Minnesota doesn’t have as many immigrants as California, Texas or New York, yet its people and their unions are now in the front ranks of the movement against today’s anti-immigrant fascism. In January, when ICE agents shot and killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, hundreds of high school students walked out chanting “ICE out!”. Unions called a day of “no work, no school, no shopping,” and businesses across the city closed in support. Neighbors built networks to warn families before raids.
President Trump had hoped to divert attention from the rising cost of living by blaming immigrants for the poor economy. Instead, more Americans blamed him, especially the trade unions who denounced this strategy and mobilized people to link defense of immigrants with defense of their living standards. “Every single one of our unions have a story about a member,” said Minneapolis labor leader Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou.
SOLIDARITY ON TRIAL
The government struck back against Minnesota’s growing movement. In June, the Justice Department charged 15 activists with promoting violence against ICE agents. Eleven of them are union organizers. The case grows out of a September 2025 presidential memo that identifies “anti-capitalism” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as warning signs of terrorism. Immigrants, Black communities, and trans and queer people are marked as suspects first, because dividing them from other workers is how fascism advances. But as solidarity grows, white workers and activists like Good and Pretti soon come under attack, too.
“The fact that we were able to organize so well and so quickly is scary for the current administration,” said Treasure Thoreson a special education teacher and union leader who is one of the 15. Federal agents subpoenaed the financial records of unions they saw as supporting anti-ICE protests. Undercover agents infiltrated a February assembly of 400 rank-and-file workers at the Minneapolis labor center. According to documents released to the defense, Homeland Security even presented a grand jury with claims tying local unions to the alleged conspiracy. Yet, the agent who spied on the workers’ assembly reported finding “no real threats” to ICE.
This case is not about public safety. It is about making organizing a crime. Defending these rights is not a partisan issue. Civil liberties groups, joined by the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Society for the Rule of Law, have told the court the government is targeting the defendants for political views the First Amendment protects. “Fifteen people were indicted,” graduate worker Ben Lewis told a labor rally at the courthouse. “Something else was indicted as well, our ability to organize.”
WHY NOW?
Both immigrants and citizens have been finding it harder to survive in the global economy. And now artificial intelligence and robotics are replacing human labor in warehouses, offices and classrooms. Young people face a future without stable work, affordable housing or healthcare. An economy built on buying and selling labor will not provide for the needs of people whose labor it finds unnecessary, so it turns to fear instead: surveillance, new laws, friendly courts and armed federal agents.
The resistance is growing in the street and in elections. The ballot is one of the few tools working people still have to demand that society’s wealth meet their needs. That is why it is under attack. Federal agencies have pressured election officials across the country with threats of prosecution over “noncitizen voting”. So, the same anti-immigrant lies used to justify ICE raids are now used to intimidate voters.
GETTING READY
Votes alone will not defeat fascism. The vote must be defended through the counting and the seating of the winners. But the bigger the turnout, the harder an election is to steal.
In the Bay Area, Bay Resistance and May Day Strong have drawn clear threat “redlines” that will provoke mass responses wherever the government does the following:
- seizing ballots
- sending ICE or troops to the polls
- refusing to count every vote
- refusing to certify results or seat the winners
If any line is crossed anywhere in the country, people will rally at 7 a.m. the next morning. They will then escalate to mass nonviolent noncooperation until the new Congress is seated on January 3, 2027.
BEYOND DEFENSE: GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE FOR OUR CLASS
As long as a tiny class owns the technology, land and wealth that everyone depends on, our rights will remain under attack. Real democracy, and a decent life for all, requires putting those resources under public ownership and democratic control. Many people call this socialism, which Rally! has explained as “cooperative ownership of our economic essentials, like land, energy, water, healthcare and technology.”
The students, teachers and unions of Minneapolis showed the answer to the campaign to blame immigrants for rising economic problems. Now we need to turn that unity toward a society where the wealth we create is owned by all of us and used for all of us. This is the unity that can defeat fascism.
An Injury to One Is An Injury to All
Published on November 2, 2026.
Rally! P.O. Box 408002
Chicago, IL 60640
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