January 2026
Democrats, Courts Won’t Do
It – Bring Out Workers Power!
Twin Cities: For a
Real General
Strike to Drive Out ICE Gestapo!
Minneapolis residents face off with federal agents on January 13. (Photo: David Guttenfelder / New York Times)
JANUARY 20 – For the past two months, paramilitary forces of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police and Border Patrol – part of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – have been terrorizing Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Carrying out Donald Trump’s plan for the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history, this army of masked federal agents initially targeted the tens of thousands of refugees from war-torn Somalia in Africa, who the racist Republican president calls “garbage.” Soon they were targeting Minnesotans based on racial profiling. Immigrants are afraid to go to work, their children fear going to school. After unleashing some 1,000 armed DHS agents – the modern-day equivalent of 19th-century slave-catchers – in mid-January Trump sent in 2,000 more feds to supposedly go after “fraud” and “crime” in “Democrat-run cities.” Now the Pentagon has put 1,500 Army troops on standby to beef up the occupation of the Twin Cities.
Renee Nicole Good, shown on ICE agent's cellphone video as she said to him, “That's fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Moments later, he murdered her.
This is the war on the “enemy within” that Trump told an assembly of all 800 top generals of the U.S. armed forces last September they would soon be waging. And as his “war secretary” Pete Hegseth vowed, they are doing it with “maximum lethality.” The January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good, shot in her car by ICE cop Jonathan Ross as her wife filmed the feds, shocked the nation. Over 1,000 protests took place across the country in the next several days, with tens of thousands marching in Minneapolis on January 10. The fact that this took place a mile from where in 2020 George Floyd was choked to death by a Minneapolis cop drove home the brutal reality that police murder never stops. Posters appeared of “Renee Nicole Good, American Mom, Murdered by ICE.” Yet since Trump took office a year ago, at least 40 immigrants have died in ICE custody or raids. And protests didn’t stop the trigger-happy feds: on January 14 ICE agents shot a Venezuelan immigrant in North Minneapolis and arrested two people who came to his aid.
What is urgently needed right now in Minneapolis-St. Paul is to bring out the power of organized workers at the head of the courageous and inspiring actions by thousands of community residents to put an end to the federal occupation and force ICE out! Activists of the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth have been in Minnesota for the last two weeks. We have joined protests by postal workers, high school students who walked out against ICE and other actions with our signs calling to “Mobilize Workers Power For ICE/Feds Out of the Twin Cities” and “For Mass Workers Action to Stop the Raids and Deportations,” while emphasizing “You Can’t Fight Trump with the Democrats – For a Revolutionary Workers Party!” Now labor and religious leaders have called for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23. But much more is needed. The IG/RIY call “For a Mass Strike and Workers Mobilization to Stop ICE Terror!”
No “Minnesota Nice” With ICE! This Is Class War
Protesters outside Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where people arrested by ICE are taken, January 16. (Internationalist photo)
The grotesque, wanton brutality of the immigration police shocked and outraged the population, which prides itself on community solidarity. The ICE cop who murdered Renee Good in cold blood walked away from the scene muttering the vile epithet “fucking bitch.” Witness statements and videos in a court suit going back to December documented how a woman who was observing ICE was thrown face down in the snow with an agent’s knee in her back and then dragged across an icy road even as bystanders yelled that she was pregnant. A woman observer was arrested, stripped of her clothes and had her bra and wedding band cut off in retaliation for asking for identification of an ICE agent. Among the most recent atrocities was a January 18 raid in St. Paul where they broke down a door and dragged a Hmong man, a U.S. citizen for decades with no criminal record, in his underwear out of his home in 12-degree weather, without a warrant, driving him to the middle of nowhere, forcing him to get out in the frigid weather so they could photograph him, before releasing him two hours later.
What is most striking is that, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis, huge numbers of ordinary people, including many workers and youth, have come out to protest, to blow whistles and honk car horns warning of the presence of ICE agents. The city has been honeycombed with Signal group chats of rapid responders reporting the feds’ movements, some with hundreds of members and well over 10,000 participants overall. DHS chief Kristi Noem, the unspeakable cruelty freak, has called them “domestic terrorists,” as she and other top Trump administration officials also labeled Renee Good while declaring her murderer to be a “hero.” Fascistic vice president JD Vance proclaimed that the killer cop has “absolute immunity” from prosecution. As we have said, the mass deportations and militarized hunt for immigrants are spearheading a drive for police-state rule (see “Abort Trump’s Police State,” The Internationalist No. 76, June-October 2025).
Thousands protested the racist police murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop, 26 May 2020. Millions took to the streets to denounce systemic racism. The cops kept on killing. (Photo: Star Tribune)
Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) mayor Jacob Frey (who was also in office when George Floyd was murdered by the cops Frey is the boss of) grabbed headlines by telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Yet, like Democratic mayors and governors across the U.S., Frey says the feds aren’t “needed” to help uphold capitalism’s racist “law and order.” And he denounced “agitators that are trying to rile up large crowds” while local police arrested 29 people during the January 10 mass march against ICE terror. DFL governor Tim Walz, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who bragged about being California’s “top cop,” mobilized the Minnesota National Guard on January 17 to “support local law enforcement.” Frey says he only has 600 police compared to 3,000 federal agents, but from L.A. to Washington, D.C. to Chicago and Minneapolis, Democrats have used local cops to shield the feds from protesters. They are all on the same side: police, National Guard, ICE, CBP, DHS, the military are all the armed fist of capital to keep down working people and the oppressed.
The courageous action of the population has exposed and made things difficult for the immigrant snatchers as they maraud around the Twin Cities, but this has not stopped ICE. Nor will the Democrats or the courts get the feds out of Minneapolis or tie the hands of these racist criminals. La migra – the hated immigration police – acts like it is above the law because it is; its masked agents look like terrorists because they are. What counts is power. Unless his rampage is stopped by a superior force, Trump will just tough it out – and he has already more than doubled the manpower of ICE. The vastly greater force that can put a halt to this hellscape is the working class, which can bring the wheels of commerce and industry to a grinding halt and through mass mobilization can stymie the action of capitalism’s corrupt armed agencies of repression. But to do so, to bring workers’ power to bear in militant class struggle, requires revolutionary leadership – as was the case in the world-famous Minneapolis general strike of 1934, which was led by Trotskyists committed to the fight for socialist revolution.
As the assault on immigrants and the working people of Minnesota as a whole continues and even escalates, representatives of the state’s labor unions, as well as religious leaders and community organizations, have called an “ICE out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” for January 23. A press release by the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO called the action along with the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation and other area labor councils around Minnesota. Also endorsing the call are SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, CWA Local 7250, the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28, ATU Local 1005, the Committee of Interns and Residents and the Minnesota AFL-CIO. The action called for “No Work, School or Shopping” to demand ICE out of Minnesota now; that the agent who killed Renee Good “be held legally accountable”; that there be no new funding for ICE in the federal budget, and that Minnesota corporations not cooperate with ICE. A demonstration in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled for 2 p.m. this Friday.
Break with the Democrats – For a Revolutionary Workers Party
A number of left groups and even some in the bosses’ media (like the Pioneer Press) are referring to January 23 as a “general strike.” Over 80 co-ops, businesses and stores in the Twin Cities area are planning to close on Friday. And many workers we’ve spoken with want to participate. But while top labor leaders signed on, and there is some unaccustomed tough talk, they are not necessarily calling on their members to strike. Teamsters Local 638, for example, issued a statement, supporting the call for “statewide community and labor action,” but just called for “any members not scheduled to work” that afternoon to participate in the demo and told members covered by “no-strike” clauses in their contracts (i.e., most of them) that “you are not legally permitted to strike” and anyone with a “legitimate reason” to take off work had better “follow the proper procedures.” Other union leaders are talking about a “sick-out” rather than an official strike. This puts it all on the members rather than taking responsibility for calling a strike themselves.
In Madison, Wisconsin tens of thousands of union members and supporters marched around the state capitol daily and occupied it for weeks in 2011, opposing a union-busting bill. “Progressive” labor leaders talked of a general strike, but then caved in out of fear that the ranks could get out of hand. Instead, they told demonstrators to go hom and vote for Democrats.
Unfortunately, at this point January 23 is not a general strike – far from it. What’s urgently needed is a struggle to turn the widespread desire for mass strike action into reality, and that struggle can’t and must not be postponed. A real general strike would mobilize the organized workers (and bring out many not yet unionized) for all-out class struggle against the bosses, their forces of repression and their parties and politicians. The January 23 action has more of the character of a “civic strike,” done in cooperation with local businesses and at least tacitly in conjunction with the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Yet a one-day work stoppage with a demonstration, which is what militant-talking labor bureaucrats and opportunist leftists mean when they talk “general strike,” is not going to kick out ICE or even modify the feds’ brutal tactics. It is essentially symbolic.
The Internationalist Group says that what’s needed is A REAL GENERAL STRIKE TO DRIVE OUT THE ICE GESTAPO. That would have to be a sustained labor action to shut down the economy and mobilize workers by the tens of thousands to use their power to put an end to the feds’ reign of terror. And that will require serious preparation. For Minnesota labor, the struggle for ICE out now must not end on January 23.
If a real general strike were to occur in Minneapolis, it would be the first in the United States since the Oakland, California general strike of 1946 that involved up to 100,000 workers, sparked by a walkout of women department store employees fighting for unionization amid a postwar strike wave across the U.S. In Wisconsin in 2011, tens of thousands of workers marched daily around the state capitol in Madison in opposition to a bill from labor-hating Republican governor Scott Walker to gut the right to unionize of public employees. Local labor leaders announced there would be a general strike on the day the legislation was voted on, but when the day arrived, these “progressive” bureaucrats called off the demonstration and told workers to go home and vote for Democrats in a special election. The Democrats lost, the legislation passed, and the teachers unions’ membership fell by 30%.
This is yet another example of how support to the Democrats means chaining labor’s power. To wage and win the struggle it was necessary to oust both mainline and “progressive” union tops with a class-struggle leadership. Such a leadership can only be built on a program getting to the root of racist terror, imperialist war and every form of oppression: a program for the working class to overturn this decaying capitalist system and take power into its own hands.
Postal workers marched on January 17 protesting ICE use of postal facilities to stage raids.
(Photo: Yuki Iwamura / AP)
Many liberal Democrats, including Democratic (Party) Socialists of America New York City mayor Zohran Mandani, are resuscitating the call to “abolish ICE.” As we explained when this demand was popularized by DSA Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Trump’s first term, the revulsion at the vile police force that is terrorizing millions of immigrants is fully justified. But the radical-sounding slogan “is being pushed by various ‘progressive’ Democrats precisely in order to pin the blame for the anti-immigrant offensive on Trump alone … and to obscure the fact that Obama deported far more immigrants than any Republican. In the remote possibility that this criminal agency were ever ‘abolished’ by Congress or the executive, the result would be another racist and Bonapartist police agency” like those that preceded ICE; so long as the capitalist class retains state power, it will never give up its machinery of repression. We also noted that those calling to abolish ICE were not calling to abolish the Border Patrol. Warning that “U.S. Immigration Policies Always Have Been Racist,” we called to “Smash the I.C.E. Gestapo with Workers Revolution!” (The Internationalist No. 53, September-October 2018).
The Battle of Minneapolis will go on. Class-struggle unionists and the growing number of activists looking for revolutionary answers must build on the mass resistance to ICE, which has kept growing since the feds invaded in early December. By sending thousands of paramilitary police and, potentially, military forces to occupy the Twin Cities, Trump may be setting a trap for himself, if labor mobilization grows. Workers, immigrants and youth across the country are intensely watching what is happening in Minnesota. A victory forcing ICE out would reverberate in cities across the country, and even in small towns and rural areas where immigrants are now a key section of the workforce. There is a lot of loose talk about a “civil war,” in which right-wingers boast that gun owners in Republican-governed states have 80 billion rounds of ammunition. But many gun owners in Minnesota are outraged over ICE’s antics, and in a hard-fought class war, the power of the workers dwarfs that of the fascists, the paramilitary cops and the billionaire masters of the capitalist government.
Battle of
Deputies Run, 22 May 1934. Trotskyist-led Minneapolis
Teamsters drive off police and deputized strikebreakers,
winning what became a citywide general strike. (Photo: Minnesota Historical Society)
The urgent task is to build a leadership fighting for a workers government here and internationally, on the revolutionary internatonalist program of Lenin and Trotsky. The victorious general strike that the Trotskyists led in Minneapolis in 1934 was one of the vital battles that led to mass unionization in the midst of the Depression, despite the attempts by the Democratic government of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and of Farmer-Labor governor Floyd B. Olson) to derail it. Now more than ever a revolutionary workers party, with a program of intransigent class struggle, is needed to lead all the oppressed to victory. For mlitant mass workers action to stop the raids and deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! FOR A REAL GENERAL STRIKE TO DRIVE ICE OUT! ■