A number of Republican mayors are condemning the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota, as they call on the president to pull back from Minneapolis and worry their cities might be next.
“It’s roiling the country,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt told POLITICO. “We’re all sort of feeling the angst of our residents and the fear that our city will be next and that chaos is going to inevitably creep across the entire country.”
Fresno, California, Mayor Jerry Dyer said in an interview that “too much damage has been done” with the crackdown and “the trust in communities has been lost.”
And Burnsville, Minnesota, Mayor Elizabeth Kautz, warned that the agency’s current tactics meant “our cities are no longer safe.”
The remarks from the trio of moderate-leaning GOP mayors who have broken with Trump in the past came at the annual gathering of the nonpartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors, held blocks from the White House. Holt chairs the conference.
The Republican leaders’ calls for Trump to deescalate after the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans by federal agents show the GOP’s deepening fissures over the administration’s aggressive immigration agenda, even as the mayors and Republicans broadly offered support for the president’s overall goal. And their alarm comes as ICE ramps up operations in other states, including Arizona and Maine.
The escalating immigration enforcement crackdown hung over the annual gathering, dominating conversations among leaders who are scrambling to prepare their cities for ICE sweeps and allay anxious and outraged residents.
Dyer on Wednesday said federal agents need to receive more training in deescalation tactics — a practice that the Fresno mayor, who served in law enforcement for 40 years, including 18 as the city’s police chief, said is integral for local police departments. He also said federal agencies should only work in communities where they have the cooperation of local leaders.
“I don’t believe that agencies should be deployed into cities against the will of local government and without the cooperation of local law enforcement,” Dyer said. “That’s a recipe for disaster, and I believe that’s somewhat of what we’re seeing today.”
And he urged other Republicans to speak out against federal immigration agents’ recent tactics.
“The Republican Party in general cannot rubber-stamp everything a party does or this administration does,” Dyer said. “Too many people today are turning a blind eye when they should be speaking out in opposition.”
It wasn’t just big-city GOP mayors who were concerned with the administration’s response: Kautz’s town of 64,000 people is in Minneapolis’ south suburbs.
Kautz, who said she now carries her passport in public, called for ICE to use judicial warrants, arguing that while violent criminals need to be off the street, it needs to be done “through proper channels, the rule of law, due process [and rooted] rooting in the Constitution.” In Minnesota, “that is not our experience.”
A new POLITICO poll found that more than 1 in 3 Trump voters said that while they support the goals of his immigration agenda, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.
Holt, who runs one of the most conservative large cities in the U.S. but backed Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024, warned that Trump’s interior enforcement was a failure.
“The president can feel, generally, that his policies at the border have been largely supported by a majority of Americans,” Holt said. “But what he’s doing inside the border seems to be not working.”
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