WASHINGTON — Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should head to red states such as Texas, Florida, and Utah with larger populations of illegal immigrants, despite critics accusing him of running a sanctuary city.
Frey stressed that he doesn’t want ICE abolished, while arguing that the thousands of immigration officers swarming his city dwarf its roughly 600 police officers and are causing “distress.”
“This, however, is the largest immigration enforcement action on record in the United States,” Frey told Fox News in an interview that aired on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday.
“I would just ask you, why is the largest-scale immigration enforcement action taking place where we don’t even have that many undocumented immigrants?” he went on. “Why would it not take place in Texas or Florida or Utah, where you do actually have a large number of undocumented immigrants?”
The Minneapolis mayor, who famously said ICE should “get the f— out” of his city after the fatal shooting of resident Renee Good last week, now says he doesn’t want to eliminate ICE.
“I do not support abolishing ICE,” he said. “However, I absolutely oppose the way that this administration is conducting themselves with us.”
Minneapolis, which has a population of about 429,983, has a separation ordinance on the books that hampers city employees from helping federal immigration officials and providing them with resources.
The city council voted just last month to strengthen that ordinance.
“We have a separation ordinance in the city. And you know what that ordinance says?” Frey stressed. “It says that I want our limited number of police officers focusing on keeping people safe, arresting perpetrators of violent crime; stopping car thefts from taking place.”
“That’s what I want them focusing on,” he added. “I don’t want them focusing on hunting down a dad that just dropped his kids off at day care, is about to go work a 12-hour shift, who happens to be from Ecuador.”
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, pushed back on Frey’s comments, stating that ICE agents aren’t receiving the necessary access in Minnesota.
“If [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz or Mayor Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said on Fox News, noting ICE isn’t able to nab murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from prisons.
While states like Florida, Texas, and Utah have much larger populations, and therefore likely more illegal immigrants than Minneapolis, they have been more cooperative with the feds than Minneapolis.
Recently, the Trump administration moved to dispatch an additional 1,000 immigration officers to Minneapolis, in addition to the 2,000 who were already there, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Frey claims there are about 3,000 officers between ICE and the US Border Patrol on the ground now in his city.
Minneapolis is still reeling from the fallout of the fatal shooting of Good, an anti-ICE activist, after she failed to get out of her SUV and instead accelerated. Officer Jonathan Ross shot Good as she drove away, a use of deadly force that the Trump administration said was self-defense.
President Trump’s team had been ramping up ICE’s presence in Minneapolis in the wake of a massive welfare fraud scandal that has rocked Minnesota.
A former federal prosecutor estimated that as much as $9 billion could have been swindled since 2018, though some skeptics — namely Walz’s administration — believe that figure might be a little high.
On Monday, Minnesota and Illinois sued to stop the Trump administration from surging ICE personnel in their states, arguing it violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which delegates unenumerated powers to states.
“What is happening right now through ICE is not about getting rid of murderers,” Frey said in defense of the suit. “Trump himself is saying that this is about retribution.”
