Ahmed Bin Hassan was keeping to himself, sitting in the car he was driving for Uber at the airport in Minneapolis. A few hours earlier, elsewhere in the city, an officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had shot and killed Renee Nicole Good.
Bin Hassan, a Somali American, was intently watching videos of the killing, which were rapidly circulating on social media, when he heard a knock on his car’s window.
It was a Border Patrol agent.
“I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me.”
Stunned, Bin Hassan opened the door and asked the agent, part of a massive crackdown on immigrants in the Twin Cities following President Donald Trump’s racist comments about the Somali community there, what she wanted. The subsequent confrontation between Bin Hassan and over a dozen masked ICE agents has since gone viral.
At one point in videos of the incident, a Border Patrol agent says to Bin Hassan, “If you were from this country, you would know I’m an immigration agent.”
Bin Hassan remarks on the use of the phrase “from this country.”
“I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me,” the agent tells Bin Hassan. “That’s why I’m asking you.”
It was a tell, Bin Hassan later said in an exclusive interview with The Intercept, about the agents’ motivation for accosting him in first place.
“They couldn’t hear my voice when they knocked on my window, but they could see my color,” Bin Hassan told The Intercept. “I knew what he meant, and I wanted to let him say his racism all out. Bring it all out.”
In the videos of the incident, one posted by a bystander and one from Bin Hassan himself, the Uber driver can be seen asking the ICE officers for their ID, questioning their citizenship. Throughout the confrontation, Bin Hassan remains defiant, refusing to share his identity with the officers and asking them for their identities and proof of citizenship. At one point a Border Patrol agent tells him, “Man, shut up!” Bin Hassan never does.
The Border Patrol agents continue to harangue the Uber driver, taking cellphone videos and photographs. At one point, Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol senior official, approaches with canisters of what appear to be chemical agents hanging off his body armor. The confrontation lasted several minutes, after which the Border Patrol agents walk away.
“I knew the consequences,” Bin Hassan told The Intercept. “Either they would kill me, like they killed the woman three hours earlier, or they were going to rough me up over there, choke me, put me in some physical pain that was only going to be for a certain duration, then I’d get back better hopefully.”
“I knew what he meant, and I wanted to let him say his racism all out.”
“I thought, hey, whatever the consequences are, if I refuse to show you my identity, let those consequences occur,” Bin Hassan said. “But in the meantime, I’m going to have fun with it.”
Though many people online praised Bin Hassan for his courage and humor, the 38-year-old American citizen said he was never scared. He said his Muslim faith has made him at ease with circumstances out of his control.
“I knew if these people are going to take me out here today, it’s going to happen,” Bin Hassan said. “So I’m just going to be me.”
American Citizen
Bin Hassan moved to the U.S. in 2005, when he was only 17. The rest of his family, including his wife and children, live in Kenya. His family had originally moved from Somalia to Kenya in the 1980s amid the Somali civil war. Bin Hassan became a U.S. citizen in 2016, he said.
Bin Hassan started working as an Uber driver only last month, in December 2025, and prior to that worked as a commercial truck driver. In 2015, he graduated from Washington State University’s Richland campus, with a degree in mechanical engineering, he said. But various jobs he applied for in the engineering field rejected him.
“I’m Black, Muslim immigrant,” Bin Hassan said. “So it wasn’t easy getting hired.”
Bin Hassan said he is still paying off more than $70,000 in loans for his education, which pushed him into driving for Uber.
The Twin Cities’ Somali community members are overwhelmingly citizens and legal permanent residents, but the Trump administration targeted the city precisely to go after Somalis.
The immigration operation in Minnesota began in December, after far-right media figures began bringing attention to cases of alleged fraud in the state. The renewed attention to the court cases, which had long been in process, prompted Trump to say Somali immigrants were “garbage,” part of a rant that was shockingly racist even by the standards of the president’s usual bigoted rhetoric.
The crackdown kicked into overdrive after a video collaboration between a MAGA influencer with an anti-immigrant history and a man later identified by The Intercept as a far-right lobbyist in Minnesota. The pair produced a video purporting to expose fraud in Minnesota day care centers, particularly those run by Somalis.
After the video’s release, the Trump administration sent thousands of federal agents to the state. Locals sprang into action with networks that tracked ICE and sought to relay early warnings, along with designated observers. One of the residents involved was Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent the day Bin Hassan was accosted.
The minute he saw federal agents in the parking lot, Bin Hassan said he realized they were there to target the Somali drivers.
“This is not the first time they came to that yard,” he said. “That’s the Uber yard, and the majority of the people that hustle from there are men and women of the Somali immigrant population here.”
“These people are doing some gestapo shit,” he added. “So they might put me or put all the Somalis, based on what Trump said, in concentration camps and ship them back.”
Despite the tensions, Bin Hassan said he wants to continue driving peacefully and took two rides on Wednesday just after the confrontation.
“I just wanted them” — the federal agents — “to get out of my way so I could continue to work, earn an honest day’s living.”
And he is not scared of running into the ICE agents on the streets again.
“When it comes to the ICE officers, we’ve met each other, they know me,” he said. “If they’ve decided to leave me alone because they found out I am a citizen, they’ve made that decision too.”
Bin Hassan reflected during his interview with The Intercept on using humor during his confrontation with Border Patrol. He had mocked the agents’ letter-and-number designations on their uniforms, rather than using their real names.
“I was making fun of his name because it was the only way I could calm myself down,” Bin Hassan said, “because I was really angry.”
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