Federal charges for assaulting, impeding DHS agents keep getting dismissed

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:02][music] >> At the height of the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, videos document arrest after arrest as the Trump administration repeatedly made claims like this.

[00:00:15]>> Assaults on officers have skyrocketed over 1400%.

[00:00:18]>> The Fox 9 investigators tracked nearly 60 cases here in Minnesota where people were arrested by federal immigration agents and accused of assaulting or impeding a federal officer.

[00:00:30]>> One officer in Minnesota had his finger bitten off by a protester.

[00:00:33]>> While there have been multiple documented cases of injured agents, we found more than half of those 60 cases have now been dropped with some attorneys making accusations of outrageous government conduct and that it lacked credible evidence.

[00:00:49]>> ICE just yelled at us and told us to leave this parking lot and we didn't feel like we had to leave the parking lot.

[00:00:54]>> In Brooklyn Park, a police officer's dash camera captured this moment when two women were surrounded, pulled from their car, and arrested by ICE agents back in January.

[00:01:04]>> We were just there documenting. The only thing we did was exercise our right to blow a whistle.

[00:01:11]I did honk my horn when I saw an a masked gunman hiding in a garbage area as children were exiting buses.

[00:01:20]>> I definitely had to remind myself like these men will kill you.

[00:01:24]Uh they just did kill another mom and I had to calm myself down in that moment and just kind of then let it happen. Um and then they put us both handcuffed in the back of one of their vehicles.

[00:01:36]>> Tippi Amundson and Heather Zeeman tell us just as they were getting driven away, one of the agents experienced a medical emergency right outside a police station.

[00:01:46]>> Brooklyn Park Tower 2, respond to a seizure at Brooklyn Park Police Station 2.

[00:01:52]>> It was obvious he was in distress. Tippi said that she had some medical training, this man needs some help. I said, "I have some medical training, too."

[00:02:00]>> The women say they were un-handcuffed to provide help to the agent, then later re-handcuffed and taken to the federal Whipple building, where they were given this citation.

[00:02:10]>> I believe they did this all for theatrics.

[00:02:13]>> It's a trend the Fox investigators have surge in Chicago last fall.

[00:02:20]>> All right, out of the car.

[00:02:21]>> Be advised, we've been struck. We've been struck.

[00:02:23]>> Get out.

[00:02:25]>> This court record documents 92 people the government arrested for attacking or impeding federal agents. But since then, there have been zero convictions, and only two of those cases remain open.

[00:02:37]>> So, we have a number of demonstrably false claims where judges have found that Homeland Security agents were making misrepresentations about assaults. And so, we know some of them have been already found to be untrue.

[00:02:53]>> Back in Minnesota, the feds dropped the charges against Tippie and Heather months after they were arrested.

[00:02:59]>> But I thought they were going to drag it out at the expense of taxpayers for a very long time.

[00:03:04]>> But the Department of Homeland Security continues to criticize the women, claiming that they lied to law enforcement about being nurses, and that they quote remain secured in the vehicle. Accusations they deny.

[00:03:18]>> It was just one more opportunity and one more circumstance where they have video footage of what happened, but DHS lies.

[00:03:27]>> Dozens of cases are still making their way slowly through the court system, but so far none of those Minnesota arrests have led to a conviction.

[00:03:36]For the Fox 9 investigators, I'm Nathan O'Neal.