Corporate Minnesota is being forced off the sidelines. After weeks of aggressive immigration raids, a fatal shooting and mass walkouts, the chief executives of Target and other major employers are now publicly urging federal authorities to pull back. Their plea is not only about values, it is about a labor force that is literally disappearing from stores, warehouses and offices across the state.
What began as a law‑and‑order push by immigration agents has collided with a regional economy that depends on immigrant workers and diverse urban neighborhoods. As staff stay home, small businesses shutter and protests swell, I see a new kind of confrontation emerging: between federal power and the companies that say they can no longer operate under siege conditions.
The letter that broke Minnesota’s corporate silence
The turning point came when a bloc of executives finally decided that staying quiet was riskier than speaking up. More than 60 leaders of Minnesota‑based companies signed a joint letter calling for an “immediate deescalation of tensions” in the streets of Minneapolis and beyond, a move that underscored how deeply the immigration crackdown has rattled the state’s business establishment. That group included household names like Target, Best Buy, UnitedHealth and Cargill, companies that usually prefer to lobby quietly rather than confront federal agencies in public.
In a separate account of the same effort, the chief executives of 60 M Minnesota‑based firms, including Minnesota stalwarts Target, Best Buy, appealed directly to Immigrat enforcement leadership, President Donald Trump and state officials to dial back operations. Another report described how Major business leaders in Minnesota framed their demand as a call for peace after federal immigration officers shot Alex Pretti, while a separate summary emphasized that More than sixty executives were willing to put their names on a coordinated response from Minnesota’s corporate class.
Violence, a fatal shooting and a city on edge
The business revolt did not emerge in a vacuum. Public outrage surged after the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE agent identified as Jonathan Ross, an incident that helped set the stage for what some accounts describe as a 2026 Minnesota general strike. That same overview notes how Public anger intensified as Minneso communities and civil liberties groups organized a broad coalition to resist the federal presence, turning a single shooting into a statewide confrontation over civil rights and local control…