Mayor of Milan says ICE agents are ‘not welcome’ at Winter Olympics as backlash grows

The Mayor of Milan has said that ICE agents are “not welcome” at the Winter Olympics next month amid growing backlash against the Trump administration’s decision to give them a security role.

The decision to bring ICE officials to the Games in Italy next month has sparked outrage, with the US still reeling from the fatal shooting of two people by agents in Minneapolis this month.

Thousands of Italians have signed petitions to demand the agency be barred from entry, after ICE confirmed it was sending a branch with the US diplomatic security service to protect top officials.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant homeland security secretary, said that ICE “does not conduct immigration enforcement operations in foreign countries”, with agents only travelling to “vet and mitigate risks”.

But Italian officials have raised concerns over the potential safety risk of ICE agents being used after the death of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot in Minneapolis on 24 January. It came just weeks after ICE agents shot and killed writer Renee Good.

In both incidents, officials claimed agents were acting in self-defence. Those accounts have been disputed and the deaths have caused public outcry.

Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, which is hosting several events, said that ICE agents are “not welcome” at the Winter Olympics, which will run from 6 February until 15 March.

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“This is a militia that kills,” he told Italian radio station RTL 102.5. “It is clear that they are not welcome in Milan. There’s no doubt about it. Can’t we just say no to Trump for once?”

Giuseppe Conte, president of the populist Five Star Movement, said: “After street violence and killings in the USA, we now learn from their spokesperson that ICE agents will come to Italy … We cannot allow this.”

Marco Furfaro, a Democratic Party MP, told La Repubblica: “ICE is not welcome in Italy in any form. The government should have said only this: our country is strongly opposed to the presence, even minimal or symbolic, of a militia so incompatible with our constitution and our values ​​at the Olympic Games.”

Attilio Fontana, the governor of Lombardy region, previously assured that ICE would only be in Italy as “bodyguards” for vice president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio when asked whether he was concerned about violent clashes involving the agency in the US.

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Mr Fontana subsequently backtracked, saying he did not know anything about the matter and did not mean to confirm their presence. Italy’s interior minister Matteo Piantedosi also said on Saturday “we are not aware at this time and at this stage” of a possible ICE presence. He said security remained the responsibility of the national authorities.

US officials finally confirmed on Tuesday that a branch would attend next month.

"At the Olympics, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is supporting the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service and host nation to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organisations,” ICE said, stressing that “all security operations remain under Italian authority”.

The HSI branch investigates global threats into, out of and through the US, according to the ICE website.

The Trump administration has also faced mounting backlash after two reporters with Italian television broadcaster RAI were threatened by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

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The journalists were accompanying a volunteer monitoring operations in the city when men, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, approached their car and demanded they roll the windows down.

Video of the incident showed the reporters identify themselves in English several times before they were warned: “If you keep following us from this point on … we will break your window and we will pull you out of the vehicle.”

Peppe Provenzano, with the centre-left Democratic party, said that the reporters had been “threatened by Trump’s political police”.

“We ask the Meloni government, if it has any national pride, to formally protest and distance itself once and for all,” he said, reported by the Ansa news agency.

Mr Trump sacked Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief leading immigration raids across the country, following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, The Atlantic reported.