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Database of Court Filings Shows ‘Startling Pattern of Abuse’ by Federal Agents Against Citizens in Minnesota

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Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

US Border Patrol agents detain an unidentified man of Somali descent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026. (Photo by Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

A new database of sworn affidavits filed by the ACLU shows masked agents detaining citizens based on race without warrants, ignoring IDs, and pointing weapons at them.

Federal agents deployed to Minnesota by the Trump administration are systematically violating the rights of US citizens and lawful residents, according to more than two dozen sworn affidavits made available this week as part of a class action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.

The suit was filed last month by the ACLU of Minnesota and partnered law firms, which said that as part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, “masked federal agents in the thousands are violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity, irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status, or their personal circumstances.”

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The case was launched by three plaintiffs, which include 20-year-old Mubashir Khalif Hussein, a Somali-born US citizen whose brutal arrest and detention was caught on video in December. He was placed into a headlock by masked agents and brought to an ICE office, where he said he was left in shackles for an hour and a half before being released miles from his home in the freezing cold.

The plaintiffs called it just one example of a “startling pattern of abuse spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is fundamentally altering civic life in the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota.”

On Thursday, the online legal policy journal Just Security published a searchable database of the 29 sworn declarations filed so far as part of the case. Nearly all of them were filed by US citizens, while a few others were permanent legal residents or had pending legal status.

The statements detail numerous allegations that agents violated their basic constitutional rights, including by detaining them without showing a warrant; targeting Somali and Latino individuals based on their appearances; ignoring identifying documents that could prove their legal residency or citizenship; restraining them violently; and pointing weapons at them during searches.

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration’s claim that when deciding whether to stop someone as part of “roving patrols,” agents had the right to consider certain factors, including “the type of work one does,” a person’s use of Spanish or accented English, or their “apparent race or ethnicity.”

While critics described it as an invitation to blatant and unconstitutional racial profiling and invasions of privacy, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that the practice should not prove burdensome to those legally in the US: “If the person is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he said.

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security,said that the “sworn affidavits show how, on the ground, this is simply not how ICE operates.”

“They did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car. I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen.”

One 33-year-old Latino citizen who was born in the US was driving to Menards on January 10 when he suddenly found himself boxed in by two cars at a stoplight. Before he knew it, he said agents were banging aggressively on his windows and one had started pointing a gun at him. When he put his vehicle in park, he said the doors opened automatically.

“When the doors unlocked, the agents did not ask me anything, they did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car,” he said. “I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen.”

“Once they did get my seatbelt off and finally [pulled] me out of the car, they threw me to the ground and pinned me,” he continued. “They were pulling on my arms so tight to put on the handcuffs. They ripped my jacket, and it was torn up. My wallet fell on the ground. I was still repeating that I am a US citizen. I repeated it over and over. They never asked for or looked at my identification.”

The agents hauled the man into their car and began driving him around and interrogating him for about 20 minutes. He said the first question they asked him was his name.

“It seemed if they were going to violently arrest me before even looking at my identification, that they should have known who I was,” the victim said.

Agents eventually realized they’d been searching for another person with the same name and birthdate. They drove their captive behind a warehouse, where nobody could see, and released him. But another agent had taken his car from the intersection. An agent said he’d only give it back if the agent could scan his face, which he did.

“I felt traumatized. My arm hurt, I had bruises from the handcuffs. They were so tight that half of my hand was numb for a few days. I guess it stopped the circulation to my hands while I was handcuffed. I had cuts on my face and hands,” the victim said. “Since this happened to me, I have to pass through that spot every time I drive to work. I keep going back to it and reliving it in my mind.”

According to the database, at least five other US citizens, lawful residents, or legal asylum seekers also claimed in court that they’d had weapons pointed at them by agents during their stops.

Two other US citizens and one lawful permanent resident detailed being subject to physical force during stops.

One 53-year-old Somali man, a US citizen since 2008, said he was physically grabbed and dragged from his car, handcuffed, and pinned against the vehicle by masked agents.

“One officer pressed his knee into my back,” he said. When I screamed out in pain, another officer put his elbow into my neck, and one of the officers yelled at me, ‘Shut the fuck up, son of a bitch!’ One of the officers responded, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country?’“

“I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab.”

One 22-year-old Somali-American citizen who was born in Minnesota said that on January 21, five agents hopped out of their car with multiple guns drawn as she was on her way to work.

She said they demanded to see proof of her citizenship, but rejected her valid ID, claiming it was fake. They demanded to see her passport, which US citizens are not required to carry under US law. The agents told her they did not believe she was a US citizen because of her “accent.”

“I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab,” she said. “It was clear that the ICE agents did not know who I was when they stopped me. I had not violated any traffic laws, and the vehicle I was driving was registered to my mother, who is a United States citizen.”

It’s one of at least five cases in the database in which agents dismissed proof of a citizen or legal resident’s status.

There have also been many other documented instances, including some caught on video, in which agents have detained a citizen or legal resident or refused to let them go because they believed the person’s “accent” did not sound American.

All 29 of those who filed affidavits in the case have alleged unconstitutional racial profiling.

One 25-year-old Somali man, a US citizen born in Atlanta, said a group of masked agents accosted him and his mother while he was shoveling snow.

He said they were joined by a pair of unmasked men who appeared to be livestreaming and helped the agents to box him in. He later identified one of them as a right-wing YouTube influencer named Ben Bergquam.

Even though the vast majority of Somalis living in the US are citizens, he said the agents and the streamers were laughing and referring to him and his mother as “illegal aliens.”

“I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed.”

At least 12 people in the lawsuit have filed sworn testimony stating that agents forced them to stop while they were driving.

In one case, a Hispanic US citizen said that after following him for a few blocks, agents put on their lights and “rammed” his car off the road.

“An agent came up to my window, asking if I was a citizen. I was furious. I told them I was a citizen and they damaged my car,” he said. “Instead of apologizing, they demanded that I produce documents to prove I was a US citizen. I was too angry. I told them again that I was a US citizen and I didn’t have to prove it to them.”

He said the episode lasted 45-60 minutes, with agents repeatedly demanding his ID, name, and place of birth. Eventually, he says, they confirmed his citizenship by taking photos and videos of him and scanning his license plate.

He said agents told him they would pay for the damages to his car, but that they drove away without providing any insurance information.

“Even though I am a United States citizen and I was carrying proof of my citizenship with me, ICE agents didn’t believe me,” he said. “I felt intense fear and shock. I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed.”

The affidavits were filed as part of the case Hussen v. Noem, which claims that agents have violated Minnesotans’ rights to equal protection and against unreasonable searches and seizures. A hearing is scheduled to take place later this month.

“The government can’t stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause,” said Kate Huddleston, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality that remain a bedrock of our legal system and our country.”

Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Continue ReadingDatabase of Court Filings Shows ‘Startling Pattern of Abuse’ by Federal Agents Against Citizens in Minnesota

Why Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients

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Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Once Palantir is inside our health service, it will be hard to get rid of. The NHS should think carefully

NHS sign

This week I debated the future of the NHS with a cardboard cutout. This was, I confess, a bit of a let-down: Louis Mosley, the UK head of Palantir, looked very fine in 2D, watermelon cocktail in hand, but we’d hoped for the man himself. He’d agreed to debate Foxglove about the NHS’s massive new plans for our health data, only to pull out at the last minute, citing ‘commitments in eastern Europe’. I suspect the real reason is that the government leant on him – and the conference organisers – to scuttle the debate. So much for public engagement.

Funny cutouts aside, this is a serious matter. The NHS, as we can see from the strikes this week, is in a historic crisis. As well as 120,000 care vacancies, the NHS has over 3,000 vacant tech roles – which stops the service from evolving to meet future needs. But instead of gripping this crisis with a credible workforce plan, the government proposes to spend nearly half a billion pounds on a database.

This is what I was hoping to debate with Louis. The government wants to give his spy-tech firm, Palantir, the contract to manage a vast new ‘Federated Data Platform’. If it goes ahead as envisaged, the FDP will be the largest single point of access to patient data this country has ever seen. It’s a pity it was left to me and Dr Marcus Baw, a GP and health IT specialist, to debate this system – because there’s so much the government won’t say about it. Like exactly what shape it will take or what purposes it will eventually serve; what it will eventually cost; who will have access; or how patient choice and consent will be honoured.

The proposed system is vast. The aim is for it to sweep in hospital, GP, even social care records – and make all this patient data available to government planners and others.

Now, parts of this are all to the good. The NHS badly needs to make better and more efficient use of patient data for the good of the NHS and of patients; there are inefficiencies in the system that urgently need fixing. But we, and many experts within the NHS we speak to, have serious concerns about the design of this contract: about whether the procurement has been fair; whether the system will work as designed; and whether Palantir, which is mainly known for supporting CIA drone attacks, predictive policing and deportation raids, is a remotely appropriate partner for the NHS.

That’s why Foxglove (with openDemocracy) brought multiple legal cases seeking to shed light on this shadowy spy-tech firm’s beachhead in the NHS since their very first £1 no-bid pandemic contract. It’s also why 50 other groups have signed the ‘No Palantir’ pledge, saying a company whose values are so manifestly opposed to those of the NHS has no place handling so much sensitive patient data.

Having one supplier to join up data and analyse it risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure

But there are deeper issues with the FDP. It runs the risk of stealing oxygen – and funding – from other critical work already underway to help the NHS join up its patient data for good. For example, openSafely, a flagship national data platform for health research, was developed by Ben Goldacre and a team at Oxford and was used for vital Covid research. It’s completely open source, safe and lights a way forward for trustworthy health research. It also costs a fraction of what Palantir does.

What’s more, pushing so much access and control to the centre may not make sense. For some issues – vaccination, workforce planning – there is a clear case for a national solution. But ultimately, most care is delivered locally and planned regionally. There are already places, such as London, that have pioneered solutions to pool patient data to plan care better – at a fraction of the FDP’s cost. It is far from clear how this will interact with the FDP, or whether it can survive the new system.

Other competitors – like a UK consortium of universities and open-source firms that are apparently bidding for the deal – would have loved a fair crack at the FDP contract. But let’s be honest: they probably haven’t got a snowball’s chance at beating Palantir’s incumbent advantage, won through a mixture of insider influence and watermelon cocktail lobbying.

Once Palantir’s in, it will be hard to get it out. The technical architecture is proprietary – and other government agencies have struggled to get off Palantir when they’ve tried. Having a single supplier to help you join up data and analyse it also risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure.

Indeed, if you take Palantir chief executive Alex Karp at his word, that’s the plan. “We are working towards a future where all large institutions in the United States and its allies abroad are running significant segments of their operations, if not their operations as a whole, on Palantir,” he wrote. “Most other companies are targeting small segments of the market. We see and intend to capture the whole.” That reads like an express statement of an intention to seek monopoly power.

It’s also clear they’re in it to profit. Their chief technology officer, Shyam Shankar, recently wrote: “The problem with defen[c]e contracting is not the popular narrative that contractors make too much money. It is actually that they make too little money… Innovators will need outsized profits to motivate progress.” Monopoly and profiteering may be good for Palantir’s share price, but they sit uncomfortably with the ethos of a public health service.

Joining up the NHS’s disparate health data systems better will present stiff challenges, and the NHS will face trade-offs – buying in consultants may be easier in the short term, for example, but may prove more expensive in the long run. But at the moment the government is stonewalling legal letters asking even basic questions about the FDP. And they are also creating facts on the ground that could be seen to favour Palantir. The legal basis for all of this, now that the pandemic’s suspension of protections for patient data has lapsed, is unclear.

People care deeply about how their health data is used. We go to the doctor to share our worries, our fears, and our pain – and if we don’t trust that conversation to be private, we may not go at all. People want to feel safe to contribute their health data for the good of the NHS – but when the government runs out ahead of patient trust, overhauling patient data systems without explaining what it wants to do, who will see the data, and what safeguards there are, people baulk. In 2021 more than a million people in a month opted out of sharing their health data because they didn’t trust the government’s last plans to pool their GP records. The history of the NHS is a boneyard of such schemes: massive, expensive white elephants that all failed because the government didn’t take the time to get the governance or consent right.

It is past time for the government to learn from these mistakes. We can build a better future for our patient data – if we take the time to design carefully, honouring patient choice and thinking about what system will serve the NHS for the long haul. Anything less is likely to fail and set the cause of progress back another five years.

Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingWhy Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients