AFTER JANUARY 23: THE GENERAL STRIKE IS THE ONLY ACTION EQUAL TO THE ATTACK
Statement by Socialists Without Borders — January 28, 2026
We must be clear and direct with our community: we are facing a calculated campaign of State Terror. This is the reality we live in: a regime that seeks to break the will of the working class through blood, surveillance, and fear. We are living under a de facto state of siege, where the state kills with impunity and constitutional protections have been swept away. This situation is unacceptable. We must recognize how we arrived at this point: this nightmare was made possible by the Patriotic Acts and repressive legislation voted for overwhelmingly by both Democrats and Republicans. Together, they have stripped away due process and removed democratic liberties from everyone. We are now in a legal vacuum where the state can kidnap and kill any member of our society without accountability.
The mass deportations, the presence of tactical units in our streets, and the detention of protesters—who are in fact political prisoners—are not just an attack on immigrants; they are a weapon of mass intimidation aimed at the entire population. By unleashing terror against one sector, the regime seeks to paralyze us all. They want a population consumed by fear, but they have underestimated our capacity for collective action.
The fundamental truth of this moment is that the General Strike is the only force capable of stopping it. The mobilization this past Friday, January 23, was a historic turning point and a massive leap in our struggle. While our militant action at the San Francisco detention center on October 24 showed we could challenge the deportation machine directly, what we witnessed this Friday was a nationwide eruption of working-class power. In Minneapolis, it was a total labor stoppage: schools were empty, small businesses shuttered their doors in solidarity, and thousands of workers walked off the job, joined by rank-and-file members of the SEIU and UNITE HERE.
Across the country, the system felt the weight of our organized power. In Chicago, transit services were crippled as drivers stayed home; in Los Angeles, port workers paralyzed the docks, halting the movement of cargo; in New York City, massive marches seized the bridges and shut down the flow of commerce; in Seattle, tech and logistics workers walked off the job in a show of total defiance; and in Atlanta, neighborhood assemblies coordinated the shuttering of local businesses and schools. In these cities, among many others, the machinery of capital was forced to a standstill. In San Francisco, the call for solidarity has seen hundreds marching from the ICE offices at 630 Sansome to City Hall, with faith leaders launching hunger strikes and community networks monitoring every federal movement. This action proved to the world that a strike of this magnitude is not a distant dream—it is a concrete reality that demonstrates the strategic power of the working class.
It is high time to expose the role of the labor bureaucracy. While the rank-and-file are ready to fight, most of the union leaders remain paralyzed by fear or bound by their loyalty to the Democratic Party. This bureaucracy acts as a barrier, refusing to call for a General Strike because they fear losing their seat at the table of the very regime that oppresses us. They prefer symbolic gestures over real economic paralysis. We reject their attempts to water down our movement. The power of the strike belongs to the workers, not to the officials who seek to manage our discontent.
The State’s response to our unity has been lethal. The murder this past Saturday of Alex Pretti, a VA nurse shot in Minneapolis while heroically attempting to aid a woman being assaulted by federal agents, confirms that the regime has shifted from intimidation to targeted execution. Alex joins our martyrs alongside Mateo Terán, who died under suspicious circumstances in federal custody, and Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent while in her car in South Minneapolis on January 7.
The bloodshed extends far beyond Minnesota. In Chicago, the community is mourning the loss of David Santi Santiago, a tireless youth organizer who was gunned down by a federal tactical unit during the defense of a community center in Little Village. In Los Angeles, we honor the memory of Elena Rivas, a garment worker and union organizer who was killed when agents opened fire on a picket line at the Port of Long Beach. These killings, along with the numerous disappearances reported in the wake of raids in Seattle and Detroit, prove that the regime has launched a nationwide execution campaign. Each drop of blood spilled is a direct consequence of the shoot-to-kill orders issued to the occupation forces, targeting those who provide the backbone of our resistance.
We are currently under a military siege. In San Francisco, we denounce the skyrocketing use of drones—over 100 deployments in recent months—now used to monitor our protests and patrol our neighborhoods. We condemn the arrival of military-grade weaponry used by these occupation troops to intimidate our streets. In Maine, the DHS has launched Operation Catch of the Day, sending masked tactical units to Portland and Lewiston to terrorize African asylum-seekers, snatching people from the streets and smashing car windows with total disregard for the law. In Minneapolis, federal authorities are attempting to criminalize basic human solidarity by labeling the filming of ICE abuses as domestic terrorism. This is a desperate attempt to hide their crimes from the world.
Furthermore, we must confront the inadequate stance of other organizations. While we face the bullets of the regime, some groups limit their response to symbolic vigils and Know Your Rights workshops. Others, trapped in electoral logic, call for patience and voting better in the upcoming midterms, effectively asking us to wait for our executioners to be replaced by their accomplices. We reject the hollow slogans of groups that speak of socialism in the abstract while refusing to call for the total paralysis of production.
In the face of this, we reject the electoral traps of the Democratic Party—the accomplices who fund these very agents and who voted for the laws that stripped us of our rights. We need to build a new anti-imperialist government: a government of the workers, of the strikers, and of those who struggle, in total solidarity with the workers of the world. Our fight is inseparable from the resistance in Palestine and Mexico; we stand in total solidarity with the movements in the Global South fighting against the militarization of borders. The same imperialist interests that build walls in Africa and Latin America are the ones deploying drones in our neighborhoods. We are one single class fighting one single global enemy. Our program is non-negotiable: Abolish ICE, Papers for All, and the immediate Freedom for all Political Prisoners.
True self-defense is collective. We salute the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Philadelphia—now known as the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity after being sued for using that name—the John Brown Gun Clubs, and the community groups patrolling our schools and streets; their courage is the vanguard. But this defense to be successful needs to be rooted in our power as workers. It is urgent that we move beyond mere protest and organize independent caucuses free from the control of the bipartisan machine to sustain the paralysis of the system.
On January 23, it was proved that the General Strike is possible. We will not stop until ICE is abolished and an anti-imperialist workers’ government is established through the total paralysis of the country.
And today we find ourselves before a new call to continue with the general strike movement, this time, for January 30, counting with the endorsement of: General Strike USA, ANSWER Coalition, National Shutdown Coalition, Palestinian Youth Movement, Somali Student Association (UMN), Black Student Union, Graduate Labor Union (UMN), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Black Lives Matter Grassroots, LA Tenants Union, Union De Vecinos, SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, ATU Local 1005, AFSCME Local 3800, UE Local 1105, CWA Local 7250, Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation (AFL-CIO), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Green Party, Our Revolution, MEChA, DARE, Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance, San Francisco Tenants Union, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), California Nurses Association, United We Dream, and Alianza Americas, along with over 150 additional organizations and growing.
JUSTICE FOR ALEX, RENÉE, MATEO, AND ANDRÉS! IMMEDIATE FREEDOM FOR ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS! DOWN WITH THE REGIME AND ITS BIPARTISAN REPRESSION! FOR A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE AND A WORKERS’ GOVERNMENT!