Minnesota’s Ellison Voices Resistance, From George Floyd to ICE

Each day before he walks into Minnesota’s Capitol on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in St. Paul, Keith Ellison or another family member drives two close friends to their jobs. He then makes sure his two friends are picked up at the end of their day.

Both are legal immigrants originally from Colombia, as is Ellison’s wife, Mónica. Like many Minneapolis-area residents, Minnesota’s top law enforcement officer doesn’t want to risk people close to him being rounded up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and sent to a detention center.

“I’m actually not tired, worn out, frustrated or overwhelmed. I’m ready for this stuff,” Ellison said in an exclusive interview this week with Bloomberg Law. “When you have an oppressive government running over the rights of people who don’t have any recourse except for the attorney general’s office, then that’s something I’m cut out for. I’m not cut out for everything, but I’m cut out for this.”

Ellison, 62, is at the center of the battle with the Trump administration over its move to send more than 3,000 agents into Minneapolis-St. Paul to crack down on illegal immigration. The former defense attorney and Democratic congressman has filed lawsuits seeking to stop the surge and to preserve evidence associated with the deaths of Renee Good, a mother of three who was shot following a brief interaction with an ICE agent on Jan. 7, and two weeks later, the shooting of Veterans Administration nurse and protester Alex Pretti by two immigration enforcement agents. Ellison’s office is also investigating the non-fatal shooting by an ICE agent of a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis.

Ellison has emerged as the voice of resistance as Minnesota has emerged as its face.

Protesters both against and in support of ICE gathered on the marbled hallways outside Ellison’s office, which features a painted mural of Harriet Tubman, the former slave turned abolitionist and freedom fighter. Outside, in sub-zero temperatures, news reporters line the streets of Minneapolis interviewing residents who have gathered around flowered memorials for Pretti and Good. Sirens blare multiple times a day. Mourners slowly walk up with flowers to lay on block-long memorials where the shootings took place about 10 minutes from each other.

“This is who we are,” said Xavier Bailey, a 27-year-old musician and resident. “We are the revolution. The nation and now the world realizes this.”

A cab driver originally from Eritrea, who declined to give his name out of fear of retaliation, said he voted for Trump and has voted Republican in presidential elections ever since he became a US citizen in 1992. So have many other East African immigrants in Minnesota, he said, because Republican administrations offered more support to his home country than Democratic administrations.

“He never said he would do this,” he said, regarding Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Similar to George Floyd

Ellison has been the voice of a resistance before.

In 2020, as attorney general, Ellison pushed for the prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was tried and convicted of murdering George Floyd, as Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds after officers threw Floyd—who was unarmed—down to the sidewalk and forced him into a prone position following a report that Floyd was using a fake $20 bill.

Securing a murder conviction against an on-duty police officer over an arrest was rare.

Ellison sees stark similarities between Floyd’s murder and the deaths of Good and Pretti.

First, he said, all three deaths came at the hands of trained law enforcement officers.

Second, after each death, government officials immediately downplayed the involvement of the officers involved.

Immediately after Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police distributed a press release that said he died following a “medical emergency” during his arrest.

Following Good’s death, White House officials said she tried to run over an ICE agent with her car. And officials said Pretti— who was legally carrying a gun—had threatened to shoot an agent.

Thirdly, all three fatal interactions were recorded on witness videos that called official accounts into doubt.

“There were maybe five or six different videos in the Floyd case,” he said. “There are way more than that in these cases.”

In each incident, Ellison said, witness testimony backed up the videos.

“The danger of video is that we rely too heavily on it, which I think you can certainly do,” he said. “You still need live witnesses who were there to narrate what they saw and then what you do is introduce the video and then the witness can help walk the jury through the video.”

There is one stark difference between the Floyd case and the Good and Pretti shootings, he said: the lack of cooperation, he says, from federal officials in the most recent cases.

“In Floyd, we ended up getting an outcome that I am proud of. But in these cases, it’s unimaginable that the feds would say, ‘We’re taking control of everything and you, the state of Minnesota, cannot have access to it.’ Nobody really anticipated something like that to happen,” he said. “This is completely unusual. This is why we are in court.”

‘This is Vindictiveness’

In Ellison’s view, Trump targeted Minnesota for three main reasons: The state voted for his opponent in all three of Trump’s election bids by close margins, state officials refused a request from the White House to provide personal information about registered voters, and they resisted scrutiny of the state’s social services programs.

For weeks, Trump and his administration have justified the surge as necessary and called the state’s Democratic leadership—Gov. Tim Walz, Rep. Ilhan Omar and others—soft on violent criminals. Walz and state and local law enforcement reject the president’s characterization, saying they will work with the federal government to remove violent offenders, but that surging has created chaos.

Late Tuesday, as elected officials spoke at various town halls across the city, a man charged a podium where Omar was speaking and sprayed liquid at her before security tackled him. Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, was arrested and charged with third-degree assault. Security for Ellison and other public officials tasked with speaking at upcoming public events in the state has been heightened.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration froze Minnesota’s federal funding for child care and supplemental nutritional assistance, known as SNAP, over alleged widespread fraud at day care centers run by immigrants from Somalia. The action, part of a broader, national crackdown on welfare programs, requires stringent new verification.

The Trump administration, Ellison said, is seeking personal, identifiable information on SNAP recipients to identify immigrants and then direct the funding elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Ellison has been criticized for not investigating the SNAP fraud allegations as aggressively as it probed and prosecuted Medicaid fraud cases. Officials within Ellison’s office said it doesn’t have authority to investigate SNAP fraud as it does Medicaid.

Standing up to the Trump administration, Ellison said, comes with a price.

“The federal government’s response has been, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do what we say? You claim it’s your Tenth Amendment right not to do it? Well then what we’re going to do is we’re going to inundate you with more than 3,000 officers, and we’re going to act so wild and out of control that you’re going to cry uncle and comply with the things that you said you were not going to do in the first place’,” Ellison said.

“This is vindictiveness and lesson teaching,” he said. “You mess with me, any city, and you’re going to get the Minnesota treatment.”

Run for Governor

In 2002, after spending 16 years as a defense attorney and community activist in Minneapolis, Ellison was elected to the Minnesota House. Four years later, Ellison—who converted from Catholicism to Islam as a 19-year-old student at Wayne State University—fended off criticism of being anti-Israel to win election to the US House, becoming the first Muslim American elected to national office. During his six terms in the House, Ellison worked on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010.

In 2018, Ellison was elected Minnesota’s first Black attorney general, assuming a role once held by Walter Mondale, who served as vice president under President Jimmy Carter.

“Keith Ellison is a superstar,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, who recently visited Ellison in his office. “There is nothing he can’t do. I have known Keith for many years and have the utmost respect for what he has accomplished and I expect him to continue to be just as successful in everything he decides to do.”

Last October, Ellison announced he would seek a third, four-year term as attorney general later this year. But then, on Jan. 5, Walz—who ran as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate in 2024—announced he wouldn’t seek a third term amid questions about the alleged social services fraud.

Ellison called in his staff to discuss the possibility of running for governor.

“As governor, you could better direct funds to various programs across the state where there are critical needs,” Ellison said.

A day later, federal immigration and border agents surged into Minneapolis. The next day, Good was killed. Trump later accused Minnesota officials of inciting resistance to immigration enforcement and raised the prospect of invoking the rarely used Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deputize active-duty military personnel to perform civilian law enforcement duties during extraordinary circumstances.

Ellison immediately put any such bids for the governor’s mansion aside.

“I came to the conclusion with all this craziness going on, the surge, the lawsuits pending, the threats to invoke the Insurrection Act, I would not give this job the focus that it needs if I decided to run for governor,” he said. “If I tried to give my full and undivided attention to run for governor, my head and my heart would be back at trying to figure out what my next step was as A.G. in the here and in the now.”

His decision was welcomed by both supporters and critics.

St. Paul resident Tim, who asked that his last name not be used out of fear of retaliation from neighbors, showed up at the Capitol carrying a sign that read “Minnesotans Welcome Ice Officers. Thank you President Trump.”

“Minnesota needs a change and Ellison would just be doing the same things Walz did,” he said. “We need Republican leadership.”

On the other side are Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who called Ellison “one of our most valuable players for our state,” and state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who described Ellison as “one of our state’s superstars.” State Sen. Zaynab Mohamed said Ellison’s background in criminal justice made him “exactly the type of leader Minnesota needs as its attorney general.”

Ellison said he believes he can do more for the state as attorney general working as part of a team.

“So me and the governor work well. I just got off the phone with him and he tells me Trump’s acting less aggressive than he was before,” Ellison said. “Well, we’ll see. But I’m like, in the meantime, we’re taking his ass to court.”