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 U.S. citizens have sparked public outrage.
The national day of protests, which saw students and teachers walking out of schools from Arizona to Georgia, came amid mixed 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 sparked public outrage and fueled demand for more protests.
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In a Minneapolis neighborhood near where Good and Pretti died, about 50 teachers and staff from local schools marched on Friday, holding anti-ICE signs, using megaphones and calling for 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 may turn on them next.”
The protests extended far beyond Minnesota.
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‘No work. No school. No purchases. Stop funding ICE,’ said a slogan on the organizers’ website, nationalshutdown.org, which listed 250 sites for Friday’s protests in 46 states and in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.
In Georgia, students at 90 high schools from Atlanta to Savannah planned to leave class this Friday.
“We are saying there will be no normalcy as long as ICE can terrorize our communities,” said Claudia Andrade, an immigrant rights organizer with the Atlanta Party for Socialism and Liberation.
In Aurora, Colorado, public schools closed their doors this Friday due to the expected large 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’ overrun by Venezuelan gangs.
And in Tucson, Arizona, at least 20 schools canceled classes in anticipation of mass absences of students and staff.
Meanwhile, backlash against immigration policy threatened to trigger a partial shutdown of the US government. Democrats in Congress announced last week that they were refusing to approve a spending package that included funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE.
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A deal announced by Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump on Thursday night would allow Congress to approve the spending package that covers a wide range of government operations, excluding DHS, while negotiating new limits on the immigration crackdown.
But the chances of lawmakers reaching an immediate agreement diminished this Friday, with opposition from some members of Congress. Financing expires at midnight.
In another development of Trump’s immigration policy, the Justice Department arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon on Friday and charged him with violating federal law during a protest inside a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month.
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A frequent Trump critic, Lemon said he was covering the protest as a journalist, not participating in it. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, called the arrest an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”
The Justice Department had previously charged three other people in connection with the protest, but a judge rejected the agency’s previous attempts to charge Lemon and several others, citing a lack of evidence.
Public opinion
Weeks of viral videos showing the aggressive tactics of heavily armed and masked officers on the streets of Minneapolis, as well as the shootings of Good and Pretti, have driven public approval of Trump’s immigration policy to the lowest level of his second term, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
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As the uproar over ICE operations grew, Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, was sent to Minneapolis after Pretti’s death sparked nationwide protests.
In his first public statements on Thursday, Homan said officers would return to more targeted operations, rather than the sweeping street sweeps that have led to chaotic clashes with protesters, and suggested the government would seek to reduce the number of officers in the city.
Organizers of Friday’s protests said they wanted to increase pressure on Trump to make good on his words from earlier in the week, when he declared his intention to ‘decrease the tension a little’.
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But Trump raised doubts on Thursday when he told reporters his administration was “in no way” backing down on its mobilization.
In a late-night social media post, he called Pretti an ‘agitator and perhaps insurrectionist’, in reference to a newly discovered video showing Pretti having a confrontation with other agents 11 days before he was killed, in which Pretti broke the taillight of a vehicle with a kick.
