Right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of trying to stoke violence with his heated and profane reaction to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shooting 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in her vehicle Wednesday.
Claiming that Frey was looking to light his “own city on fire” with his rhetoric, Kelly joined other MAGA media luminaries in parroting the Trump administration’s talking points about the killing, which has seen Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem label Good a “domestic terrorist” who attempted to run over ICE officers.
“Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
With videos of the incident painting a different picture from what DHS and Donald Trump were portraying, Frey pushed back against the “garbage narrative” that the Trump administration and conservative media were peddling about the shooting in a fiery speech on Wednesday.
“So, they are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” the Democratic mayor exclaimed at a press conference. “Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bulls**t. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.”
Frey also took aim at the administration for ramping up ICE’s presence in the city. Earlier this month, in response to the ongoing social services fraud investigation in the state that the White House has used to demonize Minnesota’s Somali community, DHS deployed roughly 2,000 additional ICE agents into the state in a sweeping immigration and “anti-fraud” crackdown.
According to the mayor, the latest surge of immigration enforcement officers in his city was “sowing chaos on our streets” and “ripping familes apart,” prompting Frey to call for the administration to pull its agents out of Minneapolis.
“To ICE, get the f*** out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here,” a passionate Frey proclaimed. “Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite.”
Frey’s call for ICE to leave the city while blaming them for creating “chaos” with their presence and “reckless” actions prompted prominent MAGA media figures to tear into the liberal politician – with Kelly front and center. In the wake of the killing, protests have grown in Minnesota, with demonstrators clashing with law enforcement and federal agents.
“Hey @MayorFrey - try to control yourself. This cop almost got run over by this woman, who accelerated into him,” the former Fox News star tweeted, sharing a clip of the shooting.
“It’s right here in this angle of the incident. How about you not try to light your own city on fire for once?” Kelly added, seemingly referencing the protests in response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
With the president going even further and claiming the ICE officer who killed Good had been “viciously ran over” and that “it is hard to believe he is alive,” despite videos of the incident showing he was not hit by the vehicle, pro-Trump pundits framed the shooting as an act of self-defense while raging at Frey and other state and local officials who have condemned the killing of Good.
“What we don't need to wait for, though, today is judging the behavior of the mayor of Minneapolis who stepped up to the podium and, without having all the facts, chose to inflame and blame,” Fox News host Will Cain fumed on Wednesday afternoon.
“That is not leadership, that is sedition,” he continued. “It's encouraging people to interfere with the lawful actions of the state. And when a mayor uses his office to delegitimize federal law enforcement in the immediate aftermath of a deadly incident, it's not protecting his city, he's putting people in danger.”
Fox News star Jesse Watters, meanwhile, called on ICE to quarantine whole blocks of Minneapolis and to “go in heavy door-to-door, apartment to apartment” because “these operations have become too dangerous.”
On Fox News’ hard-right (and much smaller) competitor Newsmax, the MAGA channel’s anchors attempted to outdo each other when it came to both justifying the shooting and raging at the state’s Democratic leaders.
“Jacob Frey; the governor, Tim Walz; the attorney general, Keith Ellison — they are enemies of the state,” Rob Schmitt groused on Wednesday night, while host Carl Higbie insisted he won’t “lose any sleep for this woman because she seemed crazy.”
While the conservative media ecosystem has predictably circled the wagons and rallied to the defense of the administration and ICE, mainstream and legacy media outlets have expressed far more skepticism over the government’s claims – especially since this is at least the fifth person killed in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“The videos do not appear to support the claim made by President Donald Trump, that Good ‘viciously ran over the ICE Officer,’” the Minnesota Star Tribune noted, while CNN anchor Jake Tapper pointed out that “to anyone with eyes, it is clear that Secretary Noem’s description is abjectly false.”
