Minnesota murder rates have risen under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz leadership as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate attempts to link spiraling crime trends of the 2020 era to the Trump administration. 

“I just want to set the record straight, because facts do matter and there’s not an alternative set of facts. Violent crime was up during the Trump presidency, and that’s even not counting his crimes,” Walz said at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday. 

Walz was named as Harris’ running mate last week, and has since hit the campaign trail to rally support for the newly-formed ticket with less than 100 days until voters head to the polls. 

His comment on crime sparked critics to call out Minnesota’s violent crime rate under Walz’s leadership, with Fox News contributor Byron York outlining how murders increased in Minnesota after Walz was sworn in as governor. 

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“It turns out that rise included an increase in Minnesota. Here are the numbers of murders in Minnesota, starting in 2018, the last year before Walz became governor,” York posted to X. 

Walz was sworn in as governor in 2019. Data from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that in 2018, the year before Walz took office, the state recorded 104 murders, a figure that increased by more than 12% in 2019, when the state recorded 117 murders. Murders in the state in 2020, when violent crimes spiked nationwide, skyrocketed to 185. In 2021, the state recorded 201 murders, 182 in 2022, and 172 last year. 

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Data from the state shows that in the four years before Walz took office, from 2015-2018, there was an average of about 113 murders recorded in the state each year, which has increased to 171 murders, according to the yearly average under Walz’s five years as governor. 

Protesters throw objects into a fire outside a Target store near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The police precinct went up in flames late on May 28 on the third day of demonstrations over the death of George Floyd. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

Violent crime rates did spike to historic highs during Trump’s final year in the White House in 2020, which has been attributed to the widespread riots and protests that swept the nation following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020. 

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FBI crime data reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that homicides in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, slightly dipped nationally from 15,320 in 2016 to 15,312 in 2017. The data shows violent crime again dipped in 2018, at 14,604 homicides, and again in 2019 to 14,678, before skyrocketing in 2020 amid the riots to 18,965 homicides. 

A large fire burns on East Lake Street in Minneapolis during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd. (David Joles/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

All in, the violent crime spike of 2020 saw murders increase by nearly 30% compared to the year prior, according to FBI data. It marked the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes.

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Experts who have previously spoken to Fox News Digital pointed to an array of variables that contributed to the increases of 2020 and the years following, including: anti-police rhetoric voiced by Black Lives Matter and defund the police proponents, the pandemic, a culture of lawlessness promoted by liberal district attorneys, and the “Ferguson effect” – when police pull back during high-profile and violent crime trends.

Demonstrators protest the death of a Black man in police custody in Rochester, New York, Sept. 6, 2020. (Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

​​Minneapolis was the epicenter of the 2020 riots, where Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of a White officer during a police encounter in the city. Floyd’s death was followed by social justice protests and riots across the nation, which came at a time when COVID-19 cases and government-mandated lockdown measures meant to control the pandemic upended society in unprecedented ways ahead of the 2020 election.

​​More than 1,500 buildings in Minneapolis alone were damaged or destroyed due to the riots, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

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Former President Trump holds his first public campaign rally with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, at the Van Andel Arena on July 20, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

The newly formed Harris-Walz ticket, which secured the Democratic nomination following President Biden dropping out of the race as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity, has focused its attention on Harris’ background as a California prosecutor when laying out its crime platform, most notably attacking Trump and his court battles. 

“As a tough prosecutor, Kamala Harris dealt with men like Trump all the time: Rapists, con men, frauds, criminals – she’s used to guys like Trump, used to putting them in their place,” a narrator for a recent pro-Harris ad says. 

Meanwhile, Trump has slammed left-wing led cities nationwide that didn’t do more to end the riots of 2020, and vowed to restore law and order across the nation to lower crime rates, including closing the border to illegal immigration.

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“The cartels will be crushed, crime will plummet, incomes will soar, the wars will end, and the American dream will come roaring back bigger, better and stronger than ever,” Trump said at a rally last week. 

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

The U.S. Secret Service was forced to apologize to a Massachusetts salon owner after using her building’s bathroom without permission ahead of a fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris last week.

The salon owner, Alicia Powers, says Secret Service agents put duct tape over her security cameras and broke into her building by picking the lock. They then allowed various people to use the salon’s bathroom over a two-hour period.

Powers told Business Insider that she was aware she had to close her salon but was not informed about the Secret Service’s other plans.

“They had a bunch of people in and out of here doing a couple of bomb sweeps again – totally understand what they have to do, due to the nature of the situation,” Powers told Business Insider. “And at that point, my team felt like it was a little bit chaotic, and we just made the decision to close for Saturday.”

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Footage from the salon’s front-door Ring security camera shows a Secret Service agent approaching the door with a roll of tape and observing the locked door and the camera. The agent then grabbed a nearby chair and stood on it to tape over the security camera.

“There were several people in and out for about an hour-and-a-half – just using my bathroom, the alarms going off, using my counter, with no permission,” Powers told BI.

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“And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left, and left my building completely unlocked, and did not take the tape off the camera,” she added.

Powers told the outlet that an EMS worker later told her the Secret Service agent in charge of security that day “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.” The Secret Service told BI that its agents “would not” have used the building without permission, but they acknowledged that an agent had taped over the camera.

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“Whoever was visiting, whether it was a celebrity or not, I probably would’ve opened the door and made them coffee and brought in donuts to make it a great afternoon for them,” Powers told BI. “But they didn’t even have the audacity to ask for permission. They just helped themselves.”

The building’s landlord, Brian Smith, says no one gave the Secret Service officers permission to use the building or even enter it.

“Me and my dad own the building, and I have a crazy eccentric guy that lives upstairs,” Smith told BI. “And he didn’t tell the Secret Service they could use it, and I didn’t tell them, and my father didn’t tell them, and they had no permission to go in there whatsoever.”

Powers says a representative for the Secret Service’s Boston field office called her to apologize after BI contacted the agency about the incident.

“He said to me everything that was done was done very wrong,” Powers told the outlet. “They were not supposed to tape my camera without permission. They were not supposed to enter the building without permission.”

The Democratic Party, and its presidential nominee Kamala Harris, should stop touting “border security” and offer a new approach to the immigration debate, one firmly rooted in American values of justice, opportunity and truth-telling.

The contrast with Donald Trump should be easy to sell: The former president is promising to enact the “largest mass deportation” in the nation’s history and issue an executive order denying birthright citizenship to any child born of residents who are in the country without papers. These actions would have a devastating impact on millions of people, many of whom have been in the United States for decades. It would wreak havoc on our economy, which is not just dependent on immigrants with and without papers, but bolstered by them. And it would tarnish beyond repair our moral standing as a human rights leader around the world.

While the Republican Party’s embrace of exclusion is frightening, equally troubling is the Democrats’ embrace of policies that falsely equate border security with more restrictive asylum regulations, including President Biden’s executive order in June that closes the border to asylum applicants when numbers reach certain limits. The hope seems to be that a somewhat less cruel approach than mass deportation will satisfy those sympathetic to immigrants but also pull some would-be MAGAistas away from the xenophobic abyss.

Harris seemed to play into this strategy with her now infamous 2021 remarks telling Guatemalans: “Do not come … If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” Although it may have been more a statement of fact than a threat, it revealed a serious lack of understanding about the forces leading migrants to leave their homes. It also hurt her — and the administration’s — credibility with immigrant communities; a “big blemish,” as a political scientist at UC Irvine told The Times. Her latest talking points — emphasizing drug cartel prosecutions and the border crackdown bill Republicans tanked earlier this year — lean in the same anti-immigrant-tinged direction.

So what should Harris say and do? To borrow her own emerging slogan, she should argue that “we are not going back” to divisive policies and “build the wall” attitudes. Tough talk against immigrants has a short political shelf life. We in California know this story first-hand.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the state’s passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, a measure that sought to block undocumented immigrants in California from accessing basic, lifeline services — especially healthcare and public education for their children. It required every teacher, school nurse, firefighter and police officer to report anyone they merely suspected to be undocumented. The initiative was stayed and eventually deemed unconstitutional by federal courts, but even without going into effect it ignited a counteroffensive on behalf of all Californians.

Three decades later, California’s political terrain has shifted so significantly that the state has extended earned income tax credits, college tuition programs and health insurance to undocumented residents. Most significantly, it is now nearly impossible for an anti-immigrant candidate to win statewide office.

The move away from exclusion didn’t happen on its own. At first, it activated a tug-of-war between California moderates and progressives about how to push back against anti-immigrant fear and fervor, with some arguing for the defensive middle ground, similar to Harris’ stance now.

What prevailed instead was a grassroots effort to establish a multiracial, cross-sector coalition of support for commonsense policies in a sanctuary state. In just one example, when anti-immigrant jurisdictions began using traffic stops to criminalize non-citizens — upending families, communities and swaths of the economy, not to mention traffic — the coalition got Assembly Bill 60 passed, after a battle spanning more than a decade, in 2013, giving undocumented immigrants access to a special driver’s license.

Along the way the process proved the benefits of inclusion to the state. As The Times reported last week, international migrants have “lifted” the U.S. and California economies, filling and creating jobs and “pumping millions of tax dollars” into government coffers.

Indeed, Golden State politicians are now likely to remind their audiences that the state’s economy — the fifth largest in the world — is home to more than 10 million immigrants with $383 billion in spending power, and that 40% of the state’s entrepreneurs are immigrants. Even undocumented immigrants are a proven boon: At a national level, they contribute $13 billion more annually to the Social Security system than they will even be able to withdraw.

California’s shift away from Proposition 187 thinking can and should be exported nationally. It’s a ready-made opportunity for any political figure, but especially Harris and the Democrats, to look to the future.

Surveys show that despite the attacks on their very existence, immigrants and their children are largely optimistic, a sharp contrast to the dark tones of a MAGA movement that thinks America can only be great if it goes back to some mythical, all-white past. Harris should wholeheartedly embrace a more hopeful vision of America, one rooted in facts that prove the contributions of immigrants, instead of being tempted to in any way countenance Trump’s hate-filled agenda.

We are both the children of once-undocumented parents. We know that immigrants enrich our society, that the demonizing of newcomers is morally and factually wrong. A bold and brave commitment to inclusion will strengthen the United States, reflect the values of a democratic and diverse nation, and move us closer to realizing the American dream that so many, especially immigrants, aspire to.

Manuel Pastor is a professor of sociology and director of the Equity Research Institute at USC. Miguel Santana is president and CEO of the California Community Foundation.