Walz pleads for calm after Trump’s Insurrection Act threat in Minnesota

Federal agents perform immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. A federal agent shot and injured an immigrant in Minneapolis on Wednesday night, federal officials said, an incident that touched off clashes between protesters and law enforcement and that came just one week after an immigration agent killed a woman in the city. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

By MITCH SMITH, NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS, SHAILA DEWAN and REIS THEBAULT

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota sought to calm quickly escalating tensions in his state Thursday, asking protesters to demonstrate peacefully and pleading with President Donald Trump to back off his threat to deploy the U.S. military to Minneapolis. The White House, meanwhile, accused Walz and other local leaders of encouraging violence.

On Wednesday evening, another shooting by a federal agent — the second there in a week — touched off more clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers in Minneapolis. In response, the president said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows him to use the military to quash an insurrection or invasion. Walz implored him to “turn the temperature down” and “stop this campaign of retribution.”

The Wednesday shooting and the threats from the White House rattled a city already seething after a federal agent killed a woman there last week. In the days since, the administration has doubled down on aggressive tactics that local officials say are meant to spread fear and provoke backlash.

A federal spokesperson said the man shot Wednesday was a Venezuelan national who was in the country illegally and was resisting arrest. He was hit in the leg and taken into custody.

The administration has labeled Renee Good, 37, a mother and poet who was shot in her car last week by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, as a domestic terrorist. Local officials have rejected the federal interpretation of events, and demonstrators have called for the arrest and prosecution of the agent, Jonathan Ross — an unlikely outcome under federal law.

Here’s what else to know:

— Wednesday shooting: Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who entered the United States in 2022, was arrested along with two other men. Federal officials have accused the men of assaulting an agent with a shovel and a broom before the agent shot Sosa-Celis.

— Civil inquiry: Lawyers representing the family of Good said Wednesday that they were pursuing what they described as a civil investigation of her killing last week.

— Prosecutor resignations: Prosecutors in Minnesota and Washington have resigned over the Trump administration’s push for them to investigate Good’s partner, Becca Good, and the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.

— ICE training: Trump administration officials’ rapid declarations that the agent who fatally shot Good was a hero, and her a villain, underscored how they have embraced using lethal force in self-defense, contrary to written standards that frame it as a last resort.

— No federal charges: Despite Trump’s assertion that attacks on immigration agents could warrant an invocation of the Insurrection Act, no federal charges — such as assaulting an officer — have been filed against anyone in Minnesota in connection with the crackdown there this week.