The blows in Minnesota began landing last year, when a fraud scandal in the state’s social services system ripped through the national news and disgusted taxpayers.

Then in December, President Donald Trump laced into Somali refugees, a group that has settled in Minnesota in large numbers, saying they were “garbage” that he did not want in his country.

Just after Christmas, another jolt: A conservative influencer posted a video that went viral online claiming that day care centres in Minneapolis were cheating taxpayers out of more than $100 million. And this week, as federal officials threatened to cut funding for Minnesota’s social service programmes and a new surge of federal immigration agents arrived in Minneapolis, the state’s beleaguered governor, Tim Walz, said that he would not run for re-election.

But it was the shooting death of a 37-year-old woman by a federal immigration officer along a Minneapolis street on Wednesday that exposed just how a wide a gulf there is between the Trump administration and Minnesota’s Democratic leaders.

At a news conference, Walz delivered an angry message to Trump: “You’ve done enough.” Hours later, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, labelled the woman who was killed a terrorist and vowed to continue aggressive enforcement actions in the city.

The clash left residents expressing anguish and fear over where events might lead next.

At a candlelight vigil on Wednesday evening, Andy Cuate, a 24-year-old from Cottage Grove, Minnesota, said that the eyes of the country on Minnesota brought him back to the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020. More than five years later, he said, it still feels raw.

“Now that we’re the centre of attention again, it’s just kind of like, ‘When are the people from Minnesota going to catch a break here?’” Cuate said.

The Minneapolis neighbourhood where the shooting occured on Wednesday is less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed by the police in 2020.

Details remained in dispute, with Trump saying on social media that the agents had acted in self-defence, while state and local officials described federal accounts of the shooting with terms like “propaganda” and "garbage".

Federal officials defended the use of force, saying the woman had “weaponised her vehicle” before being shot. At a news conference, Noem said the woman was “stalking” officers, and that the agent who killed her "used his training to save his life and those of his colleagues".

Mayor Jacob Frey called the accounts of federal officials "bullshit", describing the shooting instead as "an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed". Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota posted on social media, “Don’t believe this propaganda machine.”

Connor Janeksela, 30, who lives on the street where the shooting took place, described what he saw: “One of the ICE agents tried to rip her door open, and another one got in front of the vehicle and then shouted, ‘Stop!’ before firing three times within a second of saying, ‘Stop.’”

In his own news conference, the governor said the shooting was predictable. “We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalised operations are a threat to our public safety,” Walz said, adding that it cost a person her life on Wednesday.

New York Times News Service