Randi Weingarten is urging shoppers to stop spending money at Target because the retailer won’t condemn ICE.
The president of the American Federation of Teachers posted a video directing parents and educators to take their back-to-school shopping elsewhere, specifically to unionized competing stores. Her reasoning is straightforward: Target has not publicly opposed federal immigration enforcement operations.
Target’s corporate headquarters sit in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city where activists and union officials spent months pressing the company to take a public stand against federal immigration operations. The company stayed quiet. That silence became the trigger for the AFT’s campaign.
As originally reported, the AFT rolled out a nationwide initiative called “Shop Smart, Support Working Families,” timed to coincide with the back-to-school shopping season, one of the biggest retail periods of the year.
In the video, Weingarten said Target “has remained silent as ICE’s cruel tactics have terrorized families in Minneapolis, where the company is headquartered, and spread across the country.” The campaign asks union members, educators, and their families to withhold spending until Target adopts the public position the union is demanding.
The union’s campaign materials went beyond the boycott itself. AFT literature accused President Donald Trump of conducting an “illegal and immoral assault” on immigrants. The union also invoked two individuals by name, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, describing both deaths as “murders” while pressing Target to respond.
Weingarten framed the boycott as part of a broader effort by left-leaning organizations to push back against the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. Target, for its part, has maintained a neutral public posture on the issue throughout.
The campaign puts Target in a familiar position for large national retailers: caught between activist pressure to take political sides and a customer base that spans a wide range of views. The company has not publicly responded to the union’s demands.
Whether the boycott gains traction beyond the union’s membership remains to be seen. But with the back-to-school season in full swing, the AFT is clearly betting that this is the moment to apply maximum financial pressure on one of the country’s biggest retailers.