Student organizers called for strikes and protests across the United States on Friday to demand that federal immigration agents withdraw from Minnesota, where the deaths of two American citizens provoked public outrage.
The national day of protests, which saw students and teachers leaving schools from Arizona to Georgia, occurred amid conflicting messages from the Trump administration about the future of Operation Metro Surge, which sent about 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 Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, provoked public outrage and fueled the demand for more protests.
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In a neighborhood of Minneapolis near where Good and Pretti were killed, about 50 local school teachers and staff marched on Friday, holding signs against ICE, using bullhorns and asking federal immigration agents 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 by federal agents could turn on them next’.
The protests stretched far beyond Minnesota.
‘No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE,’ read a slogan on the organizers’ site, nationalshutdown.org, which listed 250 locations for Friday’s protests in 46 states and in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.
In Georgia, students from 90 high schools, from Atlanta to Savannah, planned to skip classes on Friday.
‘We are saying that there will be no normality as long as ICE can terrorize our communities,’ said Claudia Andrade, immigrant rights organizer for the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Atlanta.
In Aurora, Colorado, public schools closed on Friday due to the large expected absence of teachers and students. The Denver suburb was the target of intense immigration raids last year, after President Donald Trump accused the area of being a ‘war zone’ invaded by Venezuelan gangs.
And in Tucson, Arizona, at least 20 schools canceled classes in anticipation of mass absences of students and staff.
Meanwhile, the backlash against immigration policy threatened to trigger a partial shutdown of the U.S. government. Democrats in Congress announced last week that they would refuse to pass a spending package that included funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE.
An agreement announced by Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump on Thursday night would allow Congress to approve the spending package that covers a broad range of government operations, excluding the DHS, while they negotiate new limits on immigration enforcement.
But the chances of lawmakers reaching a quick agreement diminished on Friday, with opposition from some members of Congress. The funding expires at midnight.
In another development of Trump’s immigration policy, the Department of Justice arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon this Friday and charged him with violating federal law during a protest inside a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month.
Critical of Trump, Lemon said he was covering the protest as a journalist, not participating in it. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called the arrest an ‘unprecedented attack on the First Amendment’.
The Department of Justice had already charged three other people in connection with the protest, but a judge rejected the agency’s earlier attempts to charge Lemon and several others, citing lack of evidence.
Public Opinion
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, drove public support for Trump’s immigration policy to the lowest level of his second term, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
As the uproar over ICE operations grew, Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, was sent to Minneapolis after Pretti’s death sparked protests nationwide.
In his first public remarks on Thursday, Homan said that agents would return to more targeted operations, rather than the broad sweeps on the streets that led to chaotic clashes with demonstrators, and suggested the government would seek to cut the number of agents in the city.
The organizers of Friday’s protests said they hoped to intensify pressure on Trump to live up to his earlier week promises when he stated his intent to ‘ease the tension a bit’.
But Trump raised questions on Thursday when he told reporters that his administration was ‘in no way’ backing down from its mobilization.
In a late-night post on social media, he called Pretti an ‘agitator and, perhaps, an insurrectionist,’ referring to a newly discovered video that shows Pretti clashing with other agents 11 days before his death, in which Pretti kicked the rear light of a vehicle.
