By Brad Brooks, Maria Tsvetkova and Daniel Trotta
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Student organizers have called for walkouts and protests across the United States on Friday to demand that federal immigration agents withdraw from Minnesota, after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens generated public outrage.
The call for a general strike follows last Friday’s protests when thousands marched through Minneapolis in the bitter cold, urging an end to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in their city.
Protesters said they want to step up pressure even after Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota.
“We want this to be more of a sustained movement, so going forward: more striking, more protesting,” Brianna Jackson, part of the Black Student Union at the University of Minnesota, said in a video promoting the strike.
On Thursday, U.S. border czar Tom Homan, newly installed as leader of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis, said federal officers would focus on targeted operations, shifting away from the broad street sweeps.
Newly issued internal guidance from a high-ranking official of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency directs federal officers to refrain from unnecessary communication and engagement with “agitators” to avoid “inflaming the situation.”
“No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE,” ran a slogan on the website nationalshutdown.org that listed 250 sites for Friday’s protests across 46 states and in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.
Voters ousted the Democrats from the White House and returned Trump to power in 2024 partly out of frustration with a surge in illegal immigration to the United States.
But after weeks of videos showing aggressive tactics by heavily armed and masked officers in Minneapolis, American approval of Trump’s immigration policy has fallen to its lowest in his second term, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
A majority of respondents said his crackdown had gone too far.
A day after last Friday’s protests, immigration officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse at a hospital for military veterans.
Many people were already upset at the shooting death of Renee Good, 37, a mother of three, in her car on January 7.
Good and Pretti had been monitoring immigration officers, as part of a movement that enabled witnesses to capture both shootings on cellphone video.
At a memorial at the site where Pretti was killed, a woman laid a bouquet of flowers and quietly wept on Thursday, saying she felt moved to protest in his memory.
“I’m absolutely not spending any money tomorrow,” said Stacy, who asked that her last name not be used. “It’s my little way of being a voice for those who don’t have them, like Alex.”
In the southern state of Georgia, students at 90 high schools from Atlanta to Savannah plan to walk out of class on Friday.
“We are saying no business as usual while ICE is allowed to terrorize our communities,” said Claudia Andrade, an immigrant rights organizer with Atlanta’s Party for Socialism and Liberation.
On the eve of the protests, police in Washington, D.C., arrested 54 demonstrators of different religious affiliations who sat on the floor at the Hart Senate Office Building, holding banners that read “Do Justice, Love kindness, Abolish ICE.”
They were demanding that the U.S. Senate withhold funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California, Maria Tsvetkova in New York, Kanishka Singh in Washington and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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