‌Community organizers across America coordinated more than one thousand protest events this weekend following deadly encounters between federal immigration agents and civilians in Minneapolis and Portland.
The nationwide mobilization comes after ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday during what authorities described as an immigration enforcement operation. Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three and published poet, was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross while sitting in her vehicle near her Minneapolis home. The following day in Portland, Oregon, federal agents shot two Venezuelan nationals, Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras and Luis David Nico Moncada, outside a local hospital during what officials called a traffic stop. The organization behind last year’s No Kings protest movement, has been tracking demonstration locations through an online platform that shows events planned in every state from Hawaii to Maine.
Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible, said communities are coming together not just to mourn lives lost but to confront what she called a pattern of harm that has terrorized neighbourhoods. Protesters gathered outside Republican representative Juan Ciscomani’s office in Tucson, Arizona, while crowds assembled at representative Brian Mast’s office in Stuart, Florida, where approximately two hundred people participated.
Mast, who chairs the House foreign affairs committee, has publicly defended the actions of the ICE agent who killed Good, stating the officer acted reasonably under the circumstances.