After Minneapolis: building the mass movement against ICE repression and US imperialism

The spectacular Minneapolis mass protests January 23 amid widespread workplace and school shutdowns highlighted the transition of localized ICE protests into a mass movement–and a second horrific ICE murder the following day highlights the critical stakes in this fight. The shots fired by an ICE agent into a defenseless Alex Pretti as he was beaten by six ICE agents January 24 shows that an even bigger and more powerful mass movement is needed, including labor actions and strikes. Even the Minneapolis human rights official who worked in humanitarian relief in war zones in Yemen and Ukraine likened her experience to what she is seeing in the city.

The January 23 mobilization and the protest over the latest ICE murder the following day showed the potential for wider struggle against Trump’s lethal repression at home and military action abroad. The independent socialist left is in the thick of this fight and has an important role to play within it. 

While the Trump administration has unleashed repression and attacks on working people for months and bombed multiple countries, the events of January 2026 have put the U.S.—and the whole world–on new terrain. Trump’s personal endorsement of a federal ICE agent’s murder of peaceful protester Renee Goode in Minneapolis, was a message that U.S. federal agents have a license to kill anyone who gets in their way. But far from intimidating the movement, it propelled what may be the largest wave of grassroots organizing in any city since the heyday of the 1960s civil rights movement. Now ICE is targeting smaller cities such as Portland and Lewiston, Maine with overwhelming force after encountering resistance in Los Angeles and Chicago. Even so, the movement continues to spread and is developing national coordination.

The Minneapolis mass outpouring is a signal moment for the left. It linked organized labor with the social movement against ICE. The Trump administration has made it clear that it will not back down unless and until the movement is big and powerful enough to force it to do so. While the huge No Kings protests in October of 2025 showed the breadth of the opposition to Trump, the life-and-death struggle to push back ICE has led to a wave of self-activity and organization of working people that brings new collective power to the resistance.

The necessity of anti-war organizing 

The potential exists to link the anti-ICE movement to opposition to U.S. imperialism. The latest U.S. military ventures are unpopular, from the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in an attack that killed 100 people, a threatened U.S. attack on Iran, and a plan  to annex Greenland—even at the cost of an armed confrontation with NATO ally Denmark. While Trump folded on Greenland, we are in a new era of imperialist aggression, whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Trump’s declaration that he is the “acting president” of Venezuela. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, nobody’s idea of an anti-imperialist, spelled this out in his speech at the recent Davos, Switzerland gathering of political leaders and the super-rich. 

“Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised,” Carney said. “Call it what it is–a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”

Of course, the “rules-based international order” was always run in the interests of the big capitalist powers at the expense of the developing countries, whether through war such as the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or through debt traps set by the International Monetary Fund. But that era of imperialism has given way to law of the jungle, where might makes right from Ukraine to Venezuela and Europe is squeezed between the U.S. and Russia. And while the U.S. has eased tensions with China in recent months, confrontation is inevitable as the U.S. seeks to contain China’s rise as a world power–an effort that began before Trump and will continue after him. Thus the U.S. plans to spend a staggering $839 billion on the military this year after gutting the Department of Education and slashing social spending.

Israel’s genocide in Palestine is the laboratory for this new era. The U.S. funding, arming and coordination of Israel’s genocide in Palestine–begun under the Biden administration–is for Trump a model for how the U.S. will conduct a policy. The Trump “peace” plan for Gaza is aimed at consolidating U.S/Israeli dominance in the Middle East. The far right and fascist elements in the Israeli government, once pariahs, are at the vanguard of this turn in international politics. Trump seeks to coordinate these trends globally by backing far-right parties in Germany, the UK, Italy and elsewhere, while adopting the model of Hungary’s authoritarian government.

Tasks for the left

Trump is unpopular but not yet politically weakened. Far right Trump ally Steve Bannon compares the Republican-controlled Congress to Russia’s rubber-stamp Duma. the U.S. Supreme Court has greenlighted Trump’s power grab on multiple occasions, from mass firings of federal workers to slashing spending on health care. The capitalist class is queasy about Trump’s efforts to control the Federal Reserve Bank and his tariffs. But billionaires from Silicon Valley to Wall Street have mostly cheered his pro-business and pro-imperialists policies and will benefit enormously from his tax cuts. They tolerate his corruption and chaos because he furthers their agenda of cutting labor costs, weakening unions, slashing social spending, and in asserting US military power.

Now the turn in the international and domestic situation poses a new challenge. It demands a united front approach to oppose the U.S. attack on Venezuela as well as continued solidarity for Palestine and opposition to other U.S. military adventures from Iran to Cuba. The murder of Renee Good highlights that the defense of free speech–central to the Palestine solidarity campaign–now must be a fight that involves the widest possible campaign for civil liberties and the right to protest without violent repression. 

The revolutionary left has a responsibility to do what it can to coordinate and build such efforts. While those in the revolutionary socialist tradition do not share the views of those on the left that identify with the Maduro regime, we share a common goal of opposing U.S. imperialism. Likewise, while we have no illusions that the anti-Trump and anti-ICE rhetoric from Democratic politicians will be matched with sufficient action, we work alongside those who look to the Democrats today. Socialists should build these movements even as they argue for an independent mass movement capable of a consistent resistance to Trump and the far right. While the revolutionary left is small today, the level of radicalization of tens of thousands who are joining the fight makes it possible to build a left wing of the movement strong enough to do this and to build revolutionary organizations in the process. A united front of socialist organizations, such as the recently formed United Left Platform, has an important role to play in this effort. 

There is a tremendous legacy to build upon, from the labor movement’s fighting traditions and class struggle, to the women’s movement, the movements for immigrant rights and justice, the mass antiwar movements against the Vietnam war and war in Iraq, opposition to US imperialism acting through the “War on terror,” and the courage of the Black freedom struggle—from the mass revolutionary struggle against slavery, the fight against racist Jim Crow and state violence, to the Black Lives Matter rebellions. The Minneapolis resistance and the stirrings of anti-imperialism point to the potential, and urgency, of building this resistance now.