Ramstad: Open the Whipple Federal Building now

We need to see it.

For two months, the stories about the detention conditions Minnesotans faced at the Whipple Federal Building near south Minneapolis dribbled out in horrifying drops.

One of the first things border czar Tom Homan should do to begin to restore trust in the federal government is open the parts of the building where people are being kept.

It will probably be terrible. It will probably embarrass President Donald Trump and his administration more than they already are by the debacle of Operation Metro Surge.

Still, it needs to happen.

Just changing the face at the top of Operation Metro Surge after federal agents killed two Minnesotans isn’t enough. The bluster and lying must end — and light must be shone on what’s happening behind closed doors.

The Department of Homeland Security has been hiding many things about Operation Metro Surge, particularly the scale of arrests and detentions made by the thousands of federal agents involved in it.

The department also turned the Whipple Federal Building near Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport into a fortress.

The building is the site of the immigration courts for Minnesota and other parts of the Upper Midwest. Since 1965, it has been a key administrative center for the federal government in the Twin Cities, housing offices for the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies.

On Jan. 10, three Democratic members of the Minnesota congressional delegation sought to inspect the building and were shown only a portion of a detention area. Even that took a confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“This can’t stand,” Rep. Kelly Morrison said that day. But it has stood, after a judge last week refused to block the DHS policy of restricting access.

ICE and Border Patrol agents have picked up likely hundreds of Minnesotans for following them around, recording them on cellphones or making them angry in some other way. The precise number hasn’t been disclosed, and such detentions fall into legal gray zone since most weren’t charged.

“I had to beg for water and to be allowed to relieve myself in another crowded cell with a toilet behind a short wall,” Patty O’Keefe wrote in an op-ed for USA Today earlier this week.

Ryan Ecklund, a real estate agent in Woodbury who was picked up by ICE agents on Jan. 12 after following a convoy of them around that suburb, said he spent nine hours inside the Whipple detention area. He was released without being charged.

“It was a very scary, unorganized adult day care,” Ecklund told me this week. He was kept in leg irons and spent most of the time in a large room that eventually filled with eight other men who were all American citizens.

One of them was a 24-year-old carpenter who said he was hauled in after refusing to shake the hand of an ICE agent who showed up at his job site looking for undocumented immigrants.

Ecklund didn’t see where undocumented immigrants were kept. The U.S. citizens were kept in large rooms with concrete benches. They needed escorts to use a bathroom that was monitored by DHS officials.

The slaying of Alex Pretti this past weekend became the breaking point for the people, including many business leaders and top Republicans, who had been giving the Trump administration leeway in its pursuit of criminal undocumented immigrants.

To many others it was clear that if Operation Metro Surge was really about pursuing criminals, it would have been run very differently. ICE for many years investigated and arrested criminal undocumented immigrants without making a show of marauding through a community, asking random people to prove their citizenship and arresting people who did nothing more than anger an agent along the way.

DHS hasn’t commented on conditions at the Whipple Building, nor the individuals who have spoken publicly about it. In only a small number of cases have officials said anything about what they’ve done with the non-criminal undocumented immigrants they arrested.

Many have apparently been sent to other detention facilities around the country. Some have been left in other states after release and had to find their way back to Minnesota, according to news accounts.

As always, there are deeper issues at work. For years, the government has been eroding the ability of American citizens to sue its agencies and officials when laws and constitutional rights are violated.

That amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and ensures privacy, has come up again and again in discussions about whether ICE and the Border Patrol have gone too far in Minnesota.