We Can Fight This: Minnesota’s General Strike Shows How

Demonstrators participate in a rally and march during an “ICE Out” general strike and day of protest on Jan. 23, 2026, in Minneapolis. Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

There is a possible future in which the events that unfolded in Minnesota on January 23, 2026, are forgotten. The fact of the largest general strike in the state in nearly a century may be only remembered, if at all, as a big day of protests and walkouts, and no more than that.

In that future, the possibility of mass, coordinated, and powerful action is wiped from the public imaginary — because, within 24 hours, federal agents had killed another civilian in cold blood.

Donald Trump’s paramilitary forces shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. Like in the killing of Renee Good, video footage taken by witnesses appears to show a brutal, close-range killing. Eyewitnesses told The Intercept that Pretti was on the scene acting as a civilian observer. Videos show a group of more than four masked agents wrestle him to the ground and beat him, before one shoots him multiple times.

The shooting — the third in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents since Trump’s deportation machine descended on Minnesota with extreme brutality in December — is an unbearable follow-up to the most extraordinary day of mass resistance to Trumpian fascism to date.

It is also a searing reminder as to why Friday’s mass strike in Minneapolis must not be swept from our minds. Rather, it must be treated as a powerful new phase of resistance against Trump’s regime — a task that can only be achieved by building on and repeating it.

On Friday, tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved extreme cold to march en masse and shuttered a reported 700-plus businesses in a daylong general strike with the support of all major unions. They protested, transported, fed, and watched over each other, an outgrowth of weeks, months, and years of community care and abolitionist resistance. Their collective actions mark a breakthrough in the fight against the American authoritarianism of our time.

It is only a future with mass social strikes, or general strikes, involving large-scale disruption on the immediate horizon that has the chance of stopping Trump’s forces. 

On January 23, the Twin Cities offered a small glimpse of the sorts of work stoppages, blockades, and shutdowns that aggregated practices of collective resistance make possible.

The task ahead of us, in the face of the government’s unending violence and cruelty, is to take up, share, and spread the practices modeled by networks in Minnesota.

Saturday’s slaughter does not disprove the power of Friday’s strike; no one was under the impression that tides had somehow turned in a day. The point is that, thanks to Minnesota’s resistance, we can see how to go on.

People in the Streets

On Friday afternoon, when people filled the downtown Minneapolis streets, it was the coldest day of the year so far: a reported minus 20 degrees, with a wind chill reaching minus 35.

“I’m seeing icicles form on people’s eyelashes out here, on mustaches, on eyebrows, from just the condensation from their own breath freezing against their own face,” a video journalist reported from the ground. 

The day began early with dozens of protesters barricading the road outside the Whipple Detention Center, the home base of Trump’s deportation machine in Minneapolis, for over two hours.

Later that morning, over 1,000 people, including religious leaders in prayer, formed a picket outside the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport. Since December, over 2,000 people in Minnesota have been taken by federal immigration authorities; many have been deported through the airport. Around 100 people were arrested at the airport protest.

Meanwhile, businesses refused to open their doors in numbers not seen in decades.

No, the government was not brought to its knees under the economic weight of a one-day strike called on short notice. Friday, however, was a crucial step, to be built upon and built upon, creating the specific sort of political strike that takes aim at the very nature of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in our cities and towns.

It is precisely this combined model of strike, targeted blockade, and mass demonstration, all undergirded by networks of mutual aid, that we need to repeat and expand. 

“Hope Is a Discipline”

Community defense against ICE did not, of course, begin with Minneapolis — although the city has been the site of Trump’s most lawless and thoroughgoing fascist, nakedly racist operation to date. Residents in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and beyond have blockaded ICE facilities, hid their immigrant neighbors, filled immigration courts, filed lawsuits, and confronted federal agents in the street. And these acts of resistance were not only learned to fight Trump’s regime. They have been rehearsed many times over, in centuries of struggle. 

There are times in a broad and disarticulated political movement, however, when things come together. Momentum builds. And there are events that shift the ground, after which it makes sense to speak of a before and an after.

The day following the strike brought more horror where there had been an opening for hope. Hope, though, is not what is really needed now — not hope as a sentiment, at least. We prove our orientation toward a better world, whether we feel hope or not — and I do not — by continuing to act against this murderous state force, and for each other. This is what the abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba meant in calling hope a “discipline.”  

After January 23 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, we have grounds to talk and organize seriously around general strikes in other cities, states, even nationally — general strikes with the specific aim of making our cities and towns as difficult as possible for ICE and other federal forces to move through. Not by dint of social media calls, or columns like this, but by going on in the way of Minnesotans.

Minnesota organizers did not conjure the state’s largest day of labor action in nearly a century by simply announcing “general strike” online. Labor unions, religious and community institutions, and front-line activists were all key; so, too, was the fury of everyday people, in a city where community support is normalized, and militant anti-racist protest boasts a proud history.

Minneapolis’s extraordinary rapid-response networks, activated to keep watch on ICE and provide transport and care for immigrants, developed swiftly. Minneapolis-based organizers Jonathan Stegall and Anne Kosseff-Jones, however, have said, “Many of these systems sprung to life along the paths laid down by the 2020 uprising after the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd.”

As Sarah Jaffe noted in the New Republic, “The Twin Cities have had plenty of opportunities to build up these networks of resistance, networks that have only grown larger in the wake of Good’s killing.”

This constellation of factors meant in a matter of days, a strike action could be called involving hundreds of thousands of workers across sectors. This can and must be repeated elsewhere. This is not the first time Minneapolis has led the way. And it is for this reason, too, that Minneapolis will not be defeated by the deadly escalations of federal agents the following day.

21st-Century General Strike

General strikes in 2026 will not look the same as they did in the early 20th century. In an age of technocapital and decimated labor power, conditions look different. Even with a slowly rebuilding labor movement, effectively marshaling collective refusal is extraordinarily hard.

It remains the case, however, as Kieran Knutson, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis, told Democracy Now!, that “nothing runs without the working class in this country.”

A general strike against Trump’s authoritarianism requires a specific navigation of territory and time — addressing the ways ICE moves rapidly through our cities and neighborhoods — and how to fight against it. That means combining neighborhood patrols with confrontational shutdowns, and creating barriers for federal agents wherever they try to go — including the damn bathroom.