Before tens of thousands of protesters marched in Minneapolis on Friday to demand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Minnesota, they were mocked by the voice of the Minnesota Vikings.

The protestors marched from Commons Park at the edge of downtown to a rally at Target Center in temperatures that hovered around 10-degrees below zero.

While discussing the cold with former Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway, Allen said, “In conditions like this, do paid protesters get hazard pay? Those are the things that I’ve been thinking about this morning.”

The moment was saved by awfulannouncing.com and can be heard here.

“I’m not touching that one,” Greenway said, according to an audio clip posted by the web site awfulannouncing.com.

Allen continued. “Everyone’s catching strays this week,” he said, citing NFL quarterback Baker Mayfield and former NFL QB Charlie Batch. “They’re just all over. Protestors caught one this morning.”

The remark, which pushes the false narrative that protesters are paid by left-wing groups, is commonly made to undermine the importance of social protest. It drew immediate ire on social media.

Minnesotans have been protesting an immigration enforcement campaign in the Twin Cities that the Department of Homeland Security is calling “Operation Metro Surge.” Since it began in December, federal agents have shot and killed two Minneapolis residents, Renee Macklin Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Saturday. Both were 37 and U.S. citizens.

On the department’s web site, DHS director Kristi Noem said, “In the last 6 weeks, our brave DHS law enforcement have arrested 3,000 criminal illegal aliens.”

A message left on Allen’s phone went unanswered on Saturday, and the show’s producer, Eric Nordquist, declined to comment.

An email to the Vikings received no response.

At 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Allen made a post on X.com that seemed to be a response to many posts — some angry, some supportive — made to his account.

“I have to stop watching all this for a little bit. I’m so sad this terror is happening all around us here in MN,” he wrote. “I just prayed to God’s will for it to somehow stop and now and (sic) started crying.

“I truly am sorry for all hurting like me through this, and I just want us to be a Love Covenant again. Truly. Let’s all pray this stops somehow because it’s awful. And no more cheap one-liners from me.”

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MINNEAPOLIS — Saturday morning started frigid and quiet on Minneapolis’ “Eat Street,” a stretch of road south of downtown famous for its small coffee shops and restaurants ranging from New American to Vietnamese.

Within five hours, seemingly everything had changed. A protester was dead. Videos were circulating showing multiple federal agents on top of the man and gunshots being fired. Federal and local officials again were angrily divided over who was to blame.

And Eat Street was the scene of a series of clashes, federal officers and local and state police pulled back and protesters took over the area.

It all started around 9 a.m. when a federal immigration officer shot and killed a man there, about 1.5 mile (2.4 kilometers) from the scene of a Jan. 7 fatal shooting of a local woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer that sparked outrage and daily protests.

And in just over an hour, anger exploded again in the city already on edge. Even before the current immigration enforcement surge, networks of thousands of residents had organized to monitor and denounce it while national, state and local leaders traded blame over the rising tensions.

Two Associated Press journalists reached the scene minutes after Saturday’s shooting. They saw dozens of protesters quickly converging and confronting the federal agents, many blowing the whistles activists use to alert to the presence of federal officers.

They had been covering protests for days, including a massive one Friday afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, but the anger and sorrow among Saturday’s crowd felt more urgent and intense.

The crowd, rapidly swelling into the hundreds, screamed insults and obscenities at the agents, some of whom shouted back mockingly. Then for several hours, the two groups clashed as tear gas billowed in the subzero air.

Over and over, officers pushed back the protesters from improvised barricades with the aid of flash bang grenades and pepper balls, only for the protesters to regroup and regain their ground. Some five hours after the shooting, after one more big push down the street, enforcement officers left in a convoy.

By mid-afternoon, protesters had taken over the intersection next to the shooting scene and cordoned it off with discarded yellow tape from the police. Some stood on large metal dumpsters that blocked all traffic, banging on them, while others gave speeches at the impromptu and growing memorial for 37-year-old Alex Pretti, the man killed Saturday morning.

People brought tree branches in a circle to cordon off the area while others put flowers and candles at the memorial by a snow bank.

Many carried handwritten signs demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave Minnesota immediately, using the expletives against ICE that have been plastered all over the Twin Cities for more than weeks.

The mood in the crowd was widespread anger and sadness — recalling the same outpour of wrath that shook the city for weeks after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, although without the widespread rioting that had occurred then.

Law enforcement was not visibly present in the blocks immediately around the shooting scene, although multiple agencies had mobilized and the National Guard announced it would also help provide security there.

At an afternoon news conference Minneapolis police Chief Brian O’Hara said his officers as well as members of the Minnesota National Guard in yellow safety traffic vests were working to keep the area around the shooting safe and avoid traffic interfering with “lawful, peaceful demonstrations.” No traffic except for residents was allowed in a 6-by-7 block area around the scene.

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Stores, sports and cultural institutions shuttered Saturday afternoon citing safety. Some stayed open to give a break to the protesters from the dangerous cold, providing water, coffee, snacks and hand warmer packets.

After evening fell, a somber, sorrowful crowd in the hundreds kept a vigil by the memorial.

“It feels like every day something crazier happens,” said Caleb Spike. “What comes next? I don’t know what the solution is.”

Dozens of immigrant families protested Saturday behind the fences of a Texas detention facility where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent this week after being detained in Minnesota.

Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, is seen being detained in a photo released by Columbia Heights Public Schools officials that has prompted anger in the Twin Cities. Exactly what happened on a snow-covered block in Columbia Heights during the arrest is in dispute. The small school district and the federal government have given conflicting accounts. (Columbia Heights Public Schools via The New York Times)

Aerial photos taken by The Associated Press showed children and parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center clad in jackets and sweaters, some of them holding signs that included “Libertad para los niños,” or “Liberty for the kids.”

Families could also be heard outside chanting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” said Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client at the facility in the town of Dilley.

“The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview from the facility after the demonstration. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been held at Dilley since October.

The detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, in Minnesota on Tuesday has become another lightning rod for America’s divisions on immigration under the Trump administration. Versions offered by government officials and the family’s attorney and neighbors offer contradictory versions of whether the parents were given adequate opportunity to leave the child with someone else.

Earlier Saturday in Minneapolis, a federal immigration officer shot and killed a man, drawing hundreds of protesters onto the frigid streets and ratcheting up tensions in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.

Montoya Sanchez said she saw the father and son outside for a few minutes during the protest. Marc Prokosch, an attorney for the family, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment Saturday.

Montoya Sanchez said the protest was organized internally by the families exhausted by the long detention and conditions that advocates say have included food with worms, constant illness and insufficient medical access. Lee said he later heard from his clients inside that the demonstration was related to Liam Conejo Ramos’ case.

Lee, an attorney from Michigan, said was in the waiting room for a scheduled client visit when guards walked in and ordered everyone out.

“That children and their parents would risk retribution under these conditions to speak up is a testament both to how courageous they are and how abysmal the conditions of this place is,” he said.

Hundreds of children have been held at the facility beyond the court-mandated limit, according to a report filed December by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an ongoing federal lawsuit.

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CHICAGO — Harvard University is home to The Harvard Crimson, the nation’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper, and the fine student journalists there offer excellent coverage on a wide array of topics, beginning with their own campus leaders. That storied student paper published something this month that caught our eye, amplifying the university president’s comments on free speech on campus during a podcast interview.

President Alan Garber appeared in December on the “Identity/Institute” podcast and made candid comments about Harvard’s drift away from objectivity and how to fix it.

“What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues. It is not about how to sling slogans or how to advance a particular political perspective,” he said, adding: “We’re not about the activism.”

This should be uncontroversial in academia.

We’ve admired for a while Garber’s commitment to promoting these principles in classroom debate, and pushing out bad practices that would stifle engagement in the kinds of lively conversations that foster true learning and offer young minds the opportunity to sharpen their arguments, see an issue from a different point of view and, in many circumstances, change their opinion. We feel the same way about our own University of Chicago, which has several thought leaders on this issue.

Harvard, of course, has had this reckoning forced upon itself, in many ways. Deep divisions over the conflict in the Middle East threatened to tear the campus in two. Garber described the 2023-24 academic year as “disappointing and painful.”

Then, in 2025, the university faced intense external pressure as President Donald Trump’s administration froze billions in federal funding — an action a judge later ruled unconstitutional.

These are the fires that refined and defined Garber’s early tenure. We’d say he knows a thing or two about the struggle to protect free speech. That’s why his words are important — and welcome.

Of course, his critique also applies to campuses beyond his own. As many students at any number of universities across the U.S. know, there’s a real risk to speaking your mind, particularly if it doesn’t align with the accepted norms on hot-button issues. Especially in the classroom

“Think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue’ … how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” Garber said.

As a result, students often actively reject contrary points of view. Stories of conservative speakers being shouted down or banned from campus altogether have become so commonplace they no longer make headlines.

That’s not the way we’re meant to learn. It’s also not the way institutions dedicated to education are meant to function.

— The Chicago Tribune

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