‘Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Lived Through Before’: Labor’s Role in Minnesota’s ICE Resistance

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol began “Operation Metro Surge” targeting the Twin Cities nearly two months ago. Since then, they have taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while terrorizing Minnesota’s immigrant communities.

The massive deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul has been met with an incredible response from the community. Neighbors have come together to develop complex rapid response networks to track ICE and notify vulnerable people, keep immigrant families fed and protected with strong mutual aid networks, and make their opposition to what amounts to a full-scale federal invasion clearly visible.

This past Friday, unions, faith leaders, and community organizations organized a day of mass protest and economic disruption, punctuated by a rally and demonstration in well below sub-zero temperatures attended by tens of thousands.

What’s next for organized resistance in the Twin Cities? To get a picture of the situation on the ground, Inequality.org checked in with experienced labor organizer and activist Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: What has your experience been like on the ground in Minneapolis over the last two months?

Kieran Knutson: It’s unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before. There are 3,000 ICE agents in the Twin Cities metro area, just by comparison the Minneapolis Police Department is between 800 and 900 cops. 

You see them frequently and they’re constantly active, whether that be abduction raids, missions where they have the name of someone they’re trying to grab specifically, or just straight up racial profiling while ripping people out of gas stations or as they’re picking up their kids from daycare.

And confrontations with ICE have been intense. They’re deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades. Brutalizing people. It’s hard to describe, it really just strikes me as a fascist paramilitary force, a force of occupation.

CMR: How has that presence affected the community you live in?

KK: One the one hand, huge numbers of Latino workers in particular are just locking down. People stopped going out altogether. Imagine being stuck inside, not being able to go to the bar, go see friends, run errands, none of that stuff. I think there’s this level of terrorism that even if you don’t ever run into ICE you do fear it.

On the positive side, in the neighborhood that my wife and I live in, for example, there are 700 people in the rapid response network. And my understanding is that there are eight or so similar neighborhood networks across the Twin Cities — that means there’s thousands of people participating in this movement. Tons of people here are outraged, the whole society hates ICE here and that’s heartening. 

CMR: What has labor’s role been in community response?

KK: The first thing to say is that the immigrant portions of the working class are an incredibly important part of the working class in the Twin Cities and have really strengthened it to be much more pro-union and more militant. Some unions are heavily immigrant, so what’s been going on can’t help but affect them. Our local is less so, but we do have this spirit of an injury to one is an injury to all that we’ve cultivated over the years.

We see this as an extremely important fight, and labor unions have been involved in the scaling up of rapid response networks and planning actions like the big day of action last Friday.

CMR: Can you tell me more about how labor was involved in organizing that?

KK: The idea for it came out of the labor movement. There have been talks for some time about how unions have to be more serious about being able to do strikes, and political strikes in particular. There’s this problem in U.S. labor law where almost every collective bargaining agreement has a strike clause. And while this action was not able to avoid that, what it did do was create a situation where tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of workers were absent from work, almost like a mass sick out.

The unions built the coalition which includes a lot of faith groups and community organizations, ones that represent the Somali community, the Latino community, Native American groups. 

Also, since the George Floyd uprising, there have been some significant labor struggles in the Twin Cities area — teachers here went on strike, nurses have done strikes. I think that’s given people more confidence. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the experience, and the networks, that came out of the uprising in the response to ICE today. 

We really wanted to push to make this action a mass one, so we included no school and no shopping so that it could become a society-wide effort. There was a huge amount of support from small businesses, I think 700 ended up closing.

CMR: What was the intended message of the action?

KK: Some union organizers pointed out that early on in his term, when Trump was listing cities that he was going to send ICE to, San Francisco was on the list. Trump backed off though, saying that tech executives had called him to explain that deployment wasn’t necessary. So some of the thinking was, there are all these CEOs and billionaires with corporate headquarters here in Minnesota that have been silent about this reign of terror in our communities, we should start squeezing them into speaking up.

And it kind of worked — on Sunday a letter came out from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce with over 60 big CEOs signing on. That showed the business class is willing to say something to the Trump regime about the chaos it’s causing.

CMR: The day after this incredible show of solidarity, ICE officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a union member. What’s the next escalation for labor?

KK: On Monday, the first day back at work after the action, coworkers that I talked to all felt very excited about Friday. They saw the national coverage, how big the march was despite -20º weather, how celebrities got behind it. And then, to them, Saturday felt like retaliation. 

Some people are calling for staying on strike, or a real strike. Our membership hasn’t had a chance to discuss next steps yet, but speaking with other labor activists what makes sense to me is to organize a substantial assembly of rapid response groups, unions, activists, and community organizations to hash out what’s next. 

CMR: What makes ICE and the occupation of the Twin Cities a labor issue?

KK: It’s an attack on oppressed sections of the working class, some of the poorest paid sections of the working class, and sections of the working class that have the least rights. 

I think the administration is also aimed at the Twin Cities because of the George Floyd uprising, a sense of disciplining the population that had been a big part of that. I think that unions which want to be fighters for the working class have to be a part of this fight. This army that’s being constructed could just as easily be unleashed against workers who are organizing or on strike, or on social movements.

This is a dangerous, dangerous force that has to be defeated. To leave this force intact would mean a constant danger for all of us.