The first hint that something was wrong for twenty-year-old Jose Roberto Ramirez came just after 11 a.m. on Thursday in the suburb of Robbinsdale just outside Minneapolis.
Ramirez, who is a US citizen, says Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began following his car. What he describes next is a frightening and aggressive encounter that left him shaken and briefly detained.
This happened around ten miles from where an unarmed mother and US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, aged 37, had been killed the day before. Good was trying to escape a street where a federal immigration raid was taking place when an ICE agent shot her dead. She was quickly labelled a “domestic terrorist” by Kristi Noem and other senior Trump administration figures.
Ramirez said he had stopped at a red light behind a Ford Explorer that did not move when the light turned green. “It just stood there,” he said. “I waited there for a while.”
The vehicle had tinted windows, but when he finally drove around it, he saw men in tactical gear inside and believed they were ICE agents. With the killing of Good dominating the news, he felt a wave of fear. “We made eye contact,” Ramirez recalled.
Ramirez, who is of Mexican and Native American heritage, worried that the agents would target him because of how he looked and the car he was driving. He noticed the Explorer pull out behind him and called his aunt Shawntia Sosa Clara, who lives nearby.
As he spoke to her, another traffic light changed. “I make it past the green light, and it turns red for them,” he said. But the Explorer continued through the junction with its emergency lights on.
“Then they turn their lights off,” Ramirez said. “All of a sudden, I see them right up behind me. Then I see them put their masks up. So I was like, ‘Oh yeah, auntie, they’re gonna stop me.’”
They agreed to meet at a Hyvee supermarket parking lot. When Ramirez arrived, the Explorer followed closely. Agents jumped out with weapons drawn. “Pointing their guns,” Ramirez said. “They’re screaming.”
Sosa Clara arrived moments later and said the agents also aimed their guns at her. She had already contacted local police, who soon arrived. As officers spoke with the agents, Ramirez got into his aunt’s car, where she was filming live.
“You got ID?” one agent asked. “Yes, he has an ID,” she replied, then told her nephew, “Get your ID.”
Ramirez struggled to find his licence in the panic. His aunt tried to calm the situation while repeating, “We’re citizens! We’re Native!” “They’re really mean people,” she said about the agents. “They have no heart. They aren’t human. They’re not even human.”
As the encounter went on, one agent appeared to scan Ramirez’s face using a mobile phone. ICE has used facial recognition technology in recent years. “Let them scan your face,” Sosa Clara said.
Ramirez says when he tried to film the agents, one knocked his phone away and struck him. “Why did you hit him?” his aunt cried. “No! No! No!”
Local police later told The Daily Beast that the video suggested Ramirez hit an agent. Ramirez and his aunt deny this. Footage shows him being grabbed by the neck as he was pulled from the car.
“Get the f— out of the car!” an agent can be heard shouting. Ramirez claims he was repeatedly hit and thrown against a charging station before being handcuffed tightly. “They made it tighter,” he said.
He was taken to a federal building in Minneapolis, where he says agents mocked the death of Renee Good and told him his life was over. “They are saying, ‘The boys are in town. We’re gonna light the city on fire!’” he said.
After hours of processing, including fingerprinting and more facial scans, he was eventually told he would be released with charges pending. ICE declined to comment.
Before leaving, agents even handed him the wrong car keys by mistake. Outside, he found his family waiting. Still desperate to use the toilet, he was told to use a portable toilet instead, which was locked.
He went home to the city where he was born, surrounded by relatives, and left, questioning how a routine drive had turned into a nightmare in a country he says he belongs in.