By Renee Hickman, Nathan Layne and Steve Gorman
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands marched through Minneapolis on Saturday decrying the shooting death of a woman by a U.S. immigration agent, as civil liberties groups stepped up nationwide protests against President Donald Trump's deportation drive.
The massive turnout in Minnesota's most-populous city despite sub-freezing temperatures and fierce winds reflected an outpouring of public anger over Wednesday's fatal shooting of Renee Good,
37, in her car by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Smaller anti-ICE rallies occurred across the country on Saturday, including in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles and San Diego. Dozens more demonstrations were planned for Sunday.
Protesters demanded justice for Good, whom they call a victim of tyranny and unjustified lethal force, and an end to large-scale, militarized deportation efforts that Trump, a Republican, has directed mainly at cities governed by Democrats.
'HEARTBROKEN AND DEVASTATED'
Good, a mother of three, was a volunteer in a community network of activists who track, monitor and record ICE operations in Minneapolis.
Critics of ICE have disputed Trump administration assertions that the agent who shot her was acting in self-defense, or that Good posed any physical threat to the officers confronting her.
Shortly before Good's death, 2,000 federal agents were dispatched to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in what the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has called its largest operation ever.
The deployment and subsequent shooting of Good deepened the rift between the Trump administration and Minnesota's Democratic leaders, including Governor Tim Walz, who accused Trump of seeking to sow fear and chaos as a pretext for exerting even greater force.
Federal-state tensions escalated further on Thursday when a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot and wounded a man and woman in their car after an attempted vehicle stop. Using language similar to its description of the Minneapolis incident, DHS said the driver had tried to "weaponize" his vehicle and run over agents.
While condemning the ICE raids, Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, also a Democrat, exhorted protesters to refrain from lawlessness.
"We will not counter Donald Trump's chaos with our own brand of chaos," Frey told a press conference on Saturday. "He wants us to take the bait."
After a night of protests that led to 30 arrests and reports of vandalism, Saturday's much larger rally and march through the city was boisterous but orderly.
Led by a team of Indigenous Mexican dancers, demonstrators on Saturday marched through Minneapolis and along the residential street past the spot where Good was shot dead behind the wheel of her SUV.
The crowd, which the Minneapolis Police Department estimated in the tens of thousands, chanted Good’s name and slogans such as “Abolish ICE” and “No justice, no peace — get ICE off our streets.”
"I'm insanely angry, completely heartbroken and devastated, and then just like longing and hoping that things get better," Ellison Montgomery, a 30-year-old protester, told Reuters.
Democrats and civil liberties advocates have voiced distrust of the FBI-led federal investigation of the Minneapolis shooting after Trump administration officials said state and local investigators would be excluded from the probe.
Minnesota and Hennepin County law enforcement authorities announced on Friday they would launch their own inquiry.
VIDEO SHOWS RENEE GOOD CALM BEFORE SHOOTING
Much of the debate surrounding the shooting has centered on footage of the encounter from various perspectives in cellphone video clips that have gone viral on the internet.
The videos show one ICE agent, identified through official comment and public records as Jonathan Ross, firing three shots at Good from the front left corner of her SUV as it was turning to the right and pulling forward, immediately after another officer had ordered her out of the vehicle and tried to open the front driver's-side door.
A Reuters analysis of the videos shows that Ross fired the first shot through the windshield as Good's car moved past him and the remaining shots into the driver’s side of the vehicle as it continued moving away.
None of the videos shows the car making physical contact with Ross, who never loses his footing and is seen walking away afterward.
A clip that Ross took with his cellphone emerged on Friday, showing Good appearing calm as he approaches her, telling him through her open driver's-side window, "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you."
Another bystander video that surfaced on Saturday, recorded from opposite the shooting scene, pans back and forth along the street, recording several minutes of activity and noise before the confrontation.
It shows her vehicle stopped at a perpendicular angle to the street and partially in traffic lanes, about a quarter block from where ICE agents had gathered, as car horns blare and whistles shriek. Good remains in her car the entire time. The video ends as agents are seen approaching her car but before the shooting.
Minnesota became a major flashpoint in the administration's efforts to deport millions of immigrants months before the Good shooting, with Trump blaming its Democratic leaders for a welfare fraud scandal involving some members of the large Somali-American community there.
Three Minnesota congressional Democrats showed up at a regional ICE headquarters near Minneapolis on Saturday morning, where protesters have clashed with federal agents this week. They were denied access, an action the legislators called illegal.
"We made it clear to ICE and DHS that they were violating federal law," U.S. Representative Angie Craig told reporters as she stood outside the Whipple Federal Building in St. Paul with Representatives Kelly Morrison and Ilhan Omar.
Federal law prohibits DHS from blocking members of Congress from entering ICE detention sites, but DHS has increasingly restricted such oversight visits, prompting confrontations with Democratic lawmakers.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the congressional Democrats were denied entry to ensure "the safety of detainees and staff, and in compliance with the agency's mandate." She said DHS policies require members of Congress to notify ICE at least seven days ahead of facility visits.
(Reporting by Renee Hickman and Maria Cardona in Minneapolis, Carlos Barria in Portland, Ryan Jones in Toronto and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Joseph Ax and Maria Tsvetkova in New York, Ernest Scheyder in Houston and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by William Mallard, Sergio Non, Diane Craft, Rod Nickel)
