapolis. "It's so fake. 'Shame! Shame! Shame!' You see the woman. It's all practiced. They take hotel rooms and they all practice together. It's a whole scam. We're finding out who's funding all this stuff too."
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