Some Minnesota businesses participate in an anti-ICE strike amid extreme cold conditions.
There’s a huge winter storm moving across the country today and while it’s not passing directly over Minnesota, the weather in the state this morning is unusually and dangerously cold.
The entire state is under an extreme cold warning, according to the National Weather Service. NEXT Weather Alerts are also in place for Friday and Saturday.
Twin Cities residents are waking up to temperatures in the double digits below zero, with wind chills dipping as low as the 40s below zero. Frostbite can take hold in minutes in these conditions. The forecast high in the metro is 9 below zero.
The hazardous cold has caused schools across the state to close on Friday.
Despite all of this, some progressives are holding a kind of general strike today to protest ICE. Businesses of all kinds are closing as a form of protest and the plan was for all of those people who are freed up from having to work to hold protests outside. But given the weather that’s probably not a good idea.
As tensions mount and a sense of fear of detention by immigration agents permeates the state, vendors, labor unions and residents said they would participate in an economic blackout and gather at prayers and protests on what organizers called a “Day of Truth and Freedom.”.
The day of the strike, which was set to include outdoor demonstrations, dawned with much of the Midwest, including all of Minnesota, under an extreme cold warning from the National Weather Service. The cold was particularly bitter in Minneapolis, with temperatures as low as minus 20 forecast for much of the day, with wind chills even lower.
