Former President Barack Obama has strongly criticized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minnesota. Recently, Obama appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s No Lie podcast, where he discussed a range of topics, including his thoughts on the Trump administration.
Barack Obama said that ICE agents’ approach in Minneapolis was “unprecedented.” The former Democratic president lamented, “It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, tear gassing crowds simply who were standing there not breaking any laws.”
Therapy dogs have been brought into the school of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained and later released by ICE with his father, to help students cope with trauma, @lilialuciano reports. The move comes as border czar Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge in… pic.twitter.com/irVrCeyS1P
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 13, 2026
Obama was referring to the recent incident where ICE agents detained Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, alongside his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. The Minnesota father and son were transported to a detention center in Dilley, Texas, before a judge mandated their release after they spent 10 days in ICE custody.
According to the Irish Star, Obama described the ICE operations as “rogue” and “deeply concerning and dangerous.” At the same time, he also praised citizens for taking bold steps in response to federal agents in a “systematic, organized” way.
“So the rogue behavior of agents of the federal government is deeply concerning and dangerous,” said Obama. He added, “But we should take a moment to appreciate the extraordinary outpouring of organizing, community building, decency, neighbors buying groceries for folks accompanying children to school, teachers who were standing up for their kids, not just randomly, but in a systematic, organized way.”
“Citizens saying, this is not the America we believe in and we’re going to fight back and we’re going to push back with the truth and with cameras and with peaceful protests and shining a light on the sort of behavior that in the past we’ve seen in authoritarian countries and we’ve seen in dictatorships, but we have not seen in America,” Obama continued.
Great sitting down with @BrianTylerCohen to talk about everything from the courage we saw in Minnesota, to how Democrats can be true to our values and get stuff done, to how we’re building a community of changemakers at the @ObamaFoundation. https://t.co/xyskxKbM8n pic.twitter.com/E02yOaHezK
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 14, 2026
The former president added, “And it should remind us that at the end of the day, the way we get a democracy that’s working, the way we get policies that actually are helping working families get ahead the way that we restore norms, rule of law, decency, it’s going to be because we citizens are activated and paying attention and saying enough and saying, we have a different idea of what the American family should look like and community should look like. And that is what I’m seeing across the board.”
“When they’re not challenged, it’s easy to believe in free speech when it doesn’t seem like the government’s trying to crack down on free speech. It’s easy to say that we believe in the golden rule when we aren’t at risk of being arrested when we exercise the golden rule. Right now we’re being tested.”
