A Democratic congressional candidate in Minnesota has posted a video showing a brief conversation with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent about accountability and training within the agency.
Matt Little shared the clip on X, capturing an exchange in which he compared professional standards in law to expectations for federal officers.
“I’m a lawyer, trust me dude. I agree there’s some people that are not great in our profession too. But we all, like, I have to hold my profession accountable and you do too,” Little said.
The ICE agent responded, “Yes, we do.”
The agent added that “as far as policy changes and stuff goes, and training, we’re all about that.”
“I think we’ve got to battle all fronts, so that means protests and rallies and ICE response, but it also means trying to get them to understand exactly what we are thinking and what we’re seeing too, and so I think that’s what prompted it,” Little told Newsweek when asked about the discussion.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement operations across multiple states. In Minnesota, those operations have drawn heightened scrutiny and sparked protests.
Two U.S. citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—were fatally shot by federal agents this month during enforcement activity, according to reporting and public statements.
Pretti, an ICU nurse, was killed during an immigration enforcement operation on Saturday. DHS said on social media that he approached Border Patrol officers with a handgun. In videos recorded by bystanders, Pretti appears to be holding a phone. The footage does not appear to show a visible weapon. Pretti’s family said he owned a handgun and had a permit to carry a concealed firearm in Minnesota.
The shooting came weeks after Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE officer during a traffic stop in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. State and local leaders disputed the claim that the ICE officer acted in self-defense.
What To Know
Little is running for the Democratic nomination in Minnesota’s Second Congressional District. He said that if elected, “we will hold ICE accountable—every agent who abused their authority, pepper sprayed kids, or illegally broke into someone’s home.”
He told Newsweek he has been traveling the district with his team while campaigning.
“As we’re doing that, we’re also monitoring what ICE is doing,” Little said.
Little said that before the exchange he posted, he and his team were trying to determine who the ICE agents were. He said he “did not expect to have a conversation.” The agents told him they were conducting surveillance on an individual with a criminal history.
“I said, ‘Well, if you’re telling me there’s a criminal in this neighborhood next to an elementary school, then that does feel like my business doing, like you should have a warrant, and if you got a warrant, let’s go get this person. We’ll help you. We’ll help you go get this criminal, you know?’ And that’s kind of how the conversation started,” Little said.
Little wrote on X that, “At first, ICE did not want to talk.”
He continued: “This may be the only video of a real conversation with an ICE agent. After following them from an elementary school where they’d been circling to a parking lot, I was able to get a few words in. This is part of that conversation. As you’ll see, in a genuine conversation, even this ICE agent understands that they must be accountable.”
In the video, Little tells the agent, “there’s some bad folks that joined to do some bad things.”
“Oh, 100 percent, and that’s in any profession,” the ICE agent replied.
Later, the agent told Little, “I’ll be the first one to tell you, when things happen that go south, how can we make this better? How can we learn from it so this doesn’t happen again? We all try to do that, but it’s a dirty job and sometimes things happen in the moment and it’s insane.”
Little told the agent, “You guys gotta be right. You guys are pilots.”
The ICE agent responded, “We do have to be right but, like I said, sometimes you only get one split second to make a decision.”
Little later told the agent, “You have a voice. Don’t discredit your own voice to talk upward.”
“I would never. I would never,” the ICE agent said.
He added: “I’m not in the position to not speak out. You know what I mean? I’m the first person that will talk about change.”
