Amid that 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 biggest immigration enforcement operation in history.
“I thought the federal government would realize that now is not the time to be toying with people,” Abel said. “What are they going to try to do to get Minneapolis to ignite?”
Floyd’s death sparked the biggest protests of Trump’s first term. The president, who is still publicly bitter about the unrest, contends it should have been met with a stronger show of force.
That’s the approach Trump has adopted in his second term, trying to cow blue states by surging military and immigration agents into their cities and insisting that anyone who doesn’t comply with federal demands will face severe consequences.
On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance said Good’s death was “a tragedy of her own making,” blamed “leftist ideology” and said the media had encouraged protests against Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The Twin Cities operation is intertwined with a conservative effort to make Minnesota the poster child for government fraud. Though prosecutions for the fraudulent use of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal COVID-19 and health aid by social service groups began in the Biden administration, Trump and conservatives have seized on the scandal in recent weeks.
Jamal Osman, a Somali immigrant and Minneapolis city councilman who lives just a few blocks from the location of the ICE shooting, said he and other prominent Somalis in the area have been swamped with angry calls and messages since Trump made his statements. The vitriol, he said, mainly comes from out of state.
“We have whole groups of people who’ve 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 blended in, it’s all very nice. We don’t really see bad things happening here normally.”
Minnesota’s place on a list of targeted blue states is not unexpected.
Under Walz, Minnesota has become something of a beacon for liberals as an example of a state that expanded the public safety net even as the nation swung to the right. Since Trump’s first election, the state has seen large increases in education spending, free school breakfasts and lunches, and improved protection of abortion rights.
Trump lost Minnesota by only 4 percentage points in 2024, making it significantly less liberal than California and New York. Still, it has been reliably Democratic throughout the Trump years, a rarity in the swingy upper Midwest.
The state’s political tilt reflects the size of the Twin Cities metro area and its robust population of college-educated liberals, which overwhelm the state’s more conservative rural reaches.
It’s the sort of cleavage that has defined national politics during Trump’s years in office.
“Minnesota is a microcosm of a lot of the tensions we have in our society,” said David Schultz, a political scientist at Hamline University in St. Paul. “We’re a country that’s hugely polarized, Democrats-Republicans, urban-rural.”
On Thursday, Minnesota was an ominous indicator of the damage those divisions can inflict. Minneapolis schools remained closed after immigration agents clashed with high school students at one campus on Wednesday. The state’s National Guard remained on standby at Walz’s directive.
Walz begged Trump to ease up, saying Minnesota’s residents are “exhausted” by the president’s “relentless assault on Minnesota.”
“So please, just give us a break,” Walz said during a news conference Thursday. “And if it’s me, you’re already getting what you want, but leave my people alone. Leave our state alone.”
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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press reporters Giovanna Dell’Orto, Rebecca Santana and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed.
