Author: Manuel

ICE Out of MN, a coalition of unions, worker centers, and community organizations, is putting pressure on Minnesota’s corporations that stayed silent as thousands of federal immigration agents wreaked havoc on the state. The coalition is focusing its efforts on Target, a “home-grown” corporation, that once proudly championed progressive causes and local philanthropy, and has since rolled those commitments back, and donated $1 million to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration. 

The coalition is leading a corporate pressure campaign to urge the company to take steps to protect workers and use its political and economic capital to lobby against ICE. While ICE activity has decreased since its peak in Minnesota, detentions continue, and organizers are outraged that Target has stayed silent, even as ICE has come on its property. In January, two Target workers were violently detained while on the job at a Richfield, MN, location. The workers were both US citizens. 

Target, along with over 60 CEOs and other corporate leaders in Minnesota, published a brief letter on the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce website, asking for “de-escalation” the day after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. Organizers from the ICE Out of MN coalition argue that the letter is insufficient and does not directly ask for the end of ICE activity in the state. Workday Magazine reached out to Target for comment and did not receive a response by the deadline.

In an interview with Workday Magazine, Veronica Mendez Moore, a long-time Minnesota labor organizer and coordinator for the coalition, discusses Target’s role as a leader in the state, why organizers are putting pressure on the company to take action, and how Minnesotans are picking up the pieces.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Workday Magazine: What is your role in the coalition that’s focusing on Target in Minnesota? And who are the other organizations and unions that are a part of this effort? 

Mendez Moore: I’m the corporate campaigns coordinator for the ICE Out of MN coalition, which is a coalition of labor unions and community organizations. I was the co-founder and co-director of the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) that has led a lot of corporate campaigns engaging low-wage workers of color, primarily immigrant and Black workers, to take on corporate campaigns and find out where power lies, who can really make decisions that impact people’s lives, and then engaging those decision-makers to try to make changes for workers. 

In this moment, I’m thinking about how we hold corporations accountable for their complicity in the Trump agenda, specifically in Minnesota. I’m thinking about ICE’s presence here and the need for corporations to take a stand and not profit off of people’s misery. 

The coalition includes Unidos MN, CTUL, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE), St. Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE), and UNITE HERE Local 17. SEIU Local 26 and ISAIAH are also part of the corporate campaign table, but they are not part of the campaign focusing on Target. 

Workday Magazine: Can you tell me a little bit more about Target’s actions ever since Trump took office? 

Mendez Moore: We know that Target decided to donate 1 million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Target placed a bet on the Trump administration, siding with them, when they made a decision to roll back their DEI commitments that they had made around partnering with Black-owned businesses.

We also saw ICE agents go into their Richfield, MN, store and violently tackle and detain two Target team members who are both teenagers and US citizens—and Target stayed completely silent. What is the message that sends to the community? What is the message that that sends to their workers—that Target isn’t going to protect them and doesn’t have a position on their own staff members being assaulted by ICE? That puts in jeopardy the safety of their team members, the people that are shopping at Target, and anyone else nearby. 

The other big issue with Target is that they have been letting ICE regularly stage out of their parking lot, particularly on the Lake Street location in Minneapolis, in the heart of the Latino immigrant community. Target’s response to that has been that they can’t control who’s on their property, who’s in their parking lots, which is clearly untrue, because they make decisions all the time about who can and cannot be in their parking lots. 

Target is a home-grown company that has always prided itself on supporting the community. They support schools and museums and have their names on plaques everywhere because they donate money to nonprofits, and that has been something they’ve prided themselves on. As a result, many Minnesotans were very loyal to Target. Now, with Target placing its bet on the Trump administration instead of with its own community, people are turning. The tide is turning and people are angry at Target and have expectations, because with that sort of loyalty comes expectations that are not being met. 

Target signed onto a corporate letter with a bunch of other corporations calling on nobody to do nothing. There was no specific ask that ICE stop. There was nothing about protecting their staff, customers, or the general public. Minnesota expects more from Target. It is at this moment when it’s right here in Target’s backyard, the biggest immigration operation in the history of this country. Target needs to take a stand and they need to decide which side they’re on, and so far they’ve chosen to be on the side of the Trump administration.

Workday Magazine: What is the specific demand being made and what are the tactics being used right now by this coalition? We’ve seen sit-ins, boycotts, and marches. Are there other things happening behind the scenes?

Mendez Moore: So the demand is that they use their power and influence to call for ICE to leave Minnesota, and that continues to be a demand, as ICE is still in Minnesota. We’re calling on them to become a Fourth Amendment business, where they can say ICE is not allowed in their stores. Store managers at some of their stores around the country are putting plans in place with their employees and having these conversations. But Target as a corporation, and in most stores, has taken no position and done nothing to ensure the safety of their workers. 

Another demand is that they use their power to lobby Congress on a national level and to make sure that not another penny goes to DHS to continue these violent escalations that we’ve been seeing. Lastly, we’re demanding that they speak up to demand justice for Renee Good and for Alex Pretti, and that any ICE agent who was involved in harassing, harming, and murdering our community members needs to be held accountable. 

Workday Magazine: What kinds of actions is the coalition planning?  

Mendez Moore: This has really picked up nationally because a lot of folks are following the lead of Minnesotans and recognizing that Target has a significant amount of influence and economic power. Folks have been doing sit-ins, singing demonstrations, and just in the last few weeks, there were about 55 actions across the country. In some of those actions, including two local stores, people performed civil disobedience to demonstrate that Target can kick people out. They, in fact, did kick out community members who were peacefully protesting while continuing to refuse to kick ICE out of their stores.

There also have been conversations with Target board members and investors. Investors should be very concerned right now about where Target is at financially and the fact that the DEI boycott has cost them significantly. Their complicity around ICE in Minnesota has made things go even worse for them. So investors should be concerned and conversations have been happening with investors to educate them about what these impacts could mean, locally and nationally. 

Also, a letter from almost 300 Target corporate employees went to the company saying that they also are really concerned about all of these things and have the same demands. They sent that letter to Target about a month ago and Target has done nothing. 

Workday Magazine: Has there been any meaningful response from Target?

Mendez Moore: They have not responded in any meaningful way to any of the ICE demands. We are also absolutely acting in solidarity with the Black grassroots leaders that launched the DEI boycott in Minnesota. We haven’t heard anything publicly.

Right now, the next steps in this campaign are to continue demanding corporate accountability. Target continues to be silent, and so Target will continue to hear from the community, both in Minnesota and around the country. Other corporate actors also need to be held accountable for what has happened here in Minnesota, and their silence and complicity, and there will be ongoing demands for corporations to speak up and to do the right thing. 

Workday Magazine: What is the role for these other corporate actors either here in Minnesota or nationally? 

Mendez Moore: The vision for Target remains the same: to make a public stance on all these issues and use their influence. The demands will be the same for other corporations. There are a number of corporate employees at UnitedHealth Group who have spoken up and written letters to the CEO. On January 23, there was a sit-in in the lobby of US Bank demanding that US Bank also do the same thing. The organizers got a response from US Bank to meet, but from that meeting, there have not been results, and so we need to continue to ask, “Which side are you on?” 

There is no neutral here. There is a community who is making demands, and there’s a Trump administration who is trying to use corporations to do its bidding. They have a decision to make. Right now, Target is in a bit of an identity crisis with having a new CEO and having formerly made a ton of really positive commitments to the community in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings in Minnesota. They made a lot of good commitments and are now rolling those back and continuing to go down the Trump path and it’s not going to go well for them.

Workday Magazine: Why is it important for unions and the labor movement generally to be a part of this coalition? 

Mendez Moore: On a national level, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, sent a letter to Target, furious, because teachers spend billions of dollars a year at Target. Especially in Minnesota, but also on a national level, that is the place that teachers go to buy their school supplies and all the stuff that they provide for students. To be ignored by Target on this issue that teachers feel really strongly about, it has made people angry. 

MFE has been participating in the sit-ins at Target stores, where they got hundreds of folks there. SPFE has done that too. UNITE HERE had six of their members willing to risk arrest and ultimately detained and trespassed from the Target store, because they feel really strongly about a major corporation in our state who has so much influence and who has prided itself on standing with the community.

It’s important for labor even if they haven’t been leading campaigns on these particular corporate targets to come together because, here in Minnesota, many organizations and unions are used to advocacy work and lobbying and trying to get our legislators to take bold actions. But the truth is: Trump does not care what Tim Walz says. He does not care what Jacob Frey says. What is going to impact his agenda is what corporations think, and we saw that in California when agriculture corporate leaders reached out to him about the targeted enforcement there. That’s who he cares about. 

We need to call on these corporations who stand with us and to create distance between themselves and Trump. Yes, let’s do the legislative things that we can do. But there’s a real limit on what we’re going to be able to do and how we’re going to be able to get our electeds to speak out and do anything meaningful. There’s not that much in this moment that elected officials can do to stop Trump and his agenda. It’s the corporations who can—and we need to be moving them in every state across the country. When ICE shows up to do a surge, we’re going to need to continue to hold corporations accountable and have unions and community organizations on the ground in those cities, hammering the corporate targets, in order to make any significant dent in the Trump coalition.