Tim Walz Fears a Fort Sumter Moment in Minneapolis

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it’s federal forces that are risking a breach. “It’s a physical assault,” Walz told me. “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.”

He let his question about Fort Sumter hang without an answer.

Walz bowed out of his reelection race earlier this month. The 2024 vice-presidential candidate said that he didn’t want politics to interfere with his work amid an intensifying federal probe into welfare fraud in his state. Two days later, his phone rang, and it was Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Renee Good had been shot and killed by an ICE officer, one of thousands of federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of what the Trump administration declared the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. “Get yourself prepared,” was the mayor’s message, Walz recalled to me. He had understood instantly that the kind of unrest not seen since the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, could be returning to Minneapolis.

Barely two weeks later, federal agents shot and killed a second Minneapolis resident. Walz still doesn’t know the names of the agents who unloaded their firearms into Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse. State authorities were blocked from investigating both killings. Instead, the governor was placed under federal investigation along with other Democratic officials. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is demanding access to Minnesota’s voter rolls, couching the extraordinary election-year request as a quid pro quo for restoring “law and order.”

This looks to Walz like an all-out federal assault on his state. When I asked him explicitly if he thought the United States was barreling toward an armed internal struggle, he hedged. “Well, I don’t want to alarm people,” he said. He switched into the third person, saying that some of his constituents think “Governor Walz should call in the National Guard and arrest ICE.”

The governor isn’t inclined to do this. He mobilized his state’s National Guard, but to deliver doughnuts and hot chocolate to observers and protesters who have sought to document and contest ICE’s presence. He saluted their commitment to nonviolence, saying that the restraint exercised by the vast majority of his constituents may be what averts an even deeper crisis. After invoking Fort Sumter, he brought up John Brown, the abolitionist who stormed a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, fueling violent conflict over slavery that erupted in the Civil War.  

“Guns pointed, American at American,” he said, “is certainly not where we want to go.”

President Trump called Walz “seriously retarded” in a Thanksgiving post on social media. Yet the president reported having a “very good call” with the governor on Monday, saying the two were “on a similar wavelength.”

By the time of their conversation, senior advisers to the president had smeared Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.” Trump declined to echo those characterizations in interviews and other comments this week. But in their phone call, Walz told me, the president didn’t say Pretti’s name, didn’t express condolences for his family, and didn’t ask how residents of the state were doing.

Instead, Walz said, the president complained. “I just don’t understand you Minnesotans,” he said, arguing that ICE raids had “worked fine” in other places, including New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky. The president pressed him to cooperate with immigration authorities, according to Walz. The governor told me that he would comply with federal law, but outlined strict limits on his cooperation. “I’m not sure I can do much more,” the governor said. “I’m not going to send my police in to search preschools. I’m not going to have them walk down the street and ask brown people for their papers. I’m not going to do that, because that’s not my job and I don’t think it’s constitutional.”

He gave the president two conditions for their working more closely together: removing federal agents and allowing the state to take part in probes into the two killings. The president, meanwhile, promoted a change in his approach to Minnesota, saying that he was sending Tom Homan, his “border czar,” to replace Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who had become a public face of the administration’s most confrontational tactics. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

[Read: Greg Bovino loses his job]

Homan arrived and called the governor right away, Walz said. “At least Tom Homan understood, ‘Look, this is a mess. This was wrong,’” the governor told me. He and Homan have disagreements, Walz said, but the border czar made clear in their conversations that he understands how local law enforcement operates and how it responds to written requests to hold inmates for ICE to consider removal processes, known as “detainers.” Bovino never even called, Walz said. Neither did Kristi Noem, the homeland-security secretary.

Walz said that he wants to see a major drawdown of federal agents and dramatically different tactics. He said he gave Homan a window of several days to reorient the operation. That window closes tomorrow. “If we don’t see a massive change here,” Walz told Homan, “I have no choice but to go back and tell my folks that you’re not doing it.”

“And look,” the governor added, “the folks on the street are skeptical.”

Walz is also skeptical. When we spoke, he couldn’t yet determine whether there had been a significant change in ICE tactics in his state. Activists I asked couldn’t say for sure either.

One thing the governor said he did know was that the damage had already been profound. “The disruption and the moral harm that they have done to our state is unimaginable,” he said. He saw the fear up close recently when residents mistook the SUVs in his security detail for ICE vehicles and fled on foot. Children are staying home from school, he said. Families are fearful of going out for groceries. For people watching from outside Minnesota, the governor said, “it’s worse than you think.”

Minnesota may offer a glimpse of what’s in store for other states. “That assault will come to your state soon,” Walz warned. This is why he has been encouraged to see some red-state governors speak out. Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of Oklahoma and the chair of the National Governors Association, joined his Democratic vice chair, Wes Moore of Maryland, in calling for a “reset” in immigration enforcement. Governor Phil Scott, a Republican from Vermont, called on Trump to pause the operations, saying simply, “Enough.”

Walz wondered aloud if “there’s a Republican governor who could look you in the eye and say, ‘Would you have been okay with Joe Biden doing this?’” Walz said. “And I think that’s where you get a governor like Kevin Stitt saying, ‘No way in hell.’”

[Read: Police and ICE agents are on a collision course]

But there is something particular about Trump’s vendetta against Minnesota, a state he falsely claims to have won three times only to have been bested by fraud. Members of his Cabinet have piled on. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is from Minnesota, wrote on X, “ICE > MN.” Walz called the post “absolutely despicable.”

Walz won’t be on the ballot in November’s election, but he thinks the contest is at the heart of the administration’s tactics. The Justice Department’s demand for Minnesota’s voter rolls, he said, was the giveaway. The president’s party, he predicted, will be “wiped out” in a free and fair vote—assuming there is one.

“But I hear Americans on this,” he added. What they say is, “‘What makes you think we can get to November?’”