The St. Paul City Council continues to seek an investigation of police use of force during last week’s federal immigration operation and now plans a resolution on the topic for next week’s council meeting.

All seven city council members, Mayor Melvin Carter and Mayor-elect Kaohly Her, along with community members, have raised concerns about St. Paul officers deploying chemical irritants and projectiles, along with questions about the presence of the city’s officers when ICE agents arrested two people in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood on Nov. 25.

The council on Nov. 26 called for a “thorough investigation” into the use of force and adherence to the city’s separation ordinance, and said they planned to formally initiate action at their Wednesday council meeting.

“We are finalizing the language of that resolution, and really want to make sure that we get it right,” City Council President Rebecca Noecker said at Wednesday’s council meeting.

They are working to determine who should conduct an independent investigation; they expect the results to be presented to the city’s Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission for review, Noecker said. The council will also be asking the city’s Office of Financial Services to determine the police costs from the operation.

The council now expects to introduce the resolution and vote on it at next Wednesday’s Council meeting.

The Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission, meeting Wednesday night, unanimously voted to call for an independent investigation.

St. Paul’s separation ordinance says city employees are not authorized to enforce federal immigration policies, and Police Chief Axel Henry has said the city’s officers had not violated it. He said officers were not doing immigration enforcement, “but we do have a responsibility to make sure that laws aren’t broken in our city.”

Carter said last week he’d directed a review of all St. Paul police body-worn camera footage, which Henry said was underway.

Of the two arrests last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said one man was previously removed from the U.S. and illegally re-entered. Another man, Jeffrey Lopez-Suazo, is charged with striking an ICE officer’s vehicle with his own vehicle. He entered a plea of not guilty at the federal courthouse on Wednesday.

On Nov. 25, the Immigrant Defense Network alerted its “rapid response network” on social media to an “ICE raid” and people quickly amassed around the house where authorities had placed police tape.

The Department of Homeland Security said they called in back-up. People on the scene “continued to ignore law enforcement commands and aggressively advanced on law enforcement,” a DHS statement said. “ICE used their training and deployed crowd control measures for the safety of the public and law enforcement.”

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