We faced the cold, we shut our wallets, we walked off the job. We are serious: ICE out.

Minnesotans have sent a clear message in the depths of winter: we are committed to ridding our state of Donald Trump’s surge of immigration forces and the abuses they have brought with them. The sheer scale of the protests, boycotts, and strikes makes plain that this is not a fleeting outburst of anger but a durable moral stand. We faced the cold, we shut our wallets, we walked off the job. We are serious: ICE out.

Minnesota has never been a stranger to harsh weather, but what unfolded on the streets in subzero temperatures was not just a display of stoicism; it was a demonstration of values. When tens of thousands of people bundle up, bring their kids, carry signs, and march for hours in air that burns the lungs, they are doing more than registering a complaint. They are testifying, with their bodies and their time, that the presence and conduct of Trump’s expanded immigration forces in their neighborhoods has crossed a line. Cold drives out the casual participant. What remains is resolve.

That resolve is written not only in marches but in money. Minnesotans did not limit themselves to moral appeals; they organized an economic boycott and strike that hit the system where it notices: in commerce, productivity, and normalcy. Businesses closed their doors in solidarity, workers stayed home, and customers withheld spending to make visible how essential immigrant communities and their allies are to the functioning of the state. A boycott is a choice to bear voluntary loss—to give up income, sales, tips, and wages—not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. When hundreds of workplaces accept those costs to protest federal agents, it shows a shared judgment that the status quo is intolerable.

Strikes and shutdowns are also a way of asserting power in the face of an armed federal presence. The Trump-era surge of immigration enforcement in Minnesota, culminating in raids, checkpoints, and high-profile violence, is meant to project dominance and induce fear. The collective answer—workers refusing to clock in, congregations opening their doors to protesters, parents taking their children out of school to march—flips that script. It says that ICE and allied forces cannot simply move through our communities as if we are passive terrain. Instead, every raid carries a political price, every abusive encounter seeds the next walkout. When people risk discipline from employers or arrest from the state to participate, they demonstrate that they are in this struggle for the long haul.

The content of the demands matters as much as the tactics. Minnesotans are not merely calling for “better training” or politely requesting that ICE “do better.” The slogan is clearer and much more radical in its implications: ICE out. That is a declaration that the agency, as it currently operates, has forfeited any claim to legitimacy here. It signals that many in the state have moved beyond the politics of tiny reforms and into a politics of removal, replacement, or outright abolition of the structures that enable abusive immigration enforcement. The protests are not about smoothing the rough edges of a policy; they are about ending a presence that has come to symbolize fear, racial profiling, and lawlessness under color of law.

This movement also reveals a deep sense of solidarity that stretches across race, class, and immigration status. Immigrants, refugees, long-time citizens, union members, students, faith leaders, small business owners, and public officials are appearing side by side, not as isolated interest groups but as participants in a shared defense of their neighbors. When a restaurant owner closes in support of undocumented workers, or a teacher joins a picket line to protest a federal raid miles away from their school, they are making a claim about what kind of community Minnesota will be. That claim is simple: we will not accept a system that treats some of us as disposable and expects the rest to look away.

The seriousness of the commitment is also visible in the way Minnesotans are connecting street power to legal, political, and institutional change. Protests at courthouses and federal buildings are paired with demands for state and local non-cooperation, tighter limits on information sharing with federal agents, and active investigation of abuses. Community groups are not only mobilizing for a day; they are building rapid-response teams, legal-defense networks, and neighborhood organizing structures designed to outlast one news cycle or one administration. That investment of time and resources shows that residents do not see ICE’s expanded operations as a passing storm. They see it as a structural threat that must be confronted systematically and dismantled piece by piece.

Critically, these actions are an assertion of Minnesota’s own political identity in the face of a hostile federal agenda. Trump’s surge of immigration forces is supposed to send a message that Washington can impose its will anywhere, that no state or city can meaningfully resist. The answer from Minnesota has been to use every available tool of self-government—elections, public protest, economic disruption, local policy—to say no. That “no” is not symbolic; it is a commitment to making continued aggressive enforcement here politically, economically, and socially unsustainable.

Finally, the language coming from the streets—“We faced the cold, we boycotted, we struck, we will not back down”—is the language of a people who understand both the risks and the stakes. When thousands declare “ICE out” and then show up again and again, they are binding themselves to each other and to a common purpose. They are telling the Trump administration and its immigration forces that this is not their terrain, not on their terms, not anymore. In the snow and the wind and the silence of closed businesses, you can hear that promise: Minnesotans are committed to ridding their state of this surge of immigration forces, and they are prepared to keep proving it, day after day, until ICE is out.