‘They’re trying to break us’

Two days before Christmas, with federal agents ramping up immigration arrests in Minnesota, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stepped to a microphone and issued a warning.

“I am increasingly concerned because of the chaos that is being caused by these ICE agents,” Frey said. “Somebody is going to get seriously injured or killed.”

Two weeks later, with some 2,000 federal agents — more than three times the number of police officers employed by the Minneapolis Police Department — deployed to the state, that very thing happened. A federal immigration officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen, on Wednesday, unleashing a national furor, pitting federal and local officials against each other and drawing thousands of people to the streets in protest.

Wednesday’s deadly confrontation was the culmination of weeks of intensified scrutiny, verbal attacks and even conspiracy theories directed at Minnesota and Gov. Tim Walz by President Donald Trump, his administration and his allies.

Exactly why the president has been so fixated on Minnesota isn’t totally clear, though local officials and strategists working in state and national politics have pointed NBC News to Trump’s long-running — and unsuccessful — attempts to win the state and his personal disdain for Walz. (Trump, however, has repeatedly falsely claimed that he did win the state.) Many said it’s a case of Trump going after deep-blue cities in part due to their immigration policies.

A central focus of the administration’s attacks on Minnesota has also been the Justice Department’s yearslong fraud investigation that has involved some members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

In 2022, during President Joe Biden’s administration, federal prosecutors announced initial indictments in what they called a $250 million scheme to defraud a federal child nutrition program. They described Aimee Bock, who is white, as the mastermind of the operation. A jury convicted her in March. So far, prosecutors have charged 92 people and dozens have been convicted.

But conservative influencers have latched onto the scandal to push unsubstantiated claims, and Trump has used it to make disparaging remarks about people of Somali descent.

For Minnesotans, the result of all this attention has largely been disgust, fury and exhaustion.

“They’re trying to break us,” said Democratic state Rep. Emma Greenman, whose district is roughly a mile from where the shooting occurred. She said she believes the administration targeted the state because it is “a successful story of multiracial democracy and immigration — and it inherently represents a threat to authoritarian power.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News that Trump “loves Minnesota and the people.”

“It’s a state where he received historic Republican support, and he has long called out Walz for his incompetence and terrible leadership.”

“I wish they would just leave us the f— alone,” Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota told NBC News on Wednesday.

Asked why Trump was so fixated on the state, Smith replied, “I wish I knew.”

‘He’s never gotten Walz’

Trump has called Walz “corrupt,” “whacked out” and “grossly incompetent.” On Saturday, the president shared a video on social media that promoted a conspiracy theory about a Democratic lawmaker in the state who, along with her husband, was assassinated in June. The video falsely implied that Walz had something to do with the killing.

Trump has also repeatedly made derogatory comments in recent weeks about Somali immigrants in Minnesota, calling them “scammers” and “lowlifes.” While the fraud investigation into the use of federal social services funds in Minnesota has received bipartisan support in the past, Somali Americans who run child care facilities, which have been the subject of fresh allegations in the scandal, in the state say they’ve been harassed and threatened since a conservative influencer’s lengthy video on the issue went viral.

Many Democrats in the state have acknowledged that its party leaders have mishandled the situation politically as well. A state audit report released in 2024 found that failures by the state’s Education Department led to the misuse of the Covid-era program.

On Monday, Walz made the surprise announcement that he would no longer be running for re-election amid the scrutiny and pressure.

A former senior White House official who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump has long been mystified by why then-Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz as her running mate in 2024.

“He’s never gotten Walz. Never gotten it,” the official said, saying Trump and his team believed someone like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro would have been a stronger choice.

For some in Minnesota, what made Good’s shooting especially tragic was that they saw something like it coming. Bringing in federal agents, against the wishes of the state’s political leaders — and many of its residents — was a bomb waiting to go off, Frey and Walz said Wednesday.

“What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV, and today that recklessness cost someone their life,” Walz said in a news conference. “Now we hear more political rhetoric. Enough. Enough is enough.”

Frey called the incident “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable” and told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “get the f— out” of Minneapolis.

On Fox News on Wednesday night, Vice President JD Vance declared that Walz should resign. He also made an admission.

“Look, I’ve beaten up on Tim Walz enough. I don’t want to do it anymore on your program,” Vance said. “I almost feel bad for the guy, except for the fact that he should have seen this,” he said, referring to the fraud allegations.

On Thursday, however, Vance joined Leavitt at the press briefing, where he again went after Walz.

“Tim Walz is a joke,” he said. “His entire administration has been a joke, the idea that he’s some sort of freedom fighter. He’s not. He’s a guy who has enabled fraud, and maybe, in fact, has participated in fraud.” There is no evidence that Walz participated in alleged fraud.

Leavitt also said the administration wouldn’t be taking its eye off Minnesota.

“The Department of Homeland Security will 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 under the failed and corrupt leadership of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz,” she announced.

Tensions, years in the making

Trump’s focus on Minnesota can be traced to 2016, when he first toppled the so-called blue wall and won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and saw Minnesota as potentially within reach. Republicans have not won Minnesota in a presidential election since 1972.

In the view of one Democratic strategist who has worked in Minnesota, “the Trump folks thought if they squeezed Minnesota, they could turn it red.” Preya Samsundar, a Minnesota-based Republican strategist, noted Trump’s long-held goal of turning the state red and described the president’s attention and effort as a “poke in the eye” to Walz.

“I think for a lot of folks, Minnesota is still one of those states that can be attainable with the right effort,” said Samsundar, a former Midwest regional communications director for the Republican National Committee. “I think now a part of the White House’s focus is because Tim Walz was a VP candidate from a state that Trump has wanted to flip for some while.”

Until abandoning his campaign for a third term, Walz had been positioning himself as one of the Democratic Party’s future leaders, “making him a convenient person to go after,” Samsundar added.

Indeed, Trump’s criticism of Walz intensified after Harris chose him as her running mate. Trump frequently assailed Walz as a “dangerously liberal extremist.” Walz, for his part, emerged as the Democratic ticket’s chief attack dog against Trump, further attracting his ire.

After Trump won, he and his allies lumped Minnesota in with other Democratic states that, he said, weren’t aggressive enough on immigration.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali population, and most of them are U.S. citizens. Since 1993, thousands of people have fled war and instability in the East African country.

As Trump has ramped up ICE actions across the U.S., the community, mostly based in the Twin Cities, has been the target of the agency’s efforts in Minnesota. And Walz hasn’t held his tongue regarding ICE, slamming it last year as Trump’s “modern-day Gestapo.”

On Wednesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a longtime Walz ally, called the governor to remind him to keep in mind what he was dealing with: a Trump administration that lies, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

Pritzker also reupped a playbook he had shared in the past with Walz and other Democratic governors, which was to repeatedly remind his state’s residents that it was their right to protest the government but not to “take the bait” and descend into violence. That was, Pritzker believed, exactly what the Trump administration wanted so it could declare martial law.

Later Wednesday, Walz conveyed that to his residents, imploring them not to “take the bait.”

“They want a show,” Walz said at his news conference. “We can’t give it to them.”

Unfolding fraud allegations

Meanwhile, a broad fraud scandal has been unfolding in the state involving the alleged misuse of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal welfare funds. The allegations pertain largely to the Somali community. Trump has repeatedly said the Somali community has “destroyed Minnesota“ and “our country,” and his Justice Department is sending additional federal prosecutors to the state to assist the U.S. attorney’s office there with the ongoing investigations into the matter.

Republicans in the state and at the national level have blamed Walz for not taking the allegations seriously.

“The fraud is a powerful issue because it’s a real-life example of what the majority of Republicans and independents already feel is true — that their tax dollars are wasted by politicians and people taking advantage of the system,” said Matt Wolking, a longtime GOP strategist who was on Trump’s 2020 campaign.

A state Democratic lawmaker, however, said the Republican attacks all feel “very personal.”

“Donald Trump has vendettas — he goes after people. Clearly that’s a piece of this,” the person said.

“The city is emotionally fatigued,” added Roy Temple, a national Democratic operative with decades of experience in Minnesota politics, who said that, even six years later, the city is “still healing” from the George Floyd murder and fallout.

“People’s nerves are pretty shot,” Temple said, adding that the ICE raids and the fatal shooting are “triggering.”

Complicating part of the picture, however, is the scope and potential severity of the allegations of fraud.

Other Democrats in the state agreed with the sentiment that Trump was unfairly attacking many elements of Walz’s record and dumping on the Somali community — while also acknowledging the possibility that Walz hasn’t handled the situation well.

“This has been in the air in Minnesota for some time; it’s one of those things that we knew at some point this issue would really kind of percolate to the top. And we’re seeing that happen now, where a spotlight is put on this — for multiple reasons,” a Minneapolis-based Democratic operative said. The operative added that Walz’s “biggest problem” with the fraud allegations was that “he just didn’t really have any good answers for any of this.”

At a separate hearing in Congress this week on the Minnesota fraud issue, Democrats fumed about the hypocrisy of Trump administration officials who, while complaining about fraud and ICE protests in Democratic areas, pardoned fraudsters aligned with the president as well as those convicted of violence against federal officers on Jan. 6, 2021.

Republicans in the state largely defended Trump’s message — though not necessarily his tone — expressing solidarity with efforts to unroot fraud and tackle immigration enforcement.

“The national attention that the president has brought to Minnesota means that people are listening now,” state GOP Chair Alex Plechash said.