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MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent tried to get into Ecuador's consulate in Minneapolis on Tuesday but was ​prevented from entering the premises by consulate staffers, the country's Foreign Ministry said.

The attempted ‌entry prompted the Foreign Ministry to send a "note of protest" to the U.S. Embassy in Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, demanding ‌such incidents "not be repeated," the ministry said in a statement.

The statement carried a headline referring to the incident as an "attempted incursion into the Ecuadorean Consulate in Minneapolis by ICE agents."

It said the consulate staff members' actions to prevent ICE entry ensured the protection of Ecuadorean nationals who were in the building ⁠at the time.

The incident occurred ‌during a mass deportation operation being conducted by some 3,000 heavily armed agents of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol deployed to Minnesota under orders of ‍President Donald Trump several weeks ago.

Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and the Border Patrol, immediately responded to requests from Reuters for comment.

Ecuador's Foreign Ministry provided few other details. ​But eyewitnesses working in retail shops near the consulate said they saw immigration agents try to ‌enter the building.

"I saw the officers going after two people in the street, and then those people went into the consulate and the officers tried to go in after them," said one woman, who asked not to be named, citing a fear of retribution by the federal government.

The agents "weren't able to enter the consulate, from what I could see," she said.

Under an international treaty, a ⁠country's embassies, consular offices and other diplomatic compounds are ​regarded as sovereign territory of that nation, protected under diplomatic ​immunity from unauthorized entry by agents of other governments.

Dubbed Operation Metro Surge, Trump's immigration enforcement drive in Minneapolis has led to fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens ‍on the streets of ⁠Minnesota's most populous city, sparking weeks of protests there and across the country.

As political pressure for a de-escalation of tensions mounted, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, met on Tuesday with ⁠the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota, seeking to defuse the crisis.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Minneapolis ‌and Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los ‌Angeles; editing by Michelle Nichols and Thomas Derpinghaus)

The crew landed the plane at Ellington Airport, southeast of Houston, and are "all safe at this time,"NASA said in a poston X. The federal space agency added that there was "mechanical issue" that will be investigated.

The aircraft with its distinct thin fuselage is the NASA WB-57. The plane with two crew seats is capable of flying for about 6 1/2 hours at high altitudes — beyond 63,000 feet.

Video shows the plane slowly descending toward the runway, then touching down with a jolt, its wings bouncing asyellow fire and white smokebursts from beneath it. It steadily slides down the track, the flames bursting and disappearing in a cloud of smoke. The aircraft begins to slow before the video ends

Local news footage fromCBS affiliate KHOU-TVshows the plane at a stop, the cockpit hatch open, fire trucks flashing nearby and emergency responders working around the black nose of the aircraft.  Video captured by KHOU crews on the ground shows the pilot climbing out of the cockpit with assistance from emergency responders.

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The NASA WB-57 has flown research missions since the 1970s and continues to be an asset for the scientific community, according to the agency's website.

The WB-57 typically carries two crew members — a pilot and a sensor equipment operator — and is used for scientific and atmospheric research missions, according to KHOU.

Sneak peek: The Firefighter's Secret

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Bellecourt is now executive director of Minneapolis' Indigenous Protector Movement, which along with American Indian Movement chapters and the city's Little Earth Protectors has been conducting community patrols to monitorU.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activityand protect Indigenous community members — one of several actions Indigenous groups are taking that recalls the American Indian Movement's origins in the city.

"We knew we had to do something," he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Commander at Large Gregory Bovino speaks during a news conference at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal on Jan. 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minn. The news conference comes after 37-year-old legal observer Alex Pretti was fatally shot during a confrontation with federal agents. The Trump administration has sent a reported 3,000 federal agents into the area, with more on the way, as they make a push to arrest undocumented immigrants in the region.

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US Border Patrol Chief Bovino under fire after Minneapolis deaths

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Commander at LargeGregory Bovinospeaks during a news conference at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal on Jan. 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minn. The news conference comes after 37-year-old legal observer Alex Pretti was fatally shot during a confrontation with federal agents. The Trump administration has sent a reported 3,000 federal agents into the area, with more on the way, as they make a push to arrest undocumented immigrants in the region.

Bellecourt's father's legacy has been on his mind a lot lately. The 53-year-old member has helped staff a donation station set up for Indigenous and other legal observers of ICE activity in the city, where tensions exploded over the weekend with the fatal Jan. 24 shooting of nurse Alex Pretti by a U.S. Border Patrol agent as he attended a city protest.

It didn't just start with Pretti's killing. Native leaders and volunteers had previously established 24/7 patrols in response to fears spreading across the Twin Cities following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, 2026.

The Indigenous Protector Movement is one of multiple Indigenous organizations operating community patrols; Bellecourt estimated between 80 and 100 Indigenous participants, including some representing AIM chapters in neighboring Wisconsin and South Dakota.

The groups are patrolling areas populated by Indigenous populations and organizations, mostly in South Minneapolis. Pow Wow Grounds, a coffeehouse on the city's Franklin Avenue, has served as a community organizing hub and drop-off site for donations.

"It's all about protecting our community and helping our people," said Bellecourt, a member of the Bad River Band of Chippewa.

The patrols began as the federal presence intensified in Minneapolis, especially after the detentionin early Januaryof five Minneapolis-area Native men that Indigenous groups said had beenracially profiledas undocumented immigrants.

"We knew that would happen," Bellecourt said. "You have ICE agents coming in who can't tell a Native person from someone south of the border."

According to theOglala Sioux Tribal Council, several of the men were moved to Minnesota'sFort Snelling, a site Detroit-based Native American activist and historian Heather Bruegl notes served asa concentration campfor hundreds of Native women, children and elderly non-combatants sent there after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," said Bruegl, a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. "Groups like the American Indian Movement are now saying, we've got to look out for our own people and have more of a presence. It's going back to when the group was founded, patrolling the streets again."

Additionally, Indigenous organizations and tribes in states such asMichiganandOklahomahave issued statementsto members offering guidance about their rights as tribal members should they face ICE interaction, and on Jan. 24, the Oglala Lakota Nation votedto ban ICEfrom operating on the Pine Ridge reservation.

"The harm is still being done, but who's doing it is different," Bruegl said.

'I never thought I would have to wear my tribal ID'

TheIndigenous Protector Movementhas been conducting patrols through its Many Shields Warrior Society program, offering rides to community elders or young people on foot to ensure they safely reach their destination. Meanwhile, other volunteers drop off diapers to Native moms afraid to go to the store and provide soup and gasoline gift cards for legal observers.

For some organization members, the fear has been felt firsthand: On January 9, Indigenous Protector Movement vice president Rachel Dionne-Thunder posted anInstagram videopartially depicting an event she said happened that day as she observed ICE activity. Officers approached her vehicle and demanded she roll her window down, she said, threatening to break it when she did not comply.

The officers backed off and left after community patrol members quickly surrounded the vehicle, she said.

"This is how quickly things can turn," Dionne-Thunder wrote. "This is how unsafe it is right now. And this is why no one should be out here alone."

Mary LaGarde, executive director of the Minneapolis American Indian Center, described daily life as frightening. The center has temporarily shut down its Boys & Girls Club, changed nearly all of its in-person programming to daytime hours and provided transportation for elders who want to attend activities but don't feel safe walking, she said.

"There's an overall sense of uneasiness when you leave the house," said LaGarde, a member of the White Earth Band of Chippewa. "It's a really scary place to be. I never thought I would have to wear my tribal ID around my next in case I were to be pulled over by ICE for some reason."

But that's a move now suggested by the Indigenous Protector Movement and other Native organizations.

In recent weeks, tribal representatives have come to Minneapolis to provide tribal IDs to urban members unable to travel to reservation lands to procure them, including one who Bellecourt said drove in from nine hours away to provide 84 IDs for members of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota.

Indigenous activism's Minneapolis link

Minneapolis is among the largest Native American urban centers in the U.S., dating back to its role as a major hub for the urban migration that followed theIndian Relocation Act of 1956, Bruegl said.

"The U.S. put relocation policies in place where they were encouraging Indigenous people to leave their reservations and go to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Denver," Bruegl said. "They said they would help them find jobs but what ended up happening is they were forced to live in segregated neighborhoods with unemployment and discrimination."

By the late 1960s, she said, resentment was also growing over broken U.S. treaty promises of sovereignty and land. In July 1968, according to theMinnesota Historical Society, about 200 Native Americans of various tribes gathered in Minneapolis to discuss action at a meeting organized by residents Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and George Mitchell, giving rise to the American Indian Movement.

"AIM was born out of the movement to protect human rights but it also brought national attention to what would evolve into the Land Back Movement," Bruegl said.

A series of high-profile protests and actions highlighting those causes would follow, including the 1969-1971 occupation ofAlcatraz Island, a six-day occupation of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs office in 1972 and the dramatic 1973 takeover of theWounded Kneecommunity in South Dakota, among others.

When his father helped launch the American Indian Movement, Bellecourt said, Minneapolis' Indigenous neighborhood centers had fallen into economic ruin. While Franklin Avenue is now a thriving home to art galleries, tribal offices and a cultural center, he said, it was a skid row of bars and liquor stores in the late 1960s.

"Police would come and Natives would get arrested," he said. "AIM patrols would follow the cars to make sure they got to jail and not taken down to the river and beat up. There was police brutality."

In 2020, AIM community patrols sprang to life again in the community violence that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer,helping to protecttribal property and people as protesters set dozens of structures ablaze throughout the city.

That renewed the community bonds that enabled members to quickly coalesce as ICE activities in the city made it necessary.

"I think I owe it to my community and my father and mother who did this kind of work in the 60s and 70s," Bellecourt said. "My dad passed away four years ago and I know he's watching over me. We didn't think we'd be in this situation, but we are. We're not falling in line. We're not giving up."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Indigenous ICE activism recalls AIM's origins in Minneapolis

Alysa Liu, the free-spirited U.S. figure skater, quit the sport at 16 and climbed to Mount Everest base camp in Nepal.

This pair ofU.S. Olympians, each with her own winding journey, demonstrate how different personality traits and cognitive styles — how their brains work — can lead to athletic greatness.

"Different athletes may arrive at excellence via very different mixes of focus, creativity, emotional control, risk tolerance and social engagement," Paul McCarthy, a psychologist in Great Britain who has worked with athletes, told USA TODAY Sports. "The sport sets the constraints; the brain finds its own solution."

And some brains are built better for Olympic success.

Jackson, 33, won the women's 500-meter speed skating event at the 2022 Beijing Games and became the first Black woman to win a gold medal in an individual event at the Winter Olympics. She also graduated cum laude from the University of Florida Honors Program with a Bachelor of Science in Materials Science & Engineering.

Liu, 20, became the youngest U.S. women's figure skating champion at age 13. She spent a year studying at UCLA before ending her two-year hiatus from skating in 2024 and becoming a world champion in 2025.

Their approaches are as different as their disciplines, but both women are expected to contend for gold medals at the2026 Winter Olympics.

Alysa Liu can't live without fun

In October, Liu was one of about 60 athletes to attend the Team USA media summit in New York ahead of these winter games inMilano Cortina. She was the only athlete to modify a standard blue United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee T-shirt to create an off-the-shoulder look.

"… I was like, I can't change the color, but I can change the shape and I have haircutting scissors with me," she explained.

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Alysa Liu poses for a photo during the U.S. Olympic Team Media Summit in preparation for the 2026 Milan Olympic Winter Games.

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Alysa Liu, world champion figure skater and 2026 Olympic gold hopeful

Alysa Liu poses for a photo during the U.S. Olympic Team Media Summit in preparation for the 2026 Milan Olympic Winter Games.

As singular as her remixed T-shirt, Liu said she seeks fun that has included late-night karaoke and a trip to a video game café near her home in Northern California that kept her out until 4 a.m.

"I just can't live without fun," she said. " … Some days I oversleep my training and I wake up and I'm like, 'Now what?' And then some days I'll be like, 'Hmm, now I want to go to (Lake) Tahoe and swim.' And so we'll do that."

She also talked of hiking in Nepal with a friend and her friend's mother. "We were fighting over the silliest things, like, would you rather be a cow or a chicken? … But trust it was deep and meaningful."

Of figure skating, Liu said, "It's definitely an art form. I view it very much as that. But it satisfies me on a technical side, like spins and jumps and running the program itself, those are really hard. Those are difficult. And I like being an athlete.

"And then this sport, it's also artistic. You get to pick music, design your dresses, do choreography, like dancing, but it's very limited ... you can't do hip hop on ice. That does not look good. A lot of dance styles are awkward on the ice and you're not able to portray. I have a lot of concepts in my head. I'm not able to do them in skating, and that's fine. So I'll just have to find another outlet for that part of my brain, I guess."

'An artist, above all'

Liu's father, Arthur, said he was unaware of the T-shirt his daughter transformed at the media summit in New York. But he didn't sound surprised.

"I think she calls herself an artist, above all," he told USA TODAY Sports. "The way she interprets the music, the way she moves, it's very artistic."

At theU.S. figure skating championshipsin January, Liu debuted a new, edgy free skateset to the music of Lady Gaga. She also sported alternating stripes of platinum blond in her naturally dark hair.

Brian Boitano, the retired figure skater who won an Olympic gold medal in 1988, said thedecisionwas "in Alysa Liu fashion."

"For a skater to change their program a month before the Olympic is just unheard of," Boitano said onUSA TODAY's Milan Magic podcast.

It oozed the kind of fun Liu seems to look for, and the kind of fun her father said Alysa experienced when she started skating at 5 years old.

"She just took off on the ice," he said. "She was just chasing adults, hockey players, and making friends and with adults and girls of her own age, boys of her own age. She was just having so much fun on the ice."

Laura Lipetsky, who was Alysa's first coach and worked with her for about 10 years, said, "I helped her see performances as just another way to have fun. ... We did role-playing pretending it was the Olympics, and kept everything fun, so pressure felt exciting instead of intimidating."

The fun she craves and savors — the kind she showed as a youngster on the ice — was harder to come by during the pandemic, her interactions with other skaters at the rink restricted. Arthur Liu said he traces his daughter walking away from the sport in 2022 to exactly that. But on a ski trip in 2024 during her hiatus, he said Alysa rediscovered that sense of fun. Holding on to is has been a priority since her return.

There's another distinguished aspect of Liu's mind. Arthur Liu said Alysa was doing puzzles at age 2, completed first and second grade in the same year, and is a fast learner on the ice. As Arthur recently heard Boitano say, as soon as Alysa learns a move, she's "competition ready."

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Erin Jackson's 'good relationshp with loss'

Jackson greeted reporters at the Team USA media summit wearing Olympics attire, unmodified by haircutting scissors. While Liu's media session at times felt like a theme-park ride, Jackson's felt like an escalator ride – smooth, without any loop-de-loops.

Jackson acknowledged feeling some pressure defending her Olympic title in the 500-meters, but said she doesn't attach herself to the outcome of her performances.

"I don't think with sports it was ever that way for me just because I didn't grow up really as an athlete," she said. "I grew up as more of an academic or a student and then got into focusing on sports much later in my life. … So I feel like that also helped me with my approach to athletics and performance.

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Olympic gold medalist, history making speed skater Erin Jackson

"I think I came in with that mindset of kind of having a good relationship with loss."

Because a loss is something Jackson can learn from. When asked about her hope to compete beyond these Winter Games despite recurring back issues, she said: "I feel like I still have so much to learn."

And when asked about Special Forces: World's Toughest Test, a grueling reality show Jackson won in 2023, Jackson said: "It's not fun, but you'll learn a lot."

Although Jackson took up speedskating in 2017, she started another form of skating five years before that – roller derby. Jackson joined the New Jax City Rollers — a travel team based Jacksonville, Florida, about 100 miles north of where she grew up — in 2012.

"I just think it's so fun," Jackson said. "It's the only team sport I've done, so it's just amazing to have that community and just have like people to share the track with. …

"If you haven't seen a roller derby event, I really recommend it."

'We'd have to drag her out'

Renee Hildebrand started coaching Jackson before Jackson transitioned to speed skating from inline skating.

"She asked more questions than probably any skater I ever had," Hildebrand said. "Always very analytical. While she was in high school, she did the engineers' program there. And they built a robot and did things like that, and I used to get mad because she missed so much skating."

Although Jackson did not sacrifice academics for skating, she approached the sport with the same focus as she did building that robot.

Said Hildebrand, "If you tell her something, she can apply that right away to her skating. You only got to tell her once and she'll go out there and figure out how to do it."

Hildebrand said two of her top skaters struggled with starts when they transitioned to speedskating from inline skating. But not Jackson, who began working with a new coach.

"She definitely has the curiosity of how things work and why they work," she said. "But she also has the ability to put it all together and understand it, which is amazing that she's just that smart that she can figure out things like that."

Stephanie Gentz, one of Jackson's roller derby teammates, said the Olympic speedskater is ultra focused on the track. But Gentz also said Jackson is witty, will laugh at herself and can be pushed beyond her comfort zone.

"After games, after tournaments, they always have an afterparty and we'd make her dance with us," Gentz said. "We'd have to drag her out. But when we did, we would all have fun."

Olympians shaping 'howintelligence is expressed'

Taylor, the psychologist from Great Britain, shared his thoughts on the athletes' brains – in particular the ones that belong to Jackson and Liu.

"From what we know, personality traits and cognitive styles do reflect differences in how the brain functions, but not in a simple 'smart vs. not smart' way," he said. "Traits like openness, conscientiousness, novelty-seeking, and emotional regulation map onto different neural networks and neurotransmitter systems. Those differences influence how someone learns, stays motivated, tolerates risk, and responds to structure – rather than raw intelligence alone."

Taylor said Liu and Jackson strike him as good illustrations of this distinction.

"Alysa's curiosity, spontaneity, and willingness to step away from a rigid system suggest high openness and intrinsic motivation," Taylor said. "That kind of mind can be deeply intelligent, but it thrives on exploration rather than routine.

"Erin's background in engineering, combined with her athletic success, points to strong executive function, planning, and analytical thinking – yet her roller derby experience and dry humor show flexibility and playfulness that do not fit a 'serious' stereotype."

What's especially interesting, Taylor said, is elite sport seems to allow multiple cognitive and personality pathways to success, sometimes even within the same discipline.

"Different athletes may arrive at excellence via very different mixes of focus, creativity, emotional control, risk tolerance, and social engagement," he said. "The sport sets the constraints; the brain finds its own solution. We also cannot forget the social and environmental influences in this admixture.

"So, yes — personality traits are tied to the brain and how it functions, but they don't sit in opposition to intelligence. They shapehowintelligence is expressed, sustained, and translated into performance. That diversity may be one of the reasons elite sport is such a rich lens into human cognition."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Winter Olympics stars Alysa Liu, Erin Jackson explain what makes them tick