Fighting ICE from Where We Are

There is much to be learned from Minneapolis' resistance to ICE and CPB, organizing against them here has to take into account the differences in our terrain and in the strategies employed by ICE/CPB.

by: Coco N. Spirator

The mass resistance in the Twin Cities has been inspirational for all of us. Like Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles before them, the people came together en masse, organized across political and social barriers, and fought back an invading fascist army. For those of us watching from afar, looking desperately for some way to actually fight this growing fascist force, there is so much to respect in these examples, and so much to learn from.

However, it’s also easy to fetishize the specific tools of resistance that have been effective in other places and in different contexts. Rapid response teams, hyper-local ICE watch, and 3D printed whistles have been crucial tools in Minneapolis’ fight against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but our context is not the same. We can’t simply carbon copy these tools and expect them to work as well here in Thurston County.

Conflating two different strategies

Part of the issue is that what we see on the news and on social media mostly reflects what happens during a “surge.” It’s easy to miss that this represents just one of two completely different strategies that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are employing. For all of the horror and destruction “surges” cause, they are actually a pretty weak strategy.

While the numbers are hard to pin down, it seems Minnesota’s “Metro Surge” only produced about 4,000 arrests over 3 months using 3,000 agents, according to Reuters. This a scary number of arrests, especially in one place, but surprisingly few compared to the approximately 40,000 monthly arrests across the US since October, according to The Guardian.

A surge is a spectacle, built by throwing countless bloodthirsty ICE and CBP agents into one place to wreak havoc and terror for cellphone cameras to capture. It is a project of building political legitimacy through fear to create the image of a great, unstoppable boot, ready and willing to stomp out any dissent.

It is weak because it puts so much of their strength in one place, where they can be seen, monitored, and tracked. You can have watchers on every street corner of the city connected to a rapid response dispatch, and you can set up block parties or “filter blockades” to slow traffic and check for state agents. It is a strategy that allows us to build super effective tools to stop them.

ICE’s primary strategy, though, is a much more dispersed snatch-and-grab approach that focuses on successful abductions with little visibility. Because it’s incredibly difficult for us to be ready and vigilant everywhere, this strategy is much more effective. It’s telling that during the current “draw-down” of forces in the Twin Cities, the remaining agents have largely moved to the surrounding suburbs.

This isn’t to diminish any of the horror of what has happened in the Twin Cities, Chicago, Washington D.C., or Los Angeles. The point is that despite the terror, people were able to come together and run ICE out of town in part because these surges actually make them super vulnerable. However, for those of us living outside these large invasions, and outside of dense cities, we can’t expect the tools used in cities like Minneapolis to work the same way.

What does resistance look like here?

Lacey and Olympia aren’t Minneapolis or Chicago. We are facing an enemy that is dispersed, infrequent, and much harder to locate. So how do we organize to respond here?

There probably is not one single correct answer, but a good place to start is that we need to focus less on the point of contact: the moment when ICE agents gets out of their cars and grab somebody. They will always have the advantage of surprise. Instead we need to find ways to impede their ability to move and operate in the first place. We need to gum up their system, so each life they destroy costs them more and more.

One way to do this is to focus on their points of operations: field offices and detention centers where they have to go to and from. These are mostly known locations where they can be potentially tracked, ID’ed, and slowed down. Hotels that house ICE agents can be pressured, as happened in Los Angeles. Local surveillance infrastructure, like Flock cameras, can be opposed and dismantled (as we’ve done here in Olympia). We can pressure companies that support DHS to drop their contracts. On the other side, we can materially support families that are potential targets, lessening the insecurities that ICE agents take advantage of. This also means supporting and organizing directly with people that have been taken, as La Resistencia has for done years at the Northwest Detention Center. Every one of these things make it harder for ICE to work and move easily.

Above all though, we need to stop thinking in terms of finding the right tactics, and instead think in terms of what Black Rose/Rosa Negra calls deep organizing — the kind of committed, long-term relationship and support building that turns neighborhoods and workplaces into powerful communities that are able to defend and fight for themselves. This means building deep and reciprocal solidarity, for which there are no blueprints or short-cuts. This kind of organizing will allow us to work with different tactics over time, while defending against the more common day-to-day threats to targeted communities, like government neglect and police harassment. For those of us that are not part of part of a targeted population, it means building real, living relationships with those that are, so that we can work together from a place of care and real awareness. Minneapolis was able to jump to action so effectively, in part, by activating already existing structures that had been built up over years, like union/church alliances, tenants unions, and signal networks from the George Floyd rebellion.

Taking on the specific neighborhood level tactics made famous in the Twin Cities is not necessarily wrong. In immigrant neighborhoods or a large apartment complexes, it might actually be exactly the right thing to resist ICE kidnappings. Still, we need to work with a clear head about what we are actually confronting, and recognize that organizing might look totally different at different times and places. We need to think seriously, and collectively, about what the terrain really looks like where we are, and then pick, adapt, and invent from there. We need to do this so that we can all get in the fight for real.