Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey described his hope for a change in President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration policy when walking the red carpet at the gala celebrating TIME’s 2026 list of the world’s most influential people on April 23 in New York City.

Frey, a 2026 TIME100 honoree, said that he hoped Minneapolis’s pushback to Trump’s immigration crackdown in the area would lead to a real shift in the behavior of the federal agents tasked with enacting the President’s goal of carrying out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

Asked why the Trump Administration hasn’t launched an immigration crackdown of the same scale in another city after winding down operations in Minneapolis, Frey answered, “Because it didn’t go well for them.”

In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Renee Good by federal officers in January, Frey made headlines when he called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to “Get the f— out” of the city. Good’s death—along with the killing of Alex Pretti less than three weeks later—pushed tens of thousands of Minnesotans to fill the city's streets in a mass protest against the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

The “political narrative” that arose out of the Minneapolis crackdown was “horrible,” Frey said. “People, regardless of their background or their ideology, don't like to see pregnant women getting dragged through the snow. They don't like to see six year olds getting torn apart from their family.” 

“I think what was so beautiful about this is it was just this kind of common decency and common humanity where people were standing up for each other, and the whole world saw it,” he said. “And because of that, it is my hope that [immigration agents] are not just going to leave Minneapolis and then go to some other city, but they're going to stop dead in their tracks, reevaluate the way they're conducting themselves, and then change.”