WASHINGTON — President Trump told Minnesotans Tuesday to “fear not” because a “day of reckoning and retribution is coming” for the Land of 10,000 Lakes as his administration pursues a sweeping anti-illegal immigration and benefits fraud crackdown.
“Every place we go, crime comes down. In Chicago, despite a weak and incompetent Governor and Mayor fighting us all the way, a big improvement was made. Thousands of Criminals were removed!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
“Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing,” the president continued.
“FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
Trump previously dispatched National Guard troops to Chicago as part of a bid to stem violent crime, but announced late last year that he was removing them following legal setbacks in court.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance revealed plans last week to tap an assistant attorney general whose sole focus will be targeting fraud and who will start by probing Minnesota.
The Twin Cities have been rocked by protests since the fatal Jan. 7 shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.
The White House has stood by the agent, claiming he was acting in self-defense against an act of domestic terrorism.
On Monday, authorities in Minnesota and Illinois sued to block the Trump administration from surging ICE personnel to their states, arguing it violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which delegates unenumerated powers to states.
Here’s the latest on the Minnesota fraud scheme:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that hundreds more officers would be sent to Minnesota in the coming days — in addition to the approximately 2,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents there already.
“Quite honestly, we need ICE to just do what ICE is supposed to do, which is immigration enforcement,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told CNN Monday evening. “They’re doing far more than that … by harassing people, by using excessive force on a routine basis.”
“Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump pondered in his Truth Social post.
“All the patriots of ICE want to do is remove them from your neighborhood and send them back to the prisons and mental institutions from where they came, most in foreign Countries.”
The president also mused that the protests in Minnesota over Good’s death are meant to distract from the billions of taxpayer dollars that were “stolen by really bad and deranged people.”
Estimates on the precise levels of fraud vary, with Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson publicly estimating last month that $9 billion had been stolen since 2018. Nearly 100 people have been charged, with 64 convicted on fraud charges, according to the Justice Department.
Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz dropped his bid for a third term on Jan. 5 amid the welfare scandal.
