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By: Travis Wayne
DORCHESTER, MA – The brisk wind warned of an oncoming Arctic storm that afternoon of Friday, January 23, 2026. Rank after rank of one thousand banner-waving union and community members simmered at the mass rally at the South Bay Mall, a sprawling complex that includes outposts of ICE collaborators Target and Home Depot.
Massachusetts unionists were there to honor their siblings across the country, in Minneapolis, where the people paralyzed the streets and the economy at the same moment – leading the nation’s first general strike in eighty years. One hundred thousand workers marched in frostbiting temperatures as they flirted with another uprising in a city home to uprisings.
Back in Boston, SEIU purple flew next to UNITE HERE white-and-red beside the bright blue of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), each marching in proud step with one another, behind and in front of the red flags and “Abolish ICE” signs of the socialist organizations. The building trades crowded around and amidst the ICE watch verifiers and immigrant community leaders.
A change had occurred. Labor had united. The Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC), representing one hundred thousand workers alone, had led the charge. In honoring their siblings together, Boston labor issued a warning to the secret police: if we can organize this in a few days with solidarity alone, imagine what happens when you come to Massachusetts?
The General Strike in Minneapolis
The political capital for an uprising did not appear overnight in Minneapolis.
ICE invaded the Twin Cities in a rampage, going door to door abducting relative after relative, in flagrant violation of the helpless courts. The ferocity of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis boiled to a head with ICE’s execution of verifier Renee Good on January 7, 2026, which spurred on mass mobilization by the people alongside the unions whose members were being disappeared one after another.
Minneapolis is a city with a memory of mass uprising, with many organizers holding lived experiences of the George Floyd uprising of Black Lives Matter less than six years ago. Those bonds were reactivated with their ties of solidarity, at organic and grassroots levels, since the Floyd uprising also included wildcat walkouts by Minneapolis workers and political closures by businesses – both of which also happened on January 23, as part of the general strike.
These non-traditional supports to the general strike were many. Another one was the consumer boycott. By designing the general strike not only around the shut down of work, but also of consumption through shopping and social reproduction through education, the unions aimed to shut down all of society at once. For one day, the city would stop.
The infrastructure for organizing was sustained differently this time compared to the more mass character and mosaic organizational matrix of the Floyd uprising, when autonomist actors set the AFL-CIO headquarters aflame: this time, labor took leadership, including the AFL-CIO.
The coordinated synchronization was a demonstration of effective rapid response. SEIU Local 26 – whose membership is largely made up of immigrant janitors currently targeted and disappearing under ICE terror – proposed a mass day of action to a table of progressive unions. This crystallized into a Day of Truth and Freedom: the Minneapolis general strike. Every single major union signed on. The masses went on a political strike under the auspices of a non-strike as they shut down the city’s economy. The nation’s first general strike in eighty years commenced.
To paraphrase Luxemburg, Mandela, and Mamdani: it was impossible till it was done – and the people were in the streets.
The Abducted and Mass Labor’s Consensus
Since ICE’s attacks on Boston began, anti-ICE resistance has tasted like the iron of labor.
A high-profile early ICE attack was SEIU 509 member Rümeysa Öztürk’s abduction from the streets of Somerville in March 2025. Thousands swarmed the Powder House Park in anger, before hundreds of workers led by the SEIU International demonstrated in April.
The largest private sector union emerged as an early leader in the labor movement against ICE in Boston. SEIU took the front line of labor resistance in public but also the private efforts to free their member, and by the time of the June solidarity rallies with abducted California SEIU leader David Huerta, all the SEIU locals in Massachusetts were unified and organized.
The Massachusetts AFL-CIO was also present, as were other unions, but ICE attacks became more ambient, targeted, constant. Meanwhile, strikes hit across the city as union after union organized for their own workers and interests. Each mobilization built a block for a wider movement.
In the home and in less organized economic sectors, Massachusetts workers often faced ICE without the benefit of the unions’ infrastructure. In Worcester, dozens of people interfered to stop an ICE seizure of a mother and child, an incident that preceded the higher levels of legal and now lethal punishment exerted by ICE on similar incidents of grassroots resistance.
Other forms of resistance have been more response than direct. Ruth was freed through a mass coalition of community organizations and the efforts following the abduction of Allston Car Wash workers, including solidarity actions to train community members in ICE watch that followed, was organized by Boston University students and Allston-based organizers with Boston DSA.
ICE watch trainings have grown in demand. As LA organizers patrol Home Depots, the networks of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network continue to extend deeper and deeper into Boston neighborhoods. Different sections of the city each contains hundreds of volunteer ICE watch verifiers in their communities, embedded in workplaces and homes, connected by group chats that mobilize in moments with public announcements of ICE activities. LUCE holds trainings with organizations where every single seat is taken and the back room packed.
The abductions are close to everyone’s minds.
Standing Alongside ICE Watchers, Labor Faces ICE
The unions began rallying at the South Bay Mall around 3 PM on Friday, January 23 — with the Greater Boston Labor Council at the front. The Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC), representing over one hundred thousand workers in Massachusetts as part of the largest federation of workers in the United States, held a symbolic and practical position: all of labor was united.
Unions that sponsored the rally included BTU, UNITE HERE 26, 32BJ, 1199 SEIU, IBEW 103, AFT Massachusetts, Greater Boston Building Trades Union, UFCW 1445, IATSE 11, New England Joint Board, AFSCME 93, IUPAT DC 93, Sheet Metal Workers 17, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, among others.
Many of these unions have faced abductions. No longer is the story of the disappeared member or client rare.
Catherine Anderson, one Chelsea schoolteacher, pointed out the endemic nature of abductions in public schools. She mentioned the abduction of multiple students before noting that “dozens of our students have had family members and loved ones detained… ICE was in our elementary school parking lot for hours this fall.”
The SEIU simply amplified the anonymous voice of the wife of one of their members, Pablo, abducted by ICE, before translating from the original Spanish to English:
Being there locked up – he feels like he’s sick, depressed, while he’s been there. As the head of household, he covered all the expenses here and all the costs a family has. And it’s hard for me right now because I have to pay rent… we put our faith in God and hope he comes back to us soon. We know there are many people going through the same thing.
After the speeches concluded, and the final orator hopped off the pickup truck the unions had pulled up in front of Target, the mass of people began to picket the superstore. A far greater number of people holding banners and signs crossed back and forth, defying the mall’s property, than the customers that meekly trickled across the picket line into the store.
Evan, an electrician with Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), told Working Mass as the crowd marched:
ICE agents are lawless and ICE is a lawless, reckless agency with no oversight… there’s no reforming ICE. ICE is only 19 years old. Why keep it? Smoke that thing out.
Meanwhile, GBLC’s organizing director marched with Worcester and Holyoke LUCE coordinators, alongside others, into Target to speak with the bosses. They were there to deliver the letter from labor against ICE collaboration.
Community supporters stood within the audience and picket line alongside their unionized siblings. Ken Casey, the son of a union worker and local teamster and lead singer of Boston’s own world-famous Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, was on the scene.
Casey stressed the importance of the general strike. He told Working Mass:
I like to see the thought of a general strike because I think in the long run it might be our only way out of this mess… if you’re talking about the workers in the unions, that’s the infrastructure to be the tip of the spear to make the change to put forth the effort to mobilize.
The anchoring community organizations of the anti-ICE movement moved in lockstep with labor. The vast ICE watch LUCE Immigrant Justice Network sent speakers and demand letter delegates alongside GBLC leaders, and Bonnie Jin, co-chair of the Boston DSA chapter that organized key anti-ICE demonstrations preceding the January 23 mass labor rally in Dorchester, emphasized the resolve held by Boston labor and its allies:
We are in solidarity with our union siblings. We also know we’re taking steps towards a general strike, not only with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis with so many different unions… but here in Boston. Right now, the federal administration has threatened Boston with funding cuts, and we know our union siblings are under attack.
Jin was right: even as one hundred thousand workers hit the streets of Minneapolis on general strike, Donald Trump announced the decision to cut funding to any municipality that does not cooperate with ICE – amidst his ongoing war on higher education institutions, whose dramatic cuts have impacted Boston’s labor movement, in particular.
Abolish ICE as ICE Kills Again
Meanwhile, Linkedin and Spotify both aired ads advertising $50,000 sign-on bonuses for ICE agents. Gradually, the fascist gangs that plagued previous eras began to disappear – maybe, as some rumor, the first in line to join ICE. There is minimal vetting based on the report of one major ICE critic’s ability to receive a job offer. The story was embarrassing enough to the Trump Administration for the regime to target the reporter.
The tide of common sense had changed. A few hours’ drive further north into New England across the state line, one Southern New Hampshire DSA orator stood in the night – hand on mic. “Let’s be real, the moderate position is now to abolish ICE.”
Ken Casey, hands thrust in his winter coat pockets rather than on a microphone, laughed incredulously back in Boston. “Hell yeah, abolish ICE… how do you show up and snatch someone when they’re showing up for their hearing?”
The people dispersed as the sun set and the mass picket ended in Dorchester.
The next morning, back in Minneapolis, ICE slaughtered another.
Alex Pretti – an ICU nurse, a member of Local 3669 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), an ICE Watch verifier – was beaten by six secret police agents in broad daylight. They smashed his head in before loading him with fifteen bullets of lead.
The nurse was executed by ICE within a ten minute drive of the spots where George Floyd and Renee Good were murdered.
As the eastern seaboard descended into an Arctic spell that made Boston colder than Alaska, Rat City wasn’t the only one readying for an ICE invasion. There were rumors of Philadelphia preparing, too. The unions and community rallied again in hours in the cold night the evening of Pretti’s murder, the tone shifted from soaring resolve to fury among the assembled crowd.
“No fascist USA,” chanted the people. “No fascist USA.”
Travis Wayne is the managing editor of Working Mass.
The post Boston Labor Unites to Face ICE As Minneapolis Leads First General Strike in 80 Years appeared first on Working Mass.
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