By Nathan Layne
Jan 9 (Reuters) – Months before a U.S. immigration agent fatally shot a motorist in Minnesota on Wednesday, President Donald Trump had fixated on the state, repeatedly criticizing its Democratic leaders and the large Somali-American community there.
The president called Somali immigrants “garbage,” railed against a sprawling welfare-fraud scandal and ridiculed Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat who ran on the party’s ticket in the 2024 presidential election against Trump. Minneapolis also was one of several Democratic-led cities subject to major immigration crackdowns.
The agent who shot Renee Nicole Good, 37 and a U.S. citizen, was among 2,000 federal officers flagged for deployment to the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, home to the largest Somali diaspora in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security has called the operation its most expansive ever. The agent’s name has not been released by DHS.
The shooting, which inflamed the already charged political climate and sparked protests, unfolded against a backdrop of what political analysts describe as mounting animus toward a state led by Walz, whose conflict with the president traces to the unrest that followed George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 during Trump’s first term.
“There’s no secret that the president of the United States does not like Governor Walz and has paid particular attention to the fraud that occurred here,” said Marc Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis.
Osler said Minnesota seems to “trigger” Trump in several ways, pointing to his repeated attacks on Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American Democrat representing a Minneapolis district, and his losses in all three presidential elections there.
The White House has defended the shooting of Good as self-defense by a law enforcement officer merely doing his job and says the recent surge in federal resources to Minnesota was aimed at rooting out fraud.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said President Trump’s “only motivation is doing what’s best for the American people.”
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a news conference on Thursday that DHS would “continue to operate on the ground in Minnesota, not only to remove criminal illegal aliens, but also to continue conducting door-to-door investigations of the rampant fraud that has taken place in the state.”
Launched in December, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in the Minneapolis area follows similarly controversial deportation efforts in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans – all Democratic strongholds.
While California and Illinois governors Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker emerged from their battles with Trump with larger national profiles, Walz this week said he would end his bid for a third term to focus on welfare fraud allegations that have become a rallying point for Trump and his Republican allies.
SPOTLIGHT ON FRAUD SCANDAL
Nearly 100 people have been charged with felonies for what federal prosecutors say was an abuse by some nonprofit groups of Minnesota’s social service programs. Most of the people prosecuted are from the area’s Somali community.
Mike Griffin, a community organizer in Minneapolis, said he believes Trump and his allies are putting a new spotlight on a fraud scandal that dates to the Biden administration to paint the city as corrupt and justify his immigration crackdown.
“We can make sure that we end waste, fraud and abuse, but also make sure that we’re supporting our immigrant communities and supporting civilians,” Griffin told Reuters. “We can focus on those two things, but those are two separate conversations.”
Griffin was one of the thousands of protesters who gathered in the streets of Minneapolis on Wednesday night calling for a prosecution of the agent who killed Good.
In a press conference on Thursday, Walz said he would push for the state to be part of the federal investigation into the shooting and that Minnesotans would not accept an investigation where U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is the “judge, jury and executioner.”
“This is a brazen use of force. They want us to bend the knee. They want us to capitulate,” Walz said.
Dan Myers, an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, said the showdown between the federal government and the state reflects a second Trump term marked by a more aggressive use of executive power.
Trump, Myers said, has pushed “well past the boundaries of executive authority,” using the machinery of the federal government to target political adversaries, even as some states have so far managed to push back.
Francesca Taylor, who lives near where Good was shot, told Reuters she believed the Trump administration was targeting her city and state because of their openness to immigrants and other marginalized groups.
“I think it’s easy for the Trump administration to target a state that’s politically opposed to them,” she said, adding, “Trump hates Tim Walz.”
Dan Hofrenning, a political science professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, said it remains to be seen if the administration can retain enough political support to continue its surge of federal resources to Minnesota after the shooting.
“The political question of the hour is: how is it playing out for Donald Trump?” Hofrenning said. “There seems to be growing opposition to the aggressive ICE tactics.”
(reporting by Nathan Layne in New York, Renee Hickman and Rich Matthews in Minneapolis and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Craig Timberg and Diane Craft)
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