If Anyone Can Pull Off a General Strike — It’s Minnesotans (See Below)
UPDATED
Thousands of Minnesotans chanting “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” are marching through downtown Minneapolis to demand ICE leave the state.
The chants ring through the crowd—clearly energized and undeterred by freezing temperatures—that includes teachers, electricians, community members, and others from seemingly countless organizations
Many of the signs refer to Renee Good, a poet, Minneapolis resident and 37-year-old mother of three who was killed on January 7 by an ICE agent.
Good’s killing has been raised throughout the day, including during an act of civil disobedience by faith leaders at the airport, and during an accompanying news conference there.
The civil disobedience from Minnesota faith leaders resulted in the arrests of about 100 clergy who engaged in civil disobedience by blocking a key road at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport Friday morning, according to the ICE Out of MN coalition.
The clergy, according to a coalition news release, were arrested for their part in “the statewide shutdown ICE Out of Minnesota: A Day of Truth & Freedom.” The clergy’s demands focused on Delta and Signature Aviation, which they say have been complicit in and have helped facilitate the deportations of Minnesotans.
Their demands include that Delta and Signature Aviation “publicly call for an immediate end to the ICE ‘surge’ into MN and for ICE to leave the state,” to call for the officer who killed Good to be held accountable, to “publicly call for Congress to stop funding ICE” and to ensure Target stores deny entrance to any agents who do not have “signed judicial warrants.”
[UPDATED: 12:15 p.m. CST]: Police have started arresting clergy blocking the road outside of Terminal 1 departures at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport as the crowd chants “we love you.” Many faith leaders prayed in the moments before they were taken away.
A crowd of thousands—including striking workers and union members?—?stayed outside in subzero temperatures to cheer on the civil disobedience. People passed around hand warmers and snacks to help sustain the crowd.
Katrina Zabriskie, 22, just watched her mother, a Minnesota-based chaplain, get arrested. “It was really emotional,” she tells me. “When the crowd started chanting, ‘We love you,’ I started to cry. Mostly I’m just really proud.”
“We care about the safety of our neighbors,” she added. ?“We believe it is deeply unjust taking people from their homes and deporting them, brutalizing them, and keeping them in detention centers. It’s not something that should be happening.” From In These Times
By Michael Sainato and Rachel Leingang / The Guardian / Jan. 23 2026
A “no work, no school, no shopping” blackout day of protest was kicked off by community leaders, faith leaders and labor unions on Friday, January 23, in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in the state.
The “Day of Truth & Freedom” protest comes in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, the unarmed woman killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.
Their demands include that ICE leave Minnesota, that the ICE officer who killed Good be legally held accountable, an end to additional federal funding for ICE, and for the agency to be investigated for human rights and constitutional violations.
‘We have to stand together’: Minnesota economic blackout organizers push to take demonstrations nationwide
Hundreds of local businesses in Minnesota have announced closures in solidarity. Thousands of people are expected to call out from work to join the action, while others will participate by not shopping on Friday. The Minneapolis city council endorsed the day of action and the general strike.
The state’s cultural institutions – including the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Minnesota Children’s Museum – will be closed on Friday as well.
The day of action culminates with a march in downtown Minneapolis at 2pm local time. The march will end with a rally inside the Target Center, an arena downtown.
“We are going to be having dangerously cold weather on Friday – -10F with wind chills. Like the high is going to be -10F with wind chills of up to -20F,” Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, president of the Minnesota Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, told the Guardian.
“We are a northern state, and we are built for the cold, and we are going to show up, but folks are going to need to pay attention to not just the march, but what people are doing, the individual stories of solidarity that people are going to be doing.”
The Minnesota AFL-CIO, the state’s federation of more than 1,000 affiliated local unions, has endorsed the day of action, along with dozens of local labor unions.
“I think what generated the idea for this action comes out of the need to figure out what we can meaningfully do to stop it,” Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250 in Minneapolis, told the Guardian last week of the action. “The government in the state of Minnesota has not offered any path towards stopping these attacks, this violence.”
A childcare worker in Minneapolis, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation toward the immigrant families they serve, explained they were shutting down for the day after consulting and receiving immense support from the families of the children they care for.
“We had time to ask the families that we serve if they would be on board with shutting down and we got a hugely positive response,” they said. “We serve families that are on childcare assistance, families that pay out of pocket. So they were all in agreement, even ones that have been trying to go to work, even during this time where they were fearful of being out of their houses. So it was really the families. They all stood up for it too.”
[The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed to have made 3,000 arrests in Minnesota over the past six weeks.]
The US army put 1,500 soldiers on standby for possible deployment to Minnesota, as 3,000 immigration officers have been dispatched to the state by the Trump administration.
“This is beyond insane. Why would these labor bosses not want these public safety threats out of their communities?” a DHS spokesperson said in an email in response to the economic blackout. “These are the criminals these labor bosses are trying to protect,” the spokesperson added, citing 23 uncaptioned photos of claimed undocumented immigrants with criminal records who have been arrested by ICE.
Nationwide, immigrants with no criminal record continue to make up the largest group in US immigration detention, which is at record levels.
If Anyone Can Pull Off a General Strike — It’s Minnesotans
Susan Jaffe at The New Republic
Christin Crabtree lives just a few blocks from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good, on the south side of Minneapolis. A mother, like Good, Crabtree has been organizing with her neighbors against the invasion of ICE and Border Patrol in the Twin Cities, facing off with heavily armed agents at school pickup and drop-off. And that same day—January 7—Crabtree found herself face-to-face with now-infamous Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino.
“He had walked onto the school grounds where I was doing patrol that day and was holding one of the silver chemical agent canisters that he has on his vest and had another agent with him,” she said. “I watched video afterwards, and you can hear that agent cocking his gun. In the moment, I did not perceive that at all. I just remember telling the students to get back because kids were literally still walking out of school, and the students were seeing these agents tackle their teachers.”
The ongoing violence that Minnesotans are facing during the so-called “Operation Metro Surge” has put thousands of ordinary people like Crabtree into extraordinary situations, day in and day out. Parents patrol their children’s schools; neighbors deliver groceries to their neighbors who are staying home in a perverse extension of Covid lockdown-era mutual aid networks; communities have signals and Signal threads so that people can run toward or away from a smash and grab, depending on their vulnerability.
“The way that the community showed up in that moment, neighbors coming out their doors,” Crabtree said, “was just profound. Our school community has felt really held by our neighbors. As terrifying as that was, to see folks show up in that way was really, really meaningful to me.”
The Twin Cities have had plenty of opportunities to build up these networks of resistance, networks that have only grown larger in the wake of Good’s killing. Those networks have called for a day of action, under the name “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom,” today, January 23, which may be the closest thing to a general strike that the United States has seen in nearly a century.
For the balance of this article, go here please.
I truly hope the ICE officers who killed Renee and now Alex get doxxed. I wouldn’t lose a single day of sleep of they themselves get killed as a result.