January 21, 2026                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

In the split second before the ICE agent tackled him, Jonathan Aguilar Garcia darted through the door of the suburban Minneapolis Target store where he works. He wrongly assumed he’d be safe in his own workplace.  

Agents wrestled Aguilar Garcia to the ground and shoved him and another young Latino employee into an unmarked SUV. Both workers are U.S. citizens. 

As ICE agents dragged Walmart worker Suban Noor from her car in the small Minnesota town of Willmar, her shoes fell off, leaving the Somali high school student barefoot in the cold. Her family was unable to contact her until her release nearly a week later. 

The CEOs of Target and Walmart have made fortunes off the backs of low-wage immigrant workers. With these workers now facing violent ICE attacks, it’s time for their powerful bosses to take a stand. 

The ICE Out of MN campaign is mobilizing public pressure on corporate leaders to do just that by closing their stores during a state-wide protest this coming Friday. Whose side will these executives be on?

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Faith Leaders Call on Target CEO to Take Stand Against ICE 

This week’s frontline face: Pastor Martha Bardwell of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Bardwell and 120 other faith leaders staged a sit-in at Target headquarters last week, demanding a meeting with the CEO of the Minnesota-based corporation. Target executives have remained mute in the face of a surge of ICE violence that has terrorized the retailer’s workers and customers. 

After Target employees stonewalled the faith leaders for seven hours, Bardwell tried a phone number someone had found on the internet for the company’s CEO, Brian Cornell. To her surprise, he actually answered. But when the pastor asked for a meeting, Cornell hung up. 

Bardwell and her fellow protestors kept up the pressure and now Cornell is scheduled to meet with the group tomorrow.  

What makes this fight so important to Bardwell: “We’re in a crisis right now. We are a state under siege by its own government. We need Target to use its corporate power to get ICE out of Minnesota and tell Congress to stop funding ICE.” 

Bardwell is also calling on Target and other corporations to become “4th Amendment Workplaces” by refusing to allow ICE on their property without a judicial warrant and to terminate any business deals they may have with the agency. For more on her perspective, click the link below. 

What if You Held a Protest and Everyone Came?

That’s the hypothetical Mark Fisher posits in his seminal book Capitalist Realism. Capitalist structures, he reminds us, “would be nothing without our cooperation.” By denying participation in systems of oppression, we can render them toothless. 

We’re about to see that theory put to the test in Minnesota this Friday. Unions, faith leaders, and community organizations are calling on everyone in the state to protest the ICE invasion by staying home from work and school and by not shopping.

This bold action comes after ICE has doubled down since the killing of Renee Good two weeks ago. With the reign of terror expanding across the state, many immigrant families are keeping children home from school and their businesses closed. Despite organizers’ incredible efforts to protect the most vulnerable, it's clear now that no one is safe as long as ICE agents can run wild with impunity.   

The concept of an “all hands on deck” general strike may seem foreign to Americans today, but our country has seen several in the past. For a lesson on this history, check out the piece by A.J. Schumann, a former Henry Wallace fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, below.

The first year of Trump's second term was a very good one for the U.S. billionaire class. The richest 15 billionaires, all with assets of more than $100 billion, saw their combined wealth surge by more than 30 percent to $3.1 trillion. That's nearly double the S&P 500's 16.4 percent growth over the course of last year. For an interactive version of this chart, click the link to our Inequality.org analysis below.

From Rah-Rah to Ranch-Ranch: A Billionaire’s Search for Satisfaction

This week’s dour deep pocket: The billionaire Stan Kroenke, the current owner of what CNBC describes as the global pro sports empire that “stands well above the rest.” Kroenke’s empire includes the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, and the NBA’s Denver Nuggets. Also in the Kroenke mix: the UK’s Arsenal, a top franchise in the world’s most popular pro soccer league.

What has Kroenke sour: Cheering on his teams has apparently not turned out to be as satisfying as the 78-year-old shopping-mall magnate expected. So Kroenke has been branching out from arenas to acreage. Last month, Kroenke purchased nearly a million acres of New Mexico ranchland. With that acquisition, he now rates as America’s largest private landowner.

Kroenke’s current land holdings add up to the equivalent of two million football fields.

The last word: The Kroenke household certainly has the means to pick up another million acres or two — or ten. Kroenke’s wife Ann just happens to be an heiress to the Walmart fortune.

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