Scores of businesses across Minnesota were closing up for the day yesterday in what religious leaders and labour unions describe as a general strike to protest US President Donald Trump's deployment of thousands of immigration enforcement officers on the streets of Minneapolis.
"ICE OUT!" was the message of flyers posted on businesses' doors, referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency yesterday, a frigid day in snowy Minneapolis with temperatures well below freezing. "NO WORK. NO SCHOOL. NO SHOPPING."
Across the state, bars, restaurants, museums, shops and other local businesses were shuttering for the day.
Many workers in Minneapolis planned to join a march in the afternoon, intended by organisers to be the largest display of opposition yet to the federal government's surge, which Mayor Jacob Frey and other Democrats have likened to an invasion.
Miguel Hernandez, a community organiser who closed his business, Lito's Bakery in Minneapolis for the day, put on four layers, wool socks and a parka before heading out to protest.
"If this were any other time, no one would've gone out," he said, bracing for the weather. "For us, it's a message of solidarity with our community, that we see the pain and misery that's going on in the streets, and it's a message to our politicians that they have to do more than grandstand on the news."
No school districts were shutting down, but schools in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul offered remote-learning options, the *Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
Trump, a Republican, launched the Minnesota crackdown in response to fraud allegations against some members of the state's large community of people of Somali origin.
He has called Somali immigrants "garbage" and said they are to be removed from the country as part of his effort to expel more immigrants, including some admitted into the country to seek asylum and other lawful residents, than any of his predecessors.
Minnesota residents have responded with anger, making noise in the streets day and night with whistles and musical instruments.
Some agents and protesters have yelled obscenities at each other, and agents have deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades to scatter crowds.
The Trump administration says some protesters have harassed agents and obstructed their work.
Senior Trump administration officials have gone to Minneapolis to defend the ICE, with Vice-President JD Vance telling reporters during his Thursday visit the administration is "doing everything we can to lower the temperature”.
Patty O'Keefe, a 36-year-old nonprofit worker, said she would be among those willing to join the march and "expose ourselves to the elements to demonstrate the level of anger and frustration that we have”.
"We continue to be under siege from the federal government, and it feels like we need to do more because our normal forms of protest and resistance have shown to not be enough yet to really send a strong enough message to Trump," she said.
The numerous Fortune 500 companies that call Minnesota home – mostly based in the Minneapolis area – have refrained from public statements about the immigration raids.
Minneapolis-based Target, which has come under fire in the last year for retreating from its public commitment to diversity policies, has faced more criticism for not speaking out about activity at its stores.
State lawmakers have pressed the company for details of its guidance to employees if and when ICE officers show up at stores.
The company declined a request for comment.
Reuters also contacted Minnesota-based UnitedHealth, Medtronic, Abbott Laboratories, Best Buy, Hormel, General Mills, 3M and Fastenal.
None immediately responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, US federal officials struggled to quell growing outrage over the detention of a five-year-old boy in the immigration crackdown.
The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Liam Conejo Ramos was a pre-school student, said the child and his Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias – both asylum-seekers – were taken from their driveway as they arrived home.
Ramos was then used as "bait" by immigration officers to knock on the door of his home to draw out those inside, Zena Stenvik added.
In defiant comments on Thursday, Vice-President Vance confirmed Ramos was among those detained, but argued that agents were protecting him after his father "ran" from officers.
"What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?" he said.
Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro, whose constituency includes a San Antonio ICE detention centre to which it was thought Ramos was taken, rejected Vance's explanation.
"My staff and I have been trying to figure out his whereabouts, make sure he's safe, and also to demand his release by ICE," he wrote on X.
ICE commander Marcos Charles said yesterday that "my officers did everything they could to reunite him with his family" and alleged that Ramos' family refused to open the door to him after his father left him and ran from officers.
Ramos and his father were at a "family residential centre pending their immigration proceedings", he added after alleging that they entered the United States illegally and were "deportable”.
Charles claimed that "agitators" with shields had gathered outside the federal facility where he was speaking, a flashpoint for anti-ICE protests.
Former US vice-president Kamala Harris has said that she is "outraged" by Ramos's detention and called him "just a baby”.
Ramos is one of at least four children detained in the same Minneapolis school district this month, local administrators said.
Minneapolis has been rocked by increasingly tense protests since federal agents shot and killed US citizen Renee Good on January 7.
Three activists were charged with disrupting a Sunday church service with a protest accusing a pastor of working for the ICE.
The officer who fired the shots that killed Good, Jonathan Ross, has neither been suspended nor charged.