Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey during a news conference last week at City Hall in Minneapolis. Photo / Joshua Lott, The Washington Post
Jacob Frey was minutes from briefing the public on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killing a Minneapolis woman when two things infuriated him.
He had just seen video of the fatal shooting for the first time.
Then, seconds before he went out, Frey learned that Trump Administration officials were characterising the shooting as a necessary act of self-defence.
The Democratic Mayor of Minneapolis walked to a lectern and delivered a blunt retort: Trump officials’ account of what happened was “bull****”.
“To Ice, get the f*** out of Minneapolis,” Frey added later in his news conference. “We do not want you here.”
Frey, who recounted his experience in an interview with the Washington Post, has emerged as a singular figure in the aftermath of Renee Good’s death.
For days, he has aggressively countered the Trump Administration’s portrayal of the shooting, becoming one of the most prominent critics of the way the US President and his team have depicted the situation.
While President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have defended the officer and promised sweeping protections for federal agents, Frey has argued that available footage shows Good was not a threat and the officer acted recklessly.
He penned a New York Times op-ed with the headline stating “Trump is lying to you” and lambasted the FBI for seizing control of the post-shooting investigation, cutting out local officials. “This is not a time to hide from the facts,” he said.
Frey’s posture has divided elected officials and other political leaders along party lines.
Republicans have accused him of inflaming a volatile situation, while Democrats have praised him for forcefully challenging claims from Trump and others that have been called into question by close examinations of the incident as captured on video.
When asked during a CNN interview to respond to GOP criticism, Frey was unapologetic: “I’m so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears”.
Now, Frey, a youthful and expressive politician, is at the centre of another national firestorm in an eight-year tenure rocked by crises going back to the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.
That experience, he said in the interview, shaped his reaction to Good’s killing.
In what might become a prolonged showdown with the federal Government, Frey suggested he is unmoved by outside criticism, in contrast to 2020, when he was a relatively new mayor learning to navigate myriad political crosscurrents.
“I’m not the same mayor as I was in January of 2020. I am not the same person,” Frey said in the interview with the Post.
“Anybody that doesn’t acknowledge growth and lessons learned in 2020 and 2021 is not doing the necessary growth and self-reflection.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called Frey “a disgrace” in a statement, accusing him of misleading the public and seeking to “incite more violence against law enforcement” with his comments.
In Minneapolis, where Frey has drawn criticism from the left over his handling of Floyd’s death, he has won plaudits from liberal activists and voters for his response to Good’s killing.
And his actions have helped energise Democrats who have said the party’s leaders have been too timid in taking on Trump, either by shying away from fights over his immigration policies or lacking a coherent response to his consolidation of power.
Tyler Westland, 32, has been outraged by Ice’s presence in Minneapolis and recently started volunteering to alert people when agents are in their neighbourhoods.
He did not vote for Frey in last year’s mayoral election, instead supporting his leading liberal challenger. While he said he’d like to see Frey take stances further to the left, Westland approved of Frey’s response to the Ice shooting.
“We have to applaud people for doing things correctly,” Westland said.
At 44, Frey, a former marathon runner who has repeatedly confronted Trump in his second term, has, in the eyes of associates and other observers, changed from the person who struggled to manage the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.
The crisis plunged Minneapolis into unrest as protesters ransacked stores and burned a police station, ignited a national reckoning over race and set off a prolonged fight over whether to defund or reform the city’s police department.
Sharon Smith-Akinsanya, a friend of Frey’s who has known him for more than 10 years, said she has seen his growth as mayor during some of his tenure’s most challenging moments, including navigating the debate between activists and law enforcement and two tough re-election races.
Now, she said, Frey is battle-tested and confident, particularly as Minneapolis faces attacks from the Trump Administration.
“I’ve seen him be progressively stronger in his conviction and not worry so much as to whether he’s stepped on someone’s toes or made a misstep,” said Smith-Akinsanya, the chief executive of Rae Mackenzie Group, a marketing and communications firm.
In 2020, days after millions of people viewed video of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, hundreds of protesters showed up outside the mayor’s home.
Many Democratic activists were calling for Minneapolis and other cities to defund their police departments, fuelling a contentious party debate.
Frey did not support defunding the police department, but he equivocated in his comments in the days that followed, trying to empathise with protesters’ anger but opposing their central demand.
Protesters called Frey to the front and asked him to commit to defund the city’s police department. In a low voice, Frey told them he did not support abolishing the police department.
“Shame! Shame!” protesters chanted. Frey thought it might be the end of his political career, he recalled in the interview, particularly when the Minneapolis City Council subsequently supported defunding the police with a veto-proof majority.
Frey also has since become a father-of-two, which he and those close to him said have changed the way he sees his role in leading the city. Associates said he thinks more about the type of city he wants his daughters to grow up in.
“He’s emboldened because he’s more mature, and he’s thinking about his kids and what world he wants them to live in,” said Houston White, a business owner in Minneapolis who has interacted with Frey for years.
“I see a father navigating this and not just a politician.”
Over the past six months, Minneapolis has repeatedly found itself thrust into the national spotlight.
In June, a state lawmaker and her husband were shot dead in their homes, leading to a two-day manhunt for the gunman.
In August, Frey called for gun-control measures after a mass shooting at a Catholic school.
In recent weeks, Trump and right-wing media figures have attacked Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community during a wide-ranging fraud probe in which most of the defendants are of Somali descent.
As other Democrats have been more muted in responding to Trump’s onslaught and attack on minorities, Frey forcefully defended the state’s Somali community.
Shortly after Good was killed, Frey appeared at his first news conference on the incident, where he punctuated his pushback against the Trump administration reaction with expletives.
“We shouldn’t shy away from the truth and what is so obvious, and in this case, it means calling bull**** when we see it,” Frey said in the interview.
“No, an Ice agent was not run over. No, the victim Renee is not a domestic terrorist. No, the Ice agent was not purely operating out of self-defence.
“These things are not true. They’re not true if you’re a Republican. They’re not true if you’re a Democrat.”
Some Republicans have strongly rejected Frey’s commentary and criticism of Ice.
Chad Wolf, former acting Homeland Security Secretary in Trump’s first term, and Cooper Smith, also a former DHS official, said in a Fox News op-ed that Frey was using the shooting “to reignite the same radical forces that led to such destruction just over five years ago”.
Frey’s use of an expletive to tell Ice to leave the city is a typical example of him “trying to get as much airtime as possible”, said Preya Samsundar, a GOP strategist based in suburban Minneapolis who has been critical of the mayor’s record.
The video of the shooting that Frey watched last Thursday, which was recorded by a witness, shows Good’s vehicle moving towards the Ice officer as he stood in front of it.
The officer was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, the video shows.
Separate cellphone video recorded by Jonathan Ross, the Ice officer who shot Good, surfaced online on Saturday and showed for the first time that Good spoke to the officer before he shot her.
It reveals that, a split second before the gunfire, Good’s wife urged her to drive away from the scene. It does not show whether Good’s vehicle came into contact with Ross, as the Trump Administration contends.
Vance claimed the video from Ross exonerated him, while Frey argued that any self-defence contention was “garbage”.
In the years since Floyd’s killing, the city has invested heavily in emergency preparedness, violence prevention and alternative public safety initiatives, city officials said.
Frey and his top officials have grown accustomed to having to quickly respond to local events that become national, said Margaret Anderson Kelliher, the Minneapolis city operations officer.
The city also has had to become more adept at getting information out quickly, Kelliher said, because of Trump’s and right-wing media’s frequent dissemination of disinformation or assertions before facts are established.
Both Good’s and Floyd’s deaths were captured on video that quickly spread across the country.
Their killings have significant differences: Floyd was a black man who died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer; Good was a white woman who was shot at three times in her SUV by a federal immigration officer.
There are also similarities. Good’s killing happened about 1.5km from Floyd’s. Both killings became a flash point for a broader debate about law enforcement tactics.
Protests have been largely peaceful in the days since Good’s shooting, but at times officers have deployed tear gas, and 29 people were arrested at the weekend, Frey said. The city has not suffered the kind of destruction that followed Floyd’s death.
Demonstrations “have remained peaceful until last night”, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a news conference on Sunday NZT.
Last Friday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside a government building to scream at federal officers as they drove into and out of the parking lot. One carried an “Abolish Ice” flag and another beat on an overturned bucket.
At the site of the shooting, people have been holding an ongoing vigil, lighting candles and placing flowers near where Good’s SUV crashed.
Raucous demonstrations have erupted there at times, with a large crowd blocking the nearby intersection and chanting for Ice to get out of the city.
Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), who visited the site of Good’s shooting, remembered a similar scene nearby after Floyd’s murder.
“Jacob has learned from hard experience how to lead the city through tragedy,” she said.
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