The following statement will be distributed at demonstrations and protests organized in Minneapolis and other cities throughout the US on January 23, 2026.
Today, workers and young people are taking to the streets in Minneapolis and across the US to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) occupation of Minneapolis, the murder of Renée Nicole Good, and the Trump administration’s escalating assault on democratic rights.
There is a powerful and growing sentiment for mass action, expressed in calls for a general strike to demand an end to police violence, repression and attacks on both immigrants and citizens. Today’s protests are an important step forward, but January 23 cannot be seen as an endpoint. Rather, they must become the launching point for a nationwide counter-offensive by the working class against the conspiracy for dictatorship.
It is necessary to ask and to answer the question: What next?
The response of the Trump administration to opposition is escalation and provocation. The White House is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, effectively placing Minneapolis under martial law. Active-duty Army soldiers from Fort Bragg and the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska have been placed on alert for possible deployment to Minnesota.
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Minneapolis on the eve of today’s demonstrations to deliver a show of force alongside ICE agents, hailing their work and defending the murder of Good. Vance said he wanted to end “the chaos” in the city and called upon local Democrats to deploy police forces to suppress popular opposition, which he blamed on “left-wing agitators.”
On Wednesday night, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino led federal forces in a violent crackdown against protesters, deploying tear gas and making arrests outside a Minneapolis convenience store after a worker refused to serve them. Earlier in the day, ICE agents detained a five-year old child, Liam Ramos, who was used as bait to lure out family members. He and his father are now in an ICE prison in Texas.
Every fundamental democratic right is under assault. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo leaked this week authorized ICE agents to break into homes without judicial warrants, effectively obliterating the Fourth Amendment and its protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
To develop a counter-offensive, certain fundamental facts must be recognized. First, what is happening in Minneapolis is the spearhead of a broader conspiracy to establish a military‑presidential dictatorship in the United States, developed systematically since Trump’s return to power a year ago.
Trump blurted this out at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, declaring “it is sometimes good to have a dictator.” The democratic rights guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are being obliterated, and the measures now being used against immigrants and protesters will be directed against all opposition, particularly in the working class.
Second, Trump is not acting as a rogue individual, but as the political representative of the capitalist oligarchy. In the United States alone, the combined wealth of billionaires increased by $1.5 trillion, about 22 percent, during Trump’s first year back in office, bringing their total holdings to roughly $8.2 trillion. Globally, billionaire wealth surged at three times the rate of the previous five years in 2025, reaching a record $18.3 trillion.
The oligarchy has placed Trump in power because its interests are no longer compatible with democratic and legal forms of rule. The ruling class is waging a counterrevolution on every front: dismantling public education, gutting core social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and subjecting culture and intellectual life to the dictates of Wall Street. Corporations are using AI technologies to carry out mass layoffs across all industries.
Third, the assault on democratic rights is inextricably connected to the eruption of American imperialism. In the first weeks of 2026 alone, the Trump administration has overseen an illegal military intervention in Venezuela, including the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, threatened war against Iran, demanded control over Greenland, and issued increasing provocations against the allies of US imperialism in Europe and North America.
For a general strike to stop Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis!
To counter the rampage of the oligarchy, mass action is necessary. The sentiment for a general strike now emerging reflects the growing recognition that appeals to politicians, lawsuits and electoral maneuvers are incapable of countering the violence and criminality of the Trump regime.
A general strike, however, is not a one-day protest or consumer boycott. It is the mobilization of the collective power of the working class—the producers of all wealth in society—to bring the machinery of exploitation and repression to a halt. That power must now be organized and directed against the conspiracy to establish a dictatorship.
There is a powerful precedent for such a movement in the history of Minneapolis itself. In 1934, the city was the site of one of the most significant general strikes in American history, led by Trotskyist militants in the Teamsters. Workers defied the Citizens Alliance, the National Guard and police repression. Despite shootings and martial law, they won decisive victories and laid the foundation for industrial unionism across the country.
That tradition must be taken up again—in defense not only of workers’ rights, but of democratic rights themselves. The fight against dictatorship in Minneapolis is the fight of workers everywhere, in the United States and internationally, who face the same crisis and have the same interests.
A counter-offensive of the working class must be completely independent of the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus. The Democratic Party is not an ally in the fight against Trump. It is a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the intelligence apparatus whose central objective is to contain and manage popular anger rather than mobilize a working class movement against dictatorship.
In recent days, House Democratic leaders announced that they will ensure passage of a bill that fully funds the DHS and ICE. Whatever their hypocritical statements of concern over the killing of Renée Nicole Good, the Democrats have helped build up and deploy the deportation regime and the instruments of repression.
Democrats, including Governor Tim Walz, Senator Bernie Sanders and others advise those outraged over ICE’s murderous actions to direct their attention to the courts and the midterm elections. This is political deception. Trump has already declared his intention to ignore court orders that go against him, and the Supreme Court is controlled by a fascist cabal. As for the elections: there is no guarantee that they will even take place, or that, if they do, they will bear any resemblance to democratic norms.
For its part, the response of the trade union apparatus to the growing support for a general strike has been to suppress and counteract sentiment for mass struggle. The unions that have nominally backed the protest—such as the Teamsters, the CWA, the SEIU, and the nurses’ unions—have told their members that they cannot strike, citing no-strike clauses that the apparatus negotiated and enforces. This under conditions in which the Trump administration is obliterating every legal and constitutional constraint on state violence and refuses to investigate Good’s killer.
To carry forward the struggle, the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality therefore call for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood. Rank-and-file committees must take the initiative out of the hands of the bureaucracies, establish democratic control over the struggle, and begin to coordinate strike action and mass resistance from below.
Resolutions must be adopted calling for open-ended strike action, with clearly articulated demands: the immediate arrest and prosecution of Renée Nicole Good’s killer; the withdrawal of all federal paramilitary forces, including ICE, DHS, and CBP; the abolition of these repressive agencies; and the release of all detainees in ICE custody.
Coordinating committees must be built to unify these rank‑and‑file bodies across industries, cities, and states, and link them with workers internationally. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) provides the framework for this struggle, and we urge all those who want to build a real movement to join it.
It is impossible to fight fascism and dictatorship without fighting the social system from which they arise. The source of Trump’s assault on democratic rights is the domination of society by a capitalist oligarchy—a tiny layer of billionaires whose wealth and power are incompatible with democracy. The entire political establishment, including the Democratic Party, is committed to preserving this social order.
Capitalism has reached a historic dead end. To defend jobs, wages, education, health care, and democratic rights, the working class must build its own independent political movement to challenge the dictatorship of the banks and corporations and fight for socialism. The Socialist Equality Party calls on all those who agree with this perspective to join us, build rank-and-file committees, and take up the fight to mobilize the working class in the United States and internationally for a socialist future.