As mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids continue across the U.S., calls for a general strike on Friday, January 30, have echoed around the country, endorsed by organizing groups including the Los Angeles Tenants Union, IFCO Pastors for Peace, and the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition. As the strike approaches, a number of Los Angeles restaurants have announced closures on January 30 or actions to stand in solidarity with Minnesota.

The general strike comes in the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026, by a Border Patrol agent; Renee Nicole Good on January 7, 2026, by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent in Minnesota; and Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent on January 31, 2025, in Northridge, California. The nationwide general strike was preceded by a Minnesota-specific strike on January 23, 2026, which was the first U.S. general strike in 80 years. The Guardian reports that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, and eight more have been killed since the start of 2026 in encounters with ICE.

Silver Lake sports bar Untamed Spirits will be closed on Friday for the general strike. For co-founder Janie Trinh, the decision to close came down to the responsibility she feels toward the community that has formed around the bar. “Originally, we were thinking ‘Do we close, do we not close?’” Trinh says. “We have staff that we do take care of, too, but it’s not about business at this point. This is about community.”

Trinh says that before announcing their participation in the strike on Instagram, she worried about backlash but the response in the comments has been resoundingly positive. As a small business, the decision to shutter for a day can take a heavy financial toll; for Trinh, the choice went beyond the bottom line. “This has nothing to do with finances, this has nothing to do with politics anymore,” she says. “This has to do with human rights.”

“Our values don’t disappear when things are financially hard,” says Trinh. “If anything, that’s when they matter most.”

Atwater Village’s worker-owned bakery, Proof, will also be closed on Friday. Jennifer Salgado, a worker-owner at Proof, says the bakery came to the decision at the cooperative’s general assembly on January 27. They weighed closing entirely versus staying open and donating proceeds from the day, but, as a group, reached consensus that closing would have a greater impact. “It was almost unanimously decided that we would be closing, as we are also very passionate about the violence that is happening with ICE and everything happening in our communities and in Minneapolis,” Salgado says.

“Our values don’t disappear when things are financially hard. If anything, that’s when they matter most.”

— Janie Trinh

As proprietors of a small business, Salgado and her fellow worker-owners are aware of the financial effects that closing can have, both on the bakery’s income and on staff’s paychecks, but, weighed against this moment, they felt they had to take a stand, Salgado says. Staff will be given the option to take an unpaid day on Friday or use a day of paid time off if needed. “Even though we would suffer a little bit, we kind of likened it to the wildfires, where we also closed,” Salgado says. “So there is a little bit of a precedent there to give us a little leeway to be able to close and have to lose those profits.

Salgado says the decision to close reinforces Proof’s commitment to supporting Los Angeles’s immigrant communities. “We feel that the immigrant community contributes so much, especially to restaurants and bakeries,” she says. “We would not be able to do what we do without them. So we really have to back them up, and we feel that this is the best way to do it.”

Other Los Angeles restaurants and cafes, including Echo Park’s Canyon Coffee, have also announced their participation in the strike. “Thank you to the people of Minnesota for leading by example, to our community for standing up for our most vulnerable neighbors, and to our team for their support for Canyon’s participation in the strike,” reads a statement posted by Canyon on its Instagram. The Los Angeles restaurants participating in the strike will be joined by others across the country, including Bar Palmina in Philadelphia, Prima in New York, Kumiko in Chicago, and Rangoon Bistro in Portland, Oregon.

On a busy stretch of Hoover at the edge of Virgil Village, Bé Ù will be open on Friday, but owner Uyên Lê says her decision to operate does not signal a lack of solidarity. “We’ll do things in solidarity as we’ve always done, and we’ll be there in full support,” Lê says. “The general strike is really, in my opinion, something that folks take the time out to do because their regular jobs don’t provide them with the channels to stand up like this — but my business does.” Lê, who also works as a community organizer, has often spoken about her pint-sized Vietnamese restaurant as a platform for equity and a channel to address the forces of gentrification. Lê sees her community organizing work as an integral part of the restaurant, from offering low and no-cost meals to a recent fundraiser for restaurants in Minnesota that went on strike.

On January 24 and 25, Bé Ù donated all the profits from its fried chicken sandwich to independent businesses in Minneapolis that were making meals or closed in solidarity, raising almost $1,400. “I think there are multiple channels of activism, and one size fits all isn’t necessarily the case,” Lê says.

Instead of closing on January 30, Lê will keep the restaurant open to pay her staff and, hopefully, feed protesters. “I feel like a sense of responsibility as a business that lives and breathes this stuff every day to be open and to be there as a community space,” she says. Lê says that if she did decide to close, she would still pay her staff, but the cash flow loss would take at least a month to recover from, given the restaurant’s paper-thin margins. Although Bé Ù will be open, Lê says she has told her staff that if they choose to strike, she will support their decision.

“I think there are multiple channels of activism, and one size fits all isn’t necessarily the case.”

— Uyên Lê

Bé Ù is among a number of other Los Angeles restaurants that have said they support the strike but will remain open on Friday. Long Beach Filipino bakery San and Wolves writes in an Instagram post that it will donate all proceeds from its cupcakes to the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund on Friday, while Victor Heights’ Bakers Bench will donate 10 percent of its sales on Friday to Modern Times Cafe in Minneapolis, a restaurant offering free meals to its community. Bakers Bench will also make donations to Community Aid Network Minnesota and has already made a donation to Unidos Minnesota from its Martin Luther King Day sales. Others, like Gusto Bread in Long Beach, have encouraged customers to pay with cash on January 30 to avoid going through card merchants; Gusto will donate proceeds from all iced drinks to mutual aid immigration and legal funds.

Beginning in early 2025, mass ICE raids have exponentially increased across the country. On January 23, 2025, ICE conducted a raid on a worksite in New Jersey days after President Trump resumed office. In June 2025, ICE conducted multiple raids in the Los Angeles area, including in the parking lot of a Westlake Home Depot, and two locations of Ambiance Apparel; raids were also reported north of Los Angeles at farms and packing house distribution centers in Ventura, Kern, and Tulare counties. Large-scale actions have broken out in Los Angeles and across the country, as crowds take to the streets to protest ICE’s presence in their communities. Numerous restaurants, which have historically been targets of raids, stepped up to protect their workers by designating private areas of the business and posting information cards on what to do if ICE comes.

For Lê, the general strike should be seen as an action against the government and big corporations, not small businesses, many of whom are already struggling. She sees this moment as a call for restaurants like hers to become more involved and show up to support their communities in any way that they can.

“There are ways for small businesses really to engage in this movement and provide support even locally or remotely that’s a little bit more unique than some of these kinds of broader calls out,” Lê says. “And my hope is that the small businesses have a voice.”