Clergy and labor leaders in Minnesota are calling for a “Day of Truth and Freedom” on Jan. 23, during which Minnesotans do not shop, work, or go to school. The “pause,” leaders say, is intended to highlight the ongoing violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the state. “What is happening here in Minnesota is a horror that we’re living through, but we’ve been organizing in preparation,” said Minister JaNaé Bates, co-executive director of ISAIAH, a faith-based collective organizing the day’s events. “It’s not completely a shock.”
An ICE agent’s Jan. 7 shooting of unarmed mother Renee Nicole Macklin Good has become a flashpoint that sparked protests around the country. Bates said the federal agency has been escalating aggression in the Twin Cities for months. On Jan. 18, CBS News reported that there were 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed in Minneapolis—five times the size of the city’s police force—making it the nation’s largest ever deployment of immigration officials. Bates said that as the community has resisted ICE’s presence through patrols, social media awareness campaigns, mutual aid networks, and accompaniment of immigrants to work and school, the Trump administration has escalated retaliatory pressure, threatening to send active-duty Army troops. On Jan. 9, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins notified Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey that her department would suspend $120 million in food assistance funds to the state, giving it less than a week to produce proof that it had not committed widespread fraud.
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