Opinion | Minnesota needs an off-ramp before it’s too late

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I live in Minnesota, and lately the tension is impossible to ignore. You can see it in workplaces, hear it in everyday conversations and feel it in the air. What once felt like a political dispute now feels closer — more fragile — and more likely to go wrong.

I don’t pretend to have the answer, and I don’t know if anything can be done to change the current trajectory.

What I do have is a growing sense of unease that Minnesota is drifting toward a situation where confrontation becomes the default outcome. Not because anyone wants it, but because no one is actively building an off-ramp.

This moment is no longer about who is right or wrong on immigration policy. It’s about risk and incentives. It’s about the responsibility of leadership when multiple forces are pulling toward conflict rather than resolution.

Minnesota is now a focal point in a national fight. Federal immigration enforcement has intensified, protests have become routine and court rulings are stacking up. Rhetoric is hardening on all sides, and with every passing day the probability of a single bad decision — by a protester, a federal agent or a local authority — rises.

President Donald Trump’s incentives in this moment are not complicated. Immigration enforcement energizes his political base. Demonstrating strength against liberal jurisdictions fits neatly into a broader narrative about law, order and federal authority. Court losses may constrain tactics, but they can just as easily harden positions and inflame resentment. Litigation slows things down, but it does not calm the streets.

Minnesota, meanwhile, has become a symbol — less because of its scale than because of what it represents. A liberal city, with a sanctuary framework. Public disorder layered on top of long-running debates over crime, governance and social trust. In that sense, this moment is not fundamentally about numbers. It’s about narrative and leverage.

That is precisely why thinking exclusively in legal terms is insufficient.

All leaders understand that complex crises rarely yield to a single tool. Protecting Minnesota requires a two-track approach.

The state must continue to use the courts to define the constitutional limits of federal power. Litigation is essential to protecting the long-term rights of Minnesotans, but litigation alone cannot keep the peace.

In negotiation, it is often most prudent to build your counterpart a golden bridge to retreat across. When conflict becomes purely adversarial, you leave the other side no way to save face or exit. You force them to dig in, and escalation follows.

If Minnesota offers only total defiance, it invites intensification.

Leadership in this moment requires building that golden bridge — offering a limited, clearly defined “win” on public safety in order to prevent a far greater loss of civil peace.

A serious proposal could do exactly that: narrowly focusing cooperation on violent felonies, serious weapons offenses, repeat predatory crimes, and large-scale, evidence-based fraud, while seeking explicit limits on tactics that heighten confrontation — avoiding broad dragnets, door-to-door actions without specific warrants, and operations near sensitive locations like schools and hospitals.

It could include a short cooling-off period, joint incident review and a reduced federal footprint tied to compliance. None of this guarantees success, but it creates a visible off-ramp.

But this is not an attempt to relitigate his record.

This is about what leadership demands when conditions deteriorate and the margin for error shrinks.

To be clear, proposing a strategic off-ramp is not a sudden endorsement of federal enforcement tactics, nor is it a retreat from the principled positions many of us have held for years regarding the dignity of our immigrant neighbors. We can, and must, continue to contest the morality of federal policy while simultaneously acting to prevent our own streets from becoming a theater of avoidable conflict.

The leader with the greatest responsibility in moments like this is not the one with the loudest megaphone or the strongest ideological position. It is the leader closest to the people who will bear the cost if confrontation turns violent. That responsibility falls to the governor of Minnesota. Not because he caused this conflict, but because he governs the streets, schools and neighborhoods where it could spiral out of control.

Leadership right now is not about defiance for its own sake. It is about risk mitigation. It is about buying time, and it is about preventing avoidable harm.

In business, leaders are often forced to make decisions they dislike to prevent outcomes they fear more. They do not get the luxury of ideological purity when lives, livelihoods or institutions are at stake. Politics should not be exempt from that discipline.

The longer this standoff continues, the more dangerous it becomes.

Fatigue sets in.

Emotions calcify.

Miscalculations multiply.

The obligation of our leaders is not to defend past decisions or preserve personal standing. It is to reduce the probability of catastrophe.

That may mean swallowing pride. It may mean angering your own side. It may mean offering your opponent a face-saving way to step back.

Those are not signs of weakness; they are signs of responsibility.

Walz chose to run for this office. That choice came with authority, but it also came with an occupational hazard: being accountable when circumstances turn ugly and options narrow.

This is one of those moments.

At some point, being right matters less than preventing something irreversible.

That is where Minnesota is now.