How ICE Out Minnesota Coordinated 24 Simultaneous Store Occupations

Border Patrol agents dragged two employees out of a Target store in suburban Minneapolis. Within weeks, protesters had occupied 24 Target locations simultaneously from Hawaii to Pennsylvania. The coordinated action—combining Mennonite hymn-singing, labor union support, and old-school sit-in tactics—represented one of the most geographically dispersed retail occupation campaigns in recent American history.

What made this possible wasn’t anger over ICE detaining American citizens at a shopping mall. It was the organizational architecture that activists built to turn that anger into coordinated movement in two dozen cities in a single week.

The Richfield Detention

Border Patrol agents walked into the Target in Richfield, Minnesota—less than ten miles from Target’s corporate headquarters. They detained two workers at the entrance. The workers were injured during the detention. Both were American citizens. Both were released without charges or explanation.

The incident was part of Operation Metro Surge. The Department of Homeland Security called it “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” By late January, ICE had arrested roughly 3,000 people in Minneapolis alone since December 2024.

On January 28, Minnesota’s chief federal judge found that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in 74 separate cases since the start of the year. At least twelve documented cases emerged of American citizens being detained, often through racial profiling or mistaken identity.

On January 24, ICE officers and Customs and Border Protection personnel shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at a Minneapolis VA hospital. Pretti was an American citizen who’d stepped between officers and a woman being assaulted. He was trying to stop what he believed was an unlawful detention.

The Target detention video crystallized everything into a single, shareable image: federal officers in a suburban shopping mall, detaining American citizens at their workplace.

Coalition Structure

Coordinating 24 simultaneous occupations requires organizational infrastructure—and the Target campaign had it.

At the national level, the 50501 Movement and Women’s March brought their existing mobilization infrastructure and experience running multi-city efforts.

At the state level, ICE Out Minnesota served as the primary coalition hub. It brought together community groups, religious leaders, and labor unions. Unidos Minnesota, an immigrant-led advocacy organization, focused on the Richfield site where the detention occurred. They demanded that Target operate as a “Fourth Amendment business” by denying ICE entry without signed judicial warrants.

Operating as Mennonite Action, congregations organized what they called “disruptive worship services.” They sang Christian hymns inside stores to protest corporate complicity with ICE. Mennonites have deep historical experience with civil disobedience, particularly through the 1980s sanctuary movement. During that era, hundreds of congregations harbored Central American refugees in defiance of federal immigration law.

The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation—representing 175 unions and 80,000 workers—endorsed the campaign. Multiple local unions allowed members to participate in the January 23 general strike without penalty. Federation leadership framed it as a response to how “our workers are being impacted by what is happening in our communities by ICE every single day.”

At the University of Minnesota, student organizations formed their own organizing coalition. The Black Student Union, Somali Student Association, Ethiopian Student Association, Graduate Labor Union, and AFSCME Local 3800 joined forces.

This layered structure allowed national networks to provide legitimacy and coordination tools, labor federations to bring institutional resources and working-class constituencies, faith groups to provide moral framing and participant discipline, student organizations to contribute energy and organizing capacity, and immigrant-led groups to keep the demands grounded in affected communities’ experiences.

Each layer could operate somewhat autonomously while contributing to the whole.

The Week of Action

On February 9, more than 100 Mennonites and other Christians entered a Lancaster, Pennsylvania store on Fruitville Pike during normal shopping hours. They didn’t block entrances or confront shoppers. Instead, they began singing Christian hymns—including “This Little Light of Mine”—while occupying the interior space.

The singing continued long enough to draw attention from customers and media. Demonstrators then sought out management to deliver a letter with their demands before peacefully departing as police arrived. No arrests were made.

In other cities, tactics varied while keeping core elements consistent. In Minneapolis’s Dinkytown neighborhood, one store closed to avoid a planned sit-in. In Philadelphia, over 40 participants including clergy were arrested in what was characterized as nonviolent civil disobedience. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Mennonite Action groups organized similar singing and worship services inside.

The variation in outcomes—peaceful dispersals in some cases, arrests in Philadelphia, preemptive closures in others—suggests that while organizers shared a common framework, local execution and police response differed based on local conditions.

Hitting multiple sites simultaneously maximized media coverage through geographic dispersal—national outlets could report on a nationwide campaign rather than a single local protest. It distributed police and security resources, potentially reducing arrest risk at any individual site. It signaled to Target that pressure was coming from their customer base nationwide, not from Minneapolis activists alone.

Target’s Response

Target issued no public statements addressing the detained workers, the protests, or activist demands during the week of occupations.

Chief Human Resources Officer Melissa Kremer sent a memo to staff stating the company was “listening and working to de-escalate where possible.” She said senior leaders were “engaging with government officials, community partners, faith leaders and other stakeholders.” This acknowledged activist pressure without taking any public position on immigration enforcement or federal policy—the core demands protesters were making.

Incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke had assumed his role on February 2, placing him in crisis management mode during his first days as chief executive.

On January 25, Fiddelke had joined over 60 other Minnesota-based CEOs in signing an open letter from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. The letter called for “an immediate de-escalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” But it didn’t name immigration enforcement directly. It didn’t reference ICE. It didn’t address the specific demands activists were making.

By focusing on “de-escalation” and “working together,” the 60 CEOs reframed the problem. They shifted it from “federal immigration enforcement is harming our community” to “tensions are high and officials should talk to each other.” This shifted blame from ICE to the conflict itself—implicitly including activists in that blame.

This is a common corporate crisis management tactic. Issue a jointly-signed letter that allows companies to appear responsive while avoiding substantive commitment. No single company stands out. No one takes a controversial position. Everyone can claim they “spoke out” without opposing anything specific.

When clergy and community members visited Target’s downtown Minneapolis headquarters on January 15 to present demands directly, the company provided no indication it would adopt these requests. They had requested that the CEO call for an end to ICE operations and publicly urge Congress to defund ICE.

Target likely lacks the legal authority to deny ICE officers access to its stores. Federal officers can enter public retail areas without warrants. This created a strategic bind for activists. They were demanding something Target arguably couldn’t deliver.

The Greensboro Sit-Ins: When Retail Occupations Worked

In February 1960, four students from North Carolina A&T sat at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. They refused to leave when denied service. The next day, more than 20 students joined them. By February 4, over 300 students had gathered. The sit-ins spread to other stores and expanded throughout the South.

The tactical logic resembled the Target campaign. Both focused on commercial spaces for broader social change. Both employed orderly nonviolent disruption. Both generated media attention through visible protest in public spaces. But the sit-in movement achieved what the Target campaign hasn’t yet—change in corporate policy.

As sit-ins spread to roughly 100 cities by mid-1960, with an estimated 70,000 people participating, the economic impact accumulated. Woolworth’s reportedly lost about $200,000 in revenue (roughly $2.1 million in today’s dollars) due to boycotts and sit-ins.

On July 25, 1960—after seven months of sustained pressure—Woolworth’s manager in Greensboro asked four Black staff members to change out of their uniforms and order meals at the previously segregated lunch counter. They became the first Black customers served at any Woolworth’s lunch counter. Most stores soon desegregated.

What enabled the sit-in movement’s success that the Target campaign hasn’t achieved? The sit-in movement maintained sustained pressure over months rather than weeks. The economic impact was distributed nationally in over 100 cities simultaneously. The movement combined sit-ins with aggressive boycott campaigns. The demands were concrete and verifiable—”serve us at this lunch counter”—rather than abstract policy positions. And the broader historical context made clear that desegregation aligned with forces that major corporations recognized were inevitable.

The 1980s Sanctuary Movement: When Faith Communities Broke Federal Law

In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled to the United States to escape violence. But the Reagan administration refused to grant most asylum status. Religious leaders responded by opening church buildings as public sanctuaries. Undocumented Central Americans could access shelter, food, and legal advice while residing in relative safety from deportation.

On March 24, 1982, John Fife’s Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson announced its decision to become a sanctuary. Other churches followed. By 1985, over 500 congregations nationwide had declared sanctuary status, creating a distributed network of protection for undocumented immigrants.

The sanctuary movement’s engagement with federal law was more direct and legally perilous than the Target campaign. In 1985, the federal government launched Operation Sojourner, sending paid informants into sanctuary communities to gather evidence. In 1986, the Justice Department indicted 16 Americans and Mexicans on conspiracy charges related to harboring undocumented immigrants.

The defendants lost their cases legally but won a public opinion victory. By 1990, Congress passed legislation providing “Temporary Protected Status” for Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

The sanctuary movement’s lessons: Civil disobedience campaigns can win public sympathy even when participants face legal consequences. Faith-based framing generates broader coalitional support and moral credibility. Sustained campaigns over years, rather than week-long efforts, generate policy momentum. And when civil disobedience is framed as upholding higher moral or constitutional law, it can shift public opinion more effectively than campaigns focused solely on corporate pressure.

Measuring Effectiveness

On the immediate tactical level, the campaign succeeded in generating substantial media coverage and disrupting Target operations at multiple sites. Coverage appeared in local news outlets in affected cities, national news organizations, and activist media.

But measured against stated objectives, the campaign hadn’t achieved its core demands by the conclusion of the week-long effort. Target didn’t issue a public statement calling for Congress to defund ICE. Target didn’t publicly call for an end to federal immigration enforcement operations. Target didn’t implement new policies denying ICE officers access without warrants.

This gap between demands and outcomes illustrates a challenge in corporate pressure campaigns. Corporations have substantial power to resist demands through legal arguments, public relations strategy, and structural factors that may limit what they can deliver.

Yet the campaign may have generated longer-term impacts that are harder to measure immediately. Target’s new CEO now operates under heightened scrutiny regarding immigration issues, potentially affecting future corporate decisions. The protest demonstrated to Target staff that community pressure could mobilize rapidly and visibly around corporate complicity with federal enforcement. The multi-state coordination showed that Target’s brand and reputation were vulnerable to organized pressure beyond Minneapolis.

The campaign occurred within a broader context of intensifying federal immigration enforcement that was generating political and legal blowback. Federal judges were issuing scathing rebukes of ICE for systematic violation of court orders. A federal government attorney handling ICE cases told a judge, “The system sucks. This job sucks,” while explaining why her office couldn’t comply with court orders fast enough. Minnesota state officials filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to halt ICE deployments.

By February 12, Border Czar Tom Homan announced that ICE would be withdrawing 700 federal personnel from Minnesota and winding down Operation Metro Surge. Whether this resulted from corporate pressure, legal challenges, political pressure, or operational decisions remains contested.

Potential Escalation Strategies

The Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins saw repeated occupations from February through July 1960 before management capitulated. A rotating occupation model maintaining continuous presence at 5-10 strategically chosen sites for multiple months would likely generate greater pressure than distributed one-week occupations at 24 sites. This would require building participant networks committed to multi-month engagement. It would also require developing infrastructure to support occupiers—legal support, medical, supplies, security.

The anti-apartheid divestment campaign of the 1980s-90s provides a model for pressuring corporations through investor pressure. Rather than focusing on consumers and direct corporate pressure, activists could mobilize shareholder activism. Public pension funds, university endowments, and religious institutional investors hold Target stock. Universities including UC Berkeley and Smith College divested from companies doing business in South Africa, generating both direct financial pressure and reputational consequences.

While some Target workers participated in the January 23 general strike, the campaign didn’t formally involve retail workers’ unions in strike efforts. The Fight for $15 demonstrates the power of formal strikes where workers collectively withhold their work, creating operational disruption. A formal retail workers’ strike could combine consumer-facing civil disobedience with strikes from inside, multiplying economic pressure. Given that two Target workers were arrested by ICE in their workplace, framing workplace safety concerns could connect worker interests to broader campaign goals.

Rather than asking Target to unilaterally deny ICE access—which is legally problematic—the campaign could support state and local legislative efforts. These would prohibit corporations from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement absent judicial warrants. San Francisco passed a binding Sanctuary City Ordinance in 1989 that prohibits city staff from assisting ICE. A legislative campaign would ask Target and other corporations to publicly support state and local bills prohibiting cooperation with federal enforcement without warrants. This would make Target’s position alignment with local policy rather than unilateral corporate decision.

What the Campaign Reveals

The occupation of 24 Target stores represents a contemporary iteration of sit-in tactics rooted in the Civil Rights movement. It draws on sanctuary-based civil disobedience from the 1980s and on strategies from the Fight for $15. The campaign succeeded in generating substantial media coverage, creating operational disruption, applying reputational pressure to a major corporation, and demonstrating broad coalition capacity for multi-state organizing.

But measured against the stated objective of securing corporate public opposition to federal immigration enforcement and calls for defunding ICE, the campaign hadn’t achieved its core demands by the conclusion of the week-long effort. This outcome reflects the legal constraints on what corporations can accomplish, the political complexity of immigration enforcement as a policy issue, and the temporal limitations of week-long concentrated campaigns absent sustained follow-up.

Organizers can rapidly build multi-state efforts drawing on existing national networks, coalition capacity, and participant networks. The campaign demonstrates the continued viability of sit-in tactics and civil disobedience as protest methods. Contemporary activists blend historical tactics with modern coordination technology and multi-state organizational capacity.

The historical precedents examined here suggest that sustained campaigns with clear metrics of success and multiple forms of institutional pressure generate lasting change. Time-limited campaigns with diffuse demands tend to dissipate. The Target campaign’s future depends on whether organizers can sustain momentum beyond the initial week of occupations and build toward the kind of sustained, multi-front pressure that forces corporate and political change.

The moment of concentrated anti-ICE organizing in Minnesota in January-February 2025 was triggered by the videoed detention of two American citizens at a Richfield store. It challenged federal immigration enforcement, mobilized multiple constituencies, and demonstrated continued capacity for civil disobedience at scale. Whether it contributes to sustained organizing around immigration and workers’ rights, generates policy shifts, or proves to be a momentary surge will depend on what organizers do next.

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.