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Thousands in Minneapolis brave bitter cold to protest ICE crackdown
Dozens of eateries, attraction sites and other businesses shuttered as part of a day of coordinated action to defy the weeks-long federal immigration operation underway in Minnesota, AFP reported.
Images of an apparently terrified pre-schooler, Liam Conejo Ramos, being held by immigration officers who were seeking to arrest the boy's father have rekindled public outrage at the federal crackdown, during which an agent shot and killed a US citizen.
The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Ramos was a preschool student, said the child and his Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias – both asylum seekers – were taken from their driveway as they arrived home on Tuesday.
Ramos was then used as "bait" by officers to draw out those inside his home, superintendent Zena Stenvik added.
Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed to the Democratic-led city, as President Donald Trump presses his campaign to deport undocumented immigrants across the country.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called on US authorities to end the "harmful treatment of migrants and refugees."
Minneapolis has been rocked by increasingly tense protests since federal agents shot and killed US citizen Renee Good on January 7.
The officer who fired the shots that killed Good, Jonathan Ross, has neither been suspended nor charged.