Resistance to ICE is Building:
Fighting to Win
The majority of Americans oppose ICE arresting our friends, co-workers and neighbors.1 No one wants to see masked men, without ID, armed with guns, literally kidnapping people off the street. No one wants a Gestapo in the streets! The ICE Block app is one of the most downloaded apps in the country.
What began as individual self-help efforts in Los Angeles has grown into a network of community self-defense.2 Groups like “Union del Barrio” are organizing communities to converge on ICE, whether in the streets or in their hotels, challenging them, photographing them and finding ways to interfere with their assaults.
As the Trump administration escalates ICE kidnapping across the country, community self-defense is spreading. “Now Defend & Recruit,” out of North Carolina, has a website of materials to develop community self-defense against ICE.3
https://defendandrecruit.org/resources-supports/
When the government attacks with brute force, legal options through the courts become ineffective. Community defense of the people and by the people is needed.
Don’t be fooled by the Democratic Party that is intending to ride our organized anger back into the majority. Right now, the Democratic Party could exercise its government powers at the federal, state, and local level, to convene public hearings that force ICE to justify itself. But the Democrat Party leaders choose not to do so.
This is not the first time that community rapid response networks rose to fight fascism in this country. In 1855, slave owners in the territory of Kansas began a violent war against those opposing enslavement. Support networks rose across the North to defend people against these attacks. By 1856, these networks formed the new Republican Party, originally an anti-slavery party. Lincoln then won the Presidency 4 years later in 1860. This marked the beginning of the Civil War, which led to the abolition of slavery. In less than 10 years, a united people changed the world
We are the 99 percent and have it in our power to begin the world anew.
We can unite not just to defend against ICE, but to build a world where human needs come before profit, where technology serves all rather than enriches the few, and where the earth is protected not plundered. The battle for democracy is the battle for a new world—and that battle is ours to win.4
Footnotes
- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/17/americans-have-mixed-to-negative-views-of-trump-administration-immigration-actions/
- https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-ice-immigration-los-angeles-volunteers-patrol/
- https://defendandrecruit.org/resources-supports/
- https://rally-theleague.org/one-hundred-days-of-assault-the-war-against-free-speech/
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