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WILL ICE IGNITE A MASS STRIKE IN MINNESOTA?  
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Luis Feliz Leon
January 20, 2026
Labor Notes
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_ Under siege, Minnesotans are leaning on organizations at work and
in their neighborhoods to end the terror. _

Labor federations and many other groups have called for a day of
protest January 23. The momentum is growing from mass protests, like
this one in downtown Minneapolis on January 10 that drew 10,000, and
building on long-term organizing. , Brad Sigal

 

Minnesota appears to be in gear for a mass uprising. Unions, community
organizations, faith leaders, and small businesses there are calling
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for a statewide day [[link removed]] of “no work
(except for emergency services), no school, and no shopping” on
January 23.

Festering grievances swelled into a national outcry on January 7,
after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed
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poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis while she
and her wife were observing federal agents swarming her neighborhood.

A week later, another federal agent shot a Latino immigrant from
Venezuela in the leg. ICE agents have sprayed
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chemical agents in protesters’ eyes. On Wednesday night, they
detonated a tear gas canister underneath the car of a family just
trying to get home from basketball practice; the baby, strapped in his
car seat, was knocked unconscious.

Trump’s regime has ramped up racist attacks targeting Somali, Latino
and Asian communities —battering down doors, raiding small
businesses and forcing them to shutter, trailing school buses,
dropping tear gas outside schools, circling hospitals. He has
threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to
deploy the military to Minneapolis.

Under siege, Minnesotans are leaning on organizations at work and in
their neighborhoods to end the terror.

“We are not going to shop. We are not going to work. We are not
going to school on Friday, January 23. For some people they call that
a strike,” said JaNaé Bates Imari of Camphor Memorial United
Methodist Church at a press conference on Tuesday. “For many of us,
this is our right to refusal until something changes.”

UNIONS STEP UP

Among the unions endorsing the call are Service Employees Local 26,
UNITE HERE Local 17, Communications Workers Local 7250, the St. Paul
Federation of Educators Local 28, Minneapolis Federation of Educators
(AFT Local 59), the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees Local 13, Graduate Labor Union, United Electrical Workers
Local 1105 at the University of Minnesota, the Transit Union (ATU)
Local 1005, the Committee of Interns and Residents (SEIU), and the
Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation
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AFL-CIO.

“Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on
January 23rd,” said Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, president of the
Minneapolis federation. “It’s time for every single Minnesotan who
loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their
voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and co-workers
living under this federal occupation.”

Other endorsers include Faith in Minnesota, Tending the Soil, United
Renters for Justice, Unidos Minnesota, Communities Against Police
Brutality, Indivisible Twin Cities, Women’s March Minnesota, the
worker center Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha, and Minnesota
Immigrant Rights Action Committee. In all, 90 organizations, big and
small, have endorsed the call.

Under the banner “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom,” they
are calling for ICE to leave the state
[[link removed]], for the officer who killed Good
to be held legally accountable, for no additional federal funding for
ICE, and for businesses to sever any economic ties with the federal
agency.

Three thousand ICE agents have swarmed the Minneapolis area in recent
weeks, and they’ve become more aggressive, emboldened by the Trump
administration’s offer of immunity.

Workers are facing them on the job. Letter carriers organized a rally
in December to kick ICE agents off two postal parking lots in South
Minneapolis. ATU Metro Transit workers are calling on ICE to stop
interfering with bus operations
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after a violent arrest at a bus stop on January 10 and the detention
of a Somali-American Metro Transit worker last December.

“They’re walking onto Metro Transit buses,” said bus driver Ryan
Timlin, a steward in ATU Local 1005. “It’s getting to knocking
down doors. They’re just doing whatever they can to haul people off.
They call this a democratic society here in the United States—it
doesn’t feel like it in Minneapolis. It’s a nightmare. The garage
I work at in South Minneapolis has a massive East African population.
Our co-workers are walking around with passports, especially the
Somali community, which Trump is really going after. They’re U.S.
citizens!”

He and his co-workers got the local to pass a resolution saying
members should not cooperate with ICE—for instance by letting them
onto trains and buses—and establishing a rapid-response network. At
a January 14 press conference, Local 1005 President David Stiggers
called ICE’s repression
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“a throwback to the darkest times of human history, 1940s
Germany.”

ICE OUT OF MN

Nat Anderson-Lippert, organizing director for the Minneapolis
Federation of Educators, says the Minneapolis teachers have drawn
inspiration from the Chicago Teachers Union’s sanctuary schools
model
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which has brought parents and teachers together to deepen
school-community organizing. “The level of infrastructure and
organizing is so impressive and humbling,” he said.

“The attack on immigrants is not new, but the intensity we are
seeing is just extreme, and so many more people are stepping up right
now to meet the moment,” said Jason Rodney, an assistant special
education teacher at Anishinabe Academy in Minneapolis Public Schools.

In last November’s contract fight, MFE won stronger language from
the district to refuse ICE on school grounds unless the agent can show
a judicial warrant, including data privacy protections and mental
health support for staff. School workers’ jobs are also protected
should they be detained or lose their legal status, putting them on
the job recall list.

The organizing includes mutual aid, which can mean grocery runs, rent
support, and setting up carpools. The union also won the right for
families scared for their safety to do virtual learning, and the
school has hosted know-your-rights trainings.

Much of it boils down to a foundation of trust built over time,
including during the George Floyd uprising. “More people know their
neighbors since 2020 than they did before that, and that has
absolutely helped us respond more quickly, building neighborhood
response networks and mutual aid support right on our blocks,”
Rodney said.

Under the pressures of the moment, he said the union has tried to be a
steadying force. “We’re in a hundred Signal loops and it can get
draining to follow things we aren’t going to take action on,” he
said. So teachers are talking to their co-workers and deciding where
to focus. “This is a crisis,” he said, but “I think we’re
going to leave this stronger. We’re going to get ICE out.”

Trump has used a fraud scandal as a pretext to racially profile Somali
U.S. citizens and threaten to denaturalize them. But the repression
has sparked brave defiance in some Somali-American workers, like Uber
driver Ahmed Bin Hassan, who defied federal agents at an airport
parking lot in a video
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that circulated on social media. “They couldn’t hear my voice when
they knocked on my window, but they could see my color,” Bin Hassan
told _The Intercept_. “I knew if these people are going to take me
out here today, it’s going to happen. So I’m just going to be
me.”

A DECADE OF ORGANIZING

The momentum is growing from mass protests, like the one in downtown
Minneapolis on January 10 that drew 10,000. But the bold demands also
build on at least a decade of organizing.

In 2020, half a million Americans turned out to Black Lives Matter
protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, not
far from where ICE killed Renee Good.

In 2022, MFE struck to raise wages for the lowest-paid educators
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education support professionals, who were mostly people of color,
while the higher-paid teachers were mostly white. The BLM uprising had
helped build solidarity between these groups and highlight the racial
justice dimension
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of their contract fight.

It also seeded networks of resistance, which have been reactivated now
as Roosevelt High School has been engulfed in a warzone; ICE agents
have gassed students and teachers, and the school has emerged as a key
site of student walkouts. Marcia Howard, now president of MFE, taught
English at Roosevelt when Floyd was killed feet away from her front
door. She took a leave of absence to lead in that struggle, turning
George Floyd Square into a memorial and protest hub.

CWA Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson says the police murders of
Jamar Clark in North Minneapolis and Philando Castile in a suburb of
St. Paul also fueled resistance networks and raised consciousness. Now
Trump’s attacks on immigrants have opened up tough conversations
inside his local.

“If we’re going to discuss something that’s controversial,
we’re going to put it all on the table,” said Knutson. We’re
gonna have a discussion about it at the membership level, and we’re
going to move forward with what the majority believes is right.”

The conversations reflect experiences that members are having in their
own neighborhoods. When Knutson was handing out flyers about ICE, two
union women told him they were already part of the immigrant defense
network, and showed him their ICE alert whistles.

“We fight like hell on all issues of wages, benefits, and
discipline,” said Knutson. “And that gives us some credibility to
talk about things more broadly. So we talk about the philosophy that
an injury to one is an injury to all. I tell people that’s my
religion.”

Last December, ICE abducted two CWA Local 7304 members from Laos at
the electric-bus manufacturer New Flyer in St. Cloud, Minnesota. They
had worked at New Flyer for more than 20 years.

GROUNDWORK FOR DISRUPTION

Since 2011, a constellation of forces in Minnesota has been building
power [[link removed]]
by bringing together workers, tenants, and community members to
contest for power and transform the economy state-wide.

They’ve organized joint weeks of action
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strategized together about how their corporate foes are linked
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and begun lining up contract expirations
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All this helps lay the groundwork for what may be possible next week.

“Over the last two decades in Minnesota, our labor, faith and
community groups have built relationships that allowed us to take on
more strategic campaigns together,” said SEIU Local 26 President
Greg Nammacher. “We’ve taken on the corporations who run our state
to address the racial and economic inequalities they have caused, and
won big things.

“Now our communities are now under attack directly from the federal
government. And we are going to do everything in our power to defend
the workers and people who honor that call.”

GET ON OFFENSE

To go on offense, you also need backup. The Minneapolis Regional Labor
Federation is backing an eviction moratorium, because many workers are
afraid to report to work lest they risk being kidnapped by ICE.

“We don’t need to be adding to our houseless population,” said
Stacie Balkaran, a spokesperson for the federation. Through its
nonprofit arm Working Partnerships, the federation has also funded a
network of mutual aid groups. These networks have helped keep people
fed after federal attacks to strip the state of SNAP funding, and they
are coordinating aid for groceries and rides to and from work.

The federation has established a legal fund to support illegally
detained workers, aiming to raise $150,000. (You can donate here.
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According to Balkaran, these funds will go to any worker regardless of
whether they are in a union or not.

In preparation for the January 23 day of action, the Minnesota AFL-CIO
will dispatch union peacekeepers, “so that we can actually keep us
safe… and know that they are safe in exercising their First
Amendment rights,” said Balkaran.

NO WORK, SCHOOL, SHOPPING

Although unions have endorsed the calls for Minnesotans to refuse
work, school, and shopping on January 23, no union has agreed to
strike yet.

“We have not voted on a strike, but our union is calling on people
to support this call,” said Knutson. “People can say, ‘This is
not a real general strike.’ This is a mass mobilization. To me, at a
certain point, a mass mobilization becomes something qualitatively
new.”

History shows how mass protests can grow into mass strikes. The 1934
San Francisco general strike began after longshore workers and their
supporters shut down the city’s commercial district in a mass
funeral procession, following the killing of two strikers
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and beatings of thousands.

“The funeral march made the general strike, until then at best a
threat, all but inevitable,” writes historian Nelson Lichtenstein in
his forthcoming book _Why Labor Unions Matter_, because seeing 40,000
longshore workers and their supporters bring the city’s commercial
district to a halt gave the city’s working class a surge of
confidence in its own power. Six days later, with backing from the San
Francisco labor council, 150,000 workers stopped working.

Unions can advance democracy against authoritarian governments,
Lichtenstein writes, but to do so, the unions “have to transcend
themselves,” going beyond representing just members to become social
movements that can reach for “a vast new set of energies and
aspirations.”

That moment may have arrived. “Our actions now will determine what
kind of country we will have for a generation,” said Nammacher of
SEIU Local 26.

Could the mobilization expand beyond Minnesota soon? “May Day Strong
stands firmly in support of our affiliates in Minneapolis who are
doing tremendous organizing to stand up a day of no school, no work,
and no shopping next Friday,” said Chicago Teachers Union Vice
President Jackson Potter, speaking for a national coalition of unions
and community groups that has been organizing days of action
nationwide. “The way things are going, we will have no choice but to
emulate this fearless example as a nation on May 1st.”

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_Here’s the pledge_ [[link removed]]_ that
Minnesotans are signing via the May Day Strong Coalition._

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes #563, February 2026
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issue, subscribe today.
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Luis Feliz Leon [[link removed]] is a
staff writer and organizer with Labor [email protected]

* Minnesota Resistance to ICE; Mass Strike; Renee Nicole Good;
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