The same week Mayor Mike Johnston traveled to Washington, D.C. for a meeting of big-city mayors, he described federal immigration police as “the bad guys” as his office declared the city was joining “the legal fight” against ICE.
Johnston joined dozens of American municipal leaders in signing an amicus brief decrying what Johnston decried in a statement as “the Trump Administration’s unlawful invasion of Minneapolis.”
The ICE operation in Minneapolis, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, is part of the administration’s mass deportation. Trump argues he’s making the country safer. That’s a premise dozens of mayors, including Johnston, reject, arguing masked ICE officers are endangering everyone and spreading chaos across the country.
“ICE isn’t keeping us safe from the bad guys,” Johnston wrote. “Right now, they are the bad guys — and the longer they remain on our streets without immediate reforms the more people are in danger.”
Starting in early December, thousands of masked and armed federal officers poured into Minneapolis, opposed by both the mayor and the governor, and began detaining people — citizens and immigrants alike.
While the surge followed similar actions in other cities, the legal brief described it as “the most extensive, aggressive, reckless, and chaotic deployment yet.”
The brief argues the administration has violated the anti-commandeering doctrine that prevents the state and local governments from enforcing federal law. An amicus brief is a legal letter from people not directly involved in a case making a legal argument about the matter at hand. In this case, Minneapolis has requested a restraining order against ICE.
ICE’s presence in the Denver metro has been more limited, including high-profile raids in the first months of the Trump administration as well as more scattered operations throughout. Immigration arrests around Denver quintupled in 2025.
'ICE’s occupation of American cities must end now,' Mayor Mike Johnston wrote.
The message from the mayor came days after an ICE agent killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, and weeks after the same force killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old woman, both in Minneapolis. Both Pretti and Good had ties to Colorado.
“It’s not enough that two innocent people are dead, or that their families are unlikely to ever see justice served,” Johnston wrote. “President Trump unleashed this reckless and lethal ICE invasion, and now parents are so afraid of being abducted they’re scared to take their kids to the hospital or leave the house without their passports or birth certificates.”
Earlier this week, members of Denver City Council called on Congress to block funding for ICE or even abolish it.
“Families, immigrant and otherwise, are living in fear and two American citizens are dead,” Council President Amanda Sandoval wrote in a joint statement with the mayor. “We know this administration isn’t interested in accountability, so it’s time for the courts to show it still cares about the rule of law and prevent this from happening to another city.”
The city has at times struggled to regulate its own local police force. Denver has paid tens of millions in legal settlements for local law enforcement misconduct and violence, much of it related to the 2020 protests in the last Trump administration.
Earlier this week, Johnston pledged to protect all residents against the federal government and expressed his optimism that the federal government will follow the law and the Constitution.
When it doesn’t, he said, Denver will fight back in the courts.
