5 Escalation Tactics ICE Out Could Borrow from Abolition Movements
Over a million people walked off their jobs, pulled kids from classrooms, and refused to shop on January 30, 2026. The coordinated national strike shut down workplaces, schools, and streets across all fifty states—the largest such action in the United States since 1934. Organizers called it the National Shutdown. Their demand: withdraw federal immigration agents from Minnesota, prosecute the officers who killed two residents, and abolish ICE entirely.
The Trump administration’s response? Immigration enforcement operations would continue unchanged.
This gap between demonstrated power and policy change raises the central question for any movement: what comes next? When a single-day strike—no matter how massive—didn’t change anything, what strategies can actually force change?
The Shootings That Sparked a Movement
On January 7, Renée Good was shot three times by an ICE agent as she attempted to drive away on a residential Minneapolis street. The mother of three died at the scene.
Seventeen days later, Alex Pretti was shot ten times by Customs and Border Protection agents in fewer than five seconds near a doughnut shop. The 37-year-old ICU nurse for the Veterans Affairs medical system was recording the agents with his phone, not brandishing a weapon as officials claimed. Video evidence proved this.
Both killings occurred during Operation Metro Surge. The operation had deployed over two thousand armed federal agents to Minneapolis-Saint Paul starting in December 2025. That’s more personnel than the combined police forces of both cities. The Trump administration framed the operation as targeting fraud and criminal activity. In practice, it saturated the metro area with masked, heavily armed DHS agents conducting street-level sweeps.
The University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union called for the January 30 strike. Within weeks, over a thousand organizations joined. Labor unions, faith communities, student groups, immigrant rights organizations, and abolitionist movements all coordinated. The coalition’s range was itself remarkable: graduate workers, clerical staff, clergy members, the Black Student Union, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation don’t typically work together on campaigns.
What a National Shutdown Looks Like
The action was deliberately framed as an economic shutdown rather than marching in the streets. “No work, no school, no shopping”—a formula designed to make it easier for people to join, regardless of their employment situation.
Graduate workers at the University of Minnesota secured paid time off. A major climbing gym chain closed all locations and paid hourly employees for the day. Medium told staff they were free to take the day for protest. In Los Angeles, high school absenteeism spiked. Retail establishments reported dramatically reduced foot traffic.
But street demonstrations happened too. Over three hundred coordinated actions unfolded in all fifty states—rallies in Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Minneapolis, and dozens of smaller cities. Nearly six hundred faith leaders traveled to Minneapolis specifically to witness and participate. One hundred clergy members were arrested during civil disobedience at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.
The following day, organizers announced plans for over three hundred additional “ICE Out of Everywhere” rallies nationwide, with international solidarity demonstrations in other countries.
What the Strike Won (and Didn’t)
Deputy Border Czar (a senior immigration enforcement official) Tom Homan flew to Minneapolis on January 29 to “find a solution.” His announcement: a “shift in strategy” toward “targeted operations” rather than broad sweeps.
Here’s what that meant. Federal agents would stop conducting street-level operations that required large tactical teams. Instead, they would focus on arresting immigrants already in custody at county jails. This would allow for a drawdown of federal personnel. As Homan explained, “one agent can arrest one bad guy in the safety and security of a jail” rather than requiring “a whole team out to cover the back door, cover the front door.”
But Homan explicitly stated this wasn’t real change—only a change in approach. Operations would continue. The core demand—immediate withdrawal of federal agents from Minnesota—was not met.
Criminal prosecution of the officers who killed Good and Pretti? The Department of Justice announced a civil rights investigation into Pretti’s killing during the strike itself. But prosecutors declined to announce an investigation into Good’s death. And federal law makes it almost impossible to sue federal agents unless specific conditions are met.
As for abolishing ICE? No Congressional legislation was introduced or advanced. The Trump administration instead pursued expansion of ICE capacity, directing over $75 billion in supplemental funding to operations in the weeks following the strike.
Judging the strike only by immediate wins misses important ways the movement grew stronger. Media coverage reached every major national outlet. The action demonstrated coordination between sectors with different legal protections on a scale never seen before. The coalition’s range and ability to coordinate was remarkable. Public opinion showed measurable shifts—59 percent of Americans reported that ICE had become “too aggressive,” a ten-point increase since July 2025.
And organizers explicitly framed January 30 as a first move, not a climactic moment. They announced sustained mobilization plans extending through the midterm election cycle.
Five Strategies from Abolition History
So what comes next? History offers instructive precedents from movements that faced similar problems. They demonstrated power without immediately winning change. They kept coalitions together over time. And they found ways to escalate when initial actions didn’t generate sufficient pressure.
1. Rotating Sector Strikes That Hurt
The fundamental limitation of a one-day general strike is that employers and government can simply wait it out. A single day of disruption, however massive, doesn’t force negotiation. Normal business operations resume the next day.
The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strike—the explicit reference point for organizers—worked differently. It lasted months, not a day. When police fired directly into picket lines on “Bloody Friday,” killing two workers and wounding over sixty-five, the union didn’t demobilize. Forty thousand people marched on the National Guard stockade where leaders had been imprisoned, demanding their release.
The strike brought all trucking operations within the city to a standstill for weeks. That sustained economic pressure—not a single dramatic day—forced employers to negotiate.
Here’s what a rotating sector strategy would look like for the ICE Out movement. Agricultural workers strike first, creating food supply disruptions. That lasts two to three weeks. Then transportation workers strike, immobilizing freight and passenger movement. Healthcare and detention facility support workers follow, affecting detention center operations. Public sector workers come next.
Each sector strike lasts long enough to create economic pain—declining profits, broken supply chains, where refusing to negotiate costs more than giving in. But different workers participate sequentially, spreading economic burden rather than requiring every worker to forgo wages indefinitely.
The difficulty? It requires coordination between sectors with different legal protections for striking on a scale never seen before. Agricultural workers face different legal protections than public sector workers or private industry workers. The movement would need strong legal support systems for workers facing employer retaliation. And maintaining coordinated pressure over months requires sustained fundraising for strike funds and community support.
But historical evidence suggests this approach works better than single-day actions for generating change.
2. Target the Corporations That Make ICE Possible
General consumer boycotts are diffuse and hard to sustain. But targeted corporate campaigns against specific companies with direct financial interests in operations? Those create ways to pressure them into negotiating.
The United Farm Workers’ grape boycott of the 1960s and ’70s concentrated pressure on specific large producers rather than attempting to pressure the entire agricultural system. By focusing boycott efforts, the UFW created sufficient economic pain to force bargaining.
For the ICE Out movement, this means identifying and targeting: technology companies providing facial recognition, database systems, or communication systems used by ICE; banking institutions providing financial services or loans to ICE; private prison companies operating detention facilities; and food service companies operating within detention centers.
A targeted campaign against these specific corporations, combined with shareholder activism, employee organizing, and consumer boycotts, creates distinct economic pressure. Unlike government agencies that can resist economic pressure, corporations can change what they do—a technology company can choose not to renew an ICE contract, a bank can decline ICE accounts, a private prison operator can exit detention contracts.
This approach also allows participation from people who can’t strike at work. Consumer boycotts, shareholder campaigns, and pressure on corporate boards don’t require workers to forgo wages.
The difficulty? Some corporations have deep financial commitment to ICE contracts. Private prison operators, for whom detention represents major revenue streams, might accept boycott campaigns as cost of doing business. And corporate campaigns require sophisticated research operations to identify specific contracts, financial relationships, and corporate decision-making structures.
3. Build Community Defense Networks That Make Operations Harder
Rather than focusing exclusively on external pressure against ICE, develop organized direct aid networks that both reduce ICE’s ability to do their job and demonstrate alternative ways to handle immigration.
This looks like: coordinated rapid-response networks that deploy legal observers and community members to ICE locations; organized transportation networks helping immigrants reach legal support and safe locations; community legal defense funds providing bail and attorney support; organized workplace safety networks documenting and reporting ICE violations; and organized housing networks providing temporary shelter for people fleeing operations.
The underground railroad of the slavery abolition era represented organized community response to federal law that both saved lives and undermined the slave system’s operational capacity. The sanctuary movement of the 1980s organized faith communities to provide housing, legal support, and direct aid to Central American refugees while simultaneously challenging the legitimacy of operations.
During the National Shutdown, nearly six hundred faith leaders traveled to Minneapolis specifically to witness and participate, suggesting existing capacity for organized response networks.
Community monitoring and documentation of ICE violations creates evidence for civil rights investigations and lawsuits, raising the legal and political costs. Direct aid networks reduce effectiveness by removing available targets and providing rapid response. And this approach demonstrates that communities can meet their own needs without ICE, supporting the abolitionist argument that communities don’t need ICE.
The difficulty? Community defense networks face potential legal liability for “harboring” immigrants or obstruction of justice charges. The movement would require strong legal defense networks. And community networks focused on direct aid rather than changing laws might turn into another social service without addressing the root problems.
4. Link ICE to Police Violence and Mass Incarceration
The 2020 George Floyd uprising demonstrated coalition-building around police violence on a scale never seen before. Immigrant justice, racial justice, housing justice, disability justice, and labor organizations mobilized simultaneously around a common understanding of police violence.
Deliberately expanding ICE Out coalition-building to include organizations focused on police violence, mass incarceration, disability justice, and economic justice—framing operations as one dimension of broader police and state violence—broadens the group of people invested in ICE abolition.
The Movement for Black Lives platform explicitly connected anti-Blackness in operations to anti-Blackness in policing. The prison abolition movement built on decades of work linking prison expansion, police violence, and operations as interconnected systems of control over people’s lives.
People concerned about police violence, mass incarceration, or economic precarity can see direct connection between operations and their own struggles. And organizations focused on police violence have already built public consciousness about problems with law enforcement, creating openness to the message about federal law enforcement agencies.
The difficulty? Broader coalition-building creates coordination challenges and more potential for disagreement about strategy. Organizations with different constituencies might have different immediate demands or preferred tactics. And framing operations as one element of broader police violence might reduce emphasis on the specific demands emerging from the Good and Pretti killings.
5. Win State and Local Victories While Building Toward Federal Change
The death penalty abolition movement achieved its most significant victories not through federal legislation but through state-by-state campaigns that gradually reduced death penalty usage. Similarly, sanctuary development has occurred primarily at local and state levels. Over twelve states and numerous cities have implemented policies limiting cooperation with ICE.
Rather than exclusively pursuing federal ICE abolition, which faces huge political obstacles in a Republican Congress, pursue coordinated state and local laws combining reform, police defunding, and ICE accountability provisions.
This might include: state legislation prohibiting state and local cooperation with ICE absent judicial warrants; municipal legislation restricting police assistance with operations; state laws creating ICE accountability boards that can investigate independently; and state legislation funding alternatives to detention rather than ICE detention facilities.
State and local levels are more open to progressive change, particularly in blue states and progressive municipalities. These victories, while not addressing federal ICE operations directly, would reduce state and local cooperation with federal agents, making it harder for them to access local jails and law enforcement partnerships.
This strategy also allows for working with state and local officials, creating potential for both working with elected officials and through protests where elected officials propose legislation responding to movement pressure. Victories at state and local level build political networks and keep the movement in the public eye while working toward federal change.
The difficulty? State-level reform doesn’t directly address federal ICE operations or the Good and Pretti killings. Focus on legislative strategy might seem to discourage supporters expecting federal-level accountability or prosecution for the specific shootings. And the federal government overriding state immigration laws remains legally and politically disputed.
What History Teaches About Winning
No single tactic generates sufficient pressure for change without sustained organization, multiple pressure strategies at once, and keeping the coalition together over time.
The 1934 Minneapolis strike achieved victory through sustained pressure, disciplined mass mobilization, and willingness to escalate when initial demands weren’t met. But it became historically significant because workers maintained union organization afterward, allowing continued organizing in subsequent decades.
The 2006 immigrant rights movement’s single-day boycott generated immense media attention but didn’t produce change. This happened partly because sustained organizing wasn’t built after the May 1 action.
By contrast, the prison abolition movement’s capacity to sustain organizing over decades made it possible for 2020 “Defund the Police” messaging to achieve mainstream political circulation.
For the ICE Out movement, the critical question isn’t what single escalation tactic might work. It’s whether the demonstrated coalition strength on January 30 can be turned into lasting organizations capable of using multiple tactics, escalating when necessary, and maintaining pressure over extended time periods.
The movement’s own framing of January 30 as an opening rather than climax suggests awareness of this necessity. The announced plans for sustained mobilization through the midterm cycle suggest strategic thinking about the long game.
Whether this turns into sustained organizing power will determine whether the National Shutdown represents a turn toward real change or becomes another large-scale protest action that generates attention without shifting power.
This article analyzes protest and activism tactics for educational purposes. We aim to contribute to effective and ethical efforts across the political spectrum, and we present diverse viewpoints and ideas without endorsement.