Mayor says ICE seeks to cause “chaos and disruption” in Minneapolis

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey indicated Thursday that the city is united in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting of a 37-year-old woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in a residential neighborhood.

“What I appreciate about this situation right now is we in Minneapolis are all singing with one accord,” Frey told “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil. “Which is, one, we’re gonna stand up for our immigrant community. Two, we’re gonna keep people safe. And three, we’re not gonna take the bait.”

Frey said his first priority was “to keep the people of Minneapolis safe.”

“We know that the underlying intention of ICE is not safety, it’s not reducing crime, what it is, is to cause chaos and disruption in our city,” Frey said. “Clearly they want to deploy additional military resources, and we’re not gonna take the bait.”

According to Frey, the protests that have taken place since the killing of Renee Good do not mirror the violence that engulfed Minneapolis and other U.S. cities following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“If you’ve watched how a lot of these protests have carried out, this is not some repeat of what we saw in 2020,” Frey said. “What we see is people saying, ‘Hey, hang on one second, ICE wants us to take the bait, they want us to screw up, do something wrong, and ultimately see even greater military presence in our city.'”

In an interview with CBS News on Wednesday, White House border czar Tom Homan said that he wanted ICE agents to be given access to local jails and prisons in order to apprehend undocumented immigrants, arguing that this would make the current situation safer.  

When pressed on whether he would consider opening up local jails, Frey said that “the cities don’t run the jail, the jails are under the purview of the sheriff,” adding that mistrust exists between federal authorities and local residents and municipalities.

This comes after Frey, in a news conference Wednesday, demanded that ICE “get the f*** out of Minneapolis.” The Trump administration has surged about 2,000 federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities area as part of both an immigration crackdown and in response to the state’s fraud scandal. 

“There’s not a lot of confidence in this federal administration that they are going to do the right thing, either by our immigrant community, or perhaps more importantly, under the Constitution of the United States,” Frey said.

The mayor said that the Obama administration built trust with “mayors, chiefs and sheriffs around the country,” something this White House has failed to do, he argued. Frey also took aim at claims from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who on Wednesday described Good’s actions leading up to the shooting as an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The White House has alleged that the shooting by the ICE officer was an act of self-defense, while witnesses and local officials, including Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have disputed that claim, citing videos of the encounter that appear to show otherwise. 

“There was that kind of trust built in,” Frey said of past administrations. “Why? Because they didn’t create these B.S. narratives that we’re seeing already, exactly like this one, where something horrific takes place, they, from the get-go, say this is domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorism? Give me a break, this woman was trying to leave.”