“We'll All Go Down to Jail”: Minnesotans Strike, Picket, Take Arrests to Stop ICE

Katrina Zabriskie, 22, just watched her mother, a Minnesota-based chaplain, get arrested. ​“It was really emotional,” she tells me. ​“When the crowd started chanting, ​‘We love you,’ I started to cry. Mostly I’m just really proud.”

“We care about the safety of our neighbors,” she added. ​“We believe it is deeply unjust taking people from their homes and deporting them, brutalizing them, and keeping them in detention centers. It’s not something that should be happening.”

The airport has become a flashpoint in the federal assault. 

“Delta relies on MSP as a major hub, and Signature Aviation provides logistical support for ICE operations,” the ICE Out of MN coalition said in a statement released after the arrests of clergy.

​“The MSP Airport serves tens of millions of travelers each year and is now used as the key site in DHS’s operations to abduct and rush out Minnesotans to detention centers. An estimated 2,000 people have been deported through MSP, and many people who work at MSP have been abducted by ICE while at work or commuting to and from the airport.”

Some of the protesters, workers and faith leaders outside the airport could be heard chanting ​“We are the workers, the mighty mighty workers!” ​“We are under reacting” and another person with a bullhorn loudly emphasized: ​“We are here to tell corporations to stop being complicit with ICE.”

Earlier at the airport on Friday morning, Nick Benson, an organizer with the grassroots and non-partisan group MN50501, looked around and lamented the scene.

​“This airport is the narrow end of the funnel where our neighbors are getting shipped off to God knows where,” Benson said. ​“Yesterday, we hit our 2,000^th estimated deportation this month.”

Friday’s press conference and the strike and actions across the state — as well as solidarity actions across the country — come on the heels of harrowing news that a 5-year-old was taken by ICE agents from the driveway of his home in the Minneapolis area on Tuesday. The preschooler and his father are now reportedly being held in a detention center in Texas.

“This moment demands that we show up in solidarity, to witness what is being tested here, to learn from how communities are responding and to help bear the burden together,” said Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in a news release sent to reporters released ahead of the action.

​“This is not just a local struggle,” Betancourt said. ​“It is a test of who we are as a nation and what kind of future we will build together.”

The action at the Whipple Building Friday morning kicks off a day of a Minnesota-wide shutdown under the banner of ​“no work, no school, no shopping.” The call was put out publicly 10 days ago by a coalition of unions, faith groups and community organizations. The idea is to ​“suspend the normal order of business” as a way to protest the unprecedented federal deployment of thousands of masked, armed federal agents on Minnesota.

For weeks, those agents have been stalking and abducting people at schools, daycares and from their homes — and unleashing violence on people trying to protect their neighbors. 

That violence has been extreme and deadly. On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old poet, mother and Minneapolis resident Renee Good, and public outrage and despair over the murder has been a rallying cry throughout Minnesota and across the country.

The broad coalition that came together to help organize today’s work stoppage also has specific demands that include ICE immediately leaving Minnesota and that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Good, be ​“held legally accountable.” They’re also calling for ICE not to receive any ​“additional federal funding … in the upcoming congressional budget, and ICE should be investigated for human and constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”

“We are asking every single person, every family member, every teacher, every bus driver, every childcare worker, to come together, to be in community, to stand with one another,” said JaNaé Bates Imari, who was representing Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church (located in the majority non-white Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul) at a news conference on January 13.

For the throngs of those participating on Friday, the stakes are not academic. SEIU Local 26, which represents more than 8,000 of the state’s janitors, window cleaners and other property service workers, has ​“lost over 20 members to these abductions by federal agents, often without warning, often without due process,” said union president Greg Nammacher at a January 19 press conference. The federal agents’ strategy, he added, is ​“to break up families, to disappear loved ones who for hours and days often don’t have any idea where their family members are and often have no access to legal counsel.”

But it’s not just immigrant workers who are harmed. Nammacher emphasized that ​“if the declared purpose is to help U.S.-born workers get higher wages, which is sometimes what we are told, it has had the opposite effect.”

A window cleaner who led a strike four years ago to win improved safety measures on the job was recently detained at a routine immigration check-in, Nammacher said. He had lived in the country for 30 years, yet agents have already deported him to Mexico, away from his family. ​“His sacrifice made all window cleaners in the Twin Cities safer, no matter where they were born, no matter what their citizenship status,” Nammacher said.

Around sixteen members of UNITE HERE Local 17 (which represents more than 6,000 hospitality workers in the Twin Cities metro area) have recently been abducted, and the Minneapolis – Saint Paul International Airport has become a site of repeated kidnappings of both union and non-union workers.

“Uber drivers are continuously harassed and snatched away, leaving abandoned cars behind, their families completely unaware of where they are,” Sheigh Freeberg, Local 17’s secretary-treasurer, said at a January 9 press conference inside Terminal 1. ​“UNITE HERE Local 17 members who work at the airport have been taken away behind TSA, and ICE flights have increased — sometimes twice daily.”

Since the call for a shutdown went out — a Day for Truth and Freedom, as organizers are calling it — the list of unions and community and faith-based organizations joining the effort has grown. In addition to SEIU Local 26 and UNITE HERE Local 17, the Minnesota Nurses Association, another heavy-hitting union, has joined the effort.

Local and regional labor councils are also joining, and on January 20, the executive board of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, a federation of more than 1,000 unions representing more than 300,000 Minnesota workers, voted to endorse today’s work stoppage. 

“ICE’s continued occupation, actions and tactics are harming communities throughout Minnesota and making us all less safe,” Minnesota AFL-CIO president Bernie Burnham said in a statement.

The union mobilizations are not limited to urban metro areas. AFSCME Council 65 – Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, for example, represents workers in public services, non-profits and health care across the state and issued a statement supporting the coalition, even if it fell short of calling for a work stoppage.

Building trades unions tend to skew more conservative, making it significant that IBEW Local 110 sent a statement to members reading, ​“These federal agents have shown up to schools, day cares and churches. They have dragged people from their cars, broken down doors and taken people from their workplaces.”

Solidarity actions are also taking place across the country, from Massachusetts to New York to Chicago. Meanwhile, more than 700 Minnesota businesses have pledged to close on January 23 in solidarity with the strike, many of them because they were pressured by workers and other members of the community.

“Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on January 23,” Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, president of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation of the AFL-CIO said in a January 16 news release. ​“It’s time for every single Minnesotan who loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and coworkers living under this federal occupation.”

Many workers in Minnesota would already not be going to work on Friday because they are hiding from federal immigration agents. Those who do come out are ​“a voice for people who are hiding,” Feben Ghilagaber, a member of UNITE Here Local 17, told me.

Speaking a day before Friday’s action, Freeberg from UNITE HERE Local 17 told me, ​“In my mind, it is already successful. We’ve seen scores of businesses shutting down in a large part due to community pressure. There will be people in the street, but 10 times that will be staying home, not working that day. The people not shopping, the people not showing up for work, that stuff really matters too.”

“This doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be impactful,” Freeberg said. ​“There are likely tens of thousands of people who are doing the first ever workplace action that they’ve ever done, ever thought about doing, and they are going to realize that they can do this.”

He added, ​“We can all do this.”

This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.