The US justice department on Tuesday subpoenaed the offices of Minnesota’s governor and attorney-general, and mayors of Minneapolis and St Paul, as it weighed whether their public opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities amounts to a crime. One of the jury subpoenas, shared with the media by Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, orders his office’s custodian of records to produce documents since the beginning of 2025 related to “cooperation or lack of cooperation with federal immigration authorities”. The federal grand jury subpoenas were served on six offices of state and local Democrats, according to a justice department official, including those of governor Tim Walz and attorney-general Keith Ellison.
“Whether it’s a public official or a law enforcement officer, no-one is above the law in this state or in this country, and people will be held accountable,” US attorney-general Pam Bondi said in a Fox News interview after arriving in Minnesota on Friday. “Our men and women in law enforcement deserve to be safe, and that’s what we’re going to do in Minnesota,” Bondi said, without explicitly addressing the newly issued subpoenas. Trump, a Republican, has sent thousands of border batrol and immigration and customs enforcement agents (ICE) into the Minneapolis area in recent weeks to conduct deportation roundups, unprecedented in scale, that have led to many violent confrontations with residents.
The agents have carried rifles through the city’s snowy streets, dressed in military-style camouflage, tactical gear and masks, drawing loud but mostly peaceful protests from residents. Walz and Frey have denounced the ICE operations as reckless political theatre that was putting the public at risk and was designed to provoke chaos Trump would use as a pretext to exert an even greater show of force. Though he has urged protesters to remain orderly, Walz has also openly encouraged citizens to record videos of any arrests or other encounters between ICE agents and members of the public to create a database for potential “future prosecution” of wrongdoing by federal law enforcement.
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The hostility of many residents to the ICE crackdown has deepened since an agent fatally shot an American woman,Renee Good, in her car nearly two weeks ago. Federal officers have used teargas and other chemical irritants against protesters, and have drawn outrage for racially profiling black, Latino and Asian US citizens, including a man who was wrongly arrested and pulled out of his home on Sunday dressed in underpants and sandals.
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