After fatal ICE shooting, Minneapolis mayor urges activists to avoid Trump’s ‘bait’

Summary

• Mayor Frey urges peaceful protests after Renee Good's fatal shooting by an ICE agent, warning against unlawful actions that Trump could exploit.
• Minneapolis police arrested 29 protesters and one officer was injured after demonstrations at a hotel housing ICE agents.
• Nationwide "ICE Out For Good" protests are planned, demanding an end to ICE deployments, following similar shootings in Portland.

MINNEAPOLIS - Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Jan 10 urged demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of a motorist by a US immigration agent to stay peaceful, saying that any unlawful actions would play into US President Donald Trump’s hands.

Mr Frey, a Democrat, cautioned them as civil liberties and migrant-rights groups prepared nationwide rallies to protest the killing of 37-year-old Renee Good
by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan 7.

Minnesota and US officials have offered starkly different accounts of the shooting.

Twenty-nine people were arrested overnight in Minneapolis as police responded to protests, including a gathering of demonstrators outside a hotel believed to be lodging a visiting contingent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, city police chief Brian O’Hara said.

One police officer was injured in the response, Mr O’Hara told a news conference on Jan 10.

Mr Frey, who has been critical of immigration agents and the shooting, said the demonstrations to date have remained mostly peaceful and that anyone causing damage to property or engaging in other unlawful activity would be arrested by the police.

“We will not counter Donald Trump’s chaos with our own brand of chaos. He wants us to take the bait,” Mr Frey said at the news conference.

The fatal shooting of Ms Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, came soon after some 2,000 federal officers were dispatched to Minneapolis in what ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, called the “largest DHS operation ever.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, condemned the deployment as a “reckless” example of “governance by reality TV.”

Mr O’Hara said more than 200 law enforcement officers were dispatched to the Hilton Canopy Hotel on the night of Jan 9 to respond to what started as a “noise protest” but then escalated, with more 1,000 demonstrators gathered on site.

“We initiated a plan and took our time to de-escalate the situation, issued multiple warnings, declaring an unlawful assembly, and ultimately then began to move in and disperse the crowd,” Mr O’Hara said on Jan 10.

Federal-state tensions escalated further on Jan 8 when a US 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 “weaponise” his vehicle and run over agents.

The two DHS-related shootings this week have drawn thousands of protesters to the streets of Minneapolis, Portland and other US cities, with many more demonstrations under the banner “ICE Out For Good” planned for Jan 10 and 11.

Protest organisers said more than 1,000 weekend events have been planned across the country demanding an end to large-scale deployments of ICE agents, mostly to cities led by Democratic politicians.

The rallies were being organised by a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn Civic Action, Voto Latino, and Indivisible, some of which were at the forefront of “No Kings” protests against Mr Trump in 2025.