General strikes have a rich history in the United States. A wave of citywide strikes in the 1940s proved so threatening to the prevailing order that Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act, banning unions from striking in solidarity with workers at other companies. For the past few decades, the general strike has seemed more like the fanciful hope of the anarchist bookstore poster than a real possibility. Online, much the same has happened. Modern-day social media calls for mass strikes have rarely translated to collective action in the material world.
Then came Minneapolis.
On January 23, roughly 75,000 people flooded the streets on a workday, in sub-zero temperatures, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leave Minnesota. Hundreds of businesses and cultural institutions in the Twin Cities closed their doors; one in four Minnesota voters either participated in the shutdown or knows a loved one who did, according to Blue Rose Research. A motley coalition led the charge: labor unions, racial justice groups, faith-based organizations.
The remarkable success of Minnesota’s “Day of Truth and Freedom,” as it was billed by organizers, inspired student groups at the University of Minnesota to call for another day of action. One week later, on January 30, tens of thousands of protesters across all 50 states took to the streets. Students held walkouts on high school and college campuses. Many businesses in major cities either closed for the day or committed to donating their proceeds to immigrant advocacy groups. More than 1,000 organizations signed on in support of the “national shutdown.”
“We want to bring it to the national stage and see it happen all over the country,” Austin Muia, vice president of the University of Minnesota’s Black Student Union told my colleague, Nate Halverson. “We want everyone to feel that solidarity that we felt last week.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/minneapolis-minnesotas-general-strike-ice-border-patrol-trump/
The article goes on to explain what needs to be done:
1) A general strike needs to involve both organized labor and a broad coalition.
2) Ask your employers to close.
3) Building community power takes time—so start now. (The Day of Truth and Freedom was made possible by Minneapolis’s decades of organizing history and the existing fabric of community groups.)
4) Effective organizing happens at the micro level. (I saw this personally - everything that worked in Minneapolis started out with neighborhood organizing.)
5) Offer ways to get involved for people who can’t strike.
6) Understand how movements are connected so you can keep building power.
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