MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) — Police arrested about 100 clergy members who were protesting Friday at Minnesota’s largest airport against immigration raids, even as thousands gathered in downtown Minneapolis to demonstrate against the federal government’s crackdown, despite the frigid weather.
The protests are part of a broader movement against immigration raids ordered by President Donald Trump across the state, in which unions, progressive organizations, and clergy have urged Minnesotans to skip work, to stay home from school, and even to avoid shopping. Religious leaders gathered at the airport to protest deportation flights and to urge airlines to demand an end to what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has called the agency’s largest immigration-enforcement operation.
The clergy were cited on misdemeanor charges of trespassing and failing to comply with a peace officer, and were later released, said Jeff Lea, spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission. They were arrested outside the main terminal of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because they exceeded the terms of their permit to protest and disrupted airline operations, he added.
Reverend Mariah Furness Tollgaard, of Hamline Church in St. Paul, said police told them to disperse, but she and others chose to stay and be arrested in order to show solidarity with migrants, including members of her congregation who fear leaving their homes. She planned to return to her church after a brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.
“We cannot tolerate living under this federal occupation of Minnesota,” Tollgaard said.
Reverend Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to take part in the demonstration in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 23 degrees Celsius (minus 9 Fahrenheit) under a bright sun.
“What’s happening here is clearly immoral,” said the Unitarian Universalist minister. “It’s definitely cold, but the kind of ice that’s dangerous for us isn’t the weather.”
The protesters have been gathering daily in the Twin Cities since January 7, when a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Good, 37, a mother of three. Federal agents have repeatedly confronted community members and activists who monitor their movements.
Sam Nelson said he took a day off work to join the march. He noted that he is a former student of Minneapolis’ high school, where federal agents detained someone after class a few days ago. That arrest led to clashes between federal agents and bystanders.
“It’s my community,” Nelson said. “Like everyone else, I don’t want ICE in our streets.”
Organizers said Friday morning that more than 700 businesses across the state had shut down in solidarity with the movement, from a bookstore in the small town of Grand Marais near the Canadian border to the Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis.
“We’re achieving something historic,” said Kate Havelin of Indivisible Twin Cities, one of more than 100 groups taking part.
A supervising FBI agent in Minnesota resigned over how the Justice Department has handled the investigation into Good’s killing, two people familiar with the matter said Friday. The agent quit because she felt pressured not to investigate the shooting the way the FBI would have normally, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.
The FBI declined to comment.
The Hennepin County medical examiner online posted an initial autopsy report on Good, classifying her death as a homicide and determining she died from “multiple gunshot wounds.”
An independent, more detailed autopsy conducted for Good’s family found that a bullet entered the left side of her head and exited the right side. The autopsy, released Wednesday through the Romanucci & Blandin law firm, also states she was shot in the arm and chest, though those wounds were not fatal at the time.
A 2-year-old girl met with her mother on Friday, a day after she and her father were detained outside their home in south Minneapolis, attorney Irina Vaynerman told The Associated Press.
Vaynerman said they quickly challenged the family’s detention in a federal court. The filing states that the girl, an Ecuadorian citizen, was brought to the United States as an infant. The girl and her father, Elvis Tipan Echeverría, have a pending asylum petition, and neither is subject to final deportation orders.
A federal judge had prohibited the government from transferring the girl out of the state on Thursday, but she and her father were on a commercial flight to Texas about 20 minutes later, according to court documents. They were returned Friday.
Agents arrested Tipan Echeverría during a targeted operation, according to a DHS statement. The agency said the girl’s mother was in the area but refused to take the child.
Vaynerman disputed that explanation, saying that Tipan Echeverría was not permitted to take his 2-year-old daughter to her mother inside their home.
Meanwhile, DHS repeated on Friday its claim that Liam Ramos’s father, 5-year-old Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, “abandoned him” when he was arrested Tuesday by immigration agents in Columbia Heights, which led to the boy’s detention.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Liam was detained because his father “fled the scene.” The two are at the Dilley Family Detention Center in Texas, intended to house families. According to McLaughlin, agents had tried to have Liam taken by his mother, but she refused to take custody.
The family’s attorney, Marc Prokosch, said that, in his view, the mother refused to open the door to ICE agents because she feared being detained. Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights district, said Liam was “used as bait.”
Prokosch did not find anything in state records indicating that Liam’s father has a criminal history.
On Friday, Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino sought to shift the narrative around Liam’s detention by criticizing what he called insufficient coverage of minors who have lost parents to violence by people who are in the country illegally. After briefly mentioning the 5-year-old boy at a press conference, he spoke of a mother of five who was killed in August 2023.
