The fatal shooting of a 37-year-old Minnesota mother by a US immigration agent has put the city of Minneapolis and much of the United States on edge, with the potential of becoming another flashpoint in a polarised country.
State and federal officials offered starkly different accounts of the shooting, in which an unidentified officer killed US citizen Renee Nicole Good in her car on Wednesday while immigration officers were carrying out what federal officials have called the ‘largest DHS operation ever’ by the Department of Homeland Security.
With 2,000 federal officers deployed across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, thousands of people gathered in Minneapolis to protest the shooting, while demonstrations were called in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, Orlando and Columbus, Ohio.
The Minnesota operation, which includes US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, is part of Republican President Donald Trump’s nationwide crackdown on migrants and a politically charged investigation into fraud allegations against some Minnesota non-profit groups in the Somali community.
At least 56 people have pleaded guilty since federal prosecutors under the previous Democratic administration of Joe Biden, started investigating childcare and other social service programmes in the Somali community.
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