Multiple Minneapolis schools closed by hoax threat

Police say no suspicious packages or devices have been located after a bomb threat was sent to schools in the Columbia Heights neighbourhood, a suburb of Minneapolis, on Monday.

Multiple schools in the district, where a number of students have been detained in recent weeks as part of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in Minnesota, say they were nonetheless forced to close for the day.

Columbia Heights Public Schools said it closed the schools out of an abundance of caution following a credible threat. Classes will resume on Tuesday.

The school closures come as protests against ICE continue in Minnesota and across the US.

Among the students detained by federal agents in the Columbia Heights district was five-year-old Liam Ramos.

A photo of Ramos in a blue bunny-eared hat being held by ICE agents led to a national outcry.

Ramos was returned with his father to Minneapolis over the weekend from a detention centre in Dilley, Texas, after US District Judge Fred Biery granted an emergency request from the family's lawyer and ordered their release.

Separately, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Monday that two more people - Ian Davis Austin and Jerome Deangelo Richardson - were arrested in connection with an anti-immigration enforcement protest at a Minnesota church last month.

"If you riot in a place of worship, we WILL find you," she wrote on social media.

Last week, former CNN journalist Don Lemon and eight other co-defendants, including another journalist, were charged with conspiracy against religious freedom at a place of worship and injuring, intimidating, and interfering with the exercise of the right of religious freedom at a place of worship.

Lemon went into the Cities Church in St Paul on 18 January with protesters who said one of the pastors was an immigration enforcement official.

He has said was an independent journalist covering the protest, and he was released from custody after appearing in court on Friday.

More than 3,000 federal immigration officers have been in the state of Minnesota for weeks as part of a federal immigration surge ordered by US President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration.

But undocumented immigrants are not the only ones being detained by ICE in the state. Video and testimonial evidence indicate that some US citizens have also been caught up in the surge.

In January, two Minnesotans who were US citizens - Renee Good and Alex Pretti - were shot and killed by federal immigration officials as they protested the ICE actions.

Their deaths, along with the wider immigration crackdown in the Midwest city, have sparked widespread protests, which continued last weekend.

On Monday, nine days after Pretti was killed, the local medical examiner released a post-mortem report identifying his cause of death as "homicide".

Homicide refers to the killing of a person by another person. It does not necessarily signify that a crime has occurred.

The report by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said Pretti suffered "multiple gunshot wounds" fired by one or more law enforcement officers.

It added that he died in the emergency room at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. No further details were noted.

According to US Customs and Border Protection, two of its agents who were involved in Pretti's death have been placed on leave. The US Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into his death.

On Friday, thousands of people across the country participated in a "no work, no school, no shopping" strike in response to the Trump administration's continued immigration effort.

Additional protests continued over the weekend in Minneapolis and other US cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, Maine, New York and Portland.