Protest organisers said more than 1000 weekend events were planned across the country demanding an end to large-scale deployments of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ordered by President Donald Trump, mostly to cities led by Democratic politicians.
Minneapolis became a major flashpoint of the Republican president's militarised deportation round-ups on Wednesday, when an ICE officer shot and killed a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Good, behind the wheel of her car on a residential street.
The violence came soon after some 2000 federal officers were dispatched to Minneapolis in what ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, called the "largest DHS operation ever".
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, condemned the deployment as a "reckless" example of "governance by reality TV".
At the time, Good was taking part in one of numerous "neighbourhood patrols" that track, monitor and record ICE activities, according to family and local activists.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials said Good was "impeding" and "stalking" ICE agents all day, and that the officer opened fire in self-defence when she tried to ram her car into him in an "act of domestic terrorism".
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, pointed to bystander video he said directly contradicted the federal government's "garbage narrative".
Civil liberties advocates said the video showed federal agents lacked any justification for using deadly force.
Amid the sharply differing accounts of the shooting, Minnesota and Hennepin County law enforcement authorities said on Friday they were opening their own criminal inquiry separate from a federal investigation led by the FBI.
Some Trump administration officials, including Vice-President JD Vance, asserted state prosecutors lacked jurisdiction to charge a federal officer, though legal experts say federal immunity in such cases is not automatic.
The crisis atmosphere led Walz - who branded Trump and his Republican allies as "weird" during his own run for vice-president in 2024 - to put the state's National Guard on alert.
Federal-state tensions escalated further on Thursday when a US Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot and wounded a man and woman in their car after an attempted vehicle stop.
As in the Minneapolis incident, DHS said the driver had tried to "weaponise" his vehicle and run over agents.
DHS on Friday identified the wounded driver and passenger as suspected gang associates from Venezuela who were in the US illegally.
The agency said the woman had been involved in a prior shootout in Portland but provided no evidence of its allegations against the pair.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, echoing Frey, said he could not be sure the government's account was grounded in fact without an independent investigation.
The deployment of agents to Minneapolis follows Trump's recent denunciations of Walz and his state's large population of Somali immigrants over allegations of fraud dating to 2020 by some nonprofit groups administering childcare and other social service programs.
Good was shot dead just a few blocks from where George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer crushing his neck into the pavement with his knee during a videotaped arrest in May 2020.
Floyd's death sparked months of nationwide racial-justice protests during Trump's first term in office.
The two DHS-related shootings this week have drawn thousands of protesters to the streets of Minneapolis, Portland and other US cities, with many more demonstrations under the banner "ICE Out For Good" planned for Saturday and Sunday.
