American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is urging parents and educators to boycott Target because the national retailer has not publicly condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Weingarten doubled down on the union’s back-to-school campaign in a video directing shoppers to competing businesses, including unionized stores. The boycott targets Target for remaining politically neutral while federal agents enforce immigration law in Minnesota and elsewhere.
The AFT launched its nationwide “Shop Smart, Support Working Families” campaign during the back-to-school shopping season. Target’s corporate headquarters are in Minneapolis, where activists and union leaders spent months pressuring the company to oppose federal immigration operations. Weingarten’s campaign asks educators, union members, and their families to withhold their money until Target takes the public position demanded by the union.
“Target has remained silent as ICE’s cruel tactics have terrorized families in Minneapolis, where the company is headquarters, and spread across the country,” Weingarten said in the video. The union’s campaign materials went further, accusing President Donald Trump of conducting an “illegal and immoral assault” on immigrants. AFT also invoked the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, labeling both “murders” as it demanded action from the retailer. Weingarten placed the boycott within the wider campaign by left-wing organizations to obstruct the administration’s deportation agenda.
School-choice advocate Corey DeAngelis circulated the video in a post on X, describing Weingarten as “doubling down” on the boycott. “She says Target ‘has remained silent’ on ICE, so the company must be punished,” DeAngelis wrote. He added, “The crazy teachers unions must be dismantled.” DeAngelis has also argued that AFT’s use of its pension influence against Target raises fiduciary concerns because union members’ retirement funds hold millions of shares in the retailer. He called for the Justice Department to investigate whether union leaders had improperly used those investments to pressure Target into adopting their political position, describing the campaign as “education malpractice.”
Weingarten said the union had previously warned Target that its members would take their back-to-school spending to other businesses. “And in March, we said if Target remained silent, we would shop elsewhere for back-to-school supplies, and we have done that,” she said. Her statement identified the retailer’s silence as the union’s stated basis for the boycott.
She then promoted a website created to help shoppers find substitutes for the Minneapolis-based chain. “Go to the campaign website shopsmart.aft.org. Type in your zip code and get back-to-school shopping alternatives near you,” Weingarten said. After briefly stumbling over her words, she added that the website lists “unionized businesses with comparable prices to Target.”
The AFT announced the campaign on August 19th, saying that its 1.875 million members spend an average of $895 of their own money on school supplies annually. The union also said its members’ pension funds directly own 6.79 million Target shares and have billions of dollars in indirect exposure. Its campaign website claims the boycott has support from the 15 million-member AFL-CIO as well as a collection of unions and liberal activist organizations.
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Watch Weingarten direct educators and families away from Target here:
The campaign followed a March AFT resolution demanding that Target speak publicly against ICE activity in Minnesota. The union said Weingarten wrote to Michael Fiddelke on February 1, his first day as Target’s CEO, and contacted him again on March 13 but did not receive what it considered a constructive response. Weingarten accused the company of refusing to use its “considerable clout” to pressure the federal government into ending the enforcement operations.
The Department of Homeland Security rejected the union’s characterization of ICE’s work. “ICE enforces federal immigration laws, protects public safety, and conducts enforcement pursuant to federal laws and applicable agency policies,” a department spokesperson told Fox News Digital. The spokesperson added, “ICE will continue to conduct lawful actions wherever necessary to protect the American people.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.