{"id":106280,"date":"2026-01-20T20:17:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T20:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/106280\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T20:17:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T20:17:10","slug":"new-york-city-educators-must-mobilize-on-january-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/106280\/","title":{"rendered":"New York City Educators Must Mobilize on January 23"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Friday, January 23, unions and other organizations across Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota will participate<\/a> in the call to block the economy with \u201cno work, no school, and no shopping\u201d to demand justice for Renee Nicole Good<\/a> and demand ICE out of the city. Since the New Year, the Twin Cities have experienced multiple shootings by the agency including Good\u2019s murder, attacks on students and teachers at Roosevelt High School, and daily raids by ICE and DHS entering people\u2019s homes and ripping families apart.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

The UFT resolution passed with over 90 percent support, expressing a widespread and growing anti-ICE sentiment<\/a> 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 \u2014 many of whom are immigrants and from other oppressed communities facing a barrage of attacks from the Trump administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Educators have been on the front lines of the struggle against ICE<\/a> across the country \u2014 from Los Angeles<\/a> and Chicago\u2019s sanctuary teams<\/a> to New York City\u2019s immigrant defense committees<\/a>. In Minneapolis, educators have organized defense committees and families and community members have organized morning watches<\/a> to defend their students. It\u2019s not a footnote that the St. Paul teachers union was one of the first to call for Friday\u2019s call for an economic blackout in Minneapolis, nor that the UFT was one of the first to endorse Friday\u2019s solidarity action in New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The authoritarian escalation in Minneapolis builds on the ICE operations in Chicago<\/a>, Los Angeles<\/a>, Charlotte, and the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, DC. ICE agent Jonathan Ross\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 a democratic socialist mayor who has affirmed the city\u2019s sanctuary city status \u2014 we have to prepare for this type of escalation. Joining Friday\u2019s 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\u2019s action is an opportunity to mobilize the networks we\u2019ve 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<\/a> organized by the MORE Caucus of the UFT.<\/p>\n

Workers can lead the fight against ICE<\/p>\n

As the attacks escalate, the response from the working class and youth of the Twin Cities \u2014 forged by the experiences of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising \u2014 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 \u2014 by going on strike. The only way to stop ICE, DHS, and all of Trump\u2019s footsoldiers is through mass mobilization \u2014 by shutting down our schools, our workplaces, and the streets.<\/p>\n

The past several years have seen the labor movement take a central role in national politics, and educators\u2019 struggles have been part of that momentum. The historic wave of wildcat teachers strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma nicknamed the \u201cred state revolt<\/a>\u201d 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: \u201cOur working conditions are our students\u2019 learning conditions.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

This past year, the conversation around a \u201cgeneral strike\u201d has become increasingly mainstream, with the UAW\u2019s Shawn Fain even calling for one in May 2028. But the events in Minneapolis point to the fact that we can\u2019t wait until 2028 \u2014 and <\/a>that workers are ready to rise to the occasion. And in our fight, we can\u2019t 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\u2019s attacks is to organize and fight back.<\/p>\n

Our fight against for immigrants\u2019 rights and against ICE can strengthen us for the fights ahead \u2014 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: \u201cAn injury to one is an injury to all.\u201d<\/p>\n

At my workplace, we are having daily discussions about how to respond to these escalating threats. My coworkers have been discussing this Martin Niem\u00f6ller piece a lot in the last few weeks \u2014 both with our students and among ourselves:<\/p>\n

First they came for the Communists<\/p>\n

And I did not speak out<\/p>\n

Because I was not a Communist<\/p>\n

Then they came for the Socialists<\/p>\n

And I did not speak out<\/p>\n

Because I was not a Socialist<\/p>\n

Then they came for the trade unionists<\/p>\n

And I did not speak out<\/p>\n

Because I was not a trade unionist<\/p>\n

Then they came for the Jews<\/p>\n

And I did not speak out<\/p>\n

Because I was not a Jew<\/p>\n

Then they came for me<\/p>\n

And there was no one left<\/p>\n

To speak out for me.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

See you on Friday, January 23 at 4:00 pm in the north end of Union Square. Let\u2019s march together shoulder-to-shoulder in the UFT contingent and demand ICE out of our communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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