A breakfast restaurant, a bike shop, and a brewery: these are some of the hundreds of businesses across Minnesota closing their doors Friday as part of a general strike to push Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of the state.
“There’s a time to stand up for things, and this is it,” Alison Kirwin, the owner of Al’s Breakfast in Minneapolis, told the New York Times. Kirwin is closing up shop for the day as part of the wider strike to push “ICE out of Minnesota”—the motto for the protest. “If it takes away from a day of our income,” Kirwin said, “that is worthwhile.”
The general strike, along with planned demonstrations and a march, is a part of what organizers are calling a “Day of Truth and Freedom.” The event will involve protests, prayers, and fasting—whether it be from food, work, or economic activity. The day is being organized by a coalition of clergy members and supported by many businesses, movement leaders, labor organizers, and even the entire Minneapolis City Council.
According to Christa Sarrack, president of a labor union that includes about 6,000 of Minnesota’s hospitality workers, Friday may be the largest worker action in Minnesota’s history. “We cannot simply sit by and allow this to continue,” Sarrack told the Times. “We must use every tool that we have to fight back.”
The day of actions will crescendo with a march leading to the Target Center, an arena downtown. Minnesotans coming out to protest are facing extremely cold weather conditions—with temperatures in the negatives all day.
Incredible. It’s -12° (-24.4° C) at MSP airport right now.
Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, president of the Minnesota Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, told The Guardian she is not concerned: Minnesotans are “built for the cold.”
“And we are going to show up,” Gabiou continued, “but folks are going to need to pay attention to not just the march, but what people are doing, the individual stories of solidarity.”
In the days that have followed ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car, federal immigration agents have ramped up their operations. The government agents shot another person, deployed chemical weapons on protesters (including minors), detained several kids from one school district, and dragged a naturalized US citizen out into the cold in only his underwear, among many other violent incidents.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) posted on Friday in support of the day of protest, writing, “Today people across Minnesota are coming together to send a message: ‘ICE Out of Minnesota.’ Minnesotans’ rights are under attack, and ICE needs to leave our streets.”
While general strikes, or work stoppages across industries, are rare in the United States today, that wasn’t always the case. As the Minnesota Reformer pointed out, these strikes were once a key staple of protest politics in this country but have been less common due to the stifling of labor rights by those in power. In Minnesota today, with hundreds of businesses across different sectors deciding to cede profits to send a message, organizers are showing it can be done again.
“It’s tense and emotional, and folks are hurting,” Bishop Dwayne Royster, the executive director of Faith in Action, one of the leading religious organizations planning the day of prayer and protest, said. But he applauded the people of Minnesota for a “deep resilience and willingness to stand together in ways I haven’t seen folks do in a very long time.”
