On January 23, 2026, the people of Minneapolis zipped up their coats, pulled on their snow boots, and took to the streets. Tens of thousands of Minnesotans answered the call of “no work, no school, no shopping” and joined in a statewide day of protest. Their loudest demand was simple: for the 3,000 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents currently occupying the North Star State to get the hell out.
Some referred to the action as an “economic blackout,” the “Day of Truth & Freedom,” while others took inspiration from the city's own vibrant labor history and dubbed it a general strike. No matter how you slice it, everyday operations in the Twin Cities screeched to a halt that day. Hundreds of businesses and cultural institutions closed, workers walked off the job, students walked out of school; praying clergy and faith leaders blocked the road to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, and the Minnesota AFL-CIO, the state’s federation of more than 1,000 affiliated local unions, encouraged its members to join the afternoon march.
Organizers also called for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot 37-year-old mother of three Renee Nicole Good, to be held accountable; an end to federal funding increases for ICE; and for Minnesota corporations to cease cooperating with the agency. “After weeks of living under the heavy weight of this racist campaign of terror by ICE agents… today we are going to show our power,” Kieran Knutson, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis, told Democracy Now!
Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to launch a large-scale immigration raid on the local Somali community. Since then, the agency’s poorly trained, heavily armed officers have wreaked havoc in the area, tear-gassing and assaulting residents, including US citizens; detaining small children; harassing elders; and brutally killing two people—Good, and 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti.
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In 2020, police officer Derek Chauvin murdered Minneapolis resident George Floyd in broad daylight, sparking a protest movement that swept through the entire country. Minneapolis hasn’t forgotten what they learned about organizing and rebellion during that fiery summer, and as ICE began disappearing their friends and neighbors, that muscle memory kicked in. Citywide mutual aid networks, ICE watch groups, food distribution, and deep community care have defined the locals’ response to ICE’s occupation, even as the agents themselves have relied on violence and aggression to try to stamp out resistance. When January 23 came, the temperatures dropped well below zero but the streets filled with thousands upon thousands of people, armed with only their signs, their families, and their hand warmers.
I was over a thousand miles away that day, and could only follow the action via social media and texts from friends. As workers in Minneapolis put down their tools and hit the streets, I was walking around frigid Lawrence, MA, with a group of labor organizers from around the country, taking in the history of a much older work stoppage: the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike. That was another cold, wintry, citywide labor action led by immigrant workers and their allies, inspired by a fight for dignity and justice, sustained by mutual aid, and marred by police violence.
The early 1900s were a period of intense xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, and factory bosses took advantage of the widespread discrimination to pay their predominantly foreign-born workforces next to nothing. In the thunderous textile mills of Lawrence, thousands of mostly young women and children labored under dirty, humid conditions to churn out endless yards of cotton and woolen cloth; accidents were common, and tuberculosis and pneumonia were a constant threat.
“Thirty-six of every 100 of all men and women who work in the mills die before or by the time they are 25 years of age,” Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote in a 1912 study. Girls as young as 14 worked up to 56 hours per week, while making pennies on the dollar; adult workers with families to support struggled to feed their children on their tiny wages. When mill owners cut workers’ hours from 56 to 54 hours per week, they also cut those two hours’ worth of pay—32 cents a week, the price of several loaves of bread—from their paychecks. For workers who were bringing home less than $9 per six-day week, that lost bread was the last straw.
On January 11, 1912, Polish women weavers at the Everett Mill walked off the job in protest. Word of the action quickly spread, and within a week they’d been joined by 25,000 others. Lawrence was an incredibly diverse city with a large immigrant population that hailed from 51 different countries, and the strike saw Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Irish, Russian, French, Portuguese, Armenian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian workers all join together for the cause.
As the strike went on, organizers from the worker-led Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union and the Italian Socialist Federation helped the strikers form committees, raise money, and rally public support as the strike stretched into its second month. Meanwhile, local women joined the picket lines and fought cops, as well as running strike kitchens. They needed all the help they could get: City officials had responded to the strike by calling in the local militia and using police to harass and intimidate workers on the picket lines.
When strikers fought back, they were beaten or jailed; when organizers arranged to send strikers’ children out of the city to stay with pro-union families, cops attacked their train, dragging women and children off the platform and causing one woman to miscarry. Public sympathy soon swung in the workers’ direction, and Camella Teoli, a 14-year-old mill girl who had been scalped when her long hair got swept up in a textile machine, was invited to testify at a Congressional hearing in March 1912. By the end of the month, American Woolen Company and the other struck mills had caved. The workers won a 15% wage increase, double pay for overtime, and a pledge not to retaliate against workers who’d taken part in the strike. Fearful of being hit by work stoppages of their own, mill owners across New England also adopted many of the strikers’ demands.
The tactics used by young immigrant women to take on Lawrence’s textile barons are still in use today worldwide. They held multilingual meetings to ensure every worker felt heard and represented, and translated their publications into 25 languages. They cooked and fed one another, organizing soup kitchens and putting produce donations from local farmers to good use. They defended one another in the face of state violence and police brutality, and above all else, they refused to allow themselves to be divided.
“All the nations of the world are represented in this fight of the workers for more bread,” the strikers stated in a public proclamation that was translated into multiple languages and shared. “The flaxen-haired son of the North marches side by side with his dark-haired brother of the South. They have toiled together in the factory for one boss. And now they have joined together in a great cause, and they have cast aside all racial and religious prejudice for the common good, determined to win a victory over the greed of the corrupt, unfeeling mill owners, who have ruled these people so long with the whip of hunger and the lash of the unemployed.”
In short, they won because of solidarity—which is also exactly how the people of Minnesota built the durable and inspiring resistance network we all saw on January 23. Where strikers once relied on word of mouth, alarm bells, and mass meetings, today’s rebels have now added Signal chats, whistles, and affinity groups to their organizing toolbox. Times and conditions may change, but the struggle between labor and capital continues.
“The crimes of the police during this trouble are almost beyond human imagination,” the textile workers wrote all those years ago. “They have clubbed the strikers at every opportunity. They have dragged little children from their mothers' arms and with their clubs they have struck women who are in a state of pregnancy. They have placed people under arrest for no reason whatsoever.” Does that sound familiar? These early 20th-century mill girls may as well have been describing ICE. Lawrence remains a city of immigrants, where more than 80% of the population is Latino. Decades of migration from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic have revitalized the old textile town, where mills have since been turned into condos. ICE has recently stepped up its raids there, leading to an uptick in arrests and detentions that has set the entire city on edge.
I was sad not to be able to stand with protesters in Minnesota that day, but spending time in Lawrence was a much-needed reminder that there have always been workers who fought back. They refused to swallow bigoted propaganda and abandon one another in times of crisis, stood up for the most vulnerable, and stared down danger when it came for them, because the alternative—giving up— was unimaginable. My little field trip ended in a parking lot somewhere in Boston, where hundreds of people—union members, immigrant-justice organizers, socialists, grandmas, and anyone else you can think of—rallied in 19-degree weather to show their solidarity with the people of Minneapolis and against ICE’s vicious assault on our communities. It was beautiful, and it felt like yet another step toward the better future we all deserve.
We still have plenty to learn from those who came before us, including—the workers, organizers, strikers, and everyday people who found the courage to stand up against injustice and refuse to accept the unacceptable. Already, student unions in Minneapolis are calling for another mass work stoppage on January 30. As the workers of Lawrence said when they proudly walked out into the freezing January morning in 1912, “Great is the provocation, greater must be the answer of the workers to the employing class… On to the general strike of all workers, of all professions, of women, men, and children. Tie up everything. On to action!”
