By KD Tait
Minneapolis saw one of the biggest mobilisations against immigration enforcement in years on 23 January, with a mass march and a broad “shutdown” appeal that reached well beyond the usual activist circles. Thousands took the streets under the call to drive ICE out of the city. Alongside the demonstration came walkouts, workplace solidarity actions and protests by small business owners closing down for the day.
The immediate spark was the killing of Renée Nicole Good on 7 January, shot by an ICE officer during a raid in the city. That killing landed in a political context shaped by escalating federal operations and aggressive displays of force: raids, intimidation, the deliberate use of fear as a governing tool.
The ‘general strike’ in slogan and reality
Many people described the action as a general strike. That reflects a healthy instinct, of the need to go beyond ‘business as usual’. It reflects a developing understanding that raids are not defeated by moral appeals, but by making them unworkable.
At the same time, it matters what we call things, because strategy depends on it. A genuine general strike is not defined by the size of a march or the number of shops that close, but by a coordinated stoppage across key workplaces and sectors, with decisions taken by workers and enforced by their own organisation. What happened in Minneapolis was closer to a mass political strike day with uneven participation. If the scale was impressive; the lever that can actually force the state to retreat is still only partially engaged.
That’s not a dismissal of action, a demonstration of 50,000 in Minneapolis is a substantial proportion of the population. Even partial shutdowns teach lessons quickly: who has power, where the weak points are, what the police and federal agencies do when normal routines are disrupted, and what kinds of organisation we are missing.
Repression escalates
The state’s response underlined the stakes. Just 24 hours after the Friday demonstrations, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, who had been detained while participating in a protest.
Two killings in less than three weeks in the same city represent the deliberate escalation of violence, against a population which has repeatedly defied Trump. These murders are the hard edge of the immigration crackdown: militarised operations, masked agents, lethal force, then a ready-made justification offered up by the same apparatus that pulled the trigger.
The role of the unions
The trade unions sit at the centre of what comes next. Without labour power, there is no route from mass protest to decisive victory. At the same time, the dominant union leadership culture remains tied to legality, partnership with the state, and dependence on the Democrats. This contradiction is not accidental. It is built into the way the bureaucracy secures its position: negotiation over confrontation, managed pressure over open-ended struggle.
That is why the fight for effective action has to be fought inside the unions: for rank-and-file initiative, workplace democracy, and leadership that treats direct action as normal rather than exceptional.
Minneapolis has already posed the practical questions. What does it mean to support immigrant communities if workplaces continue to operate as normal while raids intensify? What does solidarity look like when deportation logistics rely on transport hubs, contractors, local administration and public infrastructure?
The killings of Good and Pretti underline what is happening. Immigration enforcement is being used as a form of domestic counter-insurgency: a mixture of terror, spectacle and exemplary violence. The state wants a lesson learned in advance — don’t resist, don’t assemble, don’t test your strength.
That’s why it’s vital to vigorously reject any talk of more ‘professional’ or ‘accountable’ version of the same machinery. When liberals talk about “reforming” ICE tactics while accepting border policing as normal, they are conceding the principle and bargaining over methods.
Frey and the Democrats: a tactical quarrel
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota’s Democratic leadership have criticised federal actions, and they posture as defenders of a “sanctuary” model. But what they are actually defending is their own prerogatives. Their message, stripped of rhetoric, is: let’s restore order, reassert local control, and work with federal authorities on the terms we can live with.
That means collaboration dressed up as pragmatism. The dispute is over tactics and jurisdiction — how raids are carried out, who controls the narrative, what level of brutality is politically manageable — not over the underlying system of immigration policing and deportation.
And this is where the current wave differs politically from the aftermath of major police murders during the Black Lives Matter upsurge. Then, the Democratic establishment could tolerate a certain amount of street anger because it could be absorbed into electoral theatre, NGO-managed reforms, and symbolic gestures. The protests were huge, but the class lever was largely left untouched.
Minneapolis has hinted at something more dangerous to the rulers: the prospect of working-class unity in action, cutting across legal status and race, and expressed through the power to stop production and disrupt the running of the city. That is harder to co-opt because it threatens not only Republican hardliners but the Democrats’ own role as managers of the same state.
When stoppages begin to appear, the Democrats stop posing as allies of protest and start acting as guardians of ‘normality’. They will talk about ‘de-escalation’, condemn ‘provocation’, and present themselves as the responsible structures keeping the movement within bounds. Their aim is to prevent a developing strike dynamic from becoming a political challenge to the whole order.
Both parties need racism and repression
What is driving the federal offensive is not simply Trump posturing to his MAGA base—otherwise it wouldn’t exist within a continuum of previous administrations going back to Clinton. It is part of a broader attempt to discipline the working class in a period of sharpening instability: inflationary pressure, decaying public services, polarisation, and an international environment moving towards open conflict between rival imperialist blocs.
Racism is the oldest tool for breaking solidarity and lowering expectations. It creates scapegoats, divides workplaces, and allows the state to test methods of repression that are then generalised. The drift towards bonapartist methods — rule by decree, permanent emergency measures, militarised policing — goes with the crisis of consent. Where the far right has the initiative, it will push further: street intimidation, authoritarian nationalism, and flirting with fascistic politics.
The point is not that Democrats and Republicans are identical. They differ on messaging, coalition management and the tempo of the offensive. But they are converging on the essential project: keeping the working class fragmented and governable while preparing society for a harsher period: austerity at home, imperial competition abroad, and tighter coercion to manage the blowback.
A movement that begins to unite workers on a class basis, and begins to reach for strike power, cuts across that whole agenda. That is why we see the whole US establishment moving quickly to place a limit on escalation: not out of humanitarian concern, but because a labour-based dynamic opens the door to a different kind of politics.
What would move this forward
If Minneapolis is to turn a mass protest day into a step towards a real general strike, the centre of gravity has to shift into workplaces in a practical way. That means meetings that decide action, elected committees that can coordinate between sites, and clear targets that hit the operational capacity of the raid-and-deportation machine. It also means refusing the ‘good cop’ offers from the Democrats: inquiries, commissions, etc that leave the apparatus intact, just like with the fraudulent disbanding of the Minneapolis PD after the murder of George Floyd.
The stakes are already written in blood. The question now is whether the city’s labour movement turns solidarity into organised power, or whether the initiative is allowed to ebb while the state regroups and resumes on its own terms.
Minneapolis has shown what’s possible when tens of thousands move together. The next test is whether that energy is organised in the only place that can stop raids for real: the workplaces that keep the system running.
