Three excellent, interrelated stories from the last week highlight the rôle that community activism has to play in resisting [neo]fascism and keeping ourselves and our neighbors safe.
Truthout brings us the story of how community groups in several parts of the country successfully shut down ICE’s plans to take over massive abandoned warehouses and use them for the mass incarceration of immigrants under brutal conditions. Stories from Romulus, Michigan; Surprise, Arizona; Roxbury, New Jersey, and Social Circle, Georgia all feature community groups on the ground successfully frustrating ICE’s plans.
The Truthout article emphasizes: “It was not bipartisanship, lawsuits, or the wisdom of elected officials, but sustained community activism that forced the federal government to abandon the warehouses… John Fabbricatore, who has been a commentator on Fox News and worked as senior adviser to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, told The New York Times that the warehouses were a quick effort to ‘scale up’ mass deportations, but failed because ‘the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks.’”
In These Times brings us a conversation with Sonali Kolhatkar, author of the book Breaking ICE, which details the ways that the Immigrant Defense Movement in Maine adapted practices from around the country to their own local conditions. Ruben Torres, an activist on the ground in Maine, says, “In Maine we saw the full force of our community. ’Community’ is a strong and powerful word in our state because of our geographic makeup. We are very spread out and rural, and a lot of times your neighbor and your community are all you have to rely on.” Torres goes on to outline the ways that neighbors showed up for each other in large and small ways in the face of ICE terror: from monitoring ICE patrols, to clandestine childcare, to shoveling each other’s driveways.
Finally and most comprehensively, Mother Jones published this long but excellent article, essentially an oral history of the ways that neighbors showed up for each other during ICE surges in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The article offers excellent object lessons in how to build on existing networks of solidarity and how to create new ones in the face of ICE terror. The stories of personal bravery and commitment are remarkable, from a pastor protecting her parishioner from ICE pepper balls, to a running club that converted itself into a rapid response network, and many others, the stories of resistance too numerous to even summarize here.
(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)