Trump's Minnesota focus: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Adam Edelman and Natasha Korecki dig into why President Donald Trump and his allies have zeroed in on Minnesota. Plus, Kristen Welker explores how the shooting in the state is emerging as an inflection point in the debate over Trump’s immigration policy.

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— Adam Wollner

Trump’s focus on Minnesota boils over

By Adam Edelman and Natasha Korecki

Two days before Christmas, with federal agents ramping up immigration arrests in Minnesota, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stepped up 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.

The 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. 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.”

Read more from Adam and Natasha →

Minneapolis shooting shifts spotlight to Trump’s deportation agenda

Analysis by Kristen Welker

Barely a week into the new year, the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis has cast a dark cloud over the country.

The tragic incident is shaping up as a major flashpoint in the debate over the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policies, much like how George Floyd’s death in 2020 — which occurred less than a mile away from this week’s shooting and was also captured on video — sparked a national firestorm over the use of police force.

Mass deportation efforts around the country have been a primary plank of President Donald Trump’s second term, and he entered office nearly a year ago with the issue of immigration as one of his political strengths.

But the polling has been clear for months: Americans’ views on Trump’s handling of immigration have generally dropped since the spring, as his hard-edged deportation policies have taken center stage.

While the investigation of the Minneapolis shooting is still in its early stages, the reaction to it from political leaders has fallen largely along partisan lines.

Vice President JD Vance exemplified the administration’s view during a rare appearance yesterday in a White House briefing room, where he admonished the media and suggested, without providing evidence, that the victim of the shooting was tied to a “broader left-wing network” and that her death was a “tragedy of her own making.”

Meanwhile, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat who will join me Sunday on “Meet the Press,” criticized the administration for “trying to spin this as an action of self-defense” and demanded that ICE “get the f--- out of our city” — highlighting the escalating tensions between federal and local authorities on these matters.

Related:

• New cellphone video shows victim interacting with ICE officer moments before fatal shooting, by Julia Ainsley, Jon Schuppe and David K. Li
• 2 people shot by Border Patrol agent in Portland identified by DHS, by Marlene Lenthang and Julia Ainsley
• Follow live updates →

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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