The Month in Review: Minneapolis

The Stories Behind the Stories

The Impact

De-Construction

In mid-December, many of us read about instances of workers climbing onto roofs and into the rafters of buildings, withstanding freezing temperatures to try to elude ICE and in some cases, ending up in the hospital. But as Merle Payne, Executive Director of CTUL shared with us “I know the news is getting out there, but what is actually happening on the ground is significantly worse. One worker went to the hospital with a fractured skull and ICE claimed that he had run at a wall at full speed, in another case, a person of color was dragged out of his car, surrounded by ICE agents with guns pointed at him, punched repeatedly in the face and handcuffed, only to be let go after they saw that he was a citizen.” Payne estimates that, given the level of fear they are living with, 75-80% of CTUL’s base has not been going to work. The most common problem he is hearing is that people can’t pay their rent. CTUL has launched a rent fund with an initial goal of $100,000 that has now raised close to $300,000. 

Restaurants Going Under

Anyone who has visited Minneapolis and St. Paul in the past few years knows that it has become quite the foodie scene but the raids are taking an enormous toll. In the last week, Dan Fehrenkamp, our partner at the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) has spoken with 15 restaurants that have closed. At Mercado Central, a mecca of Latino restaurants, owners described maxing out their credit cards and having lost so much business that they have been unable to pay the rent.

Open season on Somalis and Homecare Patients

Zuhur Ahmed, WJL research and outreach worker and long-time community activist in the Somali community told us that, while the community was already in crisis over the Trump administration’s racist attacks, now whole residential buildings are being targeted by ICE. Long-time US citizens who have been in Minneapolis for decades have been picked up on the street and harassed at their homes and businesses. People in the community have been skipping work, keeping children home from school and limiting their movements as much as they can. 

Hundreds of Somalis own and thousands more are employed by small agencies, which provide home and community-based health and child care. When it was discovered that a small number of these agencies had fraudulently billed the government for services during and after COVID, the Trump administration decided to target the whole community for collective punishment. In addition to living in fear of the ICE raids, payments to these agencies have slowed significantly since November and many agencies are close to going under. The federal government is now taking 90 days (instead of 30) to process payments. “These are low margin businesses with little savings or access to small business loans who are unable to pay their workers who were already living paycheck to paycheck,” Ahmed shared. The ripple effects have been devastating for these workers and their families; many are unable to pay for groceries or cover their rent.

Small Business Under Siege

In their recent outreach to 450 of the businesses with whom they work, NDC has found that “80% have been significantly impacted. Brick and mortar retailers told them that sales were down 50-80%. In his conversations, Fehrenkamp has heard the emotional toll this is taking: “small business owners who really care about the people they employ are crying on the phone.” He told us about a recent call with a South Minneapolis auto repair shop owner who has been in business for 20 years, currently in a cash crisis, distraught over his inability to help employees whose landlords are showing them no grace. The City of Minneapolis estimates that lost revenue is between $10-20 million per week.

“Words are not sufficient to describe what is happening right now,” said Rudy Trujillo, part of WJL’s Minneapolis Small Business Project who estimates that on Lake Street, a main business artery where most owners are immigrants, only five businesses are open out of 30. Hussein Ahmed, one of our partner bookkeepers shared with us that, while most clients and owners are citizens, they’ve been too afraid to go to Karmel Mall, a hub of the Somali community for shopping and dining. The Minneapolis Foundation, NDC and others have put together emergency funds for small businesses. 

ICE Not Rights… Green cards? Citizenship? Who cares?

ICE's presence has so destabilized communities that even routine labor enforcement has become impossible. Businesses are shuttered, and any government site visit risks deepening fear among the very workers they are charged with protecting. “How do you enforce labor law in an environment like this?” asked Brian Walsh, director of the Labor Standards Enforcement Division at the City of Minneapolis and one of our closest collaborators.

Our Minneapolis colleagues also are finding themselves and their families in the cross-hairs. Some have gotten to the point where their spouses are no longer able to leave the house. One recounted conversations with her husband: “At first, he said ‘I feel fine, I will just show them my green card’… but it became increasingly apparent that they don’t care if you have a green card… We don’t have him pick up the kids from school anymore. He’s staying home.” Another shared that his wife hasn’t left the house alone since the ICE surge. “She is a US citizen and went from ‘this is so absurd that you have to carry your passport’ to ‘oh my God, it is not safe to go outside.’ We see the stories and videos of people like her being violently snatched up off the street and locked up for hours and we can’t risk that.”

Organizing Response

For many years, Minneapolis has been an exemplar not only of effective labor, community, faith-based and immigrant worker organizing but also of deep coalition-building. For the past six weeks,we have also seen an incredible outpouring of activity on the part of people who have never participated before. Here are some of the ways in which different organizations have built the infrastructure and worked together to meet this moment.

Democracy is in the Streets… and Neighborhoods

The past six weeks have witnessed unprecedented levels of participation on the part of Minneapolis residents. WJL fellow Eric Blanc reports that the community organization Unidos Minnesota and others estimate that over 30,000 people over the past six weeks have received non-violence and civil resistance training (organizers also say there are many more informal “short and fast” trainings taking place frequently). In general, mass trainings that mix practical organizing and non-cooperation skills with political education are better than zoom calls with endless speakers. Too often people jump on these calls in the hope of learning specific actions they can take and local organizations they can plug into, but they are turned into passive listeners who often leave without concrete next steps.

Blanc writes that 4% of all residents of every neighborhood in Minneapolis are now part of neighborhood Signal groups (some other organizers have reported an even higher percentage). 

One recent survey found that 23% of Minneapolis residents had taken part in some ICE-related resistance activity, from driving children to school to monitoring and confronting ICE in their neighborhoods, to taking part in pickets, vigils and civil disobedience marches. Even tow truck drivers have volunteered their services to the families of those who have been pulled out of their cars and detained. The biggest mobilization so far has been the 50,000 strong January 23rd March. Organizers estimate that roughly 1,000 businesses, overwhelmingly small businesses, participated and that a million Minnesotans supported the action in some form that day. 

ROC-Minnesota, which has been organizing restaurant workers for many years, has launched the “86 La Migra Campaign.” It has a seventy worker organizing committee, has trained over 500 workers to create workplace safety plans for ICE response, put mutual aid support in place and coached workers to ask their management to sign on to the 86 ICE Pledge. They are also allying with small business owners who have already signed the pledge to call for the Minneapolis Hospitality Association to take a stand. 

Bigger Asks/Bigger Movement

As more parents grew fearful of leaving their homes due to ICE raids, Ruth Schultz former organizing director of CTUL and now working as an organizer for UFCW #663 (and mother of two) knew that there would need to be school support for parents and children at a massive scale. Schultz worked with Veronica Mendez, former executive director of CTUL, as well as a friend from Take Action Minnesota, to create a system to organize rides and family support. 

In Schultz’s own school of 300, which is 95% Latino, 70 kids are being driven to and from school every day. “It feels like we are running a bus company,” she told us. One of the social justice churches in the neighborhood recruited a large volunteer list and these local people have been driving kids as well as taking part in patrols. Both Mendez and Schultz described learning from Chicago organizers, the last major city targeted by ICE, as well as from the movement infrastructure that was built during the citywide mobilization around the murder of George Floyd. 

“We started to build out this network knowing that it would become more than transportation,” said Mendez. “Ally parents were starting to talk to immigrant families about what do folks really need, and they really stepped up.” As someone who grew up in Minneapolis and has been organizing there for many years, Schultz reflected upon the remarkable level of community engagement: “I feel like in this moment you just have to make big asks and not have any feelings about it. I was literally asking people can you pick up and drop off a kid every single day this week? We need full coverage, that’s the way it works best for a family to have consistency and for myself as a ride coordinator.” 

Mendez remembers early on some teachers being worried that parents would burn out but that hasn’t happened, instead she hears “Yes, I’ll do mornings and afternoons every day, I’ll figure out my life, skip my book group… This has changed people’s lives, they just don’t look the same now. People are settling into this routine.” Mendez believes “It is not just a social media moment—so many people are active in a very close to home way. The scale is just massive because there are immediate roles for people to take up: there is the very local geographic organizing around the schools, volunteer drivers, emergency crisis funds, rapid response networks and neighborhood patrols.” Mendez, who lives in south Minneapolis, a central target for the ICE raids, described seeing people patrolling the streets and hearing whistles blowing all the time. Those participating go far beyond the usual suspects.  

Revising the Playbook in a Movement Moment

“No one has ever seen this sort of organic response to anything before,” Brian Elliott, Executive Director of the SEIU State Council told us. “Neighbors and communities have really self-organized in this amazing way that I don’t think any organization or group of organizations could have done intentionally.” They are also seeing members of their own unions who had not previously been involved coming forward. “Part of this is going to be about figuring out how to connect the activism of our members who have participated in this, to the union.” Elliott notes that what we engage them on and how will determine whether people will feel compelled to take part–telling people to text or e-mail their congresspeople is likely to miss the mark. One effort I’ve heard about is ISAIAH’s effort to publicize and recruit people to attend the Democratic Farmer Labor Party caucuses last week, with good turnout results.

On a recent podcast, Greg Nammacher from SEIU Local 26, which represents over 8,000 janitors and other property service workers, also pointed to the enormous upsurge in participation noting that “groups and structures that didn’t exist, or didn’t exist at an organizational level, just weeks ago are now playing key roles.” Organizations like his have been called to shift their mindset. As Nammacher explained in a recent episode of the Dig: “Usually, when a union gets ready to strike — or when we’re trying to do turnout to an action — every single person we’re engaging has been carefully, relationally propositioned to step into action, supported in a very intentional, systematic way… in this moment, there’s a surge of momentum that is just breathtaking and comes from every direction. This is an incredibly hopeful story about combining systematic, intentional, self-conscious organizing with … understanding that in a movement moment when the entire community is provoked, things will move far beyond your organizational control.”

Not Starting from Scratch: Movement Infrastructure Matters

In a recent interview in Hammer and Hope Doran Schrantz, former Executive Director of the statewide community organizing group ISAIAH, founded in 2000 as a powerful intergenerational, multiracial, multifaith, cross-geographical statewide power-building coalition, described the organization’s reach. ISAIAH has played a critical role in organizing during this period, winning critical elections that enabled them to win major legislative victories. The organization includes a Muslim coalition of 46 Islamic centers as well as Muslim neighborhood and community organizations; Kids Count On Us, which is organizing child-care providers, workers, and parents at 500 community-based child-care centers; and a significant church base, with clusters all over the state and anchored in the suburbs and the cities. They also have 10 college campus organizations, along with young adult apartment groups. When the crisis hit, ISAIAH was able to bring its leaders together to plot strategy, and to act as an anchor organization providing critical support to the larger movement.

Tending the Soil is another central piece of movement infrastructure in Minneapolis. Formed in 2018 and comprised of five power building organizations with a long history of effective and equitable organizing, the groups have committed to long-term alignment and built shared infrastructure that has facilitated their work in this moment.

 The organizations are: 

• Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL)
• Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia | Renters United for Justice
• New Justice Project
• SEIU Local 26
• Unidos MN

Prior to ICE arriving in Minneapolis, members of Tending the Soil also pulled together an anti-authoritarian organizing table where discussion about strategies for meeting the moment had been underway prior to the ICE surge. It was at this table that ISAIAH, Unidos MN and SEIU Local 26 had been in months of planning for a major escalation in May 2026. When they decided to move the action up to the 23rd of January, what they had planned to do in 3 months was reduced to 2 weeks. They were able to leverage their existing infrastructure as well as those of other organizations including the Women’s March and the State Federation of Labor to provide a platform for mass participation. “This was a good example of organized labor and allies providing an opportunity for people to act…but not trying to control the actions,” Elliot from the SEIU State Council shared. 

Along with ISAIAH and Tending the Soil, Take Action, through its Minneapolis Families for Public Schools campaign, which organizes for bigger budgets and better contracts, has also been able to draw upon its extensive network of parents and teachers. 

Small Business In the Fight

Fehrenkamp, Schultz and Mendez all point to the important role that small businesses have been playing. They have had a crash course in federal immigration law, putting up signs that assert the legal rights of business owners to deny entry to agents without a warrant. “Many businesses have continued paying their employees for the weeks they have not been working and have become depositories for aid while they themselves are hanging by a thread,” said Fehrenkamp. Many have been raising money and a few restaurants have stopped accepting payment for food all together. Fehrenkamp has also heard deep gratitude from Somali, Hmong and Latino businesses for how the larger community has shown up for them. 

While small businesses across Minneapolis have stepped up, hometown corporations have been standing down. Target for example, has had ICE coming into some of its local stores and dragging out employees. Early in the siege, in Richfield, a blue collar suburb of Minneapolis, a janitorial supervisor was abducted by ICE inside the store during business hours. The rest of the staff (members of SEIU Local 26) locked themselves in a supply closet, refusing to leave until it was confirmed to them that ICE had left the store. The company has had a special place in the hearts of many Minneapolitans, and many are upset that the corporation has not come out strongly against the surge and denied ICE access to stores. Organizations like Power Switch Action, Sunrise, Defend and Recruit, AFT and AAUP are building corporate campaigns to pressure companies to stop cooperating with ICE and to take concrete steps to protect their employees.