The Battle for Minnesota: Violent Conflict Erupts as Trump Attacks an Entire State
Thousands of officers working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are deployed throughout the State of Minnesota to purportedly conduct immigration sweeps at the behest of President Trump. He has signaled an impatient desire to enforce a faster deportation process for illegal immigrants, whom he deems "the worst of the worst." Now Renee Nicole Good, a resident of Minneapolis lay dead in an altercation with the very ICE officers Trump has activated, shot three times in the head by Jonathan Ross. Subsequently protests have roiled Minnesota and the Trump administration has surged even more ICE officers leading to several violent confrontations. Minnesotans have taken to social media to describe the situation as tantamount to a form of civil disorder designed to bring the entire state to a halt. As a nation watches with horror, the federal government appears to be in direct violent conflict with one of its own states.
But the process by which this unfolded reveals the sinister undercurrents with which a right-wing authoritarian movement uses multiple channels to attack the underpinnings of our democracy. It also demonstrates the extent to which Trump orients violence toward enemies he makes of his political opponents. Mixed with his own conspiratorial views of reality presented to him via viral videos by a cloistered staff, the current conflict points to an ominous period of severe turbulence.
Act I: A Provocateur Lights the Fuse
This all started in the strangest way possible. Nick Shirley, a young social media instigator, filmed himself accosting various daycare center businesses in the Minneapolis area. Shirley focused on Somalis. This was possible because through successive resettlements, Somali immigrants have become a part of the fabric of the local community. The resettlements started when the United States began accepting Somali refugees after the West African coastal county descended into Civil War and internecine conflict in the 1990s. The U.S. even conducted a frenetic and intense military intervention into the politically collapsed capital city Mogadishu, which became the basis for the book and film Black Hawk Down.
Today, Somali-Americans in Minneapolis run businesses, live, work, and raise families as Minnesotans in their own right. They have integrated to the extent that Representative Ilhan Omar is a prominent member of Congress, after having spent a part of her childhood in a refugee camp. Until the lurching jolt into Trumpism starting in 2015, the story of the Somali community in Minneapolis would simply fit with the American Melting Pot narrative. It would be both special and unremarkable. Similar to Arab migrants settling in Dearborn, Michigan; Basque migrants living in Boise, Idaho, Nigerian migrants becoming a prominent fixture in Houston, Texas.
Normally, such childish videography would have barely rated a mention. However, Shirley – whom you would be forgiven for mistaking for ultra right-wing Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes – was able to take his "Man on the Street" ambushing of mainly Somali-immigrant run childcare centers and turn it into a viral video across the right-wing media ecosystem. This is because Shirley was, in his own way, standing on the shoulders of ogres. In particular, he modeled himself after James O'Keefe of Project Veritas. O'Keefe made it his goal to shoot viral undercover videos at Planned Parenthood, purportedly to blow the lid of various "abortion conspiracies" that were an article of faith among the religious right at the GOP.
O'Keefe would sneak a camera into a bag and interview himself goading employees at Planned Parenthood into saying vaguely strange things that he would supercut and edit to sound like the organization was harvesting baby parts and engaging in "abortion on demand" against state laws. O'Keefe's videos were mendacious, edited to give breath to the lie that godless liberals were murdering babies. Right wing politicians in state houses then used O'Keefe's exposes to begin clamping down on women's healthcare rights, including the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy within the law. O'Keefe targeted physicians and other medical professionals to further erode trust. The gob-smacking reality is that O'Keefe's dirty tricks worked to the intended effect. Planned Parenthood found itself swept into a maelstrom of false accusations and played defense to Project Veritas' swift moving current of misinformation. Today the right to legal abortion has been severely curtailed across large swath of the country.
Shirley is an acolyte of O'Keefe's school of ambush trickery. Right wing new media influencers like Shirley and O'Keefe excel at is using a kernel of reality as a basis to spin up a wild cotton candy of conspiracy and distraction. Shirley, parading through office parks and outside of buildings with a fixed phone camera providing jerky authenticity, portrayed himself as having uncovered a massive billions of dollars fraud. Shirley told his gullible viewers Somalis were engaged in extensive organized crime to steal money from a state programs for childcare. He laid the blame on popular Democratic Farm-Labor party Governor Tim Walz, the vice-presidential running mate of Kamala Harris. Walz was running for a third term as Minnesota governor.
Soon Shirley was making the rounds of numerous right-wing podcasts, doing interviews about the vast conspiracy he had unearthed. Repeated again and again, other right-wing influencers shared his videos. Once this happened cable news organizations including the 800-lb Gorilla of Lies that is Fox News picked it up and blasted it across the nation. Now GOP legislators in Washington, D.C. and St. Paul got in on the act, decrying with horror that this massive fraud unfolded under Governor Tim Walz. Who would enter the stage at this juncture? None other than our Arsonist-In-Chief, Donald Trump.
The problem with Shirley's narrative is that the fraud he allegedly uncovered had already been uncovered years before. The ringleader of the fraud wasn't a shifty nefarious Somali, but rather a white woman named Aimee Brock, who along with Muktar Sharif lead an organization called Feeding Out Future. They were convicted of bilking $250 million from the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) and the Child Nutrition Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hayat Mohamed Nur was convicted for her role in creating fake meal sheets and attendance records to bolster billing claims. Fozia Sheik Ali was indicted in 2017 for fraudulently billing childcare services not provided. Aisha Hirsi was also sentenced in 2015 for defrauding the state of $300,000 for false billing of childcare services.
The participants in this scheme were alleged to have used the money they stole for lavish purchases and personal benefits. Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota prosecuted the fraud under the direction of the Department of Justice during the Biden's term in office. Twenty-three individuals were held responsible for their actions. Shirley was able to use the factually correct scandal as the basis for alleging that somehow all of this was the fault of Governor Tim Walz.
The pressure campaign accelerated to the point that Governor Walz announced that he would not seek a third term in office. He spoke passionately and emotionally about his regret that the daycare scandal had bilked the state of hundreds of millions. Governor Walz agreed that fraud in this program was unacceptable and that he would urge lawmakers to continue pursing all relevant information to both hold anyone else accountable for their crimes and to prevent such fraud from happening in the future.
But the MAGA instigators had much bigger plans for this scandal.
Act 2: Trump Brings Down the Full Weight of the Federal Government
Anton Chekov, the Russian master of the short story, famously quipped that if a gun is presented in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three.
If Nick Shirley lit a fuse with his allegedly "gonzo journalism" then it must be attached to an explosive powder keg. In this case, Trump was ready to pounce. They announced that federal funds for Minnesota's childcare program would be frozen. Trump's cabinet began laying siege to the state through their various departments. The boldest conspirator was Brooke Rollins, Trump's clownish Secretary of Agriculture, who administers programs to provide supplemental food assistance to children. Trump also sicced his Department of Justice on Minnesota, which is bizarre because under Biden the DOJ obtained convictions.
Trump can't remember any facts but doesn't forget a single slight. It's a strange dynamic where he is impervious to learning anything useful, but ready to pounce on any triviality. When Kamala Harris selected Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Minnesotans were thrilled while the nation expressed puzzlement. But tuned in progressives across the nation shared the enthusiasm of his home state. Walz was a popular governor who navigated a razor thin Democratic-Farm Labor majority in legislature. He partnered with a bright and energetic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, a member of the Ojibwe Nation, and an expert legislative quarterback in Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman. And what wonders they accomplished. Hortman would tragically be assassinated in her own home along with her husband and pet dog in a targeted attack by a deranged MAGA lunatic. Every evidence suggests it was related to her legislative accomplishments. The list of those signature DFL accomplishments boggles the mind.
Together they:
Established a state-run paid family and medical leave program.
Ensured paid sick days for workers.
Banned non-compete clauses.
Exempted Social Security income from state taxes for many low-to-middle-income earners.
Signed laws protecting the right to reproductive healthcare, including abortion.
Created a "red flag" law to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a danger. Raised the age to purchase tobacco to 21.
Banned the use of handheld cell phones while driving. Signed the largest education budget in state history.
Allowed for the establishment of housing cooperatives.
Extended disability protections for those with episodic disabilities and credit discrimination protections to include familial status.
But was this it? Was Trump simply jealous of an accomplished governor. Hardly. During the sprint presidential campaign Harris ran in the late summer and fall of 2024, Walz seized the role of a happy warrior running mate. Plain-spoken, relatable, with a deep but approachable voice, Walz complemented Harris in that most important if predictably embarrassing way of American politics. He provided middle-aged white men a reason to trust her stewardship. The Harris-Walz campaign ran ads showing himself fixing up a beloved old Scout station wagon or doing TikTok's about how to fix everyday things like he was Bob Vila on This Old House. Walz was endearingly corny because he exuded comfortable authenticity. But what really ignited his profile was a seemingly off-the-cuff remark during a national cable media interview.
During the interview, asked about the latest bizarre salvo from the Trump campaign who had selected the odd duck senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, an exasperated Walz seemed to capture the mood of the nation brandishing the MAGA GOP as "weird." It was the sort of instinctual jab that political consultants dream about. Here was the entire MAGA movement boiled down to being what they truly are: weirdos. J.D. Vance was weird. He had a knack for saying aggressively inappropriate things while laughing. He seemed to insult his own voting base like a schoolyard bully. Vance was also terminally online, meaning that he would make references to strange internet conspiracies that made no sense to the public at large, such as Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating their pets.
Walz cut like a hot knife through butter when he deemed Trump and Vance as weirdos. Men who said strange things, talked in strange ways, fixated on strange topics, and carried them with an unsettling affect. Trump was angry. He growled "We're not weird!" on his Truth Social network. Which is exactly what a weird person would do. Suddenly Trump's "Ace Up His Sleeve," being a rambling, riffing, Catskills comedian came off as unbecoming of the U.S. presidency. Being weird meant Trump had been able to wrong-foot is sometimes wooden opponents. But being called weird, flipped the script. The Good Internet obliged, turning Vance into a meme of a Cabbage Patch Kid and placing his inflated comical face everywhere and anywhere.
Trump never forgot the insult. Just like when Obama pantsed him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Once he ascended to the throne of power in 2025, Trump pocketed his grudge against Walz, opting to wait until he could plan the most baroque and wide-ranging revenge plot possible. Shirley unlocked the key with his ambush attack on Somalis in the Twin Cities. Trump came guns blazing. In addition to terminating social programs, he had his Cruella de Ville, Kristi Noem deploy ICE forces to sweep the Somali communities Nick Shirley had accosted. He has also ended, as of today, temporary protected status for Somalis, hoping to speed up deportations of lawful residents granted status to remain in the country. He has called for Representative Ilhan Omar, an outspoken and unafraid critic, to be impeached, removed from office, stripped of citizenship and deported back to Somalia, leaving no doubt that his campaign against Minnesota is bone-deep and personal.
But the ICE sweeps are the real end game. One Trump has been angling for years to unleash.
Act 3: A Test Run for A Paramilitary War on Americans
Today in Minnesota, as part of "Operation Metro Surge", approximately 3,000 federal officers have been deployed. This dwarfs the combined police forces of Minnesota's top six largest metropolitan areas. Trump has had a long history of regaling audiences with lurid and gory stories of violence while also egging on police to "take off the gloves". He once famously said that it annoyed him to see cops protecting arrestees from hitting their heads when getting into police cars. To Trump, such a reflexive gesture of custodial care was a sign of wimpy sissy behavior. As though smacking an arrested person on the car door is what good cops do.
Moreover, Trump has a cellular level hatred for Minneapolis, since it was the site of the George Floyd murder by Derek Chauvin. Trump had expressed a strong desire to figure out how to get Chauvin out of prison. If we could wade into Trump's furtive and swampy mind, we'd no doubt find a man enraged that just the sort of police officer he lionizes was put behind bars for using just the sort of "tough tactics" that Trump himself adores. The fact that Chauvin choked the life out Floyd is actually a credit to the officer in Trump's mind.
Thus, deploying ICE to Minneapolis was hardly a non-sequitur. When Trump announced that he was surging ICE officers into the metropolitan Minneapolis-Saint Paul region, he was warned by local officials that the conditions were present for lethal violence. Local police were dismayed by the lack of coordination. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of ICE officers has been their inchoate belligerence toward other police officers. Observers have long worried that ICE had all the hallmarks of Praetorian Guard, a militia loyal to Trump himself rather than under the control of a neutral government authority.
ICE officers have been recruited in a sloppy and haphazard manner with lavish signing bonuses and loan forgiveness. It's even been reported that ICE officers had their training cut from several months to 47 days, to match his numeric presidency. Ruefully, it is really no exaggeration to say that if you cannot get a job in the Artificial Intelligence boom, the next best option is becoming an ICE officer. But in Trump World, nothing other than bile-sputtering hatred is free . Stephen Miller, Trump's often-shrieking consigliere, has reportedly demanded large arrest quotas for ICE officers. Trump himself appears to see ICE as a formalization of the insurrectionist forces that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this respect ICE officers have taken on Trump's personality in full. Belligerent, gratuitously violent, maybe even sexually aroused by tackling and pummeling people, ICE appears out of control to any rational observer.
This showdown culminated in the January 7, 2026 killing (and apparent murder) of Renee Nicole Gold, a motorist sitting in her Honda Pilot SUV in the middle of Portland Avenue, her own neighborhood. ICE officers were allegedly conducting one of their sweep operations to which neighbors flocked to warn other community members using whistles and protesting from sidewalks. Good's vehicle, located at an angle in the middle of the street appears to have been fashioned by her as a "traffic calming measure" to temporarily slow down, but not stop, ICE vehicles from moving.
After several ICE vehicles passed, one ICE officer Jonathan Ross got into a heated interaction with Renee's partner Becca Gold. Renee filming Ross called for him to "go to lunch" after he used his phone to make a perimeter film of their car. This was an odd act given that officers are not supposed to use personal devices as ad-hoc body cameras. Renee's last words to a masked Ross were a genial and non-chalant: "I am not mad at you." After circling her vehicle, Ross switched his phone from his right hand to his left and put his free right hand on his gun. Renee turned her wheel to leave as Ross and two other agents began shouting. The two agents seemed to try to open her car door. At this point Ross fired his weapon once through her driver side windshield striking Renee in the head. Ross then shot twice more in rapid succession through the open window on the driver's side, striking Gold twice more in the head. From his own video he can be heard exclaiming "Fucking Bitch!" Renee, mortally wounded, fell forward and the car accelerated and careened out of control striking a parked car approximately 50-100 yards away.
Ross, in a chilling follow up video taken by a bystander appears to check to make sure Renee was not moving and then walked calmly if quickly back to his fellow ICE officer and made a rolling motion with his hand that it was time to leave. Ross then left the scene of the incident while other ICE officers formed a phalanx around Renee's crashed car with her bleeding head pitched forward onto the deployed airbag. A local resident claiming to be a physician asked for access to Renee to take her pulse and was angrily rebuffed by an ICE officer. Eventually Renee's body was carried several yards away with fifteen minutes lapsing before she received any medical attention. At that point, or shortly thereafter, Renee Nicole Gold was dead.
The Trump administration reacted virulently and quickly to the video. Within hours Renee was branded a domestic terrorist who aimed her vehicle at Ross, a flatly untrue statement. Meanwhile the internet had crowdsourced numerous video angles and developed sophisticated rapid analysis showing that Gold's vehicle was intending to disengage from the ICE officers and leave the scene when Ross reacted rashly and shot at the car. The FBI announced it would lead an investigation without involving Minnesota state authorities and secured evidence including the car without letting state investigators conduct any forensic examination. On January 14, only one week after the incident, the Department of Justice, Civil Right Division, announced that it would not investigate the incident to determine if Renee's civil rights had been violated.
Meanwhile, ICE officers have fanned out across Minneapolis with the expected results. Videos have surfaced of an allegedly seventeen-year-old U.S. citizen who was kidnapped from his job at Target by ICE officers while he protested that he was an American, only to be thrown out by those officers at a Wal-Mart, sobbing and bleeding. ICE officers hauled a woman on the way to a doctor's appointment out of her car and forcibly arrested her. More videos are emerging of ICE officers tackling residents, knocking on doors, and engaging in skirmishes with protestors. Flash bang grenades have been used at the Whipple Federal Detention facility and ICE officers have even pepper sprayed a 70-year-old woman peacefully protesting on a grassy area with her husband.
Minnesotans are, at this hour, besieged by their own government in one of the most appalling displays of widespread police-induced communal violence in the United States, since perhaps the police misconduct in Los Angeles following the O.J. Simpson verdict.
This is all to say that what started with a Nick Shirley gonzo video has become part of a sweeping campaign to wage an "on the cheap made for TV" war on the people of Minnesota. Stephen Miller has issued a lawless and legally unenforceable statement that if an ICE officer is so much as touched, they may use any force they wish with "absolute immunity." This is a flatly incorrect statement of the law but is designed to arm ICE officers with a de facto authority to kill or injure anyone they come in contact with.
Online a person asked the question "Why Minnesota?" The author added the state has supposedly 95,000 illegal immigrants, while Texas has over a million, and Florida hundreds of thousands. The answer is simple. Following the failure of Trump to harness the National Guard to be his army, he is testing a new strategy. Minnesota is a practice run for a nationwide war by Trump's "new" ICE paramilitary force.
Already Kristi Noem has stood at a lectern bearing the words "One of Ours, All of Yours" which is a callback to the Nazi massacre of Lidice, Czechia, when Nazi officers rampaged and executed all able-bodied males after one of their comrades was killed. She also made a passing social media post about using drones to secure the border "and the interior." These three additional words making clear that ICE's remit was expanding to expansive domestic operations having no relationship to border security.
Meanwhile our merry trickster Nick Shirley boastfully claimed credit for taking out Governor Walz with his fraudulent and deceptive videos. He warned the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, that he was coming his city to target the Mayor's early childhood education efforts. Shirley clearly sees the methods used in Minneapolis to be repeatable across the country using "childcare fraud" as his entry point to social instability. (It's completely on brand for MAGA that his own parents were accused of a wide ranging bankruptcy fraud that stole millions from investors. Takes one to know one it would appear.)
What started with the type of homemade video that would have barely rated a mention years ago, became an end-to-end operation in which one irresponsible twenty-something tipped the U.S. toward total domestic instability. But history is a guide. After all, it was a nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand anarchist group, that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo pushing the entire European continent into a horrific war. In hearing the whistles of Minnesotans in their neighborhood, one might hear the chilling echoes of the whistles Allied officers blew calling infantrymen to emerge from their trenches and charge headlong into battle.
The searing, urgent question remains: how long can people carry on with rhythms of daily life when the streets are filling with civil conflict at their own doorsteps.