Minneapolis, May Day, and the labor response to enforcement

In January 2026, two US citizens were killed by federal agents during immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot by a Customs and Border Protection officer on January 7. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, was shot ten times by two CBP officers during a protest against federal enforcement operations on January 24. ProPublica later identified the agents who killed Pretti as Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez.

The killings were the proximate cause of the late-January shutdown that became the 75-day DHS funding lapse. They were also the catalyst for the most significant convergence of organized labor and immigrant-rights organizing the United States has seen in decades.

January 23: the Minneapolis general strike

A coalition of Minneapolis-area unions called for a general strike day on January 23 — sixteen days after Good’s killing and one day before Pretti’s. The participating unions included ATU Local 1005 (transit), SEIU Local 26 (janitors), UNITE HERE Local 17 (hotel and food service), CWA Local 7250 (telecom), and the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28 (teachers). The “no work, no school, no shopping” framing was deliberate.

The action was unusual on multiple dimensions. General strikes are rare in modern US labor practice, and most twentieth-century examples were narrowly economic — wage disputes, contract demands, jurisdictional fights. The Minneapolis action was framed differently: it was a labor response to civil-rights and enforcement violence, in a city where the affected workers and the affected immigrant community substantially overlapped.

The convergence was not accidental. Operation Metro Surge, the federal enforcement campaign that produced the killings, had concentrated in workplaces and neighborhoods where the labor and immigrant communities are deeply intertwined. The same workers ICE was arresting were union members. The same families were affected.

February through April: the slow build

The Minneapolis action did not produce immediate cascading strikes. What it did produce was an organizing infrastructure that could be activated for May Day.

Three threads built up over the spring:

Continuing federal enforcement. Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago. Continued raids in Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix. ICE arrest data through January showed an average of 1,264 daily arrests, a 300% year-over-year increase. The American Immigration Council documented twelve noncriminal arrests for every “high-threat” criminal arrest.

Continuing federal-court constraints. Judge Brian Murphy’s third-country deportation injunction. The Family Reunification Parole order. The Burma TPS injunction. The Eighth Circuit’s mandatory-detention ruling (which expanded enforcement power). The Ninth Circuit’s emergency stay (which constrained it). The pattern was incremental and uneven, but the courts produced a slow accumulation of structural constraints on the most aggressive enforcement.

Continuing labor pressure on the ground. The Starbucks Workers United strike, which had grown to roughly 3,800 workers at 180 stores in 130 cities at peak in December, partially de-escalated but did not end. The Republic Services sanitation strike continued. Kaiser healthcare workers expanded their strike in February. San Francisco teachers walked out for the first time since 1979. The LAUSD averted a strike of 30,000 support workers in April with a 24% wage agreement. The labor environment was the most active in decades.

May 1: the May Day convergence

Roughly 500 organizations staged more than 750 actions across all 50 states under a “May Day Strong” / “Workers Over Billionaires” framing. The participating unions included the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, Starbucks Workers United, the United Electrical Workers, SEIU locals, and UNITE HERE. The Sunrise Movement coordinated student walkouts, reporting more than 100,000 students participating.

The platform was explicitly political. The four named demands:

1. Shift the tax burden from working class to wealthy.
2. Eliminate ICE.
3. End US involvement in foreign wars.
4. Limit corporate election spending.

The first and fourth align with progressive economic and democracy-reform agendas that have been on the federal table for years. The second is more recent and more aggressive than typical labor demands. The third reflects the impact of the Iran strikes and the unresolved War Powers fights.

Coverage of the May Day actions explicitly cited the Minnesota strike turnout as elevated by the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The convergence the Minneapolis action had pioneered — labor response to enforcement violence — had become a national template.

What the convergence reveals

Three observations.

First, the affected populations overlap more than the policy debate suggests. Workers in low-wage service industries, in healthcare, in agriculture, in manufacturing, in construction, in transit, in education are disproportionately affected by both labor exploitation and immigration enforcement. The same families show up on both sides of both policy fights. The institutional separation between “labor unions” and “immigrant rights organizations” has long been historically contingent rather than structural; the Minneapolis-to-May-Day arc has begun to dissolve it.

Second, the federal response has been notably absent. No federal pattern-and-practice investigation of CBP. No federal use-of-force standards conditioned on grant funding. No structural reform of military-equipment transfers to federal enforcement agencies. The Justice in Policing Act remains stalled. Federal accountability has come, where it has come, through individual federal-court litigation under Section 1983 and similar civil rights frameworks — exactly the litigation framework that qualified immunity is designed to constrain.

Third, state and local responses have been substantial. Maryland’s elimination of 287(g) cooperation in February. State legislative action constraining state and local cooperation with federal enforcement in California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and others. State-level shield laws for immigrant-receiving healthcare and education systems. The legal architecture is being built around federal enforcement, even as the federal enforcement itself continues.

What’s likely to come

The reconciliation bill — Reconciliation 2.0 — is the immediate venue. The committees with jurisdiction have been instructed to deliver legislative text by May 15 funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation, bypassing the 60-vote Senate threshold. Whether the funding includes structural reform, oversight, or accountability provisions depends on Senate Democratic leverage in conference.

The labor environment will continue to be elevated. The PRO Act, the federal heat-illness rule, and the broader workplace-rights agenda all remain on the federal table. State-level minimum-wage increases, just-cause eviction protections, and right-to-counsel programs continue to advance. The labor mobilization that converged on May Day will face periodic activations through the rest of the year.

The structural question — whether the affected workers and communities can sustain coalition organizing across the labor and immigrant-rights divide — is the harder one. The Minneapolis-to-May-Day arc suggests it’s possible. The institutional history suggests it’s difficult. The political environment of the rest of 2026 will test which is more durable.

The federal response, so far, has been to deepen the underlying enforcement pressure that produced the convergence. Whether that pressure produces escalating coalition or political fracture is the question the next several months will answer.