Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz finally got President Donald Trump on the phone seven weeks into the administration’s crackdown on Minneapolis — and the president had a complaint.
Trump told the Democratic governor he didn’t “know what’s wrong with Minnesota,” comparing the state to cities like Louisville and New Orleans where there had been less fierce resistance to his immigration surges.
Walz was furious. “You didn’t kill anyone there,” he fired back, two days after public outrage over Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of Customs and Border Protection agents forced Trump to change his approach.
But the governor’s staffers, who were listening in, quietly urged him to “slow it down,” Walz said in an interview with POLITICO earlier this month. They feared if he let his rage take over he would antagonize the president.
“It’s infuriating that you got to let him think he won or whatever,” Walz recalled. “That’s not how adults usually negotiate.”
The call was one moment in an agonizing stretch for Democratic state and local officials as they sought to weather the Trump administration’s crackdown. In interviews with POLITICO, Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison and more than a half-dozen state and city officials described a concerted campaign to fight Trump’s immigration enforcement in the courts and through the media while coordinating with each other to keep the city from spinning out of control under immense pressure.
The behind-the-scenes effort was the crescendo of a broader, yearslong push to prepare the city for the worst, after surviving the upheavals that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, when protests spiraled into looting and violence and Minnesota Democratic leaders faced criticism from both the left and right for their response.
Before Pretti’s death, Trump White House officials were “in dialogue” with Walz, but they had not engaged in “any urgent or meaningful way,” said a Democratic state official, who was granted anonymity to describe private interactions.
The two-term governor and former vice presidential nominee, well aware of the president’s personal enmity for him, said he understood that Trump was only now calling because “this had become a disaster for him politically, and he needed me to help him get out of it.”
A White House official said that Trump had always wanted to work with local officials and that the recent drawdown in personnel was because they were now working with them.
For all the fury the governor hoped to channel, for himself and for his constituents, he acknowledged Trump “holds all the cards in this — a lot of them, certainly.”
Walz’s careful approach to the president on that call — and other public flashes of anger, when Frey seethed at ICE to “get the fuck out” after Renée Good was killed — represents the push-pull for Minnesota leaders, who were desperate to end the lengthy immigration showdown while not setting a precedent of submission, these Minnesota Democrats said. At least 3,000 ICE agents were deployed to Minneapolis, vastly outnumbering the city’s police force, as Trump officials said Minnesota leaders had “incited this violent insurrection.”
Democrats were united in their desperation to head off any scenes of destruction, which they believed would lead to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act — something the president threatened to do multiple times for Minneapolis and during other immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago. The Pentagon ordered 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota.
Privately, Walz and Frey enlisted business leaders and state Republicans to urge the Trump administration to change course in Minnesota. In phone calls and text messages, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) urged White House officials to deescalate after the shootings of both Good and Pretti, according to a person briefed on her conversations and granted anonymity to describe private interactions. Publicly, Walz and Frey pleaded for protests to stay peaceful, and urged Minnesotans to document on video everything they saw. “Carry your phone with you at all times,” Walz said at the time.
“I think the feds were waiting and expecting for Minneapolis to devolve into chaos and for these protests to get out of hand,” one Democratic city official said, “and so much of what we did was just focused on preventing that from happening … even if those were sometimes hard or stressful calls to make in the moment because you don’t want to upset residents.”
Minnesota Democrats leveraged local outrage until it combusted into a national backlash after Pretti’s killing, caught on video from multiple angles, rocketed across social media and cracked the country’s consciousness. As Republicans started to call for “thorough” investigations into Pretti’s death, Trump called Walz, then Frey. The president pulled Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino from the city and dispatched his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota. On Feb. 12, Homan announced the end of “Operation Metro Surge.”
It’s a playbook other Democrats from blue cities and states are eager to replicate. Officials from San Francisco and Portland have already reached out to Frey and his staff for advice, two Minneapolis city officials confirmed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Frey met earlier this month to discuss what Minneapolis had been through, and the mayors’ respective chiefs-of-staff shared similar intel with each other over the phone.
The Trump administration is also looking to copy its own playbook from Minnesota, the one implemented by Homan since he took over in early February. Last week on CNN, the border czar described “unprecedented” cooperation from Minneapolis leaders and police force since he arrived. He said “the streets of Minneapolis, the streets of Minnesota, are safer today,” adding that he isn’t surprised state and city leaders disagree with that assessment because they don’t want to give Trump “a win.” He said he expected ICE to return to its “regular footprint” within a week.
A White House official said that new cooperation allowed them to scale back personnel, adding that details of that cooperation are considered law-enforcement sensitive and declined to share specific details on it.
“Tom Homan’s critical work in Minnesota has secured new agreements to cooperate moving forward. These agreements, paired with pledges from local police to respond to our officers’ call for help, take down roadblocks, and respond to agitator unrest, represent unprecedented levels of cooperation that did not exist before,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “Democrat officials should want to work with federal law enforcement, not against them, to keep communities safe for law-abiding Americans.”
But Frey forcefully pushed back on the characterization that Minneapolis had changed any of its pre-existing policies. The separation ordinance, which prohibits city police officers from enforcing federal immigration law, is still in place, Frey noted.
“There were no deals cut,” Frey said in an interview with POLITICO. “There were no trade-offs of our values.”
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Minnesota state and city officials began preparing for a federal crackdown long before ICE descended on Minneapolis last December. It started in 2020, after Floyd, a Black man, suffocated under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death triggered a wave of protests in the city, some of which turned violent and destructive, while state and city officials struggled to respond.
“In those first few moments after Renée’s death … my first thought was George Floyd,” Walz said.
Ellison echoed him: “It was on everybody’s mind.” he said.
In the five years since Floyd’s death, local officials have overhauled the city’s emergency management protocols, incorporating 27 recommendations from an after-action report that was released in 2022. That included attending a four-day retreat to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where more than 70 city officials, including Frey, simulated realtime emergencies. They practiced how to respond to massive civil unrest that pitted residents against a military force and game-played when to ask the governor to call in the National Guard.
Walz had faced intense criticism for not activating the National Guard faster in 2020 — and he and Frey had pointed fingers at each other for the delay. “There was a real breakdown in communication at that time” between the two officials, said a Minnesota Democratic operative who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. Walz’s role in the delay followed him into the 2024 presidential campaign, when he served as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
When the city officials returned to Minneapolis after their training, one aide wrote out a one-page checklist for requesting National Guard activation and displayed it prominently on an office wall so they could move as fast as possible should the need arise. It’s still hanging in the aide’s office now. By the time Minneapolis requested the National Guard last month, they knew what to do.
Minnesota Democrats redoubled those efforts after observing and talking with officials in Los Angeles and Chicago, two early targets of Trump’s crackdown. Frey’s office drew up — and signed, once ICE arrived in Minneapolis — one executive order to ban ICE from conducting operations on city-owned parking lots, after they’d seen what happened in Chicago, one city official confirmed. Ellison and his Democratic attorneys general colleagues regularly meet to discuss shared strategies for dealing with the Trump administration.
“If they tried to override the governor and try to nationalize our National Guard, we were ready,” Ellison said. “If they tried to invoke the Insurrection Act, we were ready.”
Walz also approached mobilizing the National Guard in a different way than he had following Floyd’s murder. When he did deploy the guard on Jan. 17 to support the Minnesota State Patrol, to help manage growing tensions between protesters and ICE agents near a federal building, he urged the Guard leadership to wear fluorescent orange vests and name tags. No masks. The Guard delivered donuts, hot chocolate and coffee to protesters.
“We addressed every single protester and introduced all of those protesters by name,” Walz said. “The goal was, ‘Minnesotans are all in this together.’ Police, National Guard, everybody.”
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Hours after Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, Frey walked into a third-floor conference room in city hall. His senior staff was gathered to discuss what he would say at a press conference. Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, had already cast Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism,” and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the shooting self-defense.
Frey, who had just watched the video of Good’s death for the first time, was planning to tell ICE to “get out of here,” he told his senior staff at the time. The expletive wasn’t in his talking points, Frey recalled, but he was angry and he wanted to be honest about his feelings. He had publicly warned in December that “somebody is going to get seriously injured or killed.”
“We felt here like we were screaming from the rooftops for weeks, and they weren’t listening, and so we needed to get attention,” Frey said of his now-viral moment. “I needed to channel the very real anger of hundreds of thousands of constituents … Because, again, I wanted to encourage [a] continuation of these peaceful protests.”
For Frey, the next several weeks would test his ability to both channel the fury of his constituents while seeking deescalation — even as Trump’s White House continued to accuse both Frey and Walz of failing to temper their own rhetoric. Their urgency to find a way out of what Frey called an “invasion” of an “occupying force” became all the more pressing after ICE agents shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, on the North Side of Minneapolis on Jan. 14.
That night, near midnight, inside city hall, Frey was on the phone with Klobuchar, asking for help. Frey’s chief-of-staff was on the phone with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.). A chaotic scene played out on the TVs in the mayor’s office: sprays of tear gas and vandalized cars, the images of a city reaching a “boiling point,” Frey said. The mayor was growing desperate to find a backchannel to the White House, which they’d failed, so far, to establish, three city officials said.
The next day, Klobuchar talked to White House officials about connecting them with the mayor and Minneapolis’ police chief, Brian O’Hara, said a person briefed on the conversations and granted anonymity to describe private interactions. Frey’s chief-of-staff sent a cold email to White House senior staff and ramped up pressure on business leaders and state Republicans. However, the channels didn’t “actually open up” until after Pretti was killed, one of the city officials said.
They faced pressure from the left. Democratic Socialist Minneapolis City Council member Robin Wonsley criticized Frey and Walz for failing to do more to get ICE out, like declaring a “state of emergency” or eviction moratoriums. She told CNN in late January that residents were showing extraordinary bravery that’s “not being matched by the elected officials who do have the power to protect our residents.”
“I think there’s a nearly unanimous belief that the mayor balanced two interests — fighting for the city but at the same time, understanding there needed to be an end game, which is dialogue with the administration,” said Abou Amara, a civil rights lawyer and activist in Minneapolis.
Walz was already under pressure before ICE showed up in Minnesota, after a sweeping fraud scandal engulfed the state this fall, which drew the attention of Trump. The governor ended his own reelection bid in early January, citing the scandal as influencing his decision to pull out.
It’s clear that even after a decade of Trump, Democrats — and some European leaders — are still struggling with how best to approach the mercurial president. Both publicly and privately, Minnesota Democratic leaders said they mimicked how European countries responded when Trump threatened to buy Greenland: They didn’t blink. They refused to give until it was too politically untenable for Trump to keep pushing.
“Stephen Miller talks about this whole concept of ‘might makes right.’ If you have the military muscle to do something, then you can, and that’s the right thing to do,” Frey said. “And they’ve attempted to use that methodology on an international level, and clearly that is also a methodology used at the local level.”
These Minnesota leaders were also clear about why they think Trump replaced Bovino with Homan, who ultimately ended the operation by mid-February. After Pretti’s death, Trump’s poll numbers dropped. About six in 10 Americans now think Trump’s ICE deployments in cities have gone too far, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. Just 38 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of immigration, down from nearly 50 percent approval a year ago, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
“It became urgent for them and they knew they had to cut and run,” said a state official, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “It was clear they’d lost the messaging entirely.”
After Pretti’s death and the phone calls with Minnesota leaders, Trump dispatched Homan, who he called “tough but fair,” in a Truth Social post. Of Bovino, Trump called him “very good, but he’s pretty out there” and rejected the suggestion that it was a “pullback.”
Still, the exit wasn’t without its possible derailments. One came after Frey’s first meeting with Homan on Jan. 27, when he reiterated the city’s separation ordinance in a post on X. The following morning, Trump lashed out at Frey, accusing the mayor of “PLAYING WITH FIRE.”
One of the city officials said they had been intentional with their wording of the post because “a bright red line for us was when something was said about city policies or directives that were patently false,” even if there were some Minnesota Democrats “who felt like we were poking the bear a little bit.”
“We really want to make this end, but like to what end? Because we also don’t want to set a terrible precedent for other cities,” the official continued. “You just can’t set the standard that you can bully cities into submission.”
Minnesota Democrats continue to impart the lessons they learned with other blue cities and states. A state official said Walz was in regular touch with other governors, who are “supremely worried” about being Trump’s next target and are seeking advice, particularly over National Guard deployments.
During Frey and Mamdani’s New York City conversation last week, they compared notes on how to negotiate with the president, discussing the “nuance” required to “navigate Trump,” and “how you go about running a city through this,” according to a Minneapolis city official who attended the meeting.
“We talked about the state of play, how the federal administration conducts themselves, how decisions are made — not that either one of us knows all of it,” Frey said.
Frey, too, is giving advice for anyone who wants to hear it, from other mayors to CEOs, which he summed up in three points. First, “say what you believe, and you say it loudly and clearly,” and people “probably including Trump, respect that.” Second, “take the politics out” by focusing on how people are affected because “regular-ass people have a general concept of fairness.” Lastly, “keep repeating common-sense stuff,” which he said he’d raise in every public appearance, questioning the motives of ICE’s operations.
“This is in the back of everybody’s head … ‘if I just shut up and keep my head down, maybe they won’t notice.’ You won’t attract the eye of Sauron,” Frey said. “That is a wildly incorrect assumption. By bowing your head in despair, you will be the next city.”
