I’ve written, a lot (sorry, not sorry) about protest. In fact, I have another four thousand words on protest written and awaiting publishing. And no, protesting alone is not going to stop the horrors. As we’ve seen in Minnesota, Chicago, and Los Angeles protests often give local and state police the chance to assault residents while violating their Constitutional rights. All in support if not defense of the fascist kidnapping program.

But there is often power in protest. Especially when it’s lead by youth organizers. It forces conversations with family members. It has real and immediate consequence for participating (students are often told ahead of time they’ll be marked with a cut for walking out). Students are at a period of their lives where they could be excused for ignoring the shit storm around them to just enjoy their last years before reality sets in. They are also often looked down upon or told they don’t understand or their opinions don’t matter by adults. So when they choose to exercise their voice and call out those in power it’s extra meaningful, at least to me.

Students have long been involved in organizing around their own conditions, pushing back against principals and school boards. But solidarity is so important to our struggles, and seeing students punch up and protest a federal government that has tear gassed their peers and kidnapped their friends and family members is an important reminder that we can always do something. Seeing those students walking on streets I know, and seeing parents I know posting about how proud they are of their students hits different.

There’s so much terrible shit happening on a daily basis. Seeing the kids say, yes, this is fucked up, but we’re doing what we can, really got me. They are the girl destroying the soldier’s weapon and flipping the script by searching him.

We need to start protesting again. Or at least most of us do, if you’ve been protesting for Black Lives this whole time, thank you, how can we help? You could read the data to say, we protested, people heard, but they declined to make real change as a result. Or you could say we lost momentum when we stopped protesting, and it's protest that will get things unstuck again. I’m in the later camp, protests move people, not the other way around, so we need to be protesting. Regularly, visibly, loudly.

A call for white people to protest against white supremacy - 11/24/2021

It’s also important because media attention is fleeting but the problems we face are not. Whether it’s rallies to take action to fight climate change (something that white people seem fine vocalizing and showing up for) or protesting police brutality (which still seems to have some taboos around white participation) continued sustained protest and public pressure is the only thing that can drive continued media coverage. We have local examples of that very effect from December of 2021 and January 1st of this year. Unfortunately, our political system is built to follow that media coverage, not constituent concerns directly. So while I show up and tell our County Commissioners what they’re doing wrong and what they should be paying attention to, 10 residents making public comments doesn’t have the same political gravity as a single reporter calling them up and asking them to comment on a controversial ordinance or issue.

Further thoughts on white protest - 01/15/2022

Learning

ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood — Here’s What to Know | Teen Vogue

Here’s a step-by-step guide.

Watching

West Orange, NJ students walked out in support of their friends and neighbors and against ICE terrorizing our communities.

Reading

Feds say ICE detention center coming to Roxbury, NJ after days of contradictions by Louis C. Hochman, Mike Hayes and Michael Sol Warren

Police statements lie. ICE statements lie. The government does not act with good intent, even if well meaning people or people we know are good people working within the system. Biden Administration officials, and Biden himself, lied for 2 years about war crimes and crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing and genocide, despite daily evidence of their lies streaming to our smart phones. Why would we think they wouldn’t lie about buying a warehouse to set up a concentration camp?

This is why you can’t reform ICE. The only option is to Abolish ICE.

It wasn’t clear at the time why a statement would have been prepared — approved or otherwise — if no purchase was happening. DHS did not return several calls and emails from Gothamist in the days after its first statement,

Then, Friday, another about-face. DHS sent Gothamist a new message after business hours — an apparently edited version of its original statement, making all the same points and including much of the same phrasing.

Feds say ICE detention center coming to Roxbury, NJ after days of contradictions - Gothamist

First they were buying the property. Then they weren't. Now they are.

After my ICE arrest, I learned one crucial way to respond to trauma. We can all take part by Rümeysa Öztürk

The War Child Alliance published a report in December 2024 that found that 96% of the children they had surveyed in Gaza felt that death was imminent, and almost half reported wanting to die. Read that one more time and let it sink in: children who should have been playing, learning, singing and enjoying life – wished for death instead. This is a human-made trauma – one we are all responsible for.

“The occupation is starving us. We have no food or water and are forced to drink unsafe water. We’re here to shout and ask you to protect us … We want to live like other children.” So said children pleading from a press conference they held in Gaza held outside al-Shifa hospital on 7 November 2023. Their message was clear – they don’t want bombs; they want food and education. When children feel forced to advocate for themselves and demand the right to live, we are already in a horror story. It is one we must take action to remedy.

…

In her book  Trauma and Recovery, the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman explains: “The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.”

…

I want those children to know that so many of us care about them, mourn with them, feel their hunger, hear their cries and screams, witness their pain, lose sleep for them, weep, pray, speak, write, share, donate and want to support them in any possible way. I want them to know how many of us tried, with our small hands, to stop the wars.

One day, they might. They may grow up to read what we write and share. They may know someone heard their screams and held space for their grief. They may feel less alone, more a part of a global community that witnesses their pain and wants to relieve it.

After my ICE arrest, I learned one crucial way to respond to trauma. We can all take part | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) | The Guardian

I was detained for co-writing a op-ed about Gaza as a student at Tufts. My experience has only made me feel more connected to others facing oppression

Institutionalizing harm by Andrea Pitzer

Unlike the Courts, Congress isn’t dependent on what matters of law come through the system. Representatives and Senators can actively choose what to address and what bills to introduce. While in the minority, everyone knows that Democrats can’t magically get votes for things they want. But they can take on big issues and support the groundswell happening against ICE and Border Patrol—and the camp facilities expanding at an alarming rate across the country.

Though Secretary Clinton might want us to hand it to her husband and Barack Obama on immigration, their policies are part of what laid the groundwork for what is happening now. We can reject their immigration policies, and those of the Bushes, and Biden, and Trump, too.

Building the camps by Andrea Pitzer

We’re in a race now. We need to act before the administration has the personnel and the detention facilities to broaden the scope of its actions. It’s up to us to break the existing momentum on this front. For many, this has been a faraway issue debated conceptually in the mind, something a person can take a side on, as with the Super Bowl.

But faced with whole communities being upended and strong-armed into hosting concentration camps, many will begin to see this mass deportation movement for what it is. Something abhorrent, something truly vile, and something we have to stop.

For ICE to build concentration camps quickly, they're leaning on this Dept. of War program by Marisa Kabas

The first 96 WEXMAC TITUS awards were given in early September 2025, with an additional seven granted later that month. At the start of the year, WEXMAC TITUS added eight new awardees, and just this past Friday, an additional 24 were brought on board. The total contract value was originally $10 billion, but a request for proposals in early January showed a $45 billion increase to the ceiling—as first reported by Migrant Insider—bringing the total value to $55 billion. In their initial reporting, CNN called the program “a joint effort between DHS and the Defense Department and leans on the Navy’s Supply Systems Command as a contracting arm to hire companies for construction and maintenance of the detention facilities.”

By the estimation of Project Salt Box, a Baltimore-based group collecting and organizing public data about ICE’s land purchases and other contracts, the agency has so far purchased 11 warehouses for a sum of $697.4 million in funds from the billions they received in Trump’s funding bill last summer (that total excludes the sale prices that have not yet been made public.) That’s a net gain of 34k beds. Those confirmed sales are in Surprise, Arizona; El Paso and San Antonio, Texas; Social Circle and Oakwood, Georgia; Hagerstown, Maryland; Hamburg and Tremont, Pennsylvania; Romulus, Michigan; Chester, NY; and Lebanon, Tennessee. Another eight warehouses are listed on Project Salt Box’s DHS Contracts Visualizer that ICE intends to buy based on credible news reports and documents. The situation is so fluid that by the time you’re reading this, the numbers above may very well have changed. 

The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand by Michael Linhorst

Rest assured, the heavy hitters in ICE’s increasingly militarized world are still getting plenty of cash. The bulk of ICE’s funding is going to the agency’s top contractors—billion-dollar private prison firms like GEO Group and CoreCivic, defense contractors like Palantir, and advisers like Deloitte. But many mom-and-pop contractors are signing up to work with ICE, as well. These first-time contractors, often with scant internet presence or public track record, offer critical tools and training to help ICE rapidly expand. Their contracts show how, even as ICE’s masked agents launch raids in American cities and public opposition skyrockets, some Americans are still looking to cash in.

The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand | The New Republic

Even as ICE sparks rising public horror with its tactics and killings, a raft of companies that have never before worked with the federal government are signing up to work with the agency.

Twin Cities Unions Planning ‘Largest US Rent Strike in 100+ Years’ as ICE Occupation Drives Eviction Crisis by Stephen Prager

Last week, Walz’s office told Axios that the governor “does not currently have the legal authority to enact an eviction moratorium.”

Walz enacted an eviction moratorium in early spring 2020, which tenant organizers said allowed renters to stay home safely to avoid risks from the Covid-19 pandemic. He did this using what is known as a “peacetime emergency” declaration, which allows the governor to circumvent typical rulemaking procedures during extraordinary circumstances.

The city councils of both Minneapolis and St. Paul voted unanimously last month for nonbinding resolutions calling on Walz to take similar action to protect vulnerable residents from displacement.

Twin Cities Unions Planning ‘Largest US Rent Strike in 100+ Years’ as ICE Occupation Drives Eviction Crisis | Common Dreams

"Tenants in Minnesota are in a crisis," said Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai. "The federal invasion forced many of our neighbors to stay home and devastated our local economy."

Federal judge denies injunction, leaving TN blocking up-close recording of police activity in place by Adam Friedman

The buffer law has become a tool for law enforcement, including the Memphis Safe Task Force a group of state and federal agencies. Officers have used it regularly with members of the public, trying to monitor their actions.