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MINNEAPOLIS — Protesters for and against the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown clashed in Minneapolis on Saturday as the governor’s office announced that National Guard troops had been mobilized and stood ready to assist state law enforcement, though they were not yet deployed to city streets.

There have been protests every day since the Department of Homeland Security ramped up immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul by bringing in more than 2,000 federal officers.

A large group of protesters turned out in downtown Minneapolis and confronted a much smaller group of people attending an anti-Somali and pro-Immigration and Customs Enforcement rally. They chased the pro-ICE group away and forced at least one member to take off a shirt they deemed objectionable.

Jake Lang, who organized the anti-Islam and pro-ICE demonstration, appeared to be injured as he left the scene, with bruises and scrapes on his head. He said via social media beforehand that he intended to “burn a Quran” on the steps of City Hall, but it was not clear if he carried out that plan.

Lang was previously charged with assaulting an officer with a baseball bat, civil disorder and other crimes before receiving clemency as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping act of clemency for Jan. 6 defendants last year. Lang recently announced that he is running for U.S. Senate in Florida.

In Minneapolis, snowballs, and water balloons were also thrown before an armored police van and heavily equipped city police arrived.

“We’re out here to show Nazis and ICE and DHS and MAGA you are not welcome in Minneapolis,” protester Luke Rimington said. “Stay out of our city, stay out of our state. Go home.”

National Guard ‘staged and ready’

The state guard said in a statement that it had been “mobilized” by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz to support the Minnesota State Patrol “to assist in providing traffic support to protect life, preserve property, and support the rights of all Minnesotans to assemble peacefully.”

Maj. Andrea Tsuchiya, a spokesperson for the guard, said it was “staged and ready” but yet to be deployed.

The announcement came more than a week after Walz, a frequent critic and target of Trump, told the guard to be ready to support law enforcement in the state.

During the daily protests, demonstrators have railed against masked immigration officers pulling people from homes and cars and other aggressive tactics. The operation in the deeply liberal Twin Cities has claimed at least one life: Renee Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, was shot by an ICE officer during a Jan. 7 confrontation.

On Friday a federal judge ruled that immigration officers cannot detain or tear gas peaceful protesters who are not obstructing authorities, including while observing officers during the Minnesota crackdown.

Living in fear

During a news conference Saturday, a man who fled civil war in Liberia as a child said he has been afraid to leave his Minneapolis home since being released from an immigration detention center following his arrest last weekend.

Video of federal officers breaking down Garrison Gibson’s front door with a battering ram Jan. 11 become another rallying point for protesters who oppose the crackdown.

Gibson, 38, was ordered to be deported, apparently because of a 2008 drug conviction that was later dismissed. He has remained in the country legally under what’s known as an order of supervision. After his recent arrest, a judge ruled that federal officials did not give him enough notice that his supervision status had been revoked.

Then Gibson was taken back into custody for several hours Friday when he made a routine check-in with immigration officials. Gibson’s cousin Abena Abraham said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told her White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered the second arrest.

The White House denied the account of the re-arrest and that Miller had anything to do with it.

Gibson was flown to a Texas immigration detention facility but returned home following the judge’s ruling. His family used a dumbbell to keep their damaged front door closed amid subfreezing temperatures before spending $700 to fix it.

“I don’t leave the house,” Gibson said at a news conference.

DHS said an “activist judge” was again trying to stop the deportation of “criminal illegal aliens.”

“We will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Gibson said he has done everything he was supposed to do: “If I was a violent person, I would not have been out these past 17 years, checking in.”

NUUK, Greenland — Thousands of Greenlanders carefully marched across snow and ice to take a stand against U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday. They held signs of protest, waved their national flag and chanted “Greenland is not for sale” in support of their own self-governance in the face of increasing threats of an American takeover.

Just as they finished their trek from the small downtown of Greenland’s capital city Nuuk to the U.S. Consulate in rain and near-freezing temperatures, the news broke: Trump, from his golf course in sunny Florida, announced he will charge a 10% import tax starting in February on goods from eight European countries over their opposition to U.S. control of Greenland.

“I thought this day couldn’t get any worse but it just did,” a stunned Malik Dollerup-Scheibel said after The Associated Press told him about Trump’s announcement. “It just shows he has no remorse for any kind of human being now.”

Trump has long said he thinks the U.S. should own the strategically located and mineral-rich island, which is a self-governing territory of Greenland. Trump intensified his calls a day after the military operation to oust Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro earlier this month.

Dollerup-Scheibel, a 21-year-old Greenlander, and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen were among what others described as the island’s biggest protest, drawing nearly a quarter of Nuuk’s population. Others held rallies and solidarity marches across the Danish realm, including in Copenhagen, as well as in the capital of the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut in Canada’s far north.

“This is important for the whole world,” Danish protester Elise Riechie said as she held Danish and Greenlandic flags in Copenhagen. “There are many small countries. None of them are for sale.”

In Nuuk, Greenlanders of all ages listened to traditional songs as they walked to the consulate. Marie Pedersen, a 47-year-old Greenlander, said it was important to bring her children to the rally “to show them that they’re allowed to speak up.”

“We want to keep our own country and our own culture, and our family safe,” she said.

Her 9-year-old daughter, Alaska, crafted her own “Greenland is not for sale” sign. The girl said her teachers have addressed the controversy and taught them about NATO at school.

“They tell us how to stand up if you’re being bullied by another country or something,” she said.

Meanwhile, Tom Olsen, a police officer in Nuuk, said Saturday’s protest was the biggest he’s ever seen there.

“I hope it can show him that we stand together in Europe,” he said. “We are not going down without a fight.”

Tillie Martinussen, a former member of Greenland’s parliament, said she hopes the Trump administration will “abandon this crazy idea.”

“They started out as sort of touting themselves as our friends and allies, that they wanted to make Greenland better for us than the Danes would,” she said as others chanted in the background. ”And now they’re just plain out threatening us.”

She added that the push to preserve NATO and Greenland’s autonomy were more important than facing tariffs, though she added that she was not dismissing the potential economic impact.

“This is a fight for freedom,” she said. “It’s for NATO, it’s for everything the Western Hemisphere has been fighting for since World War II.”

But when the AP asked Louise Lennert Olsen what she would say to Trump, the 40-year-old Greenlandic nurse instead said she wanted to give a message to the American people.

“I would really like them to support our wish to be Greenland as we are now,” she said as she marched through Nuuk. “I hope they will stand against their own president. Because I can’t believe they just stand and watch and do nothing.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s giant new moon rocket headed to the launch pad Saturday in preparation for astronauts’ first lunar fly-around in more than half a century.

The out-and-back trip could blast off as early as February.

The 322-foot rocket began its 1 mph creep from Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at daybreak. The four-mile trek could take until nightfall.

Thousands of space center workers and their families gathered in the predawn chill to witness the long-awaited event, delayed for years. They huddled together ahead of the Space Launch System rocket’s exit from the building, built in the 1960s to accommodate the Saturn V rockets that sent 24 astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program. The cheering crowd was led by NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman and all four astronauts assigned to the mission.

“What a great day to be here,” said Reid Wiseman, the crew commander. “It is awe-inspiring.”

Weighing in at 11 million pounds, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule on top made the move aboard a massive transporter that was used during the Apollo and shuttle eras. It was upgraded for the SLS rocket’s extra heft.

The first and only other SLS launch — which sent an empty Orion capsule into orbit around the moon — took place back in November 2022.

“This one feels a lot different, putting crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the moon,” NASA’s John Honeycutt said on the eve of the rocket’s rollout.

Heat shield damage and other capsule problems during the initial test flight required extensive analyses and tests, pushing back this first crew moonshot until now. The astronauts won’t orbit the moon or even land on it. That giant leap will take come on the third flight in the Artemis lineup a few years from now.

Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Christina Koch — longtime NASA astronauts with spaceflight experience — will be joined on the 10-day mission by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a former fighter pilot awaiting his first rocket ride.

They will be the first people to fly to the moon since Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed out the triumphant lunar-landing program in 1972. Twelve astronauts strolled the lunar surface, beginning with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969. Only four moonwalkers are still alive; Aldrin, the oldest, turns 96 on Tuesday.

“They are so fired up that we are headed back to the moon,” Wiseman said. “They just want to see humans as far away from Earth as possible discovering the unknown.”

NASA is waiting to conduct a fueling test of the SLS rocket on the pad in early February before confirming a launch date.

“We’ve, I think, zero intention of communicating an actual launch date” until completing the fueling demo, Isaacman told reporters.

The space agency has only five days to launch in the first half of February before bumping into March.

MINNEAPOLIS — Work starts around sunrise for many of the federal officers carrying out the immigration crackdown in and around the Twin Cities, with hundreds of people in tactical gear emerging from a bland office building near the main airport.

Within minutes, hulking SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans begin leaving, forming the unmarked convoys that have quickly become feared and common sights in the streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and their suburbs.

Protesters also arrive early, braving the cold to stand across the street from the fenced-in federal compound, which houses an immigration court and government offices. “Go home!” they shout as convoys roar past. “ICE out!”

Things often turn uglier after nightfall, when the convoys return and the protesters sometimes grow angrier, shaking fences, and occasionally smacking passing cars. Eventually, the federal officers march toward them, firing tear gas and flash grenades before hauling away at least a few people.

“We’re not going anywhere!” a woman shouted on a recent morning. “We’re here until you leave.”

This is the daily rhythm of Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s latest and biggest crackdown yet, with more than 2,000 officers taking part. The surge has pitted city and state officials against the federal government, sparked daily clashes between activists and immigration officers in the deeply liberal cities, and left a mother of three dead.

The crackdown is barely noticeable in some areas, particularly in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods, and suburbs, where convoys and tear gas are rare. And even in neighborhoods where masked immigration officers are common, they often move with ghostlike quickness, making arrests and disappearing before protesters can gather in force.

Still, the surge can be felt across broad swaths of the Twin Cities area, which is home to more than 3 million people.

“We don’t use the word ‘invasion’ lightly,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told reporters this week, noting that his police force has just 600 officers. “What we are seeing is thousands — plural, thousands — of federal agents coming into our city.”

Those agents have an outsized presence in a small city.

It can take hours to drive across Los Angeles and Chicago, both targets of Trump administration crackdowns. It can take 15 minutes to cross Minneapolis.

So as worry ripples through the region, children are skipping school or learning remotely, families are avoiding religious services and many businesses, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, have closed temporarily.

Drive down Lake Street, an immigrant hub since the days when newcomers came to Minneapolis from Norway and Sweden, and the sidewalks now seem crowded only with activists standing watch, ready to blow warning whistles at the first sign of a convoy.

At La Michoacana Purepecha, where customers can order ice cream, chocolate covered bananas, and pork rinds, the door is locked and staff let in people one at a time. Nearby, at Taqueria Los Ocampo, a sign in English and Spanish says the restaurant is temporarily closed because of “current conditions.”

A dozen blocks away at the Karmel Mall, where the city’s large Somali community goes for everything from food and coffee to tax preparation, signs on the doors warn, “No ICE enter without court order.”

The shadow of George Floyd

It’s been nearly six years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, but the scars from that killing remain raw.

Floyd was killed just blocks from where an Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, during a Jan. 7 confrontation after she stopped to help neighbors during an enforcement operation. Federal officials say the officer fired in self-defense after Good “weaponized” her vehicle. City and state officials dismiss those explanations and point to multiple bystander videos of the confrontation.

For Twin Cities residents, the crackdown can feel overwhelming.

“Enough is enough,” said Johan Baumeister, who came to the scene of Good’s death soon after the shooting to lay flowers.

He said he didn’t want to see the violent protests that shook Minneapolis after Floyd’s death, causing billions of dollars in damage. But this city has a long history of activism and protests, and he had no doubt there would be more.

“I think they’ll see Minneapolis show our rage again,” he predicted.

He was right.

In the days since, there have been repeated confrontations between activists and immigration officers. Most amounted to little more than shouted insults and taunting, with destruction mostly limited to broken windows, graffiti, and some badly damaged federal vehicles.

But angry clashes now flare regularly across the Twin Cities. Some protesters clearly want to provoke the federal officers, throwing snowballs at them or screaming obscenities through bullhorns from just a couple feet away. The serious force, though, comes from immigration officers, who have broken car windows, pepper-sprayed protesters and warned observers not to follow them through the streets. Immigrants and citizens have been yanked from cars and homes and detained, sometimes for days. And most clashes end in tear gas.

Drivers in Minneapolis or St. Paul can now stumble across intersections blocked by men in body armor and gas masks, with helicopters clattering overhead and the air filled with the shriek of protesters’ whistles.

Shovel your neighbor’s walk

In a state that prides itself on its decency, there’s something particularly Minnesotan about the protests,

Soon after Good was shot, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat and regular Trump target, repeatedly said he was angry but also urged people to find ways to help their communities.

“It might be shoveling your neighbor’s walk,” he said. “It might mean being at a food bank. It might be pausing to talk to someone you haven’t talked to before.”

He and other leaders have pleaded with protesters to remain peaceful, warning that the White House was looking for a chance to crack down harder.

And when protests do become clashes, residents will often spill from their homes, handing out bottled water so people can flush tear gas from their eyes.

Residents stand watch at schools to warn immigrant parents if convoys approach while they’re picking up their children. They take care packages to people too afraid to go out, and arrange rides for them to work and doctor’s visits.

On Thursday, in the basement of a Lutheran church in St. Paul, the group Open Market MN assembled food packs for more than a hundred families staying home. Colin Anderson, the group’s outreach director, said the group has seen a surge in requests.

Sometimes, people don’t even understand what has happened to them.

Like Christian Molina from suburban Coon Rapids, who was driving through a Minneapolis neighborhood on a recent day, taking his car to a mechanic, when immigration officers began following him. He wonders if it’s because he looks Hispanic.

They turned on their siren, but Molina kept driving, unsure who they were.

Eventually, the officers sped up, hit his rear bumper and both cars stopped. Two emerged and asked Molina for his papers. He refused, saying he’d wait for the police. Crowds began to gather, and a clash soon broke out, ending with tear gas.

So the officers left.

They left behind an angry, worried man who suddenly owned a sedan with a mangled rear fender.

Long after the officers were gone he had one final question.

“Who’s going to pay for my car?”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday branded U.S. President Donald Trump a “criminal” for supporting protesters in Iran, and blamed demonstrators for causing thousands of deaths.

In a speech broadcast by state television, Khamenei said the protests had left “several thousand” people dead — the first indication from an Iranian leader of the extent of the casualties from the wave of protests that began Dec. 28 and led to a bloody crackdown.

“In this revolt, the U.S. president made remarks in person, encouraged seditious people to go ahead and said: ‘We do support you, we do support you militarily,’” said Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters. He reiterated an accusation that the U.S. seeks domination over Iran’s economic and political resources.

“We do consider the U.S. president a criminal, because of casualties and damages, because of accusations against the Iranian nation,” he said. He described the protesters as “foot soldiers” of the United States and said they had destroyed mosques and educational centers. “Through hurting people, they killed several thousand of them,” he said.

In response, Trump called for an end to Khamenei’s nearly 40-year reign.

“The man is a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people,” Trump told Politico in an interview Saturday. “His country is the worst place to live anywhere in the world because of poor leadership.”

“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran,” he added.

Trump had sounded a conciliatory tone

His comments come a day after Trump sounded a conciliatory tone, saying that “Iran canceled the hanging of over 800 people,” and adding that “I greatly respect the fact that they canceled.” He did not clarify whom he spoke to in Iran to confirm the state of any planned executions. His comments were a sign he may be backing away from a military strike.

The official IRNA news agency reported that Tehran Prosecutor Gen. Ali Salehi, referring to Trump’s remarks about the cancellation of the death sentence of 800 protesters, said: “Trump always makes futile and irrelevant statements. Our attitude is severe, preventive, and fast.” He did not elaborate.

In recent days, Trump had told protesting Iranians that ” help is on the way ” and that his administration would “act accordingly” if the killing of demonstrators continued or if Iranian authorities executed detained protesters.

In his speech, Khamenei said rioters were armed with live ammunition that was imported from abroad, without naming any countries.

“We do not plan, we do not take the country toward war. But we do not release domestic offenders, worse than domestic offenders, there are international offenders. We do not let them alone either,” he said, and urged officials to pursue the cases.

An uneasy calm

Iran has returned to an uneasy calm after harsh repression of protests that began Dec. 28 over Iran’s ailing economy. The crackdown has left at least 3,095 people dead, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, exceeding that of any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalling the chaos surrounding the 1979 revolution.

The agency has been accurate throughout the years of demonstrations, relying on a network of activists inside Iran that confirms all reported fatalities. The AP has been unable to independently confirm the toll.

Iranian officials have repeatedly accused the United States and Israel of fomenting unrest in the country. On Friday, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, in a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, accused the U.S. and Israel of meddling in the unrest.

Reports of limited internet access briefly restored

There have been no signs of protests for days in Tehran, where shopping and street life have returned to outward normality, and Iranian state media has not reported on any new unrest.

During the protests, authorities blocked all internet access on Jan. 8. On Saturday, text messaging and very limited internet services began functioning again briefly in parts of Iran, witnesses said.

Cellphone text messaging began operating overnight, while users were able to access local websites through a domestic internet service. Some also reported limited access to international internet services via use of a virtual private network, or VPN.

The extent of access and what was behind it wasn’t immediately clear. It was possible that officials were turning on some systems for the start of the Iranian working week, as the outage has affected businesses, particularly banks in the country trying to handle transactions.

Internet traffic monitoring service Cloudflare and internet access advocacy group NetBlocks reported very slight increases in connectivity Saturday morning, while Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency also reported limited internet access. It did not offer an explanation.

No new protests reported

A call by Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi for protesters to take to the streets again from Saturday to Monday did not appear to have been heeded by Saturday afternoon.

Pahlavi, whose father was overthrown by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, enjoys support from die-hard monarchists in the diaspora but has struggled to gain wider appeal within Iran. However, that has not stopped him from presenting himself as the transitional leader of Iran if the government were to fall.