While meeting with oil and gas executives at the White House earlier this month, President Donald Trump made a bizarre comment when asked about the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. “I feel that I won Minnesota,” he said. “I think I won it all three times.” (He lost the state in 2016, and again in 2020, and a third time in 2024. The margins weren’t razor thin either: roughly two points, seven points and four points.) Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, within hours of another killing by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis — 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti — Attorney General Pam Bondi was on Fox News making demands for sensitive voting information from the state like some kind of mob boss collecting protection money.
Bondi boasted of sending a letter to Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz that called on the state to hand over personal data on millions of its residents to satisfy Trump’s obsession with proving election fraud in 2020. On Monday, Vice President JD Vance piled on to suggest that the city’s wave of protests against the presence and actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are meant to allow undocumented immigrants the right to vote in federal elections.
