Donald Trump posts wild false claims and distractions after Minnesota ICE capturing

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Donald Trump posted a wild set of false and misleading claims about today’s Minnesota ICE shooting in a bid to distract attention from the incident.

Video of the incident showed at least five agents wrestle the man to the ground, before 10 shots rang out.

Before the shots, one officer is shown repeatedly hitting the man in the head with an object thought to be a pepper spray canister. The agents back away from the man after the first shot, with at least two officers seen with guns drawn.

The video ends with ICE agents walking away as the man lays motionless on the pavement.

Minneapolis Police confirmed a 37-year-old man died an hour after the shooting in South Minneapolis.

The Department for Homeland Security (DHS) claimed the man shot yesterday had been “armed” and that he had “violently” resisted attempts to disarm him.

But a second video clip uploaded later shows that in the moments before he was shot, he was holding a phone and filming ICE officers. No weapon is visible in his hands, and he is seen backing away from an officer who shoved him towards the pavement.

And a second angle of the shooting, which emerged later, shows the victim was neither brandishing a weapon nor violently resisting before being shot.

He appears to be stepping in to help another protester who had been shoved to the ground by an ICE officer. A second officer is seen repeatedly firing pepper spray into the victim’s face at point blank range before he’s wrestled to the floor.

A horrified bystander screams “what have you done…you’re killing us.”

Governor Walz tweeted: “I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening. The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, ICE agents reportedly tried to order local police to leave the scene. But Chief O’Hara refused and “instructed his officers to preserve the scene.”

A press conference by Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino was abruptly cancelled, after reporters asked questions about whether the victim was brandishing a weapon at the time he was shot and killed.

Bovino said the issue was under investigation, and details would emerge later.

Trump later posted an image of the gun DHS claim was the victim’s on Truth Social, claiming it was “loaded” and “ready to go…what is all that about?”

Minnesota is an “open carry” state, meaning citizens are allowed to carry firearms if properly licensed.

Police Chief O’Hara confirmed at the press conference that the victim held a relevant licence to carry a weapon. Video of the incident shows, from all angles, that he was neither holding a weapon before or after he was wrestled to the ground.

Trump’s post on Truth Social went on into a lengthy screed, claiming Police in Minnesota were not “allowed to protect ICE officers” and that “that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do!”

He then made a series of un-evidenced claims about Minnesota member of the House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar, and claiming the protests against ICE were a “cover up” of fraud taking place in the state.

On Friday, an FBI agent resigned from the agency, reportedly after being pressured to investigate the shooting of Ms Good in a way she felt the FBI would have ordinarily done.

For weeks, Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow the military to be deployed to tackle protesters, but so far has not done so.

This shooting comes just two weeks after the killing of Renee Good, an unarmed US citizen on the streets of Minneapolis.

Good’s death sparked waves of fury across the United States and beyond. Good had been peacefully protesting against ICE raids in the city, parking her car across a street where they were operating. When agents demanded she open the door of the car, she started to drive off around and away from an agent standing near her front left bumper.

The agent fired three shots, two of which were into the side window of her car as she had already passed him. According to an autopsy, she suffered two wounds in her arm and torso, with a fatal shot to the side of her head.

Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota’s largest airport yesterday, and several thousand gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown.

The protests are part of a broader movement against President Donald Trump’s increased immigration enforcement across the state, with labour unions, progressive organisations and clergy urging Minnesotans to stay away from work, school and even shops. The faith leaders gathered at the airport to protest deportation flights and urge airlines to call for an end to to what the Department of Homeland Security has called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.

The clergy were issued misdemeanour citations of trespassing and failure to comply with a peace officer and were then released, said Jeff Lea, a Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman. They were arrested outside the main terminal at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because they went beyond the reach of their permit for demonstrating and disrupted airline operations, he said.

Rev. Mariah Furness Tollgaard of Hamline Church in St. Paul said police ordered them to leave but she and others decided to stay and be arrested to show support for migrants, including members of her congregation who are afraid to leave their homes. She planned to go back to her church after her brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.

“We cannot abide living under this federal occupation of Minnesota,” Tollgaard said.

The Rev. Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to participate in the rally in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) despite a bright sun.

“What’s happening here is clearly immoral,” the Unitarian Universalist minister said. “It’s definitely chilly, but the kind of ice that’s dangerous to us is not the weather.”

Protesters have gathered daily in the Twin Cities since Jan. 7, when 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good was fatally shot. Federal law enforcement officers have repeatedly squared off with community members and activists who track their movements.

Sam Nelson said he skipped work so he could join the march. He said he’s a former student of the Minneapolis high school where federal agents detained someone after class earlier this month. That arrest led to altercations between federal officers and bystanders.

“It’s my community,” Nelson said. “Like everyone else, I don’t want ICE on our streets.”

Organisers said Friday morning that more than 700 businesses statewide have closed in solidarity with the movement, from a bookstore in tiny Grand Marais near the Canadian border to the landmark Guthrie Theatre in downtown Minneapolis.

“We’re achieving something historic,” said Kate Havelin of Indivisible Twin Cities, one of the more than 100 participating groups.

An FBI supervisory agent in Minnesota has resigned over the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation into Good’s killing, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The agent resigned because she felt pressured to not investigate the shooting in a way she felt the FBI would have ordinarily done, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss personnel moves.

The FBI declined to comment.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner, meanwhile, posted Good’s initial autopsy report online, which classified her death as a homicide and determined she died from “multiple gunshots wounds.”

A more detailed independent autopsy commissioned by Good’s family said one bullet pierced the left side her head and exited on the right side. This autopsy, released Wednesday through the Romanucci & Blandin law firm, said bullets also struck her in the arm and breast, although those injuries weren’t immediately life-threatening.

Meanwhile, a 2-year-old was reunited with her mother Friday, a day after she was detained with her father outside of their home in South Minneapolis, lawyer Irina Vaynerman said.

Vaynerman said they had quickly challenged the family’s detention in federal court. The petition states that the child, a citizen of Ecuador, was brought to the U.S. as a newborn. The child and her father, Elvis Tipan Echeverria, both have a pending asylum application and neither are subject to final orders of removal.

A U.S. district judge on Thursday had barred the government from transferring the toddler out of state, but she and her father were on a commercial flight to Texas about 20 minutes later, according to court filings. They were flown back Friday.

Agents arrested Tipan Echeverria during a “targeted enforcement operation,” according to a DHS statement. DHS said the child’s mother was in the area but refused to take the child.

Vaynerman rejected that explanation, saying Tipan Echeverria was “not allowed” to bring his 2-year-old to her mother inside their home.

DHS repeated its allegation Friday that the father of 5-year-old Liam Ramos abandoned him during his arrest by immigration officers in Columbia Heights on Tuesday, leading to the child being detained, too.

Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Liam was detained because his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, “fled from the scene.” The two are detained together at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, which is intended to hold families. McLaughlin said officers tried to get Liam’s mother to take him, but she refused to accept custody.

The family’s attorney Marc Prokosch said he thinks the mother refused to open the door to the ICE officers because she was afraid she would be detained. Columbia Heights district superintendent Zena Stenvik said Liam was “used as bait.”

Prokosch found nothing in state records to suggest Liam’s father has a criminal history.

On Friday, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino sought to shift the narrative away from Liam’s detention by attacking the news media for, in his view, insufficient coverage of children who have lost parents to violence by people in the country illegally. After briefly mentioning the 5-year-old during a news conference, he talked about a mother of five who was killed in August 2023.