There is a planned walkout and protest statewide for 23 January, tomorrow. We want ICE out, and the hope is that a little poke in the pocketbook might send a message. The University of Minnesota sent out the message below to all students and employees.
Dear faculty, staff, and students,
The University is aware of the recently announced call for civic action on Friday, January 23, during which Minnesotans are being encouraged not to attend work, school, or participate in commercial activity in response to federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
We fully support the right of faculty, staff, and students to engage in lawful civic expression. We also must ensure continuity of operations and meet our responsibilities to students and the University community.
For all employees
Employees, including students with University jobs, who plan to be away on January 23 must use vacation or personal holiday time with the supervisor’s advance approval. Sick or Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) cannot be used for these absences. Unapproved absences, including walking off the job or failing to report to work as scheduled, may result in corrective action in accordance with University policies and collective bargaining agreements.
Course delivery and attendance
As was noted to instructors last week, classes are expected to proceed (UMD-specific policy) as scheduled. Instructors who are considering not holding January 23 class sessions must work with their dean’s office to make appropriate alternate arrangements, including notifying students of these changes.Regarding excused absences (UMD-specific policy), students must notify instructors of the circumstances causing them to miss a scheduled class meeting in advance or as soon as possible. University policy describes circumstances for excused absences and the opportunity for makeup work. Instructors may grant excused absences for reasons not listed in University policy, but those decisions must be made in a viewpoint-neutral way and in concurrence with your academic unit. Students will not be penalized for excused absences.
We appreciate the professionalism, care, and respect our employees demonstrate during moments of heightened community concern. University leaders and supervisors should offer flexibility where feasible, while also ensuring appropriate arrangements to maintain vital services.
If you have questions about time away, attendance, or supervisory responsibilities, please contact your local HR lead. Please note that we are also tracking potential weather impacts on Friday, January 23. Should there be any operational changes, your campus will communicate. Please connect with your Dean’s office for further guidance on instruction.
In short, they support our right to engage in lawful civic expression, but you better not participate in this one unless you’ve consulted your dean and filled out all the paperwork and you have a good excuse!
Too bad. I’ve emailed all my students and told them to join in the protest. I haven’t consulted my dean or filled out any paperwork, but my excuse is that the entire country has been seized by an incompetent fascist cabal, and a brief work stoppage is the least we can do. We ought to have a nationwide general strike for a period of time sufficient to let the ruling junta know that we mean business.
I wish my university had the conviction and the moral courage to speak out, rather than sending out long weasely excuses for doing nothing.
Requiring authorization from a superior to participate in a protest does seem to defeat the purpose.
That seems a bit too far. You could them what you plan to do, but to instruct them to do the same is an abuse of power.
I do wish you well, but you have to avoid modelling yourself after the thing you hate.
could tell them
I had to look this up. Apologies. Won’t post further.
Woah. That is pretty progressive for the US. I can see why your president is so against your state.
As a former (retired) educator {or any other role), I’d do exactly the same thing. (I have a history of legal opposition to government goons since 1980, with threat of years of prison, and literal years of financial consequence.)
I regret nothing.
Sometimes, you just have to choose whether to do what you are told or to do the right thing.
I stand in full solidarity with PZ and his students. ¡Nunca seré esquirol!
Do better Americans. All of ya. Live up to your best ideals and fight and stand up agaisnt the very worst of you – the kakistocracy and bigots that are in charge now.
.
Now is the time.
If not long overdue.
Please. Please. Please.
The Guardian found an interesting tidbit of regime propaganda about Minnesota protests.
Notice it is a black person, and a woman that is singled out.
“White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest”
.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-ice-protest-arrest-altered-image
Sigh Really,WhiteHatLurker? See if you can tell the difference between A and B below:
A) You should go to the protest.
B) You should go to the protest. I’ll be taking attendance. If you don’t go, I am going to hunt you down. You and your entire family. I will detain you and your family and anyone who gets in my way or merely annoys me. I will do this illegally and lethally and with no due process. Once you are detained you may die there, you may be deported to another state or facility indefinitely, you may even be sent overseas to a gulag. Who knows? I sure don’t care in any case.
There is a difference, it is technical and might be hard to spot. But it is important. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go catch my rolling eyes before they disappear off a false equivalence cliff and disappear into an abyssal depth so deep that it’s actual dimension remains a question of scholarly debate.
FFS.
So, how does this civic protest thing actually work? I mean, how will it achieve its goal of getting ICE out of Minnesota? The purpose of their being sent there was to create chaos in a state which is politically opposed to Trump. Is abetting the creation of civic chaos supposed to make them pack up their bags because their goal is accomplished?
@10,
“So, how does this civic protest thing actually work? I mean, how will it achieve its goal of getting ICE out of Minnesota?”
A cynically inclined person might be of the opinion that it might help bring the 11th airborne division from Alaska to Minnesota after Trump invokes the Insurrection Act.
Leaf blowers to blow teargas back into the thugs’ faces I like, the whole ice around their cars thing too, but civic protest is something we’re probably well past to effect any change.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/25/protests-effective-history-impact
Yeah, Dr Martin Luther King should have just been quiet instead of organizing peaceful protests and marches.
We? You aren’t part of we, so maybe go study the history of civil protests before making more ignorant white man comments.
In a crowded field Tethys, this is surely one of the dumbest comments I have ever read here.
There are compelling reasons for fighting back against ICE, the right wing terrorists.
They are now killers, murdering people often.
In 2025, 32 people died in ICE/BP custody. We know some of them were killed by the guards. It’s possible they all were. Here is one well documented example.
Campos’ body showed signs of being choked to death. He was choked so hard, the blood vessels in his eyelids burst.
There were witnesses who saw him in an illegal choke hold, being killed by the guards.
ICE lied and said he committed suicide.
We all know about the murder of Renee Good, caught on video cameras.
We know there are others.
We just don’t know how many others and the detail of how they were killed.
ICE has nothing to do with law or immigration enforcement.
This is just right wing terrorism.
The whole goal here is to get crowds of citizens together to provoke a violent reaction of some sort.
The next step would be to fire into the crowds and leave a pile of bodies. Like Kent State except with more blood and bodies.
Then invoke the Insurrection act and bring in the US army to further terrorize the population and halt the next elections.
So far it hasn’t worked.
The citizens are very angry and doing what they can without a whole lot of violence towards the thugs and criminals of ICE.
We will just have to see what the future brings.
What kind of sickos get off on this kind of mindless violence anyway? ICE is heavily armed and has all the legal protections of our fascist Federal government. They are going after 5 year old kids, raiding elementary schools, and killing 37 year old unarmed mothers of three. They are always in gangs and always outnumber the one or two people they stop and terrorize.
It’s like the Roman Gladiator games. Except the Roman games were more organized and a lot fairer. They were battles between equally armed people.
I know there are GOP voters at home, eating popcorn, drinking beer, and cheering these atrocities on.
PS Our frequent protests have been so far peaceful but it is getting less and less likely this will last.
For Tuesday, some guy threatened to bring his guns to the protest.
I had to forward his online comment to the local authorities.
I didn’t see anyone like that there anyway.
Some woman counter protester has shown up a few times and screams incoherent insults at the crowd. She seems mentally unbalanced and is outnumbered by thousands of people. This time a couple of the protesters went after her.
The monitors had to get between them and deescalate things.
I’ve heard that she has come close to driving through the crowds with her SUV.
Just yesterday a lovely neighbor went out in the bitter cold with his very fancy rifle, and simply stood there watching the ice-stapo agents. They left.
If they want to further escalate, we will show them just how many Minnesotans own deer hunting rifles.
A person on Facebook just pointed out that the correct analog for ICE is not some foreign organisation like Gestapo. The apt analog are the ubuquitous slave patrols before 1865.
.
They are going around the place checking if people have the right to walk freely around the place.
It is ironic that while Minnesota might be a Blue state, it is just barely so.
There is an almost even split among elected state representatives in Minnesota.
This is what one of the state representatives to the Federal House has to say.
Tom Emmer, a Republican, is in a suburban district right outside of Minneapolis.
Emmer is of course, lying here.
No one is getting paid to be in the streets of Minnesota, except the hired goons of ICE, paid by the US taxpayers no less.
I’m sure the vast majority of Minnesotans that Emmer has talked to support ICE.
I’m also sure that this is like two sadistic fascists that live in his district.
In reality, there are a lot of GOP voters in Minnesota and some of them are probably cheering ICE on.
Ironically again, PZ Myers’ Federal House and state representatives from Morris are GOP.
[OT]
birgerjohansson @19, https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/15/shes-right-you-know/
It was not just pointed out in Zuck’s money machine ecosystem, there’s a post here from last week.
You commented in that post.
I am following the news; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/jan/23/ice-immigration-protests-trump-minnesota-economic-blackout-latest-news
@rorshach
Calling out your very obvious white male privilege is dumb?
You are the idiot who claimed civil protest is useless, despite the fact that you personally aren’t even on the same continent as Minnesota. Fuck right off with your complacency.
I doubt you have the fortitude to stare down ICE, armed only with a whistle.
Tethys
That business about not being on the same continent is so fucking stupid.
The person YOU elected to be the leader of your country is threatening the whole planet.
When your neighbo
ur stood out with his rifle, did you stand out too?Aussie ABC News :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-24/leading-the-fight-against-ice-in-minnesota/106248564
In every single city or district where ICE has gone, the people of the place were angry, protested, and resisted. Even in deep-red North Carolina. I think that the protests are working: no one, no matter how MAGA, wants to see armed and masked murderers roaming their city. People who never really cared about immigrants one way or the other join in. And, after all, the protests were such that ICE did leave most all of the cities they terrorized: Minneapolis getting hit so hard is an exception. (Remember how, in Manhattan, the crowd prevented the thugs from even leaving the garage they’d staged in? That was effective, ICE left NYC immediately.)
One bit of hope: invoking the Insurrection Act and sending the military has a chance of not working. Trump’s last term, the soliders, their officers, and the head generals were very reluctant to turn their weapons on American civilians. There was some question as to, if ordered to do so, they would obey. So, hope that that will not pan out.
# 2 made me laugh.
PZ: PUNCH NAZIS! No seriously, PUNCH NAZIS!
WhiteHatLurker:
PZ: Also join a protest.
WhiteHatLurker: Woah, that seems a bit too far! Don’t model the thing you hate.
@ 24 違う
I love it.
“You personally elected Trump if you live in a nation that elected Trump”.
“Also you cannot praise staring down ICE if you did not personally brandish a firearm at ICE”.
bless your heart, wanker
It will be very cold in many US states.
I wish you luck. It was many years since I had the stamina to spend hours at these kind of temperatures.
#28 demented fuckwit Silentbob
Have you found those links?
#28 demented fuckwit Silentbob
Why do you not know what quote mark are used for?
Silentbob
Why are you too chickenshit to respond to me directly?
Have you found those links?
[chigau, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog ]
John Morales
I know the fable, I’m not getting current context.
[chigau]
Context is your recent spate of comments.
I cannot elaborate further; I have undertaken to comply with PZ’s stricture, I cannot be more overt.
One cannot expect the scorpion to stop being a scorpion. That’s pretty much it.
@chigau
Minnesota did not vote for dumpster, obviously. Why do you think he is attacking our state?
My neighbor did not point his rifle at anyone. He just stood there being conspicuously white, and armed.
ICE were circling the elementary school, but decided to leave once enough people came outside and were raising the alarm.
Being conspicuously white and watching/filming the police are SOP in the cities since George Floyd.
Succinct news featuring today’s protest in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of protesters gathered despite the Arctic temperatures. Apparently it’s the first general shutdown strike in 80 years.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/LzTPS4e5MxU
#@ ^
It’s genuinely inspiring. ICE fucked about and they found out.
I wish we could all follow Minnesota’s example. (Still not having the lutefisk dude sorry.)
Minnesota (with apologies to Crocodile Dundee):
ICE? That ain’t ice, lol.
THIS is ice.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-agents-caught-slipping-on-ice-as-they-struggle-to-deal-with-harsh-minnesota-weather/ar-AA1U3TxR
The way to make ICE leave is by making their force protection equation untenable.
This is Minnesota in winter.
Have all protestors retreat to within 1/2 mile at the closest…
… except for the few who got close with diesel-filled coke bottles and set the vehicle park on fire.
Give some boy scouts .22 rifles and have them shoot the transformers that power the building.
If you’re a bastard, chain the gates shut.
The water will cut itself off when it freezes.
Anyone who wishes to, can disarm and leave Ft Zinderneuf with their hands over their heads, but as a matter of tradition, you have to leave your trousers, too. Because our women will make a memorable flag from them.
Since I am a horrible person, I would have someone who spoke old norse yelling over and over via loud speakers, “HELLO STUPID PEOPLE! You are surrounded by North America. Since you have no vehicles we do not advise you to attempt to march to 7-11 let alone russia. There is a large dumpster near the exit. Place your weapons in the dumpster and take your clothes off and we’ve got a line of friendly local minnesotans over here with hot cocoa and marshmallows.
Wrong side of the ocean, but I am with you all in spirit.
I am watching a Swedish TV program, they have dug up several ex-prime ministers from opposite political bloca to give their comments to the situation in USA.
Even the conservatives have written off Trump as insane/corrupt.
Well done PZ!
General strikes are not “protest”, they actually hit the backers of fascism in the profits, they are a form of direct action.
Be sure you are in sufficient numbers that violent repression is not an option.
And since it was mentioned: punching nazis is also very effective. Being “not strong” is the only sin they recognize, “being powerful” the only moral they actually care about. You punch them in public, they lose all their followers, all their standings, all their macho fantasies.
This was murder.
Reports are he was unarmed, on the ground, shot 5 times, and is dead.
There are videos of this murder. I refuse to watch them right now. They are horrible so you are warned, do what you want to.
Right now, I’m so angry I can barely type this.
Arrest these guys, charge them with murder. Now.
LOL, Marcus @41, I was hoping that the MN winter would be too much for ICE (very apt) too.
They can’t all be used to it, and if they don’t have the right winter gear because the govt. is too cheap to buy them any, they’ll all freeze if they go outside. And then, perhaps, as you say, the power could go out where they’re staging or staying, and they wouldn’t know how to keep the pipes from freezing, so no water, and they’d have to hightail it out of there to Florida.
Unfortunately the Whipple Building has back-up generators, and heavy security. It houses multiple federal agencies who are not involved in the illegal invasion of Minnesota.
Heil hálfviti mannr! It even alliterates like proper Norse poetry.
I