After the Strike: The Battle for the Story of Minneapolis
Minnesota’s mass strike showed the power of collective action. The fight now is over what that victory meant — and what lessons people carry forward.
Sep 19, 2026
December 2025 and January 2026 were difficult months in the Twin Cities metro. Operation Metro Surge cast a shadow over daily life, touching nearly everyone in one way or another. Maybe you were an immigrant from Ecuador without papers, afraid to even go outside. Or an educator who saw their students’ lives torn apart by the abduction of a parent. It could be that you were one of those residents that served as a legal observer and got pepper-sprayed and arrested by ICE agents. For everyone in Minneapolis and St. Paul, that time was insane, like living in a war zone.
Of course residents didn’t take the military occupation of our neighborhoods and communities lying down. Working-class people fought back by organizing themselves into massive rapid-response and mutual-aid networks throughout the metro. Every week saw demonstrations in the streets, as the working-class pushed back. Then Rene Good was murdered, and it was clear that this was something on a scale that no one had experienced before.
SEIU Local 26 led the way, along with two local nonprofits, in calling for a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on January 23. The call was quickly picked up by unions, community groups, and rapid-response and mutual-aid networks that within 13 days were able to execute a mass demonstration of 100,000 people in minus 40-degree windchills and a mass strike of between 300,000 and 400,000 people statewide. The next day Alex Pretti was killed on the streets by ICE agents, and Minnesotans witnessed the Minneapolis police and state police show up to protect ICE against a public infuriated that their community had been turned into a literal war zone — despite the governor’s and mayor’s public promises to resist the ICE occupation and protect the public that had circulated widely on social media just weeks before.
The next day, on January 25 Target Corporation and 60 other leading Minnesota corporations (in other words, the oligarchy) issued a weak but important statement calling for calm and de-escalation by the Trump administration. Several days later on January 29, Border Czar Tom Homan came to Minnesota to announce a drawdown of ICE forces in the state. It is safe to say that there was a straightforward timeline connecting the expanding resistance networks, the mass strike, the letter issued by the oligarchs, and the decision by the Federal government to bring Operation Metro Surge to an end. Target was petrified that another ICE murder might result in an even bigger strike that could spread rapidly as workers discovered their power to interfere with profits and force the ruling class to bend to their demands.
When Target called together a meeting of the 60 largest corporations in the state to suggest a course of action in the days after the drawdown, part of what they must have discussed was how to use their money and influence to rein in the burgeoning working-class movement. They have some important levers of control they can use, such as their influence on political leaders like Governor Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — both of whom collaborated with ICE during the occupation –, on Democratic Party bureaucrats, on foundations that fund liberal nonprofits, and on unions that, in turn, have close relationships with the Democratic Party and nonprofits. It’s a neat transmission belt from the ruling class to the working-class movements they seek to defuse under the auspices of giving “support” to these newly worthy sources (and then softening their edges by controlling the purse strings).
From speaking to people close to the action, we know that millions of dollars have flowed into nonprofits like Common Cause to fund GOTV efforts in recent months. The Rockefeller Foundation has been busy dispersing money to various nonprofits for the same purpose. We also saw the hand of the ruling class in the recent “National Convergence for Democracy” conference held in Minneapolis this past August. It drew 500 nonprofit and union staffers, along with liberal and political activists from around the country. While some of the workshops focused on the lessons of Minneapolis in the fight against ICE, the keynote speakers in the opening session, which included Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, all made impassioned pleas to get out the vote in November to elect new and better leaders. This, in their eyes, is the key to beating back authoritarianism. But this trajectory stands in stark juxtaposition with the actual lessons of Minneapolis, where authoritarianism was beaten in the streets and through mass action.
It’s also important to note that when the Minnesota 15 (MN15) approached conference organizers with a request for a panel on government repression of anti-ICE activists, they were turned down. The MN15 are facing years in prison for doing what hundreds of thousands of other Minnesota residents did during the occupation: they organized demonstrations, rapid response networks and mutual aid, and were heavily involved in organizing the January 23 strike and subsequent Workers’ Assemblies. Defending those who face severe repression for resisting authoritarianism must be central to our strategy. How will we persuade average people to stand against authoritarianism in the future, if we leave these defendants to fend for themselves now?
In January many unions and social movement bureaucracies were forced, under the pressure of enormous anger from their members, to join in the January 23 strike and, for a short time, were endorsing another strike on May Day (May 1). By the beginning of March, it was clear that these same forces were backing away from a May Day mass strike, partly because the drawdown of ICE had relaxed tension and partly because the leaders of the Minnesota DFL and corporations like Target were very interested in steering the public’s discontent toward the elections as a safety valve for social anger. Even socialist organizations like DSA have followed suit to a certain extent and are directing most of their energy toward getting more socialist candidates elected to office.
In the lead up to May Day 2026, the very coalition of unions and social movement groups that had called for a massive work stoppage on May 1 — May Day Strong — started to retreat from the idea. Even the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), at the heart of May Day Strong, did not carry through on mobilizing sufficient forces to shut down Chicago on May 1. They have been talking about what actions by the Trump administration to interfere with November’s elections might constitute a red line that would then trigger a general strike. This kind of preparation is essential to responding to Trump and defending democracy. But as noted above, the Democratic Party and ruling class money are pushing hard to keep dissent contained to electoral politics and rewrite the lessons of the Minnesota resistance. And so far, it looks like they are succeeding. But the battle is far from over.
