A high-speed car chase involving a man in a red Prius and federal agent ended with multi-car crash at Nina’s in St. Paul Wednesday Feb. 11, 2026. (Photo by Alyssa Chen/Minnesota Reformer)
A high-speed car chase that witnesses said involved a young man and a federal agent on Wednesday ended with a multi-car crash outside Nina’s Coffee Cafe in St. Paul.
The man was transported away from the scene in an ambulance covered by a sheet. A St. Paul firefighter said the man asked to be covered for privacy. The injuries were “not serious, that’s all I can say,” the firefighter said. A woman whose airbag went off also went to the hospital; it was unclear whether she was injured.
Three cars were damaged. A crowd of people gathered at the scene, yelling “F*ck ICE” at over a dozen federal agents who had shown up after the crash.
“This is just another incident that tells us loud and clear: Operation Metro Surge needs to end immediately,” said St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, in a statement.
Brandon Reader was about to get out of his car to go to Nina’s when he saw a red car fly by. He said a single federal agent in an unmarked sedan sped by, giving chase. The speed limit is 25 mph at the site of the car crash and surrounding streets in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood, which is a walkable mix of historic homes and restaurants.
“If I wasn’t so slow just getting out of my own vehicle, I’d have been hit” by the federal agent’s car, Reader said.
Christopher Jones was standing outside smoking a cigarette when the cars sped by.
The man’s red Toyota Prius spun out of control as he came through the intersection and hit two cars before stopping when it hit a chunk of ice, Jones and Reader said. The man in the Prius, whom Reader said looked to be a man in his 20s, shimmied out of his car window feet first and fled on foot, Reader said. Witnesses said the man looked to be Arab or Latino. Jones said he also saw the man get out of his car window and watched the man run and jump over a fence.
“I would be shocked if he was even incapacitated at the amount he was moving both when he got out of the vehicle and when I saw him in the back of the vehicle,” Reader said.
The federal agent got out of his car to pursue the man, Reader said, not checking on others in the wreck. The agent quickly caught the fleeing man, Jones said.
Multiple federal vehicles came to the scene. Reader watched as federal agents transferred the man between two different vehicles. Reader, who called 911 immediately after the crash, said that the ambulance arrived around 20 minutes after the crash. The federal agents left shortly after the ambulance left.
Reader said that one federal agent told protesters and bystanders that the man in the red Prius had been involved in a hit-and-run a mile back.
“They yelled at everybody who was upset, saying, ‘You don’t even know who this guy is and how bad he is and who we were chasing,’” Reader said.
St. Paul Council Vice President Hwa Jeong Kim was at the scene after the crash. After she heard Reader’s recounting, she said, “Are you effing kidding me? They’re going on car chases, going 80 down residential streets, to do what? How do they know that’s even the person that they’re looking for?”
A high-speed car chase in north Minneapolis in January, after which an ICE agent shot a man in the leg, arose from two federal agents mistaking a Latino man for another Latino man.
St. Paul police officers were present for crowd control. They remained after federal agents left and took witness statements. Some protesters were upset at the St. Paul police for what they saw as cooperation with federal immigration activity.
An email to the Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned.
This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Alabama Reflector, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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Author: Alyssa Chen