Nationwide protests begin over ICE in Minneapolis amid mixed messages from Trump

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Student organizers called for walkouts and protests across the United States on Friday to demand that federal immigration agents withdraw from Minnesota, where the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens have sparked public outrage.

The planned national day of protest, which saw students and teachers walking out of schools from Arizona to Georgia, came amid mixed messages from the Trump administration on the future of Operation Metro Surge, which has sent some 3,000 federal agents to the Minneapolis area in an immigration crackdown.

The fatal shootings by federal agents of citizens Alex Pretti on Saturday and Renee Good on January 7 in Minneapolis during the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation have stoked public outrage and fueled calls for more protests.

In a Minneapolis neighborhood near the sites where Good and Pretti died, about 50 teachers and staff members from local schools marched on Friday, holding anti-ICE signs, yelling into bullhorns and calling for federal immigration officers to leave their city.

One teacher, who asked not to be identified, said they were marching “to send a message to the rest of the country to organize and resist, because the aggressive invasion of federal officers may be coming for them next.”

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.

In Georgia, students at 90 high schools from Atlanta to Savannah planned 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.

In Aurora, Colorado, public schools closed on Friday due to large anticipated teacher and student absences. The Denver suburb was the target of intense immigration raids last year after President Donald Trump claimed it was a “war zone” overrun by Venezuelan gangs.

And in Tucson, Arizona, at least 20 schools canceled classes in anticipation of mass absences of students and employees.

CONGRESS COMPROMISE UNCERTAIN

Meanwhile, the backlash against the administration’s immigration policy threatened to spark a partial U.S. government shutdown. Democrats in Congress last week said they refused to pass a spending bill that included funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

A deal announced by Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump late Thursday would allow Congress to approve the spending package covering a wide swath of government operations excluding DHS while they negotiate new limits on Trump’s immigration crackdown.

But odds that lawmakers would be unable to reach an immediate deal rose on Friday as some members of Congress objected to the agreement. 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.

Lemon, a frequent critic of Trump, has said he was covering the protest as a journalist, not participating. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called the arrest an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”

The Justice Department previously charged three other people in connection with the protest, but a magistrate judge rejected the agency’s earlier attempts to charge Lemon and several others, citing a lack of evidence.

PUBLIC OPINION SHIFTS

Weeks of viral videos showing the aggressive tactics of heavily armed and masked agents on the streets of Minneapolis, as well as the shootings of Good and Pretti, 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 earlier after Pretti’s killing prompted national outcry.

In his first public remarks on Thursday, Homan said agents would return to more targeted operations, rather than the broad street sweeps that have led to chaotic clashes with protesters, and he suggested the administration would seek to reduce the number of agents in the city.

Organizers of Friday’s protests said they wanted to step up pressure on Trump to follow through on his words earlier in the week, when he said he wanted to “de-escalate a bit.”

But Trump raised doubts on Thursday when he told reporters that his administration was “not at all” pulling back its deployment.

In a late-night social media post, he called Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” in reference to newly unearthed video showing Pretti had a confrontation with other agents 11 days before he was killed, in which Pretti shattered a vehicle’s tail light with a kick.