Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey appeared to deflect and virtue signal to his city’s Somali and Latino communities after NBC News’s Kristen Welker pressed him on his recent explicit comments toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On the same day an ICE agent in his city fatally shot Renee Good — who appeared in video to accelerate her vehicle in his direction — Frey told the agency to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” During a Sunday interview on “Meet the Press,” Welker asked the mayor if he bore any “responsibility as a local leader” to “bring down the temperature” as volatile anti-ICE protests erupted in the city and across the country.
“Of course, I bear responsibility to bring down the temperature, that’s part of my role as mayor. And, by the way, protests here in Minneapolis are peaceful,” Frey replied to the host. “And, you know, to those that are offended, I’m sorry I offended their delicate ears.”
“I dropped an F-bomb and they killed somebody,” the mayor added, repeating verbatim a comment he made two days prior. “I think the killing somebody is the inflammatory element here, not the F-bomb, which I’m sure we’ve all heard before.”
Welker followed up by highlighting anti-ICE remarks Frey made prior to the shooting. In December 2025, Frey claimed that the law enforcement agency’s increased presence in the city under the Trump administration worried him that “somebody is going to get seriously injured or killed.” The host also asked the mayor if he supports abolishing ICE.
“Well, first off, I did not say that ICE enforcement was unconstitutional. What I said is the way that they are doing it is unconstitutional,” Frey replied. “You can’t come into a city and discriminate solely on the basis of, ‘Are you Latino?’ or ‘Are you Somali?’ and then randomly pick people up off the street after that.”
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Frey went on to claim “we have had pregnant women dragged through the street,” as well as teenage American citizens “just picked up.”
“You can’t just detain somebody because they look like they are Somali or they look like they are Latino. To be very clear for the whole country, that is what is happening right now,” Frey asserted.
Welker then presented Frey with Trump White House border czar Tom Homan’s observation Minneapolis’s “sanctuary city” policy — which Frey supports — interferes with ICE’s abilities to do its job.
“How do you respond to that argument, that your city’s stance and eliminating cooperation with ICE has made it harder for federal law enforcement to safely enforce immigration laws in your city?” Welker asked.
“Look, what our policy says is that I don’t want our police officers spending time working with ICE on immigration enforcement. Because why? That’s not our primary job. You know what I want our police officers doing? I want them stopping murders from happening. I want them preventing carjackings,” the mayor said.
“You know what I don’t want them doing? I don’t want them spending a single second hunting down a father who just dropped his kids off at day care, is about to go work a 12-hour shift, who happened to be from Ecuador,” Frey continued. “That guy, he makes Minneapolis a better place, and I am proud to have him in our city. So, I want our officers focusing on safety, not randomly plucking people off the street and hunting them down.”
The mayor, who has a history of vying to gain the support of Minneapolis’s significant Somali population, defeated a prominent socialist challenger of Somali descent, Democratic Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh, to win reelection to a third term in November 2025.
Frey notably went viral the following month for appearing to have a queasy reaction while visibly struggling to finish eating a plate of cambuulo, a traditional Somali bean porridge. The white Democrat’s apparent public relations stunt came in the wake of reports that dozens of Minnesotans — the vast majority of Somali ancestry — took part in a massive fraud scheme which allegedly resulted in some taxpayer money winding up in the possession of radical Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab.
Frey also came under scrutiny in the summer of 2020 for kneeling at the casket of career criminal George Floyd during a memorial service.
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