By Renee Hickman, Steve Gorman and Nathan Layne
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Saturday urged demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of a motorist by a U.S. immigration agent to stay peaceful, saying that any unlawful actions would play into U.S. President Donald Trump’s hands.
Frey, a Democrat, cautioned them as civil liberties and migrant-rights groups prepared nationwide rallies to protest the killing of 37-year-old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Wednesday. Minnesota and U.S. officials have offered starkly different accounts of the shooting.
Twenty-nine people were arrested overnight in Minneapolis as police responded to protests, including a gathering of demonstrators outside a hotel believed to be lodging a visiting contingent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, city Police Chief Brian O’Hara said.
One police officer was injured in the response, O’Hara told a news conference on Saturday.
Frey, who has been critical of immigration agents and the shooting, said the demonstrations to date have remained mostly peaceful and that anyone causing damage to property or engaging in other unlawful activity would be arrested by the police.
“We will not counter Donald Trump’s chaos with our own brand of chaos. He wants us to take the bait,” Frey said at the news conference.
The fatal shooting of Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, 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.”
O’Hara said more than 200 law enforcement officers were dispatched to the Hilton Canopy Hotel on Friday night to respond to what started as a “noise protest” but then escalated, with more 1,000 demonstrators gathered on site.
“We initiated a plan and took our time to de-escalate the situation, issued multiple warnings, declaring an unlawful assembly, and ultimately then began to move in and disperse the crowd,” O’Hara said Saturday.
Federal-state tensions escalated further on Thursday when a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot and wounded a man and woman in their car after an attempted vehicle stop. Using language similar to its description of the Minneapolis incident, DHS said the driver had tried to “weaponize” his vehicle and run over agents.
The two DHS-related shootings this week have drawn thousands of protesters to the streets of Minneapolis, Portland and other U.S. cities, with many more demonstrations under the banner “ICE Out For Good” planned for Saturday and Sunday.
Protest organizers said more than 1,000 weekend events have been planned across the country demanding an end to large-scale deployments of ICE agents, mostly to cities led by Democratic politicians.
The rallies were being organized by a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn Civic Action, Voto Latino, and Indivisible, some of which were at the forefront of “No Kings” protests against Trump last year.
(Reporting by Renee Hickman in Minneapolis, Ryan Jones in Toronto and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Joseph Ax and Maria Tsvetkova in New York, Ernest Scheyder in Houston and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by William Mallard, Sergio Non and Diane Craft)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.