Protesters Turn to Economic Disruption to Fight ICE

Protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations have spread across the country in the wake of federal agents’ killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota last month. 

The latest protests, billed as a nationwide shutdown, draw inspiration from a one-day general strike held in Minneapolis last month, and embrace economic disruption as a new strategy to resist the Department of Homeland Security’s militarized occupation of Democratic-led cities.

The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti drew bipartisan outrage and sparked a new round of protests on Jan. 30, when people across the United States missed work and school as part of an anti-ICE shutdown. 

In Los Angeles, dozens of businesses closed their doors and thousands of demonstrators marched through Downtown to voice their opposition to Trump’s crackdown on immigrant communities.

“We are marching against ICE, telling them that their terror will not be accepted,” said Andreina Kniss, an organizer with KTownForAll who attended the Downtown L.A. protest. “We don’t want them in our communities, we don’t want them in our city.”

Jennifer Flack Okin, who attended the protest with her children, said protesters’ “ultimate demand is to abolish ICE.”

Many protesters emphasized how important economic disruption could be in resisting the Trump administration’s policies. 

“Humanitarian interests and genuine empathy [are] not enough to convince this administration to stop what they are doing with immigrants in this country, so I believe an economic protest is more than necessary,” said Naima, a political content creator who attended Friday’s protest. 

Kniss echoed that sentiment, saying that “one of the most powerful tools we have in our arsenal to fight back against a society that only cares about money is interrupting that money, interrupting that time, making sure deliveries don’t get to their locations, making sure that ICE agents don’t have hotels to sleep in, that restaurants don’t serve them.”

But even some workers who participated in the one-day shutdown said more sustained action would be necessary to affect meaningful change. 

“A lot of people are very open to this kind of economic disruption, at the end of the day. It needs to be longer. One day is not enough,” said Cole Cyccone, rental manager at the camera rental shop CSLA, which limited its hours on Friday. 

Bart Gold, a Writers Guild of America union member, said that Americans should “take a lesson from France and how their national strike effected change when their government wouldn’t listen to what the people wanted.” 

Some local elected officials also attended the protest, including L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

When asked whether she was in favor of a long-lasting general strike, Raman told Capital & Main, “If that’s what it’s going to take to move the needle, then I’m all for it, but it’s going to take incredible organization, and I stand ready and willing to work with people, unions, all of our organized institutions to help do that.” 

After thousands of protesters marched from L.A. City Hall to Boyle Heights, a few hundred demonstrators, including 87-year-old Congresswoman Maxine Waters, gathered in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown where the Department of Homeland Security has held detainees. Protesters stood off against federal agents, who swung batons, rammed riot shields and deployed tear gas, pepperballs and irritant spray against the crowd, injuring protesters and journalists. 

On Saturday, President Donald Trump said in a rambling, 450-word post on his social media platform TruthSocial that “under no circumstances are we going to participate in various poorly run Democrat Cities with regard to their Protests and/or Riots unless, and until, they ask us for help,” and that he had “instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property.” 

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main.

Jeremy Lindenfeld is a California Local News Fellow.