ICE shooting reinforces Minnesota’s grim role as a target for Trump

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal officers have faced opposition in nearly all the cities targeted by President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign. But in Minnesota — a state in daily conflict with the Trump administration this year — a 37-year-old woman was shot and killed by an immigration officer.

Trump has focused on many blue states in the divide-and-conquer campaign that defined his second term, and now he has turned to Minnesota, where the killing of George Floyd and the protests it sparked have tainted his first presidency.

Trump last month called the state’s Somali population “garbage” in the wake of a wide-ranging federal investigation into COVID-19 and medical aid fraud linked to organizations serving Somali immigrants, among others. Fraud issues prompted Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — Kamala Harris’ former running mate for 2024 — to announce this week that he will not run for re-election.

In June, a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband were assassinated by a Trump supporter, despite conservatives’ insistence that the gunman was actually a leftist working at Walz’s behest. On Sunday, the victims’ family begged Trump to remove a social media post echoing those conspiracy theories.

Memories of the chaos that followed the killing of George Floyd

Amid this mounting tension, the Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was sending more than 2,000 federal officers to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in what it claimed would be the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.

Read more: What we know so far about the Minneapolis shooting

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who killed Renee Judd during a protest Wednesday against immigration raids opened fire just blocks from where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in 2020. The similarities were painful and frightening for many in the area, including Stephanie Appel, a 56-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, who keeps her gas tank full and cash on hand in memory of the chaos that followed that killing.

“I thought the federal government would realize that now is not the time to manipulate people,” Appel said. “What are they going to try to do to set Minneapolis on fire?”

Floyd’s death sparked the largest protests during Trump’s first term. The president, still publicly bitter about the unrest, maintains that it should have been met with a stronger show of force.

This is the approach Trump has adopted in his second term, trying to intimidate blue states by increasing military and immigration agents in their cities and insisting that anyone who does not comply with federal demands will face severe consequences.

The migration operations that began last summer in liberal strongholds such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland also sparked major protests. Good is at least the fifth person to be killed during Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts.

Vice President J.D. Vance said Thursday that Judd’s death was a “tragedy of her own making,” blamed “leftist ideology” and said the media had encouraged protests against Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.

Federal investigators have Somalis in their sights

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The Twin Cities operation is intertwined with a conservative effort to make Minnesota the poster child for government fraud. Although prosecutions have begun for the fraudulent use of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal coronavirus and health aid by social service groups in the Biden administration, Trump and conservatives have seized on the scandal in recent weeks.

In November, Trump described Minnesota as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” after a report by a conservative news website, City Journal, alleged that federal funds were fraudulently flowing to the militant group Al-Shabaab. There was little, if any, evidence to prove such a connection. However, the president said he would end temporary protected status for Somalis in Minnesota.

The allegations got a new charge late last month when conservative influencer Nick Shirley posted an unverified video claiming that Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis had fraudulently collected more than $100 million in government aid.

Jamal Osman, a Somali immigrant and Minneapolis City Council member who lives a few blocks from the site of the ICE shootings, said he and other prominent Somalis in the area have been bombarded with angry calls and messages since Trump made his comments. He said the vitriol comes mainly from out of state.

“We have whole groups of people who have never been to Minnesota,” Osman said in an interview. “Minnesota is probably one of the nicest places to live. It’s a beautiful area with very nice people and we’ve blended in, everything is very nice. We don’t see bad things happening here normally.”

The Trump administration said Tuesday it will withhold funding for programs that support needy families with children, including funding for day care, in five Democratic-led states over concerns about fraud. Minnesota was joined on the list by California, Colorado, Illinois and New York.

“Leave our country alone”

Watch the video in the player above.

Minnesota’s place on the list of targeted blue states is not unexpected.

Under Walz, Minnesota has become a beacon for liberals as an example of a state that has expanded its public safety net even as the nation has shifted to the right. Since Trump’s first election, the state has seen significant increases in education spending, free breakfast and lunch in schools, and improved protections for abortion rights.

Trump lost Minnesota by just 4 percentage points in 2024, making it significantly less liberal than California and New York. However, it has been reliably Democratic throughout the Trump years, a rarity in the swing upper Midwest.

The state’s political tilt reflects the size of the Twin Cities metro area and its strong population of college-educated liberals, which overshadow the more conservative rural areas of the state.

It’s the kind of division that has defined national politics during Trump’s years in office.

“Minnesota is a microcosm of a lot of the tensions we face in our society,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in St. Paul. “We are a very polarized country, between Democrats and Republicans, urban and rural.”

On Thursday, Minnesota was an ominous indicator of the damage those divisions can do. Minneapolis schools remained closed after immigration agents clashed with high school students at a campus on Wednesday. The state National Guard remained on standby at Walz’s direction.

Walz begged Trump to tone it down, saying Minnesotans were “exhausted” by the president’s “relentless attack on Minnesota.”

“So please give us a break,” Walz said during a press conference on Thursday. “And if it’s me, you already get what you want, but leave my people alone. Leave our country alone.”

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press reporters Giovanna del Orto, Rebecca Santana and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed.