It is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. You have these federal agents and unmarked vehicles, big trucks, SUVs, pickup trucks. Their faces are covered, they're wearing camouflage and helmets and the whole thing, And it is an omnipresent part of daily life in certain parts of the city. Road now Democratic leaders of Minnesota slamming the Trump administration of reports of planned immigration enforcement targeting Somollians and the Twin Cities.
Jason de Russia lives and works as a radio host in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the past three weeks, he's watched as his city has been transformed into a battleground after Trump sent thousands of ice agents onto the streets.
So they are here, and it's very different from the vibe with local police or are marked vehicles. They're not wearing masks, and people are using whistles to sort of alert the surrounding area that immigration authorities are there. So throughout the city you have this kind of cacophony of whistling. People are angry, they feel betrayed by the federal government.
The city's become the epicenter of Trump's hardline immigration crackdown. As he ramps up efforts to round up and deport ten million people, promising the largest deportation in US history.
Just people who are here illegally, who are being grabbed up. It's if your skin isn't white, you are being questioned and sometimes you're being detained.
I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven am today WCCO host Jason to Russia on the revenge driving Trump's obsession with Minneapolis. It's Wednesday, January twenty eighth. Jason, Let's talk about Alex Preddy. Who was he and tell us about what happened to him.
I think Alex pretty and his shooting will go down as the turning point for this. Alex Freddy was a thirty seven year old intensive care nurse. He like men people, especially younger people, was out there actively sort of observing.
He was agitating.
Perhaps we don't know the full encounter, but what we know from the videos is he was trying to come to the rescue of a woman who was shoved by an ICE agent. The ICE agents surrounded him, sprayed him with pepper spray, pulled him to the ground. They were all over him, and one agent pulled a handgun that appeared to be in his waist holster. In Minnesota, you can, if you have the right license, legally carry a handgun,
and he did have the right license. But then ICE agents fired shot after shot after shot and killed him in the hours afterwards. It's the federal government said that he was intending to do maximum damage for PREDI.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed he approached the US Border Patrol officers with a nine millimeter semi automatic handgun, violently resisted attempts to be disarmed, and wanted to do maximum damage and massacre.
Law enforcement, you know, portraying him like he was some sort of intended assassin of the ICE agents, when the video showed just the opposite. And so the combination of the shock of his killing and the lies was really a tipping point where a lot of Minnesotans who have been on the sideline have come forward and said no more.
So.
We've had all of these different accounts about what actually happened. What is it that the local authorities are saying.
The state here is trying to do their own investigation, But when state investigators showed up on the scene, the federal in investigators refuse to allow them entry, refused to allow them to preserve the crime scene, and in fact, a couple hours later, every it is gone. And you think, like, I've been a journalist for more than twenty five years and I've covered plenty of law enforcement involved shootings, and usually it's taped off and blocked off for blocks, investigated
for twenty four hours on the scene. Here they were gone by a couple hours, and the FEDS didn't even let the state people in, and instead you have an administration that is pronouncing judgment two hours afterwards and telling you that the guy who was killed is the bad guy. So there's a lack of trust right where if you don't trust.
What do you have?
Okay, So that lack of trust has been building for weeks. This isn't the first violence or even the first death we've had in Minneapolis. So how did we get here?
We saw these videos over and over of random stops.
A terrified woman flees two men in masks. It's not a mugging. She's an American citizen being chased by Ice agents who think she's here illegally.
There was a teenager stopped at a gas station just because of the color of his skin.
Doesn't votal.
But then there was another shooting.
Renee Good appears calm as she speaks to the officer. When another ICE officer orders her out of the car. She then turns her steering wheel to the right and begins to drive and three shots ring.
Now, so that really escalated things to another level. But now, within you know, three weeks, two people have been killed on the streets of Minneapolis. The immigration surge here, you know, I think it's fair to as an outsider, to say, why were they focused on Minneapolis.
Minneapolis shares a border with Canada.
When you think about illegal immigration, you don't think Minneapolis is the headquarters of this. You have to bear in mind that right now in our city there are three thousand federal agents, ICE agents, Border patrol agents. The city of Minneapolis has six hundred police officers, three thousand federal agents who are here who are not here before, compared to the normal police force of six hundred.
Jason, you said before that the focus on Minneapolis suggests that this isn't just about cracking down on immigration. So what is it really about.
I think it's about retribution.
I think it's about power, It's about showing that you have the power and the full force of the federal government. Is just a way to settle a score. That's what it feels like to people here.
Coming up why Trump wants payback, Jason, can you tell me more about why Trump has targeted Minneapolis in particular.
It all goes back to a longstanding of argument that the President of the United States has had with the state of Minnesota. So, first of all, he lost his campaign for president in the state three times, and he believes that that's because of fraud, and he thinks part of that fraud was people who were here illegally who were voting for his opponent. Our state Governor Tim Walls ran for vice president with Kamala Harris against Donald Trump
and Jade Vancid. I think some of the beef stems from that the President publicly posted on truth social that Minnesota would see retribution. But then the more immediate aftermath was a scandal in Minnesota where there was more than a billion dollars of fraud discovered in social services welfare type benefits that the state administered federal money. And most of the people who had been charged by the US
Attorney are Somali Americans. But that gave an opening to say, well, we're going to send in all these troops and clean up the illegal immigrant fraud.
Minnesota is a train wreck. It is corrupt, and it was under the leadership of Governor Walls in this mayor that they allowed it to happen, and they let criminals in, illegals and people abuse programs and steal the money.
Part of the controversy of being here in Minneapolis is if you were really trying to get a large number of undocumented illegal people out of here.
We're not a huge city.
We're not even in the top ten of the biggest cities in the country that they believe have undocumented immigrants. But that is been their mission, go get as many as you can and get them out. And there was reporting over the weekend that there is an incentive system set up where ICE agents are getting bonuses for people that they arrest. They're not getting bonuses for successful cases, but they're getting bonuses for grabbing people up.
So what kind of tactics are they using to do that.
Some of what's happening is that immigration authorities are going to workplaces and auditing their paperwork, and frankly, a lot of People who are skeptical of mass immigration arrests often say like, well, why aren't you going to after the people who are hiring people who are here illegally. The effort that's gotten more attention is the fact that there are video encounters of sort of these random You know,
if you follow the agents, they'll pull you over. If I continually see you following us, interfering with us, honking your horns, blocking our cars.
You have a very high probability of making a really bad.
Decision and being arrested.
If you look brown or black, they'll pull you over, pull you out of the car.
Roughy up.
It's just very like it feels like it's out of the nineteen fifties kind of rough and tough kind of cop stuff, so very aggressive and sort of violent interactions. You have certain pockets that have higher concentration of you know, Latino immigrants or Somali immigrants or Asian immigrants, and so they have been focusing in those areas at times, going
door to door, pulling people out of cars. You know, there are rules of engagement on these things that used to be followed, and now it seems that anything is up for grabs. The way they've been acting here. It's very troubling and it does have a large number of people here afraid, afraid to leave their house, afraid they're
going to be snatched up and detained. The new mayor of the city of Saint Paul has to carry her passport card around with her because she is a refugee, and so she has to have her papers with her. So it's this, I don't know what it's like in Australia. If if show me your papers is something that people would expect, but it's not what we expect.
It's not how things are done.
And Jason, we had the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, writing to the governor over the weekend urging a change of course. Could you tell us about that.
Her letter was interesting.
There were a couple of things where she was laying out were ingredients that would lead to an end to the ice surge in Minneapolis. She was demanding cooperation and then she wanted the voter roles from Minnesota. So this is something the federal government has been asking for private voter information. And the President, in this obsession that the election was rigged against him in Minnesota, wants to look
into the voter roles in this state. Today, the governor and the mayor mini Sapolis both talked to the President of the United States. This is something that should have happened months ago, but finally happened today. So I think
that's a good sign. But I do think that the President of the United States knows that he's losing support, and he does not want to lose support, and so I do expect there will be some way by the end of this week that the Trump administration can say mission accomplished, we got five thousand undocumented whatever they want to say, but they'll take a win, and the local leaders will take a win too, and they'll say we got them out of here, so everybody gets a win,
and then we could move forward. And we've seen quite a bit of movement in Minneapolis, in fact, on this day, where the outspoken commander of the Border Patrol who's been the public face of this whole effort, is being replaced.
CBS News has learned that Bovino is departing Minneapolis imminently, as are many other cvps, and well Vino at least has been relieved of his command in Minneapolis. He remains in charge of operations across the country of the White House.
And so is that a step towards some sort of resolution.
Perhaps.
I do expect that this will wind down, and so we'll see the political tides are turning, for sure.
And Jason, finally, on a personal level, how does it feel to be watching all of this happen in your home city?
You know, it's exhausting, it is heavy. We do not like being the center of the world's attention. This has been my home for more than twenty years, and it's heartbreaking. But this place always has had an activist bent and a social justice bent, and there's an idea here that if you raise your voice, that you can affect change. And I do have hope that people will see the good here and not just focus on some of the
images that they've seen. The President has seen that these tactics generate this sort of activity, so it's almost impossible to have this sort of full, aggressive, in your face tough guys coming to town were enforcing immigration laws without the anger, without a shooting. So I am optimistic that things got so bad here that it will prevent this from happening in other cities.
Jason, thank you so much for sharing all of this with.
Us my pleasure.
Also in the news, allies of Opposition leader Susan Lee have declared their support amid growing speculation about her leadership. The coalition split last week after Susan Lee accepted the resignation of three National shadow ministers who defied official coalition policy and voted against new hate laws in the Senate.
Shadow Attorney General Andrew Wallace and Liberal frontbencher Tim Wilson of both denied rumors that anyone within the Liberal Party is mounting a leadership challenge, and a thirty one year old man has been charged after a home made explosive device was thrown into a crowd of people at an Invasion Day rally in central Perth. Officers evacuated a crowd of around two thousand people from Perth CBD on Monday after a device containing explosive liquid, ball bearings and screws
was found but did not detonate. The device was taken for preliminary testing by police forensics teams. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven a m. Thanks for listening
And