Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey Isn’t Sorry He Told ICE to “Get the F--k Out of Minnesota”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was meeting with his staff on Wednesday morning when he received a phone call from Brian O’Hara, a hulking former New Jersey cop who has served as Minneapolis police chief since 2022.

“ICE shot someone,” O’Hara said. “We’ve got two officers that are in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

Frey, who was just sworn in for his third and final term as mayor of the largest city in Minnesota, was holding a strategy session across the street from City Hall with his cabinet and council members. The meeting, he told me in an interview, turned into an emergency preparedness session to handle the fallout from the shooting.

Video taken by onlookers at the scene would soon spread on social media, inflaming tensions in a city already on edge after the Trump administration deployed 2,000 federal agents to the Twin Cities this week as part of an immigration crackdown. The footage showed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, appearing to reverse her SUV as an ICE agent attempts to open the driver’s side door, shouting “Get out of the fucking car.” As she began to pull forward, another officer fired through the windshield, and she accelerated quickly, eventually hitting another car and coming to a stop. She was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Footage of the killing became a grim Rorschach test for observers who argued that Good had either deliberately driven her car toward agents or panicked and tried to drive away after reportedly receiving contradictory orders. A New York Times analysis of the footage found that her car appeared to be “turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire.”

Protestors clash with federal agents in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 8, 2026.Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images.

The Trump administration was quick to frame the tragedy in extreme terms. Almost immediately after the shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Good had carried out an “act of domestic terrorism.” President Donald Trump initially claimed Good was “screaming and trying to run over policemen” when she was shot—though he appeared to soften his view of the incident after watching the footage during an interview with several New York Times reporters. Still, the administration’s adversarial approach had by the end of Thursday been cemented. “This is classic terrorism,” said Vice President JD Vance at a Thursday press briefing. “The reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and that guy acted in self-defense.”

Frey, a 44-year-old lawyer by trade known for battling progressives in his state over issues like defunding the police, had blunt words for ICE in his own press conference on Wednesday. “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis,” he said. “We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety and you’re doing exactly the opposite.”

Despite the administration’s claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who deliberately sought to kill ICE agents with her car, Good’s ex-husband said she was a devout Christian and mother of three who had just dropped their six-year-old son off at school and was driving home when she encountered ICE agents on a snowy street. Photos of Good’s Honda Pilot at the scene showed a blood-soaked airbag and stuffed animals in her glove compartment.

Frey, his voice inflected with anger, told me he was not surprised by the killing. “The chief and I had been talking about this happening both privately and very publicly for over a month,” he said. “And so this is one of those scenarios where I hate to be right. We said that either a civilian, resident, police officer, or ICE agent is going to get seriously injured or killed because of the chaos that ICE is creating. We said this was going to happen and tragically and horrifically it did.”

I spoke with Frey by phone on Thursday as he managed the fallout from the shooting that has put his city on edge. As we spoke, ICE clashed with protestors in the streets, and Minnesota governor Tim Walz weighed whether to deploy the Minnesota National Guard. The rest of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Vanity Fair: Could you lay out why you believe the presence of ICE creates a dangerous climate?

Jacob Frey: It’s not just the presence. Immigration enforcement has existed through many administrations, both Democrat and Republican, for decades. That is not what we're talking about. Similarly, we’re not talking about the presence of federal agents. We have worked extensively with federal agents from the DEA to the ATF to the FBI to the US Attorney’s Office, to successfully drive down crime, investigate homicides, get guns off the street, have strategic plans to arrest gang members and deal with the narcotics trade. The North Side presently is seeing the lowest level of gunshots on record in history. I support our police, I support law enforcement, but I do not support conduct that is unconstitutional where they are coming in discriminating only to the extent that they have determined that somebody is Latino or Somali, and then indiscriminately plucking them off the street thereafter. Not to mention, I don’t think that these ICE agents know what these ICE agents are doing. They don’t appear to have a plan. There is no clear strategy. They’re certainly not going about this work in a methodical fashion. It really feels like flying by the seat of their pants. Here’s what I think happened. I think they were told by someone way up in the Trump administration to do a thing that they can’t really do. They say, “Go to Minneapolis and deport a bunch of Somalis.” And there wasn’t the proper pushback on how you do that legally or constitutionally. And they come here only to find out, Oh, they’re almost all American citizens. They’re here legally. They got here on a plane on Delta. It’s not like there’s some meatpacking plant or factory where you can find a bunch of undocumented Somalis. Those things don’t exist. They’re documented. And then they realize that, and then they start targeting our Latino community who has contributed so phenomenally to our city. We’re going to stand with them.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the case of Renee Good “an act of domestic terrorism.” Trump said she tried to run over an officer with her car. What did you make of the claims from the administration about what happened in this specific case?

That sounded to me like a person that did not believe a word that she herself was saying. You ever heard somebody talk and they’re saying these words and you can tell that it’s literally just the mouth moving and words coming out of it, but there’s no guttural belief? I mean, domestic terrorism? That’s such a ridiculous allegation that it’s not deserving of a response, but I mean, I will respond anyway. We’ve all got two eyes. We can see what happened. This is a person that was clearly scared and concerned and trying to get out of there.

Protesters hold photos of Renee Nicole Good, the day after she was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.Genaro Molina/Getty Images

Your comments that ICE should get the fuck out of Minneapolis led some criticism about you potentially contributing to escalating tensions. What’s your response to those complaints?

First, we have been warning, without the use of F-bombs, for over a month that something like this would happen. We have been describing in great detail the concern that we have and why this chaotic way of operating could very well result in somebody getting seriously injured or killed. I’m so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but no, it’s not the F-bomb that inflames matters. It’s the killing of a person that’s inflammatory. Obviously, right? They’re not operating constitutionally. Everybody should be standing up against this, Democrat or Republican. For those constitutional law scholars that are out there, people that care deeply about the endurance of our Republic, they should be absolutely livid because this is not the way that we operate in America. We’re better than this.

Obviously, you don’t want ICE in your city. Is there anything that you can do to control what the federal government does in Minneapolis?

Well, they’re looking for any excuse to deploy substantial military as an occupying force in Minneapolis, they being the federal government, they being Trump.

You believe they want to deliberately stoke tensions to justify a response?

That is what it seems. It seems they are looking for any excuse here. This is not the way they would operate if the goal were reducing crime. This is not the way that they would operate if their goal was immigration enforcement. I mean, [Barack] Obama, as you know, under the Obama administration, there’s a substantial number of people that were deported and not anything, not like this. This is political. It is done seemingly with the intent to sow discord and stoke fear and cause chaos. And importantly, we can’t take the bait. I am very optimistic that our whole city, our community members recognize that we have a very important role to play. We’ve got to meet the magnitude of this moment, meeting that hate with a whole lot of love, meeting that fear with a whole lot of hope. Recognizing that we care about our immigrant neighbors and an occupying force that is excused by something going wrong here is exactly what they want. It’s exactly what the Feds want. And so we can’t take the bait. And that has been a message that I’m delivering. It’s been a message that our community members are delivering. In other words, peace. We’ve got to stay peaceful here.

This killing evoked memories of another very high-profile killing in the city, George Floyd in 2020, which happened about a mile away. The response to that murder, which included riots, was pretty disastrous for Minneapolis. Do you fear a similar tinderbox situation here?

It’s a very different situation. Of course, I have deep concerns. And at the same time, Minneapolis is resilient, we’re strong, and we also learn from experience, and we improve. Just speaking about me personally, I am not the same mayor that I was in April of 2020. I have learned, I have gained experience that has made me a better mayor and a better leader, and I use those experiences every single day, especially during a time of crisis like this. And I know that our community, our city, is rising to the challenge here. We may get knocked down seven times, but we get back up eight. And like I said, we don’t work with ICE, we do work with our community members.

Do you worry about the abilities of Democrats to push back against the excesses of the Trump administration?

Yeah, of course. We’ve got to show that Democratic run cities can work. If you go back, you were just talking about 2020. If you go back to those late days of May and early days of June in 2020, there was a very viral video of me getting booed and shamed out of a protest that was taking place outside my home, where I was asked to commit to defunding the police. And I said, no. That moment didn’t tickle. I mean, I was spat on, I had things thrown at me. In that moment, I thought maybe my political career was over, but it is a moment that I’m very proud of because it was the right thing to do.

The truth is that we need good constitutional policing in this city and in this country. And we have seen great strides in keeping people safe in Minneapolis. Again, crime is down in Minneapolis. I think we’re in a position right now collectively where we got to love our country more than our ideology. And we got to recognize that the opposite of Donald Trump extremism is not the opposite extreme. It’s good, thoughtful governance. Where we are loving our neighbors, we are doing right by them, we abide by the Constitution, and then we love our country and our city more than our ideology. That’s what's got to happen here. The Trump administration is not doing this. Their whole motto is—what is it? Country first?

America first.

This is not putting America first.