Chapter 1: What happened during the ICE shooting in Minneapolis?
The Trump administration and Minnesota officials are giving conflicting accounts of what happened on a street in Minneapolis yesterday when a woman in an SUV was shot at close range by an ICE agent. President Trump told The New York Times last night, quote, it's a terrible scene. No, I hate to see it. But he said, quote, you're supposed to listen to law enforcement.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, meanwhile, took aim at ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. When CNN told Fry that Republicans were calling his remarks divisive, he said this. I'm so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but here's the thing.
If we're talking about what's inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else.
Chapter 2: How did the fraud scandal lead to ICE's involvement in Minnesota?
ICE is in Minnesota in the first place because a fraud scandal drew the Trump administration's attention. What happened there is coming up on Today Explained. This is Today Explained. My name is Max Nestrak. I'm a reporter and editor for Minnesota Reformer. Over the past couple of weeks, a fraud scandal in Minnesota has consumed the American right.
Chapter 3: What do we know about the victim, Renee Good?
That scandal led to the government deploying a bunch of ICE agents to your area, to Minneapolis. Yesterday, one of those officers shot and killed a woman. What do we know about that shooting? So yesterday morning around 10 a.m., ICE officer fatally shot a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident named Renee Nicole Good. I spoke with witnesses and received a video of the incident.
And what we see is that the witness I talked to said, She was out for a walk and saw an ICE vehicle stuck in the snow. And then more ICE vehicles arrived, and bystanders were blowing their whistles in protest to get people's attention as part of these patrols and ICE watch that people throughout Minneapolis and the Twin Cities are doing to document the arrests.
Then we see Goode in her Honda Pilot parked perpendicular in the middle of the street.
Chapter 4: What conflicting narratives emerged from local and federal officials?
And an ICE agent, she waves one by, then another ICE agent pulls up, gets out of his car, and yells at her to get out of the car. And we see her back up and then pull forward, and that's when an officer who's near the front of the vehicle fire three shots, fatally killing her. Dude, you did a murder for what? !
Even though the video of this encounter is out there from multiple angles, people do not agree on what they're seeing. President Trump yesterday spoke first. What did he say happened? He echoed what we heard at a news conference yesterday. Kristi Noem accused Good of stalking and impeding ICE operations.
That is completely different than what many people see in the video and what we're hearing from Democratic leaders, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, accused ICE of terrorizing their neighborhoods.
I mean, ICE has been carrying out state-sanctioned violence in our communities.
And she called their actions reckless and callous, and that ICE needs to be held accountable. And your mayor, Jacob Fry, what has he had to say? Well, he gave a very impassioned news conference saying very bluntly for ICE to get out of Minneapolis.
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Chapter 5: How have local leaders responded to ICE's actions?
Having them there was only causing more chaos. Having them there was only making a difficult situation even more problematic and one that, yes, they created themselves. And that's something that has been repeated by the governor and members of Minnesota's congressional delegation is that they don't want ICE conducting this enhanced enforcement operation in Minnesota.
A few weeks ago, DHS began ramping up immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. And on Sunday, we received reports that about 2,000 more officers and agents were coming to the state in what DHS is calling its largest operation ever.
And so this has really created a standoff between Democratic leaders who say they are not getting any coordination or communication from the Trump administration and federal agencies who are carrying out these operations. All right. So as all of this is happening in the streets, Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz announced this week that he's not going to run for reelection.
I came to the conclusion that I can't give a political campaign my all.
Chapter 6: What is the Feeding Our Future scandal and its implications?
Every minute that I spend defending my own political interest would be a minute I can't spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who want to prey on our differences.
That announcement was tied to the scandal that I mentioned. Can you explain what happened here? Yeah, so this goes back a number of years with the prosecution of people for stealing funds intended to feed hungry children during the pandemic.
The story has reached the national news and the Oval Office just in recent weeks, but it really began in 2022 when US Attorney Andy Lugar, a Biden appointee, charged nearly 50 people with stealing $250 million from this pandemic-era program.
Before long, the scheme that began with a simple idea in March of 2020 grew to become the largest pandemic fraud in the United States.
And so now this has been known as the Feeding Our Future scandal after one of the nonprofits at the center of it. It now includes more than 90 indictments across multiple social service programs. So the fraud is no longer contained just to this meals program, but to other programs aimed at serving the most vulnerable Minnesotans.
And there is a very important detail here, which is that a majority of the people charged and convicted are of Somali descent. That's right. And now we're seeing the Trump administration use that to justify vicious attacks on the entire Somali American population in Minnesota of roughly 91,000. Most of whom are American citizens.
If local media have been on this story since 2022, why did it boil over in late 2025? So Christopher Ruffo, a conservative journalist, writes a piece in City Journal with this bombshell quote from a confidential source that the largest funder of al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer. And al-Shabaab is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that runs parts of Somalia.
And days later, President Trump calls Somali immigrants garbage and unleashes a torrent of other attacks on Somalis and draws national attention to Minnesota.
We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage.
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Chapter 7: How did Nick Shirley's investigation impact the situation?
that money likely, some of it likely ends up in the hands of al-Shabaab because they charge taxes or rather extort people. All right. So Chris Ruffo, who is an activist journalist, went out on a limb with the funding terrorism claim. However, in his article, he points out that there was massive fraud and that local officials, most of whom, as I understand it, were Democrats, did not root it out.
This happened on their watch. Yeah, that's right. You know, Democrats have always condemned the fraud. And Governor Tim Walz has said they take strong action against people accused and those people go to jail.
If that is happening, those people should go to prison. They should go to jail.
But I have to say the sheer scope of it is really an indictment of the Walz administration's ability to steward public resources. And I think it's underscored that all of these social service programs have really been run on the belief that everyone is honest.
And I think that goes back to a tradition here in Minnesota of a Scandinavian style, high tax, high services government that is trusting and doesn't have the checks in place to prevent abuse. How do we get from Chris Ruffo's expose, which included some truths as well as some unproven stuff, to Tim Walz resigning? So pressure has been mounting for months.
The House Republicans created a committee, a fraud oversight committee. It became clear that Republicans were going to run on this issue.
When I try to get a good night's rest, it's hard because I think about the billions of dollars that have been stolen from Minnesotans. This is absolutely unbelievable.
This was going to be their signature issue in trying to win back the governorship in 2026. The New York Times publishes a big piece in November that makes it even harder to ignore.
And then it gets the attention of a young independent YouTuber named Nick Shirley, who posts a 40-minute video on December 26th showing himself going around to Somali-run daycares and demanding to see children and not seeing any children.
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Chapter 8: What are the broader implications of the ICE shooting and fraud scandal?
Like the DHS says it's running the largest operation ever in the state right now. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstie Noem said yesterday that ICE operations did not stop after the killing, that they will continue as planned. So there's a sense on both sides that there's a fight to be had here. And so I think people are digging in for a continued standoff between the state and federal government.
Max Nestorak of the Minnesota Reformer. Thanks so much, Max. Thanks for having me. Coming up, Nick Shirley's daycare investigation went viral and drew the feds to Minnesota. Who is Shirley and what's he doing?
This is Today Explained.
I'm Noelle King with Jay Caspian Kang. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he recently wrote about Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old citizen journalist who knocked on daycare doors in the Twin Cities and claimed to have uncovered empty buildings. Jay, what is Nick Shirley's style? What do his videos look like?
On one hand, it kind of looks like the, you know, like Action News at 5 live investigation that you probably grew up watching on your local news where, like, a reporter will go into a business and they'll say... Will you stop payment to the contractors that are under investigation?
How are you, sir? We'd just like to ask you about why you don't want to fly commercial. You said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demons. Why do you think that?
And then the business owner will kind of respond. And the whole drama is watching the business owner respond, right? That type of like gotcha moment is the core, I think, of what he's doing.
But he's also melding a lot of things that are more native to the internet, which is sort of this man on street reporting that was popularized by streamers like Sneeko or whoever, where they go out and they say like, What would you rate this girl on a scale of 1 to 10?
Top four.
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