ICE shooting reinforces Minnesota's grim role as Trump's target

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

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

Trump last month called the state’s Somali population “garbage” in the wake of a massive federal investigation into COVID-19 and medical aid fraud tied to organizations serving Somali immigrants, among others. The fraud cases led Minnesota's Democratic governor, Tim Walz — former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 running mate — to announce this week he will not run for reelection.

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

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.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who killed Renee Good during a protest Wednesday against the immigration raids opened fire just blocks from where, in 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. The parallels were painful and frightening for many in the area, including Stephanie Abel, a 56-year-old Minneapolis nurse, who is keeping her gas tank full and cash handy in memory of the chaos that followed that slaying.

“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.

Immigration operations that started last summer in liberal strongholds such as Chicago,Los Angeles and Portland also generated large protests. Good is at least the fifth person killed during ICE enforcement efforts.

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. Vance spoke at the White House to announce a new assistant attorney general position to prosecute the abuse of government assistance programs that will focus on Minnesota.

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.

In November, Trump called Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” after a report by a conservative news site, City Journal, claimed federal money was fraudulently flowing to the militant group al-Shabab. There has been little, if any, evidence, proving such a link. Nevertheless, 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 unconfirmed video claiming that day care centers in Minneapolis run by Somalis had fraudulently collected over $100 million in government aid.

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.”

The Trump administration on Tuesday said is withholding funding for programs that support needy families with children, including day care funding, in five Democratic-led states over concerns about fraud. Joining Minnesota on the list were California, Colorado, Illinois and New York.

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.”

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

This story has been corrected to show George Floyd was not fatally shot.

Federal agents confront protesters outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minn. (AP Photo/Tom Baker)

A makeshift memorial honoring the victim of a fatal shooting involving federal law enforcement agents is taped to a post near the site of the previous day's shooting, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minn. (AP Photo/Mike Householder)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responds to questions from reporters regarding whether he will seek a third term during a press conference following an event on the state's new Paid Family and Medical Leave program, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that he will allow service members to carry personal weapons onto military installations, citing the Second Amendment and recent shootings at bases across the country.

In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he is signing a memo that will direct base commanders to allow requests for troops to carry privately owned firearms “with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection.”

He said any denial of a service member's request must be explained in detail and in writing.

“Effectively, our bases across the country were gun-free zones,” Hegseth said. “Unless you're training or unless you are a military policeman, you couldn't carry, you couldn't bring your own firearm for your own personal protection onto post.”

Questions about why service members lacked access to weapons have often emerged following shootings on the nation's military bases. Such shootings have ranged from isolated events between service members to mass casualty events, such as the shootings by an Army psychiatrist at Texas’ Ford Hood in 2009 that left 13 people dead.

Hegseth cited some of the events in his video, including a shooting that injured five soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia last year. Officials said the shooter, an Army sergeant who worked at the base, used his personal handgun before he was tackled by fellow soldiers and arrested.

“In these instances, minutes are a lifetime,” Hegseth said. “And our service members have the courage and training to make those precious, short minutes count.”

Defense Department policy has prohibited military personnel from carrying personal weapons on base without permission from a senior commander, with strict protocol for how the firearms must be stored.

Typically, military personnel must officially check their guns out of secure storage to go to on-base hunting areas or shooting ranges, then check all firearms back in promptly after their sanctioned use. Military police are often the only armed personnel on base, outside of shooting ranges, hunting areas or in training, where soldiers can wield their service weapons without ammunition.

Tanya Schardt, senior counsel at the Brady gun violence prevention organization, said in a statement that Defense Department leaders and the military’s top brass have opposed relaxing the current policy, which was originally enacted under President George H.W. Bush.

Schardt noted that most active duty service members who die by suicide do so with a weapon they own personally, not one military-issued, and argued that there will “undoubtedly be an increase in gun suicide and other gun violence.”

While fewer American service members died by suicide in 2024, the suicide rates among active duty troops overall still have gradually increased between 2011 and 2024, according to a Pentagon report released Tuesday.

“Our military installations are among the most guarded, protected properties in the world, and they’ve never been ‘gun-free zones,’” Schardt said. “If there is a problem with violent crime on these installations, then the Secretary of Defense has an obligation to alert the American people and describe how he’s working to prevent that crime.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)