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Fire and ICE: A Story of Grassroots Resistance to Operation Metro Surge

November: A Storm Is Coming

On November 21st, 2025, President Trump takes to social media to unleash a barrage of racist attacks against Minnesotans and accuse the state of being overrun with government fraud. Days later Trump escalates these attacks calling Somalis living in Minnesota “garbage.”

Just as Trump sent his hordes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Los Angeles and Chicago earlier in 2025 as part of his plan to both terrorize immigrants and assert control over sanctuary cities, he is now putting the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in his crosshairs. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officially announces Operation Metro Surge on December 4th.

This comes at a critical juncture in Trump’s presidency. The two main issues that propelled him into his second term were the economy and immigration. However, by late 2025 the economy is at best a mixed bag as uncertainty over tariffs threatens inflation and trade wars and the supposed benefits of the AI build-out are not felt by most Americans. Additionally, the drama around Trump’s place in the Epstein files and the unpopularity of Trump’s recent intervention in Venezuela threatens his hold on his base and his appeal with the broader electorate. Therefore, Trump bets that conducting another ICE surge as his premier domestic initiative is the best way to shore up his support ahead of the mid-term elections in 2026.

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The Big Break: General Strikes in the Past and Present

[A free and printable PDF pamphlet version of this essay is available here.]

The term “general strike” is re-entering the vocabulary of more and more workers in the US today. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to coordinate their contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028 provided the initial impetus for this. Labor Notes, which hosts the largest union conference in the US and produces the labor movement’s most-read website, has published half a dozen articles over the last year about general strikes. Some union leaders, like Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants, have discussed and called for general strikes publicly in recent years. Trump’s lurch further right in his second term has emboldened many to call for a general strike to fight back. Even relatively mainstream political figures, such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have recently called for a general strike amidst Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrant communities and federal occupations of major cities.

A general strike is a work stoppage in a city or region that halts the majority of its economic activity. Historian Jeremy Brecher notes three essential features of such strikes: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”

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A grainy white and black photo of a bridge being built over a wide river. Long metal arches are being built between concrete pylons.

Building Organizing Networks through 1-on-1 Conversations

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

For those who get really involved in union activism or political activism, there are different ways that such activists use their time. There are what I call the “floater” activists. Floaters go to all the meetings, go to all the protests and rallies, and spend a lot of time socializing with other activists. I call them floaters because they float around to everything, but this floating happens without being social rooted or having deeper political designs. Floaters will often think they have the most influence on social change because they do everything and go to everything, but I think this detracts from a more grounded approach that is more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to the floaters, there are the activist “builders.” There are two things that builders do: 1) they build and cohere networks of people who are affected by a problem, and 2) they organize these networks in a particular direction to address that problem.

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Organizing Conversations for Union Contract Campaigns

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations. A pamphlet version of this post is available for download here.]

No other US institution gives workers as much agency over the terms of their own life and livelihood as a union contract campaign. The fortunes of the entire labor movement are recorded in the language of thousands of settled contracts year after year.

For most rank-and-file workers in recent decades, sadly these have not been contests we’ve fared well in as wages have stagnated and inequality has grown. At its most dreadful, a contract campaign is a long procession of bureaucratic bickering and deflating concessions.

But when workers get organized and unite around a common purpose, they become an unstoppable force. The campaign transforms into a vessel for realizing collective ambitions, passions, and values. The power of workers to win their demands is carried forward by the trust and solidarity that exists in the relationships between them. To go from weakness to strength, workers need to talk with each other.

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The Question for an Organizer Is What the Wing Is for a Bird

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

“You can get all your ideas across just by asking questions, and at the same time you help people to grow and not form a dependency on you. To me it’s just a more successful way of getting ideas across.” – Myles Horton in conversation with Paolo Freire in the book We Make the Road by Walking.

Myles Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and developed a model of popular education that played an important role in stimulating the bottom-up leadership of both the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s civil rights movement. Horton paid close attention to crafting and wielding questions as an essential tool of grassroots organizing.

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