When I first moved to Minneapolis as a freshly-pressed college graduate in 2009, it didn’t take long for me to glom onto the Whittier neighborhood’s stretch of Nicollet Avenue, where Somali, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Mexican places scrunched up shoulder-to-shoulder like they were riding the rush-hour bus together. There, the familiar smells, words, and sounds made me — a child of Viet refugees and a product of multiculty New York — feel like a plausible part of the city’s fabric. Between shifts at the crappy sandwich shop I worked at in St. Paul, I’d spend my precious income at the many immigrant-owned restaurants on Nicollet. At the now-closed Harry Singh’s, the Trini doubles were a blessed oasis of mouth-inflaming spice in an otherwise not-so-piquant culinary landscape. My husband and I got our wedding cake from the neighborhood’s panaderia, Marissa’s, where they gamely reproduced the text of a Toynbee tile with gel icing, no questions asked.
The first piece of food writing I ever published professionally was centered on a restaurant on that street: Hien Deli, which, as I recall, served up a mean batch of banh beo. You could get 10 of them for a measly $3 back then.
Last week, Alex Pretti — an observer, an ICU nurse, a beloved member of the cycling community, a Minneapolitan just like so many of the people I love — was murdered in cold blood by federal immigration agents just across the street from where Hien Deli used to be: in front of the fancy donut shop, around the corner from my friend’s bar, right before the eyes of everyone in the nation.
The situation in Minnesota represents something unprecedented in modern American history. Approximately 3,000 federal immigration agents now roam the Twin Cities, nearly outnumbering the region's 10 largest police departments combined. People are being pulled from cars, abducted from streets and schools, and killed for simply bearing witness. A 5-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos, was grabbed by ICE as he and his father were returning home from school and shipped off to a detention camp in Texas. According to her witness affidavit, the woman who filmed Alex Pretti's murder is afraid to go home. Many BIPOC residents have largely exited public life, unable to safely go to school, work, or buy groceries without fear of harassment, or worse. The mayor of St. Paul, Kaohly Her, is Hmong American and recently testified that her parents were afraid to leave their homes.
According to data collected by the Trace, a publication that tracks gun violence, five people have been killed in shootings by federal immigration agents since the crackdown began in Los Angeles in June 2025.
Minnesota's elected officials find themselves in an impossible position. Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have repeatedly asked President Trump to withdraw federal forces, but as Wired explains, state and local governments cannot simply kick out federal law enforcement. The National Guard has been activated, but primarily as a buffer rather than active resistance. Any stronger response risks giving Trump the pretext he appears to be seeking to declare an "insurrection" and deploy federal troops. In other words: the states cannot protect their own citizens from federal violence.
What's happening in Minnesota right now is a test case. The Trump administration is learning what it can get away with, probing the limits of resistance, manufacturing pretexts for further occupations. If this becomes normalized in one city, it will spread to other places — including the Bay Area.
But we still wield power.
Last week, hundreds of businesses shut their doors in Minneapolis as part of an organized general strike, and hundreds of thousands of people hit the streets.
This didn’t happen easily. People took serious risks in joining Friday's general strike. More than 750 small businesses — restaurants that absolutely cannot afford to take a financial hit — did so.
Meanwhile, corporations with far more resources and skin in the game, like Target and 3M, have barely said shit. Notably, Bay Area tech corporations that support ICE operations, like Palantir, Salesforce, and Google, show no sign of leaning off the gas.
The Bay could easily have been ground zero for this. There but for the grace of a few billionaires go we, right? But we can’t make the mistake of thinking that we’re insulated from this violence. We are not any safer here.
What scares the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration most is what they're already seeing in Minnesota: people who aren't the prime targets committing themselves to sacrifice and solidarity. They're not just shutting their blinds and letting this happen; they're vociferously opposing it and putting their bodies on the line in a horrifyingly real way. They understand that this isn't just about immigrants and other people’s children.
Minnesotans are doing all they can, but they can’t keep fighting alone. Not just because they are us, but because ICE is coming to our cities next.
It’s time for a nationwide general strike: a coordinated withdrawal of labor across industries and regions until ICE is abolished. We must make it costly everywhere, all at once.
A general strike isn’t about calling upon heroes: Much of the work is in prepping and giving your community the confidence that it can actually pull it off. Since the uprisings that rocked the area after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, our friends in the Twin Cities have put in the work to bolster their mutual aid networks and build the infrastructure that can, at least temporarily, support their communities outside of business-as-usual. Mutual aid means that people can get fed without having to go to the store. It means those of us who aren’t worried about making rent can help out those who are. Find out, today, who your neighbors are, and make yourself available for giving rides, babysitting, escorting kids to school, or, god forbid, sounding the alarm when the feds come around. The best thing you can do to bring a general strike into being is to make people feel taken care of.
How gorgeous is that as a counteraction to so much harm?
The alternative is accepting that federal agents can kill us with impunity. That toddlers can be snatched into unmarked vans based on the color of their skin. That entire communities can be terrorized into silence while elected officials watch helplessly from the sidelines, constrained by constitutional structures designed for a government that operates in good faith. That we’re willing to tolerate all of this from an agency that is younger than most of the people reading this sentence.
The occupation of the Twin Cities is an attack on all of us. We are all being compelled to avert our eyes; and if not that, then to at least shrug when we’re told baldfaced lies about what we’re seeing. If we allow this to stand, we have already lost.
Minnesotans have shown us the way forward. They've demonstrated that when the state cannot protect us, we must protect each other. That when legal and constitutional remedies are blocked, collective action remains.
Now it falls to the rest of us to match their collective courage. To shut down our workplaces, our businesses, our cities in a coordinated refusal to proceed as normal while federal agents commit murder in American streets.
There is no option. We act together or not at all.
