UNITED States federal agents have shot and killed another person in Minneapolis amid an immigration crackdown, authorities said, spurring protests and fresh calls for President Donald Trump to immediately pull heavily armed officers out of the city.
At a news conference on Saturday, Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said a 37-year-old man, whose identity has not yet been released, died in hospital after suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
The man was a Minneapolis resident and a US citizen, O’Hara told reporters.
“Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands,” he said.
The deadly shooting took place amid a weeks-long deployment of US immigration enforcement and other federal agents to Minneapolis, where they have been carrying out raids as part of Trump’s anti-immigration push.
“This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said during a separate news conference in Saint Paul, the state capital and Minneapolis’ twin city.
“It’s a campaign of organised brutality against the people of our state. And today that campaign claimed another life,” said Walz, pledging that Minnesota would handle the investigation into the killing.
A federal agent cordons off the area as people gather at the scene of the shooting in Minneapolis [Tim Evans/Reuters]
Video footage of the shooting, which has been circulating on social media, showed a group of US law enforcement officers wrestling a man to the ground before several gunshots were heard.
The Department of Homeland Security said a US Border Patrol agent shot and killed a person who had a handgun and resisted attempts to be disarmed.
Bellingcat, a group of researchers and journalists who conduct open-source investigations, said footage of the shooting “appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired”.
“Two different agents are visibly firing their guns, with at least 10 shots being heard in total. Most of them are fired after a brief delay, when the man is already lying motionless on the ground,” the group said.
Another video of the incident, taken from a different angle, also showed the man holding a cell phone in his hand before he was pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot multiple times.
O’Hara said police believed the person was “a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry”.
The shooting comes just weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a Minneapolis woman named Renee Nicole Good in her car earlier this month.
Federal agents also shot a Venezuelan man in a separate incident last week in the city.
Trump and senior members of his administration have justified the deployment of ICE and other federal officers to Minneapolis as part of the US president’s pledge to carry out the largest deportation operation in the country’s history.
But residents and elected officials have condemned the Trump administration for its anti-immigration policies and said the presence of heavily armed officers on their streets is not making people safer.
Speaking during Saturday’s news conference alongside the city’s police chief, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey denounced the Trump administration for its continued crackdown.
“I just saw a video of more than six masked agents pummelling one of our constituents and shooting him to death,” Frey said. “How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?
“How many more lives need to be lost before this administration realises that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values? How many times must local and national leaders … plead with you, Donald Trump, to end this operation and recognise that this is not creating safety in our city?”