Washington: Is ICE open to offers to help? A street-level test says maybe not.

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One complaint of Trump administration officials related to ICE operations in Minnesota is that protesters interfere with federal officers’ work.

Another beef is that state and local officials won’t work with the feds to apprehend dangerous undocumented criminals — though since Sunday, Trump says he has a newfound cooperation with Gov. Tim Walz and, for about a minute, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

In St. Peter, a local official decided not to wait for any mixed messages to be clarified and made an offer earlier this week directly to ICE officers on the street.

“If you have a specific person in mind,” Nicollet County Commissioner Nicole Helget said to agents from her SUV through a partially open window of a vehicle next to her with ICE agents inside, “I can likely help you get that person out of here.”

Helget told the agents she works for the county and was offering to lead them to whomever they were looking for because the way they were going about it was inefficient and scaring the hell out of people.

Her guided-tour approach would save time and money, Helget told them.

“If you have a person, let us help you. I know just about every family in here. We don’t need to be spending taxpayer money like this,” she said.

While the officers’ response isn’t the clearest on the video, suffice it to say they didn’t say, “Hey thanks! That’s a great idea!”

And like a million other encounters, the temperature started rising.

“You come in here and you’re knocking on five different houses, you don’t know [expletive],” Helget railed, asking to see documentation for their mission. “What house is he in? Where does he live? What did he do? What crime?”

“Listen, we’re done with this conversation,” the agent said — exhibiting a seemingly newfound de-escalation strategy the agency hasn’t been widely known for of late.

Could this be signs of a new Minnesota n-ICE?

Agency officials didn’t return a request for comment, either on any new conflict-avoidance policy or whether they would accept citizen offers to help catch bad guys.

Which raises the question: Was Helget being serious, or just messing with them?

“I was calling their bluff,” she told me afterward.

“I would speak to our chief of police and our sheriff, and I think we’d be very happy to remove any violent criminal with a warrant who is at large. We’re very good at that down here.”

As for the agents, what happened after the interaction with Helget?

Her husband, Erik Koskinen, who captured the conversation over her shoulder from the driver’s seat of their car, said they afterward “operated a mission that got them stuck on the icy street.”

To verify that, you’ll have to wait for another cellphone video to surface.