By Brad Brooks, Maria Tsvetkova and Daniel Trotta
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 call for a general strike was aimed at expanding on a similar demonstration last Friday in Minneapolis, when thousands marched in the bitter cold, urging an end to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in their city.
The new round of protests came amid continued mixed messages from the Trump administration on the future of Operation Metro Surge, which has seen some 3,000 federal agents deployed to the Minneapolis area.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was dispatched to the city earlier this week to take over in the wake of Saturday’s fatal shooting of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, whose death prompted a 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.
Hours later, however, Trump told reporters on Thursday evening 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.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon 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” on Friday.
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.
Lemon’s arrest is the latest example of Trump’s Justice Department focusing on investigating protesters, activists and Democratic leaders in Minnesota, rather than the agents who shot Pretti and another U.S. citizen, Renee Good, on January 7.
At least half a dozen federal prosecutors resigned from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office in protest of a directive to investigate Good’s widow, while others in the department’s civil rights division also indicated they would be leaving.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey are among the Democratic leaders whose offices were subpoenaed by the Justice Department, which is investigating whether their opposition to Trump’s enforcement surge amounts to a crime. All three have denounced the probe as politically motivated.
PROTESTS FRIDAY
With tensions still high in Minneapolis, organizers of Friday’s protests said they want 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.”
“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.
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 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.
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.
Trump officials attacked both Good and Pretti in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, accusing both of “domestic terrorism.”
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.”
On the eve of the protests, police in Washington, D.C., arrested dozens of faith leaders 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. Lawmakers in Washington were striving on Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown amid a debate over new restrictions on immigration agents.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Rich McKay, Maria Tsvetkova, Susan Heavey and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Dan Trotta and Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Clarence Fernandez and Alistair Bell)
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