On Wednesday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed an observer in Minneapolis.
This was always going to happen.
With the Trump administration’s now-standard insistence that the ICE goons invading blue cities are actually the ones who are afraid and vulnerable, the agent claimed that he was “fearing for his life” because the woman “weaponized her vehicle.”
This was a favorite lie that ICE invoked in Illinois and California—basically, if your car happens to be anywhere near an ICE agent, they become so scared that they have to shoot you.
ICE’s behavior in Minneapolis is so beyond the pale that even Mayor Jacob Frey—a person not exactly known for his condemnation of law enforcement and who defended the presence of Minneapolis police officers at a July 2025 federal raid—is furious.
Shortly after the killing, Frey issued an official statement demanding that ICE leave the city.
The Trump administration justified its unprecedented surge of 2,000 federal agents to Minnesota as necessary because of alleged daycare fraud by Somali immigrants. Because you definitely combat potential economic fraud by sending thousands of armed ICE goons to a city where nearly all Somali residents are U.S. citizens.
Once the administration started beating its chest and bragging that this was the “largest immigration operation ever”—and once Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived to oversee her precious thugs—it was ready to hurt, if not kill, Minneapolis residents for the crime of living in a Democratic and diverse city.
Noem, for her part, seems to be partially blaming Minnesota’s weather for one of her minions murdering someone.
“Our ICE officers were out in an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis,” Noem said on Fox News. “They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
You won’t be surprised to learn that the video of the shooting shows nothing of the sort—not a sad, stuck vehicle in sight, nor any ICE officer being attacked. But Noem got exactly what she wanted: a way to flip the script, lying that Minneapolis residents violently attacked them.
Trump has already weighed in and done just that: inventing an upside-down world where an ICE agent was “violently, willfully, and viciously” run over and “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
There is, of course, no report that an ICE agent was run over, nor that he is in the hospital. Even Noem didn’t say that, instead stating that the video showed someone “attempting to run over our law enforcement officers.”
Normally, we’d say the administration should get its story straight, but it really doesn’t matter when both stories are lies.
So what happens now that they’ve gotten the violence they crave?
It’s hard not to see this as linked to the Supreme Court’s December decision blocking Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Chicago. That decision upheld a lower court decision saying that the National Guard cannot be federalized unless the president is unable—with the regular military—to faithfully execute the laws.
However, as the Supreme Court’s brief order explained, there are very rare circumstances in which the president could send in the military without violating the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from acting as domestic law enforcement.
Under that decision, Trump would have first needed the proper authority to send the military into Chicago, but the court noted that the government didn’t identify any authority allowing that. What this means is that Trump must first invoke some authority to deploy the military, and then—only after the regular military is inadequate to help ICE “faithfully execute the laws”—could he federalize a state National Guard unit.
After the Supreme Court decision, Trump sullenly pulled the National Guard back from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. But it certainly wasn’t like he was going to stop forcing a military crackdown on blue cities.
Trump desperately wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he threatened to do in 2020 during uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd—which, of course, was also in Minneapolis.
With that, it’s no surprise that this shooting occurred less than a mile away from George Floyd Square. Trump has already declared that he is allowed to invoke the Insurrection Act if the courts won’t let him send in the National Guard, and … the courts won’t let him send in the National Guard.
Minnesota’s National Guard may be there nonetheless, though not in the capacity Trump wants.
Gov. Tim Walz has activated the State Emergency Operation Center, which would coordinate any law enforcement action, and issued a warning order for the Guard to begin preparing.
“To Donald Trump and Kristi Noem: You’ve done enough,” Walz said, before announcing that the Minnesota National Guard is on standby.
« I remind you, a warning order is a heads-up for folks, and these National Guard troops are our National Guard troops,” he said.
In readying to deploy, the Guard will do additional equipment checks and call up people who might be activated.
But having the National Guard roll in won’t really decrease the temperature—which is now at whatever comes after boiling—and it isn’t really a great situation for residents who lived through the state’s response to the George Floyd uprisings.
Regardless of whether that happens, what we have now is a blue city on edge, enraged, and fearful—and Trump likely has a brand-new justification for a military crackdown. And, really, that’s what he wanted all along.
