MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Shaken by the death of a woman shot by an agent during a migration raid, the Twin Cities of Minnesota were preparing on Sunday for what many expect will be a new normal in the coming weeks, as the Department of Homeland Security carries out what it called its largest migration operation to date.
Protesters shouted at federal agents and tried to disrupt their operations by blaring car horns, banging drums, and blowing whistles in a Minneapolis neighborhood filled with single-family homes.
There were some shoves and several people were sprayed with pepper spray just before the agents knocked down the door of a house on Sunday. They later escorted away a man in handcuffs.
“We’re seeing a lot of immigration enforcement crackdowns across Minneapolis and across the state, federal agents simply invading our neighborhoods,” said Jason Chavez, a Minneapolis city council member. “They’re here for sure.”
Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants who represents an area with a growing immigrant population, said he is closely monitoring and gathering information from chat groups about where residents are seeing agents operate.
Whistlers stood at street corners in the neighborhood where Renee Good, 37, was shot dead on Wednesday, watching for any sign of federal agents.
More than 20,000 people have taken part in a range of trainings to become “observers” of crackdown activities in Minnesota since the 2024 elections, said Luis Argueta, spokesman for Unidos MN, a local human rights group.
“It’s a role people choose to take on voluntarily, because they choose to look out for their neighbors,” Argueta said.
The protests have largely remained peaceful, but the Twin Cities remain on edge. Minneapolis public schools will begin offering remote learning on Monday for the next month in response to concerns that children may feel unsafe leaving.
Many schools closed last week after Good’s shooting and the unrest that followed.
As the operations continue, two of the state’s top Democrats said on Sunday that the investigation into Renee Good’s death should not be supervised solely by the federal government.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and U.S. Senator Tina Smith said in separate Sunday interviews that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.
“How can we trust the federal government to conduct an objective, impartial, and unfettered investigation when, at the outset of that investigation, they’ve already announced exactly what they saw and what they think happened?” Smith said on ABC’s This Week.
The Trump administration has defended the agent who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and his fellow officers and that Good had “turned her vehicle into a weapon.”
Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, defended the agent on Fox News Channel’s The Sunday Briefing.
“That agent had milliseconds, if not little time, to make a decision to save his life and that of his fellow agents,” he said.
He added that the operations in Minnesota would not be necessary “if local jurisdictions would work with us to hand over these criminally illegal aliens once they’re deemed a threat to public safety by locals.”
The killing of Good by an ICE agent and the shooting of two people by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, sparked dozens of protests nationwide over the weekend.
Thousands marched in Minneapolis on Saturday, where Homeland Security described its deployment of immigration officers in the Twin Cities as its largest migration operation to date.
