Ice + Local Law Enforcement

A Birds Eye View

Missile development isn’t the only dubious activity happening at U-War Park. Only a few hundred feet South of the North Wind plot the University of Minnesota maintains a gun range operated jointly between the University of Minnesota Police Department, the FBI, and University administration. The facilities have been leased out to a wide variety of agencies from local law enforcement organizations to the USPS Inspection Service, and perhaps most infamously: ICE.

ⓘ Important Update

In a testament to the public pressure of the campaign, SDS received word on August 29th, 2025 that the UofM would no longer be contracting the UMore Park gun range to any external agencies. This change is expected to go into effect by the end of November. Read our full statement here. The language on the website will be changed accordingly.

Finding information on the site has been extraordinarily difficult. SDS has poured over records, archives, and funding requests to find the little information we have today. From satellite imagery, it appears the range was constructed sometime between 1991-2002. This continued lack of transparency from the UofM comes to a peak with the mysterious Minneapolis/St. Paul Police “E.S.T.Y.” site directly North of the gun range, still on University land, as well as the recent efforts of the University to contract the site directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, directly aiding in the militarization of the agency that we’ve seen culminate in the military-like deployments in LA as well as the recent raids here in Minneapolis.

Nothing New: UMN Cooperation with ICE

The University of Minnesota has made a point this past spring to try to distance itself from ICE, claiming “…the University does not have responsibility or an active role in federal officials enforcing federal law or court processes…”.¹ Cunningham herself has made comments that recent ICE action has been “deeply concerning,” specifically surrounding the recent arrest and subsequent holding of UMN grad student Doğukan Gunaydin for almost two months.² All of it begins to ring a little hollow considering the University of Minnesota has been actively abetting and profiting from the training of ICE officers for almost five years.

A recent Minnesota Reformer article³ exposed the fact that since 2020, the University has annually renewed a contract the the Department of Homeland Security to lease the UWar Park gun range to the St. Paul Field Office division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This was especially pertinent considering the almost-concurrent raid at Lake St. and Bloomington in South Minneapolis that saw the deployment of a BearCat style vehicle and 11 federal agencies (Including ICE) plus local law enforcement.⁴ ⁵ ⁶

Make no mistake, the University of Minnesota has played a direct role in enabling such raids to take place. SDS reviews of range booking info indicate that ICE has been allowed to use the range almost 50 times since 2020 (See Figure Above). That is 50 times that ICE officers were instructed on the use of lethal firearms against the people of this country, all under the purview of the UofM. Now, under direction from the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has begun the construction of pop-up concentration camps around the country. It is our duty now more than every to ensure that our tuition dollars aren’t going towards this fascistic mobilization of our immigration forces.

On Friday, August 29th, SDS received word from a Regent of the University of Minnesota that admin had made the executive decision to stop all external leases of the UMore Park Gun Range, effective at the end of November. SDS confirmed, through public spending databases,⁷ that the University did not renew its annual contract with ICE as of September 8th, 2025. This marked the victory of one half of the campaign demands surrounding the gun range. As we will get into throughout the page, we’re still demanding that the gun range be shut down entirely.

UMPD – Still around for some reason

The University of Minnesota Police Department was founded in 1947, with the University’s primary goal being the establishment of an on-campus investigative unit. Since its inception over 80 years ago, the UMPD has had a tumultuous history with students on campus, especially protesters.

In the Vietnam era, UMPD was deployed against student antiwar activists by administration. The situation escalated until municipal police and the national guard were called in. ⁸ They’ve been present for many of the most historically significant acts of student protest at The U. Their historical ineffectiveness at “fighting crime” and open collaboration with racist policing across the city boiled over into a 2020 editorial from the MN Daily calling for the disbandment of the UMPD as a force.⁹

The UMPD responded with huge efforts to bolster officer standing and increase recruitment. Currently, a University officer is set to make six figures after two years of employment.¹⁰ This comes in tandem with The U’s deal with MPD giving the UMPD jurisdiction over Dinkytown and parts of Marcy-Holmes.¹¹

As the U continues to broaden their police jurisdiction, the annual UMPD funding has continued to increase. Part of this wider initiative to bolster police power has included the acquisition of military equipment. The 1033 program is a federal initiative that funnels weapons from the military to cops across the country. As a part of the program, UMPD received M-14 and M-16 assault rifles.¹²

The UMPD also owns an LRAD, or Long-Range Acoustic Device, a crowd control weapon used to dispel protests known to cause permanent hearing loss.¹³ At the UMN Divest Encampment and at Halimy Hall, UMPD’s primary directive was to protect the reputation and functioning of a University publicly funding genocide, and punish students who were standing in the way. They are there to harass us at every Northrop protest or Regents disruption. They arrested a Black student while protecting the Regents in March of 2025–the same meeting they passed their resolution limiting departmental statements in response to pro-Palestinian faculty speech. As long as there has been a people’s movement on campus, the UMPD has been our most confrontational enemy. They are a directly political arm of administration of the state, complete with a bloated budget and assault weaponry.

THe mpd connection

The Minneapolis Police Department is an irredeemably racist and destructive institution. Black people are still nearly 5x as likely to be murdered by Minneapolis police.¹⁴ Since 2020, the anti-black violence perpetrated by the MPD has not wavered or ceased. Neither has The University’s insistence on working with and training MPD officers.

Following the murder of George Floyd and a public call to divest from MPD, the University has obfuscated it’s relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. In 2020, a Black Carlson student wrote then president Joan Gabel demanding the U cut ties with the MPD.¹⁵ Gabel’s near immediate response was a pledge to stop having MPD do on-campus security for “large events or specialized services.”

This was presented publicly as complete divestment. Privately, this meant the University would continue to train, collaborate with and bolster MPD while handling it’s own security for sporting events. It was thus absolved of guilt for racist collaboration and celebrated for “listening to it’s students.” Unknown to the public was the fact that MPD had used the UMPD gun range and had co-owned a facility of unknown use on U-More land since at least the mid 90s. Divestment had been purely symbolic.

Despite the already inconsequential nature of Gabel’s PR move, removing MPD from some larger events and unspecified “services” was too much commitment for the University. Just two years after it was put into effect, under the same U administration, The U rolled-back it’s half-assed divestment and brought MPD back for campus events.¹⁶

The MPD hasn’t stopped targeting students on campus or doing racist patrols of the communities surrounding campus. MPD zip-tied our wrists and slammed us into walls to defend U admin and their property during the occupation of Halimy Hall. The FBI and SWAT still receive firearms training on University property using University equipment. The relationship between the U and local cops/feds is stronger than ever. This is extremely daunting given not only the racist nature of our local police departments but also the political repression and xenophobic violence the feds have been especially guilty of lately.

OUr Central task

> why are there armed guards on campus?

The connection between the University’s willingness to train ICE and the FBI and the amount of money it pours into maintaining its own police force should not go overlooked. The University led a campaign of lies, broadly insinuating “divestment” from MPD following the extra-judicial murder of George Floyd, and still trains racist MPD cops and uses the money to supply guns to its own. There is no isolation between the University’s active participation in militarization, over-policing and state-sanctioned racism, and it’s participation in genocide or ecocide. It is all reflective of a unified motive: profit, at the expense of students, workers, land, and life.

The concept of the UMPD is itself suspect. The University, deeded land by the government for the explicit purpose of colonial expansion, now lends itself out to corporate interests and has propped up a bubble of white gentrification in Eastern Minneapolis. The UMPD can’t protect it’s student body or solve it’s issues because that isn’t it’s purpose. It does nothing to better a mental health crisis on a campus with a suicide problem. It does nothing to fight the culture of rape and sexual assault perpetrated at every house on frat row. The University has only investigated and subsequently expelled two students for sexual harassment, assault or relationship violence in the last 5 years. Meanwhile, over 15 students have faced suspensions over pro-Palestine protests on campus since March of 2024.

The primary purpose of the UMPD is to protect the U’s corporate interests. Their days are mostly spent ticketing cars and waiting patiently for a student protester they can intimidate. The University has long used it’s police force as a means of punishing student activists, dating back to the fights against the US’ Imperialist invasion of Vietnam and Apartheid in South Africa. Since October 2023, UMPD has actively participated in / overseen the arrest of at least 21 student and alumni protestors, and has investigated several more.

Our history of anti-police work and our violent arrests/incarceration at the hands of UMPD/MPD (and SWAT) has informed our perspective on the UMPD gun range at U-More. It is not enough to publicly cut the ICE contract. The University’s police do not need a gun range. They do not need guns.

> how we fight the cops

Our full demands, beyond “End the ICE Contract,” read “End the usage of the UMore Park Firearms Range.” Understanding the historical and contemporary role of UMPD, it is our belief that the gun range, used for years as a mechanism of police militarization and a beacon of racist and xenophobic violence, should be permanently shut down.

If the University wishes to protect it’s students and it’s community over it’s pockets, the move is simple.

End the ICE contract and make all previous and current collaboration with ICE fully transparent. (Which we have partly won already.)
Implement a sanctuary campus and refuse to allow ICE to target our friends and loved ones.

Further, the system of University policing and the violence it has enabled must be dealt with.

Shut down the gun range and demilitarize the UMPD.
Stop training the MPD, the FBI, and any other arms of the state that seek to exploit student money. (Which we have won.)
Stop using the UMPD as a means of political repression.

The University doesn’t bend to polite requests or quiet whispers. They divested from Apartheid because students occupied Halimy (“Morrill”) Hall 3 separate times and maintained political pressure between acts of escalation. We move in the same way.

We need your help in spreading the word, getting petition signatures, and making our voices heard. We will continue to organize over the summer, and come fall, we will hit the streets of campus. Fighting cops isn’t something we can do from inside. The only things that shield us now are barricades.

We will need signatures and emails, and also your real, physical support. Come to our protests. Come to our meetings. Ask how you can get involved. We can Stop U-War park, stop the Minnesota Aerospace Complex, shut down the gun range–but first, we may have to get in the way.