The US city of Minneapolis was on high alert Thursday, a day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a woman.
About 1,000 demonstrators gathered in a parking lot near the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, which houses several federal agencies, including an immigration court.
The crowd held American flags and signs calling on ICE to leave Minnesota. They shouted “shame” and “murder” at the armed and masked federal officers, some of whom used tear gas and pepper balls on the protesters.
At one point, law enforcement officers threw smoke devices to disperse the crowd. As the protest reached the two-hour mark on Thursday, the crowd was directed farther away from the entrance.
Protests also took place in other US cities, including New York City, Seattle, Detroit, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Antonio, New Orleans, and Chicago.
Minnesota and Trump administration officials offered starkly different descriptions of what happened on Wednesday, when an unidentified ICE agent shot 37-year-old US citizen Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, in a residential neighborhood.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have defended the shooting, calling it an act of self-defense. They claimed that the woman had attempted to ram agents in an “act of domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, called that assertion “bulls—” and “garbage,” as he pointed to videos of the incident that appeared to contradict the government’s account.
According to the footage, two masked officers approached Good’s car, which was stopped at a perpendicular angle on a Minneapolis street.
One officer ordered Good out of the car and grabbed her door handle. The car briefly reversed and began driving forward, turning right in an apparent attempt to leave the scene.
A third officer positioned in front of the car on the left drew his gun and fired three times while jumping back. The last shots were aimed through the driver’s window after the car’s bumper appeared to have cleared his body.
The shooting occurred while the DHS was launching an operation in Minneapolis that would deploy 2,000 federal agents and officers as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
On Thursday, the head of Minnesota’s state investigations agency said that the US Attorney’s Office had barred the agency from participating in the investigation of the fatal shooting, which will be led “solely” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In a statement, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Superintendent Drew Evans said that the FBI had informed the BCA that “the BCA would no longer have access to case materials, scene evidence, or investigative interviews necessary to conduct an independent and thorough investigation.”
“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands,” the BCA said in a statement. “As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.”
At a press conference on Thursday, Noem said local and state investigators had “no jurisdiction” as the incident involved federal officers.
