The Atlantic (Gift)

01/28/2026

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it’s federal forces that are risking a breach. “It’s a physical assault,” Walz told me. “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.”

He let his question about Fort Sumter hang without an answer.

Walz bowed out of his reelection race earlier this month. The 2024 vice-presidential candidate said that he didn’t want politics to interfere with his work amid an intensifying federal probe into welfare fraud in his state. Two days later, his phone rang, and it was Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Renee Good had been shot and killed by an ICE officer, one of thousands of federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of what the Trump administration declared the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. “Get yourself prepared,” was the mayor’s message, Walz recalled to me. He had understood instantly that the kind of unrest not seen since the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, could be returning to Minneapolis.

Barely two weeks later, federal agents shot and killed a second Minneapolis resident. Walz still doesn’t know the names of the agents who unloaded their firearms into Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse. State authorities were blocked from investigating both killings. Instead, the governor was placed under federal investigation along with other Democratic officials. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is demanding access to Minnesota’s voter rolls, couching the extraordinary election-year request as a quid pro quo for restoring “law and order.”

This looks to Walz like an all-out federal assault on his state. When I asked him explicitly if he thought the United States was barreling toward an armed internal struggle, he hedged. “Well, I don’t want to alarm people,” he said. He switched into the third person, saying that some of his constituents think “Governor Walz should call in the National Guard and arrest ICE.”

The governor isn’t inclined to do this. He mobilized his state’s National Guard, but to deliver doughnuts and hot chocolate to observers and protesters who have sought to document and contest ICE’s presence. He saluted their commitment to nonviolence, saying that the restraint exercised by the vast majority of his constituents may be what averts an even deeper crisis. After invoking Fort Sumter, he brought up John Brown, the abolitionist who stormed a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, fueling violent conflict over slavery that erupted in the Civil War.

“Guns pointed, American at American,” he said, “is certainly not where we want to go.”

Minnesota may offer a glimpse of what’s in store for other states. “That assault will come to your state soon,” Walz warned. This is why he has been encouraged to see some red-state governors speak out. Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of Oklahoma and the chair of the National Governors Association, joined his Democratic vice chair, Wes Moore of Maryland, in calling for a “reset” in immigration enforcement. Governor Phil Scott, a Republican from Vermont, called on Trump to pause the operations, saying simply, “Enough.”

Walz wondered aloud if “there’s a Republican governor who could look you in the eye and say, ‘Would you have been okay with Joe Biden doing this?’” Walz said. “And I think that’s where you get a governor like Kevin Stitt saying, ‘No way in hell.’”