“An Injury to One is an Injury to All” An Interview with a CWA Union Leader in Minnesota on Defending Members from ICE Operations in MN 2-3-2026

Published February 10, 2026 in IUE-CWA Local 201 News February 2026 Edition.

Guest: Kieran Knutson, CWA 7250 in MN 

Interviewer: Adam Kaszynski, IUE-CWA 201 in MA 

Interviewer: As a CWA Local president in Minnesota, could you tell us what conditions are like for workers and unions in Minnesota right now? I know your Local along with many other unions called for a National Day of Action last month to demand ICE get out of Minnesota. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and the local and how your local came to support that call to action? 

Guest: I’m Kieran. I’m president of CWA local 7250. We’re mainly a telecom Local with about 700 members, we represent AT&T workers and call centers, technicians, and retail workers also represent a direct TV call center and ADT home security technicians. Our biggest unit now is an Activision quality assurance group, video game workers. 

ICE has been conducting its largest-ever operation in Minnesota for the last two months. They have about 3,000 agents in the state. Just by way of comparison, the Minneapolis Police Department has fewer than 700 officers, and the St. Paul Police Department has around 500. So this is an enormous police force that’s descended on Minnesota and is carrying out what I would call an unaccountable, unleashed campaign of terror against the working class, especially poor working-class people, and immigrant workers in particular

Initially, they were doing targeted abductions of workers. For example, we had two workers from a sister CWA local at a bus production factory, New Flyer in St. Cloud, Minnesota. These two men were getting off their shift and were abducted. They had both lived in the U.S. for 50 years, having come from Laos when they were four or five years old. They’d worked in that factory for over 20 years. They’d had some legal trouble when they were young, but they served their time and had been working steadily for decades. They were no threat to the community, one of them is a grandfather, one is a devout Buddhist. 

Beyond that, there’s been widespread, random abductions. Agents get bonuses for scalps, so people are being taken off the street. There’s open racial profiling. We had a steward who’s Latino, born in the U.S., a citizen with no legal issues. He was pulled over leaving work, no traffic violation, just because he was Latino. This is happening all over the Twin Cities. 

People are being grabbed while pumping gas, while bringing their kids to daycare. There’s video of a worker at Chipotle taking out the trash and getting jumped by ICE in the alley. In other cases, workers are lured outside, someone comes into a coffee shop and says there’s something wrong with your car, and when the person goes out, ICE jumps them in the parking lot. There have been U.S. citizens snatched up by ICE, beaten, and dumped in parks or other communities far away from where they were picked up. 

There have been three killings I would call murders. One was Rene Good, an artist and poet who had just dropped her son at kindergarten. ICE was abducting someone on her block. She confronted them and was shot and killed in the side of the head. Another murder was a man from Nicaragua who was abducted randomly (not on any targeted list) and injured so badly he died two days later in a Texas detention facility. Not a criminal, not on a list, a regular guy. And then there’s Alex Pretti, a union brother and VA nurse, by all accounts a decent human being, who was killed while participating in neighborhood patrols monitoring ICE. 

In MN, working-class and middle-class people hate ICE now. It’s seen as an outside force assaulting 1st , 2nd and 4th amendment rights and people want them out.

There’s also been massive resistance—protests at the federal building, churches delivering groceries to families locked down and unable to work.

Interviewer: What has labor’s role been throughout these past 2 months? 

Guest: Dozens of trade unionists have been abducted and deported, and one member killed. Three CWA members in Minnesota have been taken. That’s why unions are stepping up. When Rene Good was killed, we knew we couldn’t put action off anymore. It is really a Union issue. We organized a Day of Action—no work, no school, no shopping—on January 23rd. Our local had over 80% participation. The call center where I work was effectively shut down, 86% of workers didn’t show. All our locals’ sectors participated. There was a 100,000- person march in 20-below zero weather and we marched to the Target Center, the NBA arena and concert arena, we went inside. Union leaders spoke including the president of CWA.

Interviewer: What were the demands of the Day of Action, and what came out of it?

Guest: The demands were ICE out and justice for Rene Good. Afterward, amazingly, some corporations got their act together and the Chamber of Commerce put out a weak statement urging restraint from Trump. Leadership of the operation was replaced, but abductions continue at about 80 per day. A lot of it feels cosmetic. We’ll see. We’re still in the fight, there is a lot more rounds to go. 

Interviewer: Why is the campaign focusing on corporate targets like Target? 

Guest: We heard that some billionaire Silicon Valley tech bros that are close with the Trump administration pressured Trump to not come to San Francisco and ICE actually backed off due to that pressure. So now we are looking at corporate targets because donors and corporations seem to be who they listen to. 

Interviewer: People across the country are extremely politically divided, especially around immigration issues. I would assume members of your local have a wide array of opinions. How did the union go from divided like the rest of the country to 82% of your membership participating in a work action to get ICE out of Minnesota? 

Guest: I wish I could say we planned it out, but honestly it’s just that awful here that ordinary normal people are fed up with being occupied and harassed. People who aren’t in a political cult of any kind on any side are influenced by what goes on around them. It’s been so outrageous, the assault on the community. So, anybody who has an honest idea about what’s going on wants ICE out around here. Unions don’t have two opinions—we have a million, sometimes in the same person. Sharing the stories of the two New Flyer factory workers humanized the situation for us early on. People could see themselves working next to them. It gets beyond the hype and headlines. These are our people under attack. Then the savagery just got turned up. Ok, now they are going to be killing people on the streets in broad daylight? That changes people. Everyone can see the effect of having 3000 ICE agents on the street, and people hate it. We feel occupied by an outside force. That changes people. Also what’s happening in neighborhoods seeps into the workplace. Resistance is everywhere. It feels like a civil resistance movement building from below. 

Interviewer: The Trump administration claims that ICE operations in MN are targeting the worst of the worst, but that has been largely debunked by the publicly available statistics and researchers across the political spectrum. What are you seeing in the twin cities, is it the worst of the worst being targeted? 

Guest: The people they have been picking up that are the worst of the worst, are people that are already in prison or jail, or just like any American that got in trouble at a certain point in their life and did their time and are now out and working. They make it seem like there are jack the rippers running around the community terrorizing people and that that is who they are grabbing and that’s just not true. For example, they raided this older guys house the other day, because they thought someone lived there, turned out he didn’t, who they said had a warrant. But instead they grabbed this guy in his 70’s and paraded him out in his boxers in an act of humiliation, and it turns out this guy was a US citizen, not any lapsed citizenship status, a US Citizen. They raid places and just scoop up everybody who may be related or not. 

Interviewer: How is the Union dealing with the employers around this situation?

Guest: We’ve negotiated protocols for what happens if ICE comes on site—some written, some informal. We’ve gotten what we needed in key cases. AT&T(one of our employers) has a $100 million contract with ICE, and we need to take that on next but we are not there yet. We’re also participating in broader corporate accountability campaigns, especially Target, because the government seems to be pressured most successfully by corporate interests. 

Interviewer: Why do you think this a union issue? 

Guest: Because an injury to one is an injury to all. That’s my philosophy. If you are attacking my brother or sister, you are attacking me. Our members are being abducted and harassed by ICE. Historically, unions are essential in resisting authoritarianism. And where unions have not been part of that fight usually those movements don’t succeed. The movement resisting the ICE operations in Minnesota and the Union led day of action, has given tens of thousands of people experience in political job actions, something rare in the U.S. You read about it in France or Brazil and stuff but not in the US. So we learned how to do something new. It’s raised our confidence. We can bring that into our contract fights. Who would have thought we could bring out 82% of our workforce over a political issue? A year ago, I don’t know. If you asked me six months ago who among your neighbors would come out on the streets with you to confront the federal police? I would have been like, “maybe nobody?” I don’t know. And now people are showing up everywhere for each other. Its just that bad here right now. 

Interviewer: You described the day of action as like a “political strike,” or general strike, something our local has been learning about from GE workers in Italy. As I understand it, because Italian workers have healthcare and retirement through the state, they’ve historically used general strikes, across employers and industries, to win and defend those systems against concessions and privatization, targeting the government rather than individual companies. In the U.S., by contrast, healthcare and much of retirement are tied to employers, and workers across industries hear the same arguments: pensions are “a thing of the past,” inadequate 401(k) matches are “industry standard,” and rising healthcare costs are unavoidable. Yet every union hears these same claims from every employer, showing a shared, systemic problem. If workers were broadly united across industries in a general strike, could that kind of leverage win concessions from the state or employers on healthcare, retirement, or even a national COLA? The recent action in Minnesota around ICE operations is the first example I can recall in the U.S. in my lifetime where multiple unions from multiple employers took action with demands on the state and corporations by taking a day off work. Do you see this sort of tactic as a viable tool for winning dignified retirement and healthcare and other rights for workers?

Guest: I agree we need to be looking at tactics like general strikes and actions that unite workers more broadly than one employer to reverse the declining benefits and conditions of the working class. I want to be clear though- that this day of action (no work, no school, no shopping) had the character of a general strike in the sense that tens of thousands (likely hundreds of thousands) of workers were absent from work. But to be clear, no union formally went out on strike (with an announced strike, strike vote, picketing etc.). We have PTO in the contract, we used that or were marked absent. 

But look a perfect general strike wasn’t going to be delivered from the heavens - not on our first try. But I think this effort puts us in a much better place to call days of actions like that going forward. 

Interviewer: Any final thoughts? 

Guest: This is an assault on the working class as a whole. It’s a test of our unity. It would be shameful not to respond—and incredibly empowering if we do.