ICE agents battered down Minneapolis man's front door and arrested him without a warrant; judge ruled the raid unconstitutional

On January 11, 2026, around 9 a.m., masked and heavily armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents used a battering ram to break down the front door of Garrison Gibson's home in north Minneapolis and arrested him, as part of the Operation Metro Surge enforcement deployment. Gibson's wife, their 9-year-old daughter, and her cousin were asleep inside when agents forced entry with weapons drawn; family members livestreamed the raid on social media while repeatedly asking to see a warrant. Agents claimed to have one, but no judicial warrant was produced before or during the forced entry — the document eventually shown afterward was not a judicial warrant.

Gibson, a Liberian national who fled that country's civil war as a child and had lived in the U.S. for two decades under an order of supervision, had been complying with routine ICE check-ins, his last one roughly two weeks before the arrest. He was held in ICE custody until U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan ruled on January 15, 2026, in Garrison G. v. Bondi, that agents "forcibly entered Garrison G.'s home without his consent and without a judicial warrant. This arrest violated the Fourth Amendment," and ordered ICE to release him immediately, subject to his existing supervision conditions. The order noted Gibson had no criminal record.

Gibson later told reporters that agents took what he described as "trophy" photos during the raid and that he was held afterward in an overcrowded holding cell before his release. Neither ICE nor DHS disputed the absence of a judicial warrant in public accounts of the arrest.

This entry records the January 11 warrantless home arrest that Judge Bryan found unconstitutional. ICE's separate re-arrest of Gibson on January 16, 2026, at a routine check-in appointment hours after this court-ordered release, is recorded as its own event: a distinct enforcement decision, on a different day, carried out through a different unlawful process.