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.
Ahmed Bin Hassan, an Uber driver who confronted Border Patrol agents that questioned him, during an interview near his home in Minneapolis on Jan. 9, 2026. Photo: Fatima Khan
“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,