The mass, coordinated anti-ICE protests and walk-outs across the country on Friday—many of them coordinated by organized labor—are the latest sign that unions and left-wing activist groups view resistance to ICE and immigration enforcement as their best opportunity in years to rekindle the rage and rioting that marked the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
That was the year when, in the name of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter rioters torched a Minneapolis police precinct, smashed in storefronts in Los Angeles, and launched fireworks inside a Seattle Starbucks in addition to violent and sometimes deadly unrest in other large cities such as Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Portland. Roughly five years later, with BLM dormant and discredited, the organized left, led by labor unions, is rekindling national unrest—but with a fresh cause.
The call to impede ICE and Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops has become the latest anthem sung among activists in those deep blue cities and others, including New York and Hartford. Labor unions have endorsed a “Day of Truth & Freedom” in Minnesota, which entails hundreds of businesses closing their doors on Friday as a strike against the federal immigration crackdown. Activists in cities across the nation will join in “Ice Out For Good” marches to show solidarity with the Minnesota effort.
The organized nature of the demonstrations has not been lost on President Donald Trump.
“These people are professionals,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. “They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner.” Speaking to reporters that same day about the scene at the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, he described a protester who was “so loud, like a professional opera singer … These are professional agitators that want to see our country do badly.”
This month, assuming a role similar to that which it played in fomenting BLM chaos, unions, including United Auto Workers, have taken leading roles in coordinating the nationwide march.
“No work, no school, no shopping — only community, conscience, and collective action,” the ICE Out For Good website reads. Those outside of Minnesota are encouraged to “take action on January 23 in solidarity by organizing or attending a non-violent solidarity event, demanding corporations stand up to ICE, and calling on Congress to act now to rein in ICE.”
An “ICE Out for Good” rally—organized by a conglomerate of large and small unions as well as left-wing political groups such as Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America—is being held in Manhattan’s Union Square late Friday afternoon.
The unions, which once championed the BLM cause, have since rechanneled their energies toward resisting ICE and Border Patrol officers, perhaps seeing an opportunity to rebuild solidarity and passion on the left in the face of the MAGA movement. Friday’s strikes and protests, for example, resemble the nationwide “Strike for Black Lives” that took place in July 2020 at the behest of 60 unions and social justice groups, the San Diego-based outlet KPBS reported. Essential workers from Boston to San Francisco ditched their jobs to “rewrite the rules so that Black people can thrive, that corporations dismantle racism, [and] white supremacy.” In June of that year, researchers around the world promised a strike to #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia in support of BLM.
The Minnesota chapter of the AFL-CIO union approved the Friday march. Joining in the march, the group asserted, will “reject fear” and unite Minnesotans to “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,” said its president, Bernie Burnham.
On Wednesday, the Customs and Border Protection commander, Greg Bovino, was denied service at a Speedway in South Minneapolis. That small act of defiance, among many others, has galvanized the anti-ICE movement.
On Friday, a UAW chapter is leading a gathering in Boston to “stand together in collective power” with Minnesota. The union’s branch, UAW Region 9A, covers vast territory, spanning from Massachusetts to Puerto Rico, suggesting that its crowd could draw protesters from across the United States.
Another union, the Professional Staff Congress City University of New York (PSC-CUNY), which represents 30,000 CUNY and Research Foundation CUNY faculty and staff, also encourages others to join the rally. “We take to the streets to challenge Palantir and Amazon for enabling ICE to rip our communities apart,” read its flyer, adding that, “and for fueling the machinery of mass deportation and family separation.”
The logos for Amazon, Palantir, and Home Depot—three corporations accused of collaborating with ICE—are crossed out on another flyer issued for Friday’s Union Square rally.
Beyond progressive cities, demonstrations are also slated to occur in purple cities, like Dallas, or even red ones, such as Miami. Republican states, including Mississippi, Arizona, and Alabama, also have demonstrations scheduled in their blue enclaves. Meanwhile, other solidarity rallies are clustered in Democratic strongholds, like California, Oregon, and Washington.
Some social justice activists have pledged a “commitment to nonviolent action” by seeking to “de-escalate any potential confrontation” and behave lawfully, according to one New York protest’s flyer. Friday’s marches and job actions will put that promise to the test, given the tenor of some of the anti-ICE unrest. When the Trump administration sent some 2,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities area, they were met by activists who trailed their movements and harassed them outside their hotels.
Renee Good’s death has lit a tinderbox of anti-ICE sentiment, much in the way Floyd’s 2020 death—also in Minneapolis—sparked the most violent and deadly BLM riots yet. Trump and other conservatives have claimed that the protest that led to Good’s death was a professionally orchestrated operation to block ICE officers from doing their jobs.
Good’s wife, Becca Good, who was on the scene and urged Good to “drive, baby, drive,” reportedly followed an Instagram page, “MN Ice Watch,” that describes itself as an “autonomous collective documenting & resisting against ICE, police, & all colonial militarized regimes.”
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