About 1,000 demonstrators gathered on Thursday morning at a federal building where an immigration court is housed, chanting “shame” and “murder” at armed and masked federal officers

International News via Reuters:

Minneapolis was on edge on Thursday, a day after a U.S. immigration agent fatally shot a 37-year-old mother of three in an incident that drew immediate condemnation from city and state officials who blamed President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement surge for sowing chaos in the city’s streets.

About 1,000 demonstrators gathered on Thursday morning at a federal building where an immigration court is housed, chanting “shame” and “murder” at armed and masked federal officers, some of whom used tear gas and pepper balls on protesters.

Minnesota and Trump administration officials offered starkly different accounts of the shooting, in which an unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good in a residential neighborhood.

The agent was among 2,000 federal officers that the Trump administration had announced it was deploying to the Minneapolis area in what the Department of Homeland Security described as the “largest DHS operation ever.”

DHS officials, including Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, defended the shooting as self-defense and accused the woman of trying to ram agents in an act of “domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, called that assertion “bullshit” and “garbage” based on bystander videos taken of the incident that appeared to contradict the government’s account.

Videos showed two masked officers approaching Good’s car, which was stopped at a perpendicular angle on a Minneapolis street. As one officer ordered Good out of the car and grabbed at her door handle, the car briefly reversed and then began driving forward, turning to the right in an apparent attempt to leave the scene.

A third officer, positioned in front of her car on the left, drew his gun and fired three times while jumping back, with the last shots aimed through the driver’s window after the car’s bumper appeared to have cleared his body.

The video did not appear to show contact and the officer stayed on his feet, though Noem said he was taken to a hospital and released. Trump, a Republican, claimed on social media the woman “ran over the ICE Officer.”

The competing narratives highlighted the political polarization in the U.S., where Trump’s supporters enthusiastically endorse his version of events and opponents contend his assertions are often provably false.

Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who urged the federal government to withdraw its officers, said he had put the state’s National Guard on alert. Minneapolis public schools were closed on Thursday and Friday as a precautionary measure.

With classes canceled, 17-year-old Addie Flewelling attended the Minneapolis protest on Thursday to condemn the shooting and show her opposition to the immigration crackdown, including a raid at her high school earlier this week.

“Students were chased off of their place of education,” she said. “This is not ok. I’m scared to go to school.”

SLAIN WOMAN HAD THREE CHILDREN

The Minneapolis City Council, which identified the dead woman as Good, said she was “out caring for her neighbors this morning and her life was taken today at the hands of the federal government.”

Good had a 15-year-old daughter and two sons aged 12 and 6, according to the Washington Post.

She graduated from Virginia’s Old Dominion University in 2020 with a degree in English, the school’s president, Brian Hemphill, confirmed in a statement.

“This is yet another clear example that fear and violence have sadly become commonplace in our nation,” Hemphill said. “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”

While at ODU, she won an undergraduate poetry prize, according to a 2020 Facebook post by the school’s English department, which described her as hailing from Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“When she is not writing, reading, or talking about writing, she has movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons,” the post said.

The Facebook post also said she co-hosted a podcast with her husband, comedian Tim Macklin. He died in 2023 at 36, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, called for an investigation into Good’s death, saying it was “deeply disturbing” and “tragic.”

Good’s mother told the Star Tribune that her daughter was “extremely compassionate,” and not the type of person to confront ICE agents.

“She’s taken care of people all her life,” her mother, Donna Ganger, told the newspaper. “She was loving, forgiving and affectionate.”

FBI, STATE OFFICIALS INVESTIGATE SHOOTING

The Minnesota operation, part of Trump’s nationwide crackdown on migrants, was also mounted in response to a politically charged investigation into fraud allegations against some Minnesota nonprofit 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 programs in the Somali community.

The FBI and Minnesota state officials are both investigating the shooting.

The ICE officer could be immune to state prosecution if he was determined to be acting within the scope of his official federal duties, and any legal case would likely come down to whether he reasonably feared for his life, said Caren Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State College of Law.

She said cases involving vehicles tended to favor officers because a car could be considered a deadly weapon.

Minnesota law allows the use of deadly force by an officer only if an objectively reasonable officer would believe that doing so was necessary to protect the officer or others from immediate death or serious harm. Federal law has a similar standard.

Reporting by Renee Hickman and Maria Alejandra Cardona in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Helen Coster, Tom Hals and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Joseph Ax and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Deepa Babington

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from dozens of international and U.N. entities, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change

International News via Reuters:

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the United States from the foundational U.N. climate treaty, which the U.S. Senate unanimously adopted more than 30 years ago, may be illegal, according to some legal experts who say that Congress would need to approve its exit.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from dozens of international and U.N. entities, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as the scientific Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that “operate contrary to U.S. national interests” of focusing on oil, gas and mining development.

Trump, a vocal critic of renewable energy who has called climate change a “con job” and a hoax, went beyond his previous action of withdrawing the U.S. – the world’s biggest historical greenhouse gas emitter – from the Paris climate agreement, by removing the country from the underlying UNFCCC.

He also pulled the U.S. out of the key scientific climate change body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a host of other U.N. bodies focused on environment, health, arts and women’s rights.

SOME EXPERTS QUESTION PRESIDENT’S POWERS TO WITHDRAW

Some international law experts said the president’s unprecedented move on Wednesday raises major legal questions because case law has not been clear on whether a president can unilaterally withdraw the country from a treaty that has been ratified by a majority of the Senate.

“Because the U.S. entered the UNFCCC with advice and consent of the Senate in 1992, it’s our legal view that it also must be exited using the same process in reciprocation,” Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity told Reuters. “Letting this lawless move stand could shut the U.S. out of climate diplomacy forever.”

The CBD is currently evaluating whether to take the U.S. government to court on this, Su said.

White House officials were not immediately available to respond to Reuters questions on the legality of the move.

Quitting the UNFCCC would take effect a year after notification and would mean the U.S. would withdraw from all global climate negotiations including the central Paris climate agreement.

The U.S. already skipped the annual U.N. international climate summit last year in Belem, Brazil for the first time in three decades and Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris pact a year ago. It is the only country to exit the UNFCCC.

The UNFCCC requires wealthy industrialized countries to take measures to cut their emissions, adopt policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, publicly report their emissions, and provide funding to help poorer nations address climate change.

While the rules around ratifying a treaty are clear, the rules around withdrawing from a treaty are not spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, said Curtis Bradley, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

This has meant that some presidents have asserted the authority to withdraw the United States from treaties and international agreements without seeking Congressional approval. For example, Republican President Ronald Reagan withdrew the U.S. from UNESCO in 1983 over his concerns about that agency’s perceived politicization.

Bradley said Congress could enact legislation to prevent a president from unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty. Congress did pass a law in 2023 to stop a future administration from withdrawing from the NATO treaty.

“But that is not likely to happen for the UNFCCC,” he said, given the polarization around climate change policy in Congress.

HOW EASY IS IT TO GET BACK INTO A TREATY?

Legal experts are also split around how difficult it would be to rejoin the UNFCCC.

Some legal groups believe that if a future administration wants to get back in, it would need to go through a new process of getting the two-thirds support in the U.S. Senate required for treaty ratification.

Other experts argue that the U.S. can easily rejoin after 90 days, using the “advise and consent” that the Senate used to ratify the treaty unanimously in 1992 under Republican President George H.W. Bush.

In recent years, achieving a two-thirds majority in the highly polarized U.S. Congress has been near impossible, especially on divisive issues.

The U.S. has entered into more than 90% of international agreements through different mechanisms that rely on executive authority or pre-existing domestic laws.

Sue Biniaz, former deputy special envoy for climate change during the Biden administration, said she is in the camp of legal scholars who believe that rejoining the UNFCCC could be “seamless” because of the unanimous Senate approval it won in 1992.

“There are multiple future pathways for rejoining the key climate agreements,” she said.

Reporting by Valerie VolcoviciEditing by Frances Kerry