On 23 January, English teacher John Reuss stood in -30C temperatures on the streets of Minneapolis and explained why he was on strike:
“In the middle of my lesson ... [a] student messaged me and said, ‘ICE is outside of my house right now, what do I do?’ ... Thank god his neighbours were out there, outside of his house, and they chased ICE out of their neighbourhood. Those agents had been circling around his house all morning. This is our last option, we need to shut it all down, and so I’m calling on every educator in this state, in this country, to shut it down, with Minneapolis and St Paul ... because if we don’t shut it down, your city is next.”
Reuss is one of many Minnesotans who have drawn a line in the sand, and who are no longer willing to accept the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against migrants, workers and anyone who dares to challenge the government’s terror campaign.
Citywide strikes are not an everyday occurrence in the United States; to find a precedent for the Minneapolis strike, you have to go back almost a century, to the 1940s. But it happened on 23 January. School teachers and airport workers walked out. Government offices and call centres were effectively shut down. Businesses and public institutions closed across the city as their employees rallied in the streets.
Trump’s shock-and-awe ICE tactics were intended to terrorise people into submission and make them feel that resistance is impossible. But instead, they provoked a widespread radicalisation and generalised determination to fight back. When Alex Pretti was murdered a day later—executed in broad daylight by ICE agents after he attempted to defend a fellow protester—this determination only hardened.
Pretti’s death followed that of Renèe Good, a Minnesota woman who was shot dead in her car by ICE agents, and another six who have been killed during ICE’s rampage through US cities. Pretti’s final act was one of defiance. Minnesotans are memorialising him by spreading the rebellion.
On 28 January, standing outside Minneapolis City Hall, the president of the Somali Student Association, Dahir Munye, announced plans for another strike on 30 January. This time, organisers called for nationwide participation.
“They wanted to intimidate us and to spread fear in our hearts, but that isn’t going to work”, Munye told the New York Times. “That’s exactly why we are going back ... The only way to truly fight back is to extend and expand the shutdown movement from last Friday.”
The movement has clearly taken on a national dimension. Thousands of high schoolers walked out from Los Angeles to Austin to New York. One high schooler who organised a walkout from her school in New Hampshire told Vermont Public:
“I thought my voice was not going to matter at all. I thought maybe ten people would make it. Your voice does matter. You do have an effect. All it takes is that tiny little spark and the whole fire will be lit.”
Entire school districts in Colorado shut down due to the number of teachers refusing to work. In Portland, everything from restaurants to pet stores was closed.
This incredible wave of solidarity with migrants has dealt Trump his biggest defeat since the 2024 election. Greg Bovino, the jackbooted commander of the Minnesota operation, has been demoted and faces imminent retirement. His core coterie of hard-right immigration officers has been moved out of the state. Reeling from the backlash, even some Republicans are calling for the resignation of Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security. A planned ICE offensive in Maine has been completely abandoned.
The mass revolt has also exposed the fallacy of liberal identity politics: supposedly “privileged” US-born workers have embodied the labour movement’s timeless refrain: an injury to one is an injury to all. They have thrown themselves onto the front line and mobilised in outstanding numbers on behalf of, and alongside, the most marginalised.
While the fight against ICE and Trump’s broader authoritarian agenda is going to be a long one, the events in Minneapolis are a huge step forward for popular resistance. This isn’t just because of the gritty determination of the protests. It’s because, in looking for a way to resist, they’ve rediscovered the greatest weapon our side has: the mass strike.
Working-class people have flexed a power that has been tragically underutilised in recent decades—their ability to withdraw their labour and bring society grinding to a halt.
The week before the 23 January shutdown, postal workers had already begun successful protests to kick ICE out of their facilities. The Letter Carriers’ Association in Pennock, Minneapolis, said agents had been using post office carparks as staging posts for immigration raids throughout December. State employers have collaborated with ICE and allowed them to operate on post office property, on school grounds and at transit points. An estimated 2,000 people have been deported via the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, with the assent of bosses and administrators.
Employers might advise cooperation with ICE agents, but none of this can continue when workers do not comply. Growing numbers of working-class people have simply started to disobey orders—refusing service to ICE agents in hotels, chasing them out of supermarkets, shutting them out of schools.
Hamsa Hussein, a Somali Uber driver and unionist, told Labor Notes about being accosted in his taxi by ICE agents while he waits to pick up passengers from the airport:
“They ask you, ‘Are you a citizen?’ If you say, ‘Yes, I am a citizen,’ they ask you, ‘Where were you born?’ And it is an illegal question. I've been here for almost 17 years. So I am not afraid to come out for my rights.”
Hussein said that in 2022, his Service Employees International Union organising committee numbered a few hundred. Today there are 3,000 members. “When they see what the union is doing, they get energised and they get confidence.”
As the national shutdown unfolds, a growing number of workers are looking to their own power to take on Trump. Minneapolis has shown, in real time and at spectacular scale, not only who has the power to defeat Trump, but who is really fit to run this world as well.
It is not the capitalists who bow down to Trump, nor the Democratic politicians who are more concerned about mass action than ICE overreach, nor the bureaucrats labouring under the illusion that the system can be made good. It is the working class, the millions of men and women who have chosen, in the face of fascistic terror, to take matters into their own hands and stand against the armed might of the state.
Instinctively, they have drawn on the power they have but so often are not conscious of: the power to bring the economy to a halt. In doing so, they have shown that everything that happens, and everything we need, is designed, produced and transported by workers. Politicians, ICE thugs, bosses: working people need none of them. This is the heart and soul of socialism: workers standing together to assert their common humanity against the barbarism of capitalism.
So how did this happen?
First, resistance to ICE has been galvanised by a bold minority willing to take the risks involved in standing up to the state. As ICE terror has spread from city to city, rapid response networks monitoring and obstructing ICE operations have followed them, from Los Angeles to New York to Chicago.
In Minneapolis, this resistance has been particularly intense. The scale of the Trump offensive demands it: the city has been inundated with 3,000 ICE agents, who have effectively taken over. Residents have likened it to a foreign occupation. Migrant workers have been forced to stay home and forgo their wages to avoid capture. Their families survive on grocery deliveries coordinated by local teachers’ unions.
Importantly, Minneapolis has been the site of deep and determined organising well before now. It was ground zero for the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement—Alex Pretti and Renèe Good were both murdered less than a mile from the site where George Floyd was killed by a racist cop in 2020. These past struggles have left a legacy. Activist networks established during the Black Lives Matter protests have endured. But Trump’s second term of brutality has drawn in thousands more organisers. Since ICE’s rampage began, at least 65,000 people have undertaken anti-ICE training.
The sheer force of this effort has united huge swathes of the city against the ICE occupation. This is why the call to escalate the struggle with a call for “no work, no school, no shopping”, initially spearheaded by church and community groups, turned into a reality on 23 January.
The upsurge put pressure on union leaders, who have so far been acquiescent in the face of Trump’s attacks, to swing in and support the mobilisation. On 23 January, members and supporters of the SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America filled almost all of the 20,000 seats of the home stadium of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The national AFL-CIO union federation in Minnesota was forced to put out a statement endorsing the demonstrations.
This process echoes developments in Italy last year when determined workplace activism compelled leaders of the main union federation to support a mass strike in solidarity with Palestine. The political general strike is back on the agenda.
In a world of far-right authoritarianism, imperial aggression and assaults on living standards, workers are beginning to mount a challenge. All the institutions that claim to uphold democracy or to act as a bulwark against authoritarianism have buckled.
The only effective bulwark is the organised working class. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that throughout history, class struggle has been “carried on in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”. For too long, the power of workers has been hidden and the tension at the heart of society obscured. But the barbarism of capitalism is starting to bring it back into the light. Minneapolis is drawing the battle lines. It’s up to the rest of us to follow.
