Tim Walz Wants the Worst

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 15, 2026

 

On Wednesday night, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz lived down to the expectations he set for himself in the days following the deadly encounter between ICE agent Jonathan Ross and protester Renee Good last week. In a rare prime-time address, the governor once again likened the federal government’s immigration enforcement initiatives in his state to an occupation of a hostile, alien power. This time, however, he encouraged Minnesotans to do something about it.

 

“What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief,” Walz averred. “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities.”

 

The deployment of about 800 U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as about 2,000 ICE agents, to Minnesota represented the “retribution and reckoning” that Donald Trump himself promised, Walz said. The president’s equally noxious rhetoric certainly helped Walz advance the claim that the federal government represents “a direct threat” to his state. But the governor was not content to just complain about it. He implored Minnesotans to resist.

 

“Let’s be very, very clear,” Walz continued, “this long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”

 

He called on state residents to “protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully,” and to “peacefully film ICE agents,” as though repeating the word “peacefully” negates the danger that protesters put themselves in when they insert themselves between armed law enforcement officers and their targets of arrest. Indeed, he set out to convince the passionate and impressionable that they had been deputized in the campaign of resistance he envisions by the state.

 

“If you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record,” Walz encouraged. “Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

 

Make no mistake about it: What Walz is advising his citizens to do is likely to result in more violence and, potentially, more death. There is no question that the American public is not in love with the images of federal immigration enforcement officers streaming into American communities, barking orders at residents, and menacing lawbreakers and law-abiding citizens alike. A certain admirable suspicion of authority is embedded in Americans’ DNA, and Walz may be attempting to harness the public’s emergent hostility toward Trump’s mass deportation program for his own ends.

 

Perhaps Walz thinks a few more confrontations like the one that unfolded in Minneapolis will heighten the contradictions and mobilize hostility toward the Trump administration. Maybe he’s just too dense to understand the gravity of the forces with which he’s toying. Regardless, the governor is not content to allow cooler heads to prevail. He is actively fanning the flames.

 

Donald Trump and his allies will surely respond in kind. Every prominent actor in American politics appears to be addicted to the uncompromising, fatalistic bombast that passes for discourse on the country’s social media platforms. The most uncharitable interpretation of this moment might lead us to conclude that no one — neither Trump, nor Walz, nor their respective core constituents — has any incentive to tamp down the passions bubbling up from America’s streets. Maybe every player in this drama believes he will benefit from a little violence. If that is not the conclusion to which they’ve arrived, even subconsciously, no one is acting like it.

 

Walz’s rhetoric is, however, particularly contemptible. He chose to take a bellows to this moment of smoldering civic tension. He asserted that the federal government is executing a military-style “occupation” of his state — hyperbole that is certain to trigger, at least, the violent anti-Israel demonstrators with whom Walz spent much of 2024 ingratiating himself. He cannot be wholly ignorant of the allusions he is making, even if they are absent-minded.

 

Maybe Walz doesn’t know what he’s doing. But maybe he does. And if he does, his speech represents a reckless display of contempt for civic comity. There will be consequences.