Originally published by Socialist Alternative United States on February 26, 2026
Over two months, the Twin Cities working class built a mass movement of resistance culminating in a citywide general strike that forced ICE to retreat. One way or another, the Battle of Minneapolis will go down in history. But exactly how is yet to be written.
Will it be remembered as just one heroic battle, a bloody nose for Trump, in the larger war against Trump’s far-right authoritarian power grab? Or will it be remembered as the decisive turning point—the rediscovery of the political strike, which then led to further escalation by the movement until it defeated Trump for good?
Opinion Polls Alone Won’t Bring Down Trump
After witnessing the violent scenes of federal occupation, and inspired by the powerful mass movement in the Twin Cities, more people in the US now support the idea of abolishing ICE than oppose it. Only 20% think the murder of Alex Pretti was justified. But opinion polls will not bring down Trump, who takes a page out of the book of Caligula, Rome’s tyrannical emperor: “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”
The stakes are rising. Wannabe-king Trump’s private army from the DHS was forced to retreat from the Twin Cities at the hands of the mass movement (not the do-nothing Democrats), but ICE and CBP have already increased their presence elsewhere. In February, ICE purchased a 64-acre warehouse with capacity for 1,500 detention beds outside of Philadelphia for $87 million, with similar purchases being made across the country.
Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-worker, and pro-war, pro-billionaire agenda continues to plow forward. Only the multiracial working class—using its power to shut the economy down dead in its tracks and bring billionaire profits to a halt—can stop this historic onslaught on our rights. Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis, remarked after the Twin Cities general strike on January 23, “There’s nothing we’re doing that’s rocket science. This can be replicated anywhere.” Now, he along with other union leaders and dozens of community organizations are calling for another day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on May 1, but this time nationwide. To pull this off, we can’t underestimate what it will take: a bold lead from major national unions taking up the call and shouting it from the rooftops, and a groundswell of bottom-up organizing to turn up the heat.
Minneapolis showed us how to win a battle. To start winning the war we need to make a nationwide general strike on May 1 a reality.
Protests, Rapid Response, Boycotts & Strikes
As long as inequality and oppression have existed, people have fought back using a variety of tactics, and the past 13 months of Trump 2.0 have been no exception. For many weeks after Trump was reinaugurated, the fightback was limited, mainly featuring one-off disparate protests around different issues. Then in April, the first Hands Off national day of action began to unite the protests into a singular movement, which gave way to the record-setting No Kings days of action in June and October.
When the ICE offensive began to really ramp up with the invasions of Los Angeles in June and Chicago in October, anti-ICE rapid response networks quickly grew into new and innovative vehicles of struggle. Each new invasion Trump launched forced these organic neighborhood formations to become increasingly sophisticated, reaching their highest level of coordination and effectiveness yet in Minneapolis—where roughly four percent of the population are in rapid response Signal chats. Especially earlier on in the occupation of Minneapolis, rapid response networks led to the stopping of some detentions, by a dozen or more people surrounding ICE agents and forcing them to retreat.
However, once Trump tripled the number of federal agents, flooding more violent manpower into each individual abduction attempt, rapid response began to run up against its limits as a largely reactive and defensive tactic. After dozens of union members in SEIU Local 26 and Unite HERE Local 17 were detained and deported, and Renee Good was murdered while carrying out legal observation, it was clear the movement needed a new, more offensive tactic. Under pressure from below, a handful of union leaders made the call for a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on January 23. While these union leaders themselves didn’t use the term “strike” out of fear of anti-worker laws, and some actually shamefully opposed the “No Work” portion for the same reason, a strike is exactly what the call entailed. And even the lead provided by those unions that did actively organize work stoppages was enough impetus to make the citywide general strike a reality.
Over the last year, many in the movement have also called for boycotts of companies like Target that cancelled their DEI initiatives following Trump’s election, and the wide support for these calls show ordinary people’s desire to put their money where their mouth is. Focused boycotts can have a certain impact, but have limitations as part of an escalatory strategy if divorced from concerted action by workers, especially strike action. As we explained last spring, “Our power as consumers pales in comparison to our power as workers. Trying to change a company’s policy by 10,000 customers not shopping translates to a tiny dent in profits, whereas 1,000 workers not going into work translates into dozens of stores being shut down and profits there halted completely.”
Boycotting a company during a strike is an extremely important auxiliary tactic which helps enforce the strike, but the main hit to profits comes from the work stoppage itself. The mass boycott of South Africa in the 1980s helped to bring down apartheid, but this was a supplement to the historic mass working-class movement within the country itself. The power of the working class, as the force which makes society run and therefore has the power to stop it, is always central.
Why Strikes?
Since Trump’s inauguration, Socialist Alternative has argued in every protest speech and at every organizing meeting that the power of the working class, especially strike action, will be critical for stopping Trump’s agenda. Why?
Labor creates all value. When workers strike, billionaire bosses make no profit. After the Twin Cities general strike, CEOs from more than 60 Minnesota-based corporations authored an open letter calling for “an immediate deescalation of tensions” because following Alex Pretti’s murder they were terrified of a second even bigger strike which was palpably possible. Literally the following day, talk emerged from the Trump administration about scaling down “Operation Metro Surge.” It’s true that corporations benefit from anti-immigrant divide-and-rule tactics that break the unity of workers in the face of exploitative bosses, and they don’t want to stand up to Trump for fear of retribution and losing out on his pro-corporate policies. But capitalists fear nothing more than workers using their collective power.
Though still extremely powerful and effective, the Twin Cities general strike did not shut down the whole local economy, and key profit centers like the airport and logistics industry were kept open. In future political strikes this should be a key focus.
Making May 1, International Workers’ Day, a nationwide day of strike action would be the biggest and most powerful rebuke to Trump’s far-right authoritarian agenda so far. This call to action needs far more unions signing onto it, and those who have backed it need to be broadcasting it far more widely. If truly built for by union leaders, and accompanied by a groundswell of organizing from below in every union, non-union workplace, school, community, rapid response group, and more, May 1 can become the first nationwide general strike in US history.
But even short of a full-on general strike, substantial workplace actions in a few cities across the country would still be a significant step forward for the movement. This could serve as a stepping stone toward more and bigger nationwide strike action in the future, for instance if Trump tries to rig the results of the midterm elections or new escalations in the ICE offensive.
Overcoming Fear & Anti-Worker Laws
Capitalism globally has had several hundred years to perfect and refine its system for the subjugation of the working class. The law is at the very heart of this system. Over the last century in the US, this has meant laws forbidding public sector workers from going on strike, the Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947 which made political strikes illegal, and many other laws explicitly designed to neuter the power of the working class to advance its interests.
Many unions today also have “no-strike” clauses in their contracts which bar workers from striking outside of specific contract negotiation windows. These are the product of union leaders who are willing to negotiate away their members’ rights in exchange for small concessions in wages or benefits, which then end up being attacked in the next contract anyway.
Many important strikes throughout history, including in the last decade, were illegal. The vast majority of the educator strikes which swept the nation in 2018-19 starting in West Virginia were illegal, but in no case was a single teacher arrested. This is because there is strength and safety in numbers and they can’t arrest all of us, but also because it is the strength and organization of the working class compared to the bosses which ultimately decides who wins and who loses, not this or that specific law. In the case of the West Virginia teachers, it was rank-and-file workers, not their overly cautious leaders, who decided to disregard anti-union laws. This is why bottom-up organizing will be crucial.
As MLK Jr. said, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” This May Day we need to bring back the legacy of MLK Jr. and the best traditions of the US labor movement: the strongest possible nationwide general strike, followed up by continued organizing on a mass scale, will begin to override the laws meant to contain us.
Make A May Day General Strike A Reality!
We need strike ready committees in every union and non-union workplace, walkout organizing committees in every school, and rapid response groups should begin discussing how they too can build support for mass strike action on May 1.
Our movement has made history over the last year, including with the largest single day of protest in US history last October. However, Trump continues to escalate which means we need to escalate too. After a year of protesting, boycotting, and more, we need to take the next step, using the power of the working class to shut down business as usual and demand the abolition of ICE to fund education, housing, and healthcare instead. All out for May 1!
