Twin Cities Workers Strike Against ICE. Two Hundred Cities Follow.

As workers in two hundred and fifteen cities prepare to walk out today in solidarity with Minneapolis, the whole world is watching.

WASHINGTON — By six o’clock this morning, as commuters across the Twin Cities reach for their car keys and parents pack school lunches, Minneapolis began an experiment in collective withdrawal that has not been attempted in an American city in nearly eighty years. The thermometer reads -21 degrees below zero. The buses, if the organizers are right, will not run. The schools will stand empty. The retail corridors will go dark.

By noon, tens of thousands of workers are expected to gather in downtown Minneapolis for what labor leaders are carefully calling a “Day of Truth and Freedom”—careful because “general strike” is a phrase that carries legal consequences in a country where such actions are functionally illegal, where union contracts forbid them, where the mere declaration can trigger lawsuits that drain treasuries. But whatever euphemism is deployed, the reality is plain: this could be among the largest coordinated labor stoppage in modern American history, and it is spreading.

Payday Report’s strike tracker, updated throughout the week, now shows solidarity actions planned in two hundred and fifteen cities across all fifty states. The number was forty-three on Sunday. It was a hundred and twenty on Tuesday.

By Thursday evening it had more than doubled again. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Seattle. Boston. Phoenix. Philadelphia. Detroit. Not symbolic demonstrations but walkouts, school closures, business shutdowns—the whole repertoire of withdrawal that labor theorists describe and that American workers have largely forgotten how to perform.

Of course, the question hanging over this Friday morning is not whether people will show up—the organizing has been too thorough, the anger too deep—but whether what happens in Minneapolis today becomes a template for resistance to federal immigration enforcement or a cautionary tale about the limits of labor power in an age of surveillance, litigation, and bureaucratic constraint.

The precipitating event was a killing, though that hardly captures what happened on January seventh when ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots through the windshield of Renee Nicole Good’s car, striking the thirty-seven-year-old mother in the head, chest, and forearm as she appeared, according to video evidence, to turn her steering wheel away from him.

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The Department of Homeland Security immediately characterized the incident as domestic terrorism—Good had tried to run over the agent—but an independent autopsy commissioned by her family told a different story. The federal government’s response was to double down on what it calls Operation Metro Surge: two thousand agents deployed to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area in what acting ICE Director Todd Lyons termed “the largest immigration operation ever conducted.”

Door-to-door searches in Somali neighborhoods. Traffic stops. Workplace raids. The apparatus of enforcement applied with a totality that Governor Tim Walz, the former Vice-Presidential candidate, described as an “occupation” by “armed, masked, undertrained” agents conducting “indiscriminate” operations against “Minnesotans of color, regardless of citizenship.”

What transformed outrage into a general strike was the intervention of organized labor. On January fifteenth, the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation—one hundred and seventy-five unions, eighty thousand members—formally endorsed the action.

The Minnesota AFL-CIO, with its eleven hundred affiliated locals, followed. This was not a spontaneous eruption but a calculated gamble by union leadership that the moment demanded it. Keiran Knutson, president of CWA Local 7520, has been frank about the tightrope he is walking. Hence the linguistic hedge: a Day of Truth and Freedom, not a strike.

The distinction will fool no one, but it provides legal cover, a way for workers to honor picket lines without technically violating no-strike clauses in their contracts. It is the kind of lawyerly maneuvering that characterizes American labor in the twenty-first century—militant in spirit, defensive in practice, always calculating the cost.

The internal contradictions are already visible. While federation leadership endorsed the walkout, some union bureaucracies moved to contain it. Teamsters Local 638 circulated warnings that participation would breach collective bargaining agreements. UPS workers, facing their own rank-and-file pressure, have said publicly they will walk anyway.

“We are not doing anything on Friday,” one told organizers. “It’s a general strike. No work, no school, no shopping. If we can shut the economy down, that’s the goal.” The split between union leadership’s strategic caution and rank-and-file militancy is a familiar story in American labor history, the tension between those who manage institutions and those who work in them. What makes today’s action significant is that the institutional leadership is, for once, out in front, betting that the political moment justifies the risk.

The corporate response has been silence. Target, where ICE agents detained two U.S. citizens inside a Richfield store earlier this month—both tackled after refusing to answer citizenship questions, one with a passport in his pocket—has declined every request for comment. So have UnitedHealth Group, Best Buy, 3M, Delta Airlines.

Target’s outgoing CEO, Brian Cornell, scheduled a hasty meeting with faith leaders yesterday under mounting pressure to address the company’s cooperation with ICE, which has been using Target stores as staging grounds. Organizers have demanded that corporations become “Fourth Amendment businesses,” refusing ICE access without judicial warrants. More than nine hundred small and medium-sized businesses have announced they will close today—food co-ops, retail shops, professional services, many offering paid time off for their workers.

The Fortune 500 companies have said nothing. Their calculus is transparent: wait it out, avoid choosing sides, hope the news cycle moves on. Whether they can still do that in an era when workers have demonstrated they can coordinate across two hundred cities in less than a week remains to be seen.

The five demands animating today’s action are unambiguous: immediate ICE withdrawal from Minnesota; legal accountability for agent Jonathan Ross; zero additional federal funding for ICE in any congressional appropriations; constitutional investigations into human rights violations; and corporate Fourth Amendment compliance. The framework is equally clear: no work, no school, no shopping, except for essential services. A march and rally at two this afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, with wind chills approaching twenty below.

The optimists expect tens of thousands. The pessimists worry that the cold, the legal threats, the institutional resistance will suppress turnout. Both may be right. General strikes are not precision instruments. They are demonstrations of collective capacity, tests of whether people believe they have more power together than apart.

What makes today significant—assuming people show up, assuming the machinery actually stops—is its synthesis of movements that have historically operated in separate spheres. Here is organized labor explicitly defending immigrant rights, challenging decades of union ambivalence toward undocumented workers. Here is a state government in open confrontation with federal authority, with the Department of Justice subpoenaing Governor Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison in an obstruction investigation that raises questions about federalism that will almost certainly end up in court.

Here is an attempt to transform labor and consumer power into direct political leverage, to make the ordinary functioning of commerce contingent on the federal government’s immigration policy. Whether any of this works—whether ICE withdraws, whether agent Ross faces charges, whether Target capitulates, whether Congress defunds enforcement operations—is unknowable.

General strikes in American history have had mixed records. The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, the historical reference point organizers keep invoking, won recognition for the union but required Governor Floyd Olson’s mediation and National Guard intervention. The 1946 Oakland general strike collapsed after two days. The 1919 Seattle general strike lasted five days and accomplished almost nothing except to terrify the business class.

But success, in these cases, is not always measured by immediate policy outcomes. Sometimes it is measured by what becomes thinkable afterward. The 2020 protests following George Floyd’s murder did not end police violence, but they generated more than six hundred workplace strikes across the country and shifted the national conversation in ways that are still unfolding.

The question today is whether what happens in Minneapolis creates a model for confronting federal immigration enforcement, or whether it becomes another example of labor’s structural weakness in a legal regime designed to prevent exactly this kind of action. By tonight we will know whether tens of thousands showed up or whether the cold and the legal threats and the institutional inertia kept people home. We will know whether Target’s stores stood empty or whether business continued as usual. We will know whether two hundred and fifteen cities really walked out or whether the tracker was counting demonstrations that never materialized.

The machinery of the Twin Cities is about to be tested. In a few hours, the buses will roll or they will not. The schools will open or they will not. The Target stores will serve customers or they will go dark. What we are witnessing is not a spontaneous uprising but a carefully orchestrated act of refusal, organized across unions and cities with a sophistication that suggests labor has been learning, quietly, how to coordinate in an age of digital communication and distributed networks. Whether that coordination translates into actual power—the kind that changes federal policy or makes corporations think twice about cooperating with ICE—depends entirely on what happens in the next twelve hours. By six this evening, when the rally ends and people go home, we will know whether this was the beginning of something or just another Friday in January, cold and forgettable, with nothing changed except the rhetoric.