During her two days in immigration detention, a St. Paul woman who was born in Minnesota said she “put her faith in God” and prayed after suffering what appeared to be a stress-induced seizure and being taken to a hospital in arm and leg restraints.

Nasra Ahmed, 23, tilted her face to the side Sunday evening to show the broken skin and bruising she said she suffered on the side of her head when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shoved her to the ground of a parking lot outside the apartment complex where she lives with relatives.

“I gave them my I.D. since they asked,” said Ahmed, a U.S. citizen who has no documented criminal history in Minnesota. “I did everything they asked.”

On top of her treatment, residents of the predominantly Somali-American housing complex have expressed shock and outrage that a U.S. citizen would be taken into custody by armed immigration officials.

“What is going on is not right,” said her father, Mohamed Ahmed, who had no access to his daughter during her two days of incarceration.

“It’s wrong. Everyone can see,” he added. “They’re not going after the ‘worst of the worst.’ They’re terrorizing the community. They’re terrorizing mostly communities of color, but everybody is being targeted now. Nasra committed no crime, but they put her in jail. She’s got bruises.”

Growing federal presence

Nasra Ahmed’s arrest is the latest in a growing number of reported immigration detentions involving non-citizens and U.S. citizens.

Stepped-up immigration enforcement throughout the Twin Cities began late last year and escalated in early January with upwards of 2,000 ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said last week that DHS would send “hundreds more” federal officers to Minnesota.

Ahmed, who lives with an aunt in the complex off Lower Afton Road in St. Paul, said she had just left home around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday to pick up her prescription medication when two Somali-American men ran past her in the parking lot.

Nasra Ahmed, 23, photographed outside a relative’s apartment near Lower Afton Road in St. Paul on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026, where she was forcibly detained by federal immigration agents on Wednesday, suffering cuts and bruises to her face and legs. She spent two days at the Sherburne County Jail before being released without charges on Friday night. She is a U.S. citizen, born in Minnesota, with no documented criminal history. (Frederick Melo / Pioneer Press)

She suddenly found herself in the middle of a group of ICE agents who had been chasing them, she said. The armed agents demanded to see her identification, and she complied.

The situation quickly escalated anyway, she said, with an agent calling her a racial slur and another telling her they were “making America great again.” In videos of the incident recorded by neighbors and circulating on social media, a dozen agents can be seen surrounding her, forcing her to the ground and then into a car.

A jail roster later listed her as 5’4 and 112 lbs. — an unlikely threat to a team of agents, at least in her own eyes.

“They used a lot of force to arrest me,” she said. “They pinned me. I have a bruise on my head. I’ve been having head pain since that incident. My whole body is aching. … I was crying. I was screaming.”

Two days in detention

Ahmed said her cellular phone was confiscated and has yet to be returned. She was driven by two agents — a Latina and the driver, a Caucasian man — to the Whipple Building at Fort Snelling, where she said she shared a detention cell with a woman who had suffered gashes to her legs that had bloodied her pants.

The woman, who was Native American, told Ahmed she had been forcibly removed from her car.

Ahmed was soon transferred to the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, which serves as a holding facility for ICE. A jail roster listed her as being held pending federal felony charges, but it provided no additional details.

Ahmed, a former Amazon factory worker, has been taking time away from working since suffering repeated medical episodes that include seizure-like symptoms. On Thursday, she said, she had another episode, which may have been stress-induced.

She was taken, shackled, to an Allina hospital, where she was given an MRI and held overnight under watch.

“The way they treated me during that episode while I was transported, I was cuffed from my hands to my legs. I was covered in chains,” she said. “They had a padlock on me. … While I was in the hospital, if I needed to go to the restroom or I needed to get up, they had chains on me like Hannibal Lecter, pretty much.”

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She was returned Friday to the Sherburne County Jail, and then moved back to the Whipple Building, where she was released around 7:45 p.m. Friday without charges. With her cell phone confiscated, she had no way of calling her parents, but she was driven home by a federal public defender.

Her father, Mohamed Ahmed, had worked closely with the office of state Rep. Samakab Hussein DFL-St. Paul, to get her out of federal detention.

“She’s never been arrested,” her father said. “She’s a good citizen.”