MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis and students across the United States staged walkouts on Friday to demand the withdrawal of federal immigration agents from Minnesota following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.
Students and teachers abandoned classes from California to New York on a national day of protest, which came amid mixed messages from the Trump administration about whether it would de-escalate Operation Metro Surge.
Under a national immigration crackdown, President Donald Trump has sent 3,000 federal officers to the Minneapolis area who are patrolling the streets in tactical gear, a force five times the size of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Protesting the surge and the tactics used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, several thousand people gathered in downtown Minneapolis in sub-zero temperatures, including families with small kids, elderly couples and young community activists.
Katia Kagan, wearing a “No ICE” sweatshirt and holding a sign demanding the agency leave the city, said she was the daughter of Russian Jews who immigrated to America seeking safety and a better life.
“I’m out here because I’m going to fight for the American dream that my parents came here for,” Kagan said.
Kim, a 65-year-old meditation coach who asked that her last name not be used, said she was at the protest because of “basic compassion” for her fellow residents of Minneapolis.
“Democracy is what’s at stake in Minnesota. This is a full-on fascist attack of our federal government on citizens,” Kim said.
In a Minneapolis neighborhood near the sites where Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two U.S. citizens, were fatally shot this month by federal immigration agents, about 50 teachers and staff members from local schools turned out to march.
Rock star Bruce Springsteen lent his voice to the protest, taking the stage at a fundraiser for Good and Pretti in downtown Minneapolis. With the words “Arrest the President” plastered to his guitar, he played his new song “Streets of Minneapolis,” written in response to the deaths.
Protests stretched well beyond Minnesota.
“No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE,” ran a slogan on the organizers’ 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.
CONGRESS COMPROMISE UNCERTAIN
In Aurora, Colorado, public schools closed on Friday due to large anticipated teacher and student absences. The Denver suburb saw intense immigration raids last year after Trump claimed it was a “war zone” overrun by Venezuelan gangs.
In Tucson, Arizona, at least 20 schools canceled classes in anticipation of mass absences of students and employees.
Walkouts were planned at 90 high schools in Georgia. On the campus of DePaul University in Chicago, protesters chanted and held signs with slogans such as “sanctuary campus” and “fascists not welcome here.”
High school students bearing anti-ICE signs staged a walkout from class in Long Beach, California. In New York, a long parade of high-school-age protesters marched toward downtown Brooklyn chanting anti-ICE obscenities.
Meanwhile, the backlash against the administration’s immigration policy threatened to spark a partial U.S. government shutdown as Democrats in Congress opposed funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
Senate Democrats and Trump reached a deal late Thursday that would approve a wider spending package while they continue to negotiate limits on Trump’s immigration crackdown.
But the deal threatened to fall apart on Friday as some members of Congress objected to the terms. Funding expires at midnight.
In other fallout from the immigration crackdown, the Justice Department arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon on Friday and charged him with violating federal law during a protest inside a St. Paul, Minnesota, church earlier this month. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called the arrest an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”
PUBLIC OPINION SHIFTS
Weeks of viral videos showing the aggressive tactics of heavily armed and masked agents on the streets of Minneapolis have driven public approval of Trump’s immigration policy to the lowest level of his second term, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
As uproar over the ICE operation grew, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was dispatched to Minneapolis, saying his officers would return to more targeted operations, rather than the broad street sweeps that have led to clashes with protesters.
Trump said earlier this week he wanted to “de-escalate a bit” but on Friday the president reiterated his accusation that protesters in Minnesota were insurrectionists. He has previously threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow deployment of the military.
“These are paid insurrectionists, paid troublemakers,” Trump asserted without evidence.
The U.S. Justice Department has started a civil rights investigation into Pretti’s death, which could potentially lead to criminal charges against the officers involved, though there is a high legal bar to bringing such a case.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche downplayed its scope in a press conference on Friday, describing it as a “standard investigation by the FBI when there’s circumstances like what we saw last Saturday.”
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Rich McKay, Susan Heavey, Andrea Shalal and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Clarence Fernandez, Alistair Bell and Cynthia Osterman)
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