Tens of thousands protest in Minneapolis over fatal ICE shooting

Tens of thousands of people marched through Minneapolis on Saturday to decry the fatal shooting of a woman by a US immigration agent, part of more than 1,000 rallies planned nationwide over the weekend against the federal government's deportation drive.

The massive turnout in Minneapolis despite a whipping, cold wind underscores how the fatal shooting of 37‑year‑old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Wednesday has struck a chord, fueling protests in major cities and some towns. Minnesota's Democratic leaders and the administration of President Donald Trump, a Republican, have offered starkly different accounts of the incident.

Led by a team of Indigenous Mexican dancers, demonstrators in Minneapolis, which has a metropolitan population of 3.8 million, marched towards the residential street where Good was shot in her car.

The boisterous crowd, which the Minneapolis Police Department estimated in the tens of thousands, chanted Good’s name and slogans such as “Abolish ICE” and “No justice, no peace, get ICE off our streets.”

"I'm insanely angry, completely heartbroken and devastated, and then just like longing and hoping that things get better," Ellison Montgomery, a 30-year-old protester, told Reuters.

Minnesota officials have called the shooting unjustified, pointing to bystander video they say showed Good's vehicle turning away from the agent as he fired. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has maintained that the agent acted in self-defence because Good, a volunteer in a community network that monitors and records ICE operations in Minneapolis, drove forward in the direction of the agent who then shot her, after another agent had approached the driver's side and told her to get out of the car.

The shooting on Wednesday came soon after some 2,000 federal officers were dispatched to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in what DHS has called its largest operation ever, deepening a rift between the administration and Democratic leaders in the state.

Federal-state tensions escalated further on Thursday when a US 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 "weaponise" his vehicle and run over agents.

The two DHS-related shootings prompted a coalition of progressive and civil rights groups, including Indivisible and the American Civil Liberties Union, to plan more than 1,000 events under the banner "ICE Out For Good" on Saturday and Sunday.