This Friday, January 23, unions and other organizations across Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota will participate in the call to block the economy with “no work, no school, and no shopping” to demand justice for Renee Nicole Good and demand ICE out of the city. Since the New Year, the Twin Cities have experienced multiple shootings by the agency including Good’s murder, attacks on students and teachers at Roosevelt High School, and daily raids by ICE and DHS entering people’s homes and ripping families apart.

Across the country, from New York City to Los Angeles, workers and youth will be mobilizing in solidarity with Minneapolis. As educators in New York City, we have to join these mobilizations in full force with our coworkers and communities.

This past Wednesday, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) passed a resolution in the delegate assembly calling for an emergency mobilization and day of action on that same day. Our union will join PSC-CUNY, SEIU 1199, Teamsters Local 804, as well as organizations like Hands Off NYC and DSA in a rally and march on January 23.

The UFT resolution passed with over 90 percent support, expressing a widespread and growing anti-ICE sentiment shared by broad sectors of teachers and the working class. As teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, and school support staff, we work day in and day out with our students, their families, and our communities — many of whom are immigrants and from other oppressed communities facing a barrage of attacks from the Trump administration. 

Educators have been on the front lines of the struggle against ICE across the country — from Los Angeles and Chicago’s sanctuary teams to New York City’s immigrant defense committees. In Minneapolis, educators have organized defense committees and families and community members have organized morning watches to defend their students. It’s not a footnote that the St. Paul teachers union was one of the first to call for Friday’s call for an economic blackout in Minneapolis, nor that the UFT was one of the first to endorse Friday’s solidarity action in New York. 

The authoritarian escalation in Minneapolis builds on the ICE operations in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, DC. ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s murder of Good, a white U.S. citizen, while standing up for her immigrant neighbors shows that no one is safe from these attacks. It also demonstrates what we already know: Trump’s advances into our cities have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with repressing discontent and combativity in the face of authoritarianism, imperialist attacks, and economic and political crisis.

As workers in New York City, we have to treat this as a preparatory moment. With Trump directly threatening sanctuary cities and with Zohran Mamdani in office — a democratic socialist mayor who has affirmed the city’s sanctuary city status — we have to prepare for this type of escalation. Joining Friday’s mobilizations is not only an act of solidarity, but a part of the political and organizational preparations we need to make in order to defend New York. This Friday’s action is an opportunity to mobilize the networks we’ve already created between educators, students, and our communities. And as the struggle develops, rank-and-file teachers along with community members in schools across each city should democratically discuss ideas, decide on next steps, and organize among ourselves on how to participate. Already educators are organizing and thinking next steps, like a town hall on this coming Sunday organized by the MORE Caucus of the UFT.

Workers can lead the fight against ICE

As the attacks escalate, the response from the working class and youth of the Twin Cities — forged by the experiences of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising — points to a way forward. Students have been bravely organizing walkouts; communities have been disrupting ICE every step of the way; and on Friday, workers across the state will be showing the indispensability of working-class power in this fight — by going on strike. The only way to stop ICE, DHS, and all of Trump’s footsoldiers is through mass mobilization — by shutting down our schools, our workplaces, and the streets.

The past several years have seen the labor movement take a central role in national politics, and educators’ struggles have been part of that momentum. The historic wave of wildcat teachers strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma nicknamed the “red state revolt” was a key struggle against austerity and for common-good demands that jolted the labor movement awake. Throughout the pandemic, teachers fought for safe schools under the slogan: “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.” As the U.S. systematically defunds public education and harms the most marginalized students while hitting deadly new records in military and ICE funding, that slogan is more true now than ever.

This past year, the conversation around a “general strike” has become increasingly mainstream, with the UAW’s Shawn Fain even calling for one in May 2028. But the events in Minneapolis point to the fact that we can’t wait until 2028 — and that workers are ready to rise to the occasion. And in our fight, we can’t rely on the courts, Congress, or the Democrats; we have to rely on our own power as workers independent from both capitalist parties that have laid the groundwork for the attacks we are seeing today. As LA showed before, and Minneapolis is showing now, the only way to stop Trump’s attacks is to organize and fight back.

Our fight against for immigrants’ rights and against ICE can strengthen us for the fights ahead — from austerity and attacks on immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ+ youth at home to imperialist attacks on Latin America and the Middle East abroad. All these struggles are deeply connected; we have to build and unify our fight if we want to win, embodying the longtime rallying cry of the labor movement: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

At my workplace, we are having daily discussions about how to respond to these escalating threats. My coworkers have been discussing this Martin Niemöller piece a lot in the last few weeks — both with our students and among ourselves:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

In our society, there are a million pressures toward individualism, toward isolation, toward staying silent rather than speaking out. But we are educators; the mission of our profession is to prepare the youth to change the world for the better. We have to lead by example and show our students that you cannot be neutral in the face of oppression.

See you on Friday, January 23 at 4:00 pm in the north end of Union Square. Let’s march together shoulder-to-shoulder in the UFT contingent and demand ICE out of our communities.