Protest organizers said more than 1,000 weekend events were planned across the country demanding an end to large-scale deployments of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents ordered by President Donald Trump, mostly to cities led by Democratic politicians.
Minneapolis became a major flashpoint of the Republican president’s militarised deportation roundups on Wednesday, when an ICE officer shot and killed a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Good, behind the wheel of her car on a residential street.
The violence came soon after some 2,000 federal officers were dispatched to Minneapolis in what ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, called the “largest DHS operation ever.” Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, condemned the deployment as a “reckless” example of “governance by reality TV.”
On Friday night, throngs of demonstrators staged a “noise protest” outside a Minneapolis hotel believed to be lodging a visiting contingent of ICE agents.
Video posted by activists on social media showed protesters, some wearing brightly coloured inflatable costumes, creating a din by beating on drums, banging pots and pans, yelling through bullhorns and blowing on brass instruments and whistles.
Others directed high-power flashlight beams at the hotel’s windows.
The crowd thinned after yellow-vested state police in riot gear marched into the area and declared an unlawful assembly, CNN reported.
Police were responding to “information that demonstrators were no longer peaceful and reports of damage to property,” the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said on X. “Dispersal orders were given prior to arrests.”
At the time she was killed, Good was participating in one of numerous “neighbourhood patrols” that track, monitor and record ICE activities, according to family and local activists.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials said Good was “impeding” and “stalking” ICE agents all day, and that the officer opened fire in self-defence when she tried to ram her car into him in an “act of domestic terrorism.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, pointed to bystander video he said directly contradicted the federal government’s “garbage narrative.” Civil liberties advocates said the video showed federal agents lacked any justification for using deadly force.
Amid the sharply differing accounts of the shooting, Minnesota and Hennepin County law enforcement authorities said on Friday they were opening their own criminal inquiry into the incident separate from a federal investigation led by the FBI.
Some Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, asserted state prosecutors lack jurisdiction to charge a federal officer with a crime, though legal experts say federal immunity in such cases is not automatic.
The crisis atmosphere led Walz – a prominent Trump antagonist who branded Trump and his Republican allies as “weird” during his own run for vice president last year – to put the state’s National Guard on alert.
Federal-state tensions escalated further on Thursday when a US Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot and wounded a man and woman in their car after an attempted vehicle stop. As in the Minneapolis incident, DHS said the driver had tried to “weaponise” his vehicle and run over agents. (Reuters)
