Keith Ellison: Trump Hates Minnesotans Because We Love Each Other
Activism
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Comment
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February 9, 2026
The president attacked us because of who we are and what we value. We have an obligation to resist.
Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s campaign that targeted the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, where I am attorney general, appears to be the largest deployment of immigration agents in U.S. history. This domestic invasion inflicted enormous damage on our state.
Federal agents killed two people in two weeks: Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who worked at the Minneapolis, Virginia, hospital. (There has been at least one other non-fatal shooting.)
Agents arrested countless numbers of people and actually demanded that they show their papers – in America. We’ve seen door-to-door searches where officers barge into people’s homes without cause. We have seen stores closed, markets closed, restaurants under siege, employees afraid to go to work, and students afraid to go to school. We will live with the scars of this abuse for years to come.
That’s why my office sued the Trump administration. We requested a restraining order to stop Operation Metro Surge. The lawsuit we filed was, in my view, necessitated by the federal government’s unprecedented abuse of the Constitution and President Trump’s open promise of “retaliation” against the State of Minnesota. We were able to piece together facts to show that the reason Trump’s home army flooded our state is not because we have a particularly large population of undocumented immigrants. Rather, we have been targeted because Trump considers us his political enemy. This is a violation of our First Amendment right to free speech.
Additionally, the 10th Amendment gives Minnesota dual sovereignty with the federal government. Yet we have seen the White House attempt to force elected leaders to bend to its will rather than that of the people of our state. The federal government deployed more than 3,000 masked, heavily armed agents to achieve what Congress or a court would never grant: forced control over Minnesotans’ politics.
People may ask, “Why does Minnesota have to deal with this targeted oppression?” One answer is that we have voted against the president three elections in a row – something he has publicly said he is deeply unhappy about. But there is a deeper, truer answer: Trump came after us because of who we are and what we value.
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We welcome foreigners. We view refugees as valuable members of our community, not threats. We care for the most vulnerable among us. We want to be a place where everyone can live, no matter where they come from. And while we of course believe in the rule of law, we also believe that immigration is not a sin.
In short, Trump hates us because we love each other.
To those watching this madness unfold elsewhere in America: I submit to you that, just as Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles were the forerunners of Minneapolis, Minneapolis is the forerunner of many of the other cities and states, including Maine, that Trump has his eyes on. If we don’t stop this behavior in Minnesota, it will only continue to spread – and that won’t be good for anyone in our country.
We must recognize that this is a constitutional test for Minnesota and the entire nation. This reality has led me to think a lot recently about the first principles and very premises on which this nation was founded.
Think about how things started. Ask yourself: what happened during the Boston Massacre of 1770? British imperial agents, under orders from a distant power, were sent into a local community and shot the protesters dead. The framers of the Constitution suffered these abuses and many others. When they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they were thinking about powerful central governments using force against communities and the people who live in them. It was these concerns that led them to establish the separation of powers and our system of federalism.
The whole purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to put an end to the kinds of events that are currently happening in Minneapolis. These founding principles are today under attack. We were told this could happen. In The federalist paperswe were warned that unscrupulous and unethical leaders could arise and that they had to be controlled. We were told that if you have a corrupt federal authority that allows federal agents to commit crimes with impunity, local authorities have the right, prerogative and obligation to do something about it.
As Attorney General of Minnesota, I am prepared to take seriously my obligations to the people I serve and to the Constitution of the United States. I have an obligation to do something about this. And I have a duty to stand with my fellow Minnesotans and all Americans who value peace, justice and the rule of law. If we do this, if we stand together, work together, resist together, we will win.
From Minneapolis to Venezuela, from Gaza to Washington, DC, we live in a time of staggering chaos, cruelty and violence.
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