What We Know About Calls for a General Strike Over the Immigration Crackdown in Minneapolis

Activists are calling for a “nationwide day of no school, no work and no shopping” across the U.S. on Friday, Jan. 30, to protest President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown following the fatal shootings of two people by federal agents in Minneapolis. “The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country – to stop [Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN,” the website for the National Shutdown campaign reads. Thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets and hundreds of businesses shuttered last Friday in a similar general strike to call for an end to federal immigration enforcement operations in the state after an ICE officer shot 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good earlier in the month. A day after the mass demonstration, another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti, was killed by federal agents. Read more: On Thin ICE in Minneapolis: How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Sparked a Crisis of Trust Organizers for the upcoming nationwide strike noted the widespread “shock” and “outrage” over the two recent shootings in Minneapolis, as well as those of Silverio Villegas González in a Chicago suburb  and Keith Porter Jr. in Los Angeles last year. Porter, a 43-year-old father of two, was killed by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s Eve. González, also a father of two and originally from Mexico, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in September. He was 38. The Trump Administration has maintained that federal agents were acting in self defense in each of the shootings. But both Democrats and Republicans have raised concerns in the wake of the recent killings in Minneapolis, which have prompted protests across the country. “While Trump and other right wing politicians are slandering them as ‘terrorists’, the video evidence makes it clear beyond all doubt: they were gunned down in broad daylight simply for exercising their First Amendment right to protest mass deportation,” the National Shutdown website asserts. Who has called for the strike? The call for a nationwide general strike has come from a decentralized movement across multiple large cities, from Minneapolis to Cleveland to New York City. Organizers are asking people to abstain from work, school, and commerce to protest immigration enforcement and the recent shootings. The National Shutdown website lists local and national partners including the Defend Immigrant Families Campaign, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, the LA Tenants Union, and multiple student organizations at the University of Minnesota, while large activist groups like CodePink have also pledged to join. Several actors and other celebrities have joined in and called for the public to participate in the strike, including The Last of Us actor Pedro Pascal, Hacks’s Hannah Einbinder, Edward Norton, and Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis.  Many of these actors posted on Instagram and social media to spread news of the strike, including Pascal. “Truth is a line of demarcation between a democratic government and authoritarian regime,” Pascal wrote in the caption of a post about the strike, one of several he has recently made denouncing ICE and federal immigration agents’ actions. “What they’re doing in Minnesota with the strike needs to expand,” Norton told the Los Angeles Times while at the Sundance Film Festival. “We should be talking about a national general economic strike until this is over.” How successful was Minnesota’s walkout? Despite a reported negative-20 degree temperature in Minneapolis and preparations for the incoming snowstorm, photographs from Minnesota’s strike on Jan. 23 showed tens of thousands of people marching en masse. Over 700 businesses were shuttered in the day-long protests, with support from dozens of labor unions across the state. Dozens of clergy members sang hymns and prayers while kneeling on the road outside the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, calling for Trump to withdraw the 3,000 federal law enforcement officers sent to the area as a part of the so-called “Operation Metro Surge.”  Roughly 100 clergy members who participated in the demonstration were arrested. Read More: Minnesotans Shutter Businesses and Call Off Work in Economic Blackout Day to Protest ICE Beyond businesses, several cultural institutions in the Twin Cities closed as well, including the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Children’s Museum. Bernie Burnham, president of Minnesota AFL-CIO, the state’s federation of more than 1,000 affiliated local unions, said in a statement ahead of the mass walkout that members of the union would join with our fellow Minnesotans to reject fear and speak with one voice as we call for ICE to leave our state, no additional funding for ICE, legal accountability for ICE’s killing of Renee Good, and for Minnesota’s large corporations to stop cooperating with ICE.”