![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/10/1.jpg\")
The original photograph by Chris Juhn.
\nOne of the enigmas of the second Trump administration is that the grassroots fascist activity of 2017 to 2020 has not returned with comparable force. But as Trump’s hold on power weakens, we will likely see the far right return to the streets. This makes it important to track what fascists are trying to do today and to block them every step of the way.
\n\nThe above illustration appears courtesy of Chris Veal. You can support Spider-Man in his efforts to resist fascism here.
\n\nBy contrast with the first Trump administration, Trump’s second term has not yet seen large-scale street mobilizations involving fascists and other white supremacists. Neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and Trump supporters have attempted to disrupt anti-Tesla protests, No Kings rallies, and the recent demonstrations at Delaney Hall Detention Facility in New Jersey. Yet so far, these efforts have only taken place on a small scale and have met with massive resistance.
\n\nNonetheless, neo-Nazis like Jake Lang are testing the waters, hoping to revitalize mass far-right street politics, while groups like the Proud Boys have once more taken to showing\nup at Democratic Socialists of America events. Disgraced Trump official Greg Bovino has launched\na run for the presidency after speaking at a white supremacist conference in Portugal. The far right are attempting to regroup for the battles ahead.
\n\nWe should track the fascists as they endeavor to return to street action—especially as the midterm elections grow closer and the institutional far right becomes concerned about losing control. Various far-right ideologues are now attempting to stoke frustration about the administration’s slow rollout of repression targeting the opposition; some are argung that lethal street violence is the only path forward for the right. As Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio recently\nposted, “They’re still doing it because we didn’t hang them last time.”
\n\nTwo things are certain. First, the far right will continue to pressure the Trump administration to ramp up repression of anarchists and the left, from the DSA to autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-fascist groups. At the same time, they will claim that the Trump administration has not gone far enough, and will attempt to promote and normalize vigilante violence—which could be especially dangerous at a time when the state is providing cover for fascist terror. As the Trump era nears its end, the far right see a narrowing window of opportunity in which they can act before power changes hands.
\n\nAutonomous movements must monitor the far right and block their efforts while working to strengthen and support grassroots mobilizations against state violence and the fascists who cheerlead for it.
\n\nSince\nTrump pardoned him, no one has done more than Jake Lang to advance the cause of street-level far-right violence. Despite being denounced, laughed at, and sidelined by most of the existing fascist movement, including the leaders of the Proud Boys, neo-Nazi podcast grifters, and even Nick Fuentes, Lang has sought to draw together a coalition of white supremacists to take the offensive against those who oppose Trump’s rule. To that end, Lang has organized a series of ill-conceived rallies around standard MAGA grievances: supporting ICE, attacking Somali immigrants, and rallying against Muslim communities.
\n\nWhile Lang’s racist and Islamophobic stunts date to\nthe beginning of Trump’s second term, Lang entered the spotlight on a national scale in 2026. Last January, in the midst of Operation Metro Surge, Lang held\na rally in Minneapolis, aiming to capitalize on the Trump administration’s fixation on the local Somali community. Lang only managed to mobilize a handful of supporters, but hundreds of people rallied to oppose him, forcing him to flee the scene. Over the next several weeks, Lang continued to use Minneapolis as a backdrop for his stunts, receiving\na felony charge after vandalizing an anti-ICE sculpture erected by veterans and being filmed giving a Nazi salute while rallying in support of ICE.
\n\nLang then pivoted to attacking Muslims, attempting to hold rallies in New York against the democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. In August, Lang attempted to rally in Dearborn, only to be run\nout and attacked, then returned weeks later, gathering a crowd of several hundred, as Trump supporters seized on the primary victory of progressive democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim. Drawing a mostly older crowd of Trump supporters and far-right bikers, Lang confronted a comparable crowd of local Dearborn residents, who eventually\npushed Lang’s supporters off the street.
\n\nIn late August, Lang returned to Minneapolis to hold a march\nattacking Black people. Hundreds of Twin Cities residents came\ntogether in opposition. Lang’s rally lasted less than ten minutes. Hundreds of people confronted him and his handful of supporters. With the full support of the police, Lang and his supporters drove a truck onto a public sidewalk and into a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Lang was joined by a team of hired security, who pepper-sprayed many people in a failed attempt to hold back the crowd.
\n\nIn the ensuing chaos, a demonstrator dressed as Spider-Man jumped on top of Jake’s truck and punched him. Although police quickly arrested Spider-Man for his civic-minded effort, Lang and his small group of supporters were nonetheless forced to flee the area, only to themselves be arrested on riot charges.
\n\nBut while the city and local law enforcement made a grand show of arresting Lang, as Unicorn Riot later reported,
\n\n\n\n\nfelony riot charges against white supremacist provocateur Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang [were later dropped]… citing “extensive evidence of communication and logistical coordination between the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and Lang’s security detail,” according\nto a press release.
\n
After a few days in jail, Lang was released, already promoting his next neo-Nazi rallies.
\n\nAlthough Lang walked free as a result of police collusion, in early September, over\n100 people rallied in solidarity with William Nicholas Love, the “Minneapolis Spider-Man” who is still facing misdemeanor charges of attacking Lang. Love’s attorney addressed\nthe crowd, arguing that Love pled “not guilty” because he had acted in self-defense and proclaiming, “Spider-Man and the rest of the people of this city have the right to defend themselves.”
\n\nSpeaking to the assembly in a full Spider-Man costume, Love told the crowd, “Black, white, Mexican—whatever race you are, we are in this together.”
\n\nIn a recent episode of the podcast Posting Through It, the hosts documented how Lang considers himself to be operating under the direct protection of the Trump administration, believing that Trump officials will intervene to protect him. And while Lang has managed to rack up charges across the US as a result of his various stunts, so far, law enforcement across the country has continued to roll out the red carpet for him. In Minneapolis, police were prepared to work directly with Lang to inflict violence on locals, despite the explicitly racist content of the rally and Lang’s recent history of violence against police in Washington, DC. It turns out that blue lives don’t matter after all, should they accidentally pose an obstacle to establishing an even more authoritarian order.
\n\nThis is the context in which Lang is traversing the US in hopes of finding issues that can mobilize the MAGA base to engage in street violence. So far, he has not succeeded. By contrast, the outpouring\nof support for the “Minneapolis Spider-Man” is reminiscent of the viral moment of celebrity for the masked anti-fascist who punched suit-and-tie white supremacist Richard Spencer at Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. Already, two crowd-funding\ncampaigns have raised almost\n$200,000 in support of Love, as supporters have flooded\nthe internet with supportive memes and costume\nlook-alikes.
\n\nThe state is allowing Lang to keep attempting to set off fascist street violence, but so far, the public has turned out over and over again to prevent that spark from catching.
\n\n The original photograph by Chris Juhn.
\nJake Lang is not the only one seeking to catalyze a new wave of fascist street violence. After mass grassroots resistance forced ICE to draw down immigration raids in the Twin Cities, the Trump administration removed Greg Bovino from his leadership role within the Border Patrol. Bovino pivoted to openly embrace the white supremacist movement, posting photos of himself giving a Nazi salute and traveling to Europe to speak at a white nationalist conference alongside various neo-Nazis.
\n\nOn August 1, Bovino was scheduled to speak at an anti-immigration rally in Fishers, Indiana. Over a thousand people marched in opposition. As a consequence, in the end, the white supremacists and Republican bureaucrats held a gathering of less than a hundred people at a secret location—a muddy field.
\n\nThis outpouring of resistance in a city of less than 100,000 is encouraging. It shows what is possible in an era that has brought millions of people out into the streets in resistance to ICE, Flock cameras, and data centers.
\n\nFor precisely that reason, another section of the far right is attempting to create a wedge within the emerging movement against AI data centers. Humans\nFirst, a non-profit led by pro-Trump figures, recently called for protests against data center projects across the US. While Trump has been quick to\ndenounce the movement and offer his full support for data center expansion, neo-fascist\nthought leaders like Tucker Carlson and Steven Bannon have pivoted to attempting to co-opt opposition to data centers and Flock cameras. Carlson is now hawking\nanti-Flock merch complete with ski masks and anti-surveillance slogans. The far right exists to impose inequality and domination by force; it only masquerades as populist and libertarian in order to sell itself to the public. We have to drive these two fascists out of these growing social struggles and expose them as enemies of freedom.
\n\nAs opponents of fascism, we have several responsibilities. The first is to build a mass collective resistance to the state’s assault on anti-fascist and anti-capitalist movements. The second is to rally our communities against far-right attempts to take the streets, so they cannot rebuild their capacity to inflict violence. The third is to thwart fascist efforts to engage in entryism targeting the emerging social struggles against AI, data centers, and Flock surveillance cameras.
\n\nThese are massive tasks, but the good news is that a new generation of activists is getting involved in community organizing on a mass scale. Seasoned organizers are in a position to pass on their knowledge and analysis to communities fighting against fascism. There’s lots to do. Let’s get to work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/10/2.jpg\")
\nAcross three decades, Russia has been at the forefront of the worldwide descent into authoritarianism. Vladimir Putin’s government has suppressed opposition in ways that aspiring autocrats like Donald Trump are still striving to emulate. Yet despite widespread repression, there is still resistance in Russia, and as Putin’s model proliferates, people everywhere around the world stand to benefit from learning about it. Likewise, we should support Russian anarchist and anti-war prisoners, both because resistance within Russia offers hope for the eventual end of war and totalitarianism and because, should autocrats consolidate power where we live, we will wish for people to support us, as well.
\n\nThe following text is based on a presentation Antti Rautiainen offered at the Baltic Anarchist Book Fair in Tartu on May 30, 2026. You can watch a video of the presentation here or listen to it via Spotify. The above photograph shows the consequences of an action carried out by the anarchist Ruslan Sidiki.
\n\nIn Russia, street protests against the war were crushed in 2022, the first year following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to the human rights organization OVD Info, 18,901 arrests for anti-war protests in year 2022 were followed by 274 arrests in 2023, 41 arrests in 2022, and just 13 arrests in first half of the year 2025. The reason for this sharp decline was the “Ilya Dadin” law of 2014, according to which “repeated offenses in following the established organization of protests” across a period of 180 days can result a prison sentence of up to 5 years. Thousands of people were arrested once or twice for taking part in anti-war street activities in 2022 and received either a fine or a prison sentence of a few days—but few risked being arrested for a third time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/1.jpg\")
Detentions for anti-war actions by year, first half of 2025, according to OVD-Info.
\nRussian polls have been unreliable since spring 2022. After the criminalization of anti-war opinions, some polling companies reported that up to 60% of people queried refused to give answers. Before the polls became unreliable, 58-71% of Russians indicated a pro-war sentiment in various polls. However, opinions were intensely polarized between different groups. People in major cities were more anti-war than those in other locations; younger people were more anti-war, as were women. The greatest division was between people who watch television, the chief propaganda tool of the state, and people who do not watch it. Among people less than 30 years old who do not watch television, 80% were anti-war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/2.jpg\")
\nThe general impression among critical Russians is that the majority of those in Russia still share a pro-war sentiment. However, a shift is visible even in officially tolerated opinion polls. According to polls by the Levada Center, over the past two years, the share of Russians supporting the continuation of the war effort has dropped from around 41% to around 28%, and share of those who support peace talks has grown from 51% to 62%. At the same time, the number of those who support making concessions to Ukraine is at 24%: people want peace, but on terms favorable to Russia.
\n\nOf course, this may simply reflect what people are willing to say to anonymous pollsters.
\n\nAnother difference is that now, people in small cities and rural localities are expressing more anti-war sentiment than those in major urban centers. Moscow is the most pro-war city. The likely explanation is that most of the frontline casualties are from small, peripheral communities.
\n\nWhy, after more than four years of war, with more than a million Russian soldiers wounded or dead, is anti-war sentiment still confined to a minority?
\n\nAs the saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.” During the first years of the war, salaries were growing even with high inflation rate. Starting in 2004, the Russian ruling class hoarded huge profits of the oil and gas trade in a fund currently known as the “National Wealth Fund.” Instead of raising the standard of living by investing in healthcare, social benefits and services, and the like, the money was stashed to be spent on wars and militarization. Now these billions are finally flowing into the economy in the form of wartime investment. The unemployment rate is negligible; in some cases, salaries have multiplied at factories in regions that were previously economically depressed. Generous monthly payments for contract soldiers are up to five times the average salary in poorer regions. At the same time, payments to widows and orphans are shifting the economy in the most destitute areas of the Russian federation, from which most of the enlisted soldiers come.
\n\nDuring the first months of 2026, the Russian economy contracted for the first time since the beginning of the war; but now, once again, it is on a growth trajectory, due to the oil price hike following the war in Iran. The Russian state budget is running on a deficit due to the costs of the war, but there are plenty of ways to solve that issue, such as tax increases, using what remains of the National Wealth Fund, cutting social spending and education, and forcing oligarchs to buy state obligations. The Russian economy will likely be able to sustain the war for several years yet, although the standard of living is stagnating now and drone strikes are causing increasing inconvenience.
\n\nAnother factor explaining Russian support for the war is the situation on the frontline. Russia’s advances have been very slow for years, but most weeks, Russia is still gaining more territory than it is losing. The traditional dream of socialists of all stripes is that soldiers will turn their rifles against the ruling class and finish the war. But throughout world history, this usually takes place in a situation in which a war has already been lost, as in Russia in February 1917 and Germany in November 1918. It is not certain that Russia will win this war, but as long as the chances are high, many people would like to be on the winning side.
\n\nThe third factor is that for a random person, the risk of ending up in the war remains low. The independent media project Mediazona, originally established by members of Pussy Riot, has been tracking Russian losses by monitoring social media and other sources, and they have been able dig up information about 239,000 dead at the front. Of these casualties, the service branch of 22.5% of the casualties is unknown. 36.7% are volunteers, 11% are inmates, 21.5% are contract soldiers, and only 8.3% are mobilized soldiers. Some of the volunteers, inmates, and contract soldiers have not signed their contracts voluntarily; inmates and conscripts are pressured to sign contracts. But the vast majority of them had a choice, and even those mobilized often had the option of not appearing in the enlistment office and leaving the country or dodging the draft by other means. Few people who have died in the front have genuinely used every means at their disposal to avoid this.
\n\nAlso, many of those who would otherwise have opposed the war have left Russia. The exodus that took place in 2022 involved up to 700,000 people. Many of them have returned due to the difficulties of life in emigration, but emigration is continuing.
\n\nAt the same time, the intensity of the repression targeting anti-war opinion is without precedent since the beginning of Perestroika in 1986.
\n\nYet there are still protests and social movements. Activatica is a project monitoring protests in Russia, and they are tracking several hundred protests and direct actions every month. The most popular topics are environmental issues; anti-repression events, such as letter writing events for political prisoners, are still tolerated. Activatica lists much fewer anti-war protests, and those are usually direct actions. In a few cities, lone pickets of stubborn pensioners are still occasionally tolerated without a resulting prison sentence, such as the pickets by Viktor Gilin in Perm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/3.jpg\")
Protests and direct actions by type, monthly, year 2025, according to Activatica.
\nThe number of anti-war direct actions actually appears to be growing. In 2024, Activatica recorded 145 actions; in 2025, 233 actions. Activatica tries not to count actions provoked by Ukrainian internet scammers, who hack the bank accounts of (usually elderly) persons, then blackmail them into carrying direct actions, which often result in severe sentences. The internet scamming industry is widespread in Ukraine, and it is contributing to the war effort in this dubious way, perhaps also as a consequence of its links to Ukrainian security services.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/5.jpg\")
Direct actions by region, 2024, according to Activatica.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/6.jpg\")
Direct actions by Russian region, 2025, according to Activatica.
\nHowever, Activatica does not attempt to differentiate between actions carried out by activists and Ukrainian secret services—which is challenging in any case, because the secret services occasionally masquerade as activists. One may assume that actions involving explosives that occur not far from the Ukrainian border, or professional-level assassinations of Russian officers in major cities, are unlikely to be the efforts of activists, whereas small-scale Molotov cocktail attacks far from the frontline are probably the work of activists. Often, it is difficult to be sure who is behind what. Moreover, it is possible that people who genuinely oppose the war are contacting Ukrainian secret services in order to solve their own financial problems, or in order to combine their financial and a political interests. The model of Ukrainian secret service hiring civilians for money might be described as “Sabotage as Service”—the same model that is widely used by the Russian secret services in Ukraine and around Europe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/7.jpg\")
Oil storage facilities burned in Kandry, Bashkokorstan, in an action claimed by Rospartisan on May 26, 2026. Rospartisan has a big-tent policy of covering any anti-war direct actions, from anarchists to the far-right.
\nThe vast majority of small-scale sabotage actions are not claimed by any group. During the first years of the war, the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK) succeeded in conducting several major sabotage actions. BOAK was established before the 2022 invasion; it represents the direct continuation of the wave of insurrectionary anarchism that occurred in Russia from 2008-2013, inspired by the uprising in Greece in December 2008 after the police murdered Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Among the founders of the organization was Dmitry Petrov, an anarchist from Moscow who was killed by Russian forces while defending Ukraine in 2023.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/8.jpg\")
The logo of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists.
\nNo one that the authorities have caught has been proven to be a BOAK activist. In one case, the authorities claimed that they had arrested a BOAK member for carrying out direct action, but an anarchist political prisoner who was held in the same prison confirmed that the activist had nothing to do with BOAK or anarchism. The case of another person who was arrested last year and accused of being a BOAK member still awaits confirmation or refutation, due to the secrecy of the court materials. BOAK cannot confirm or refute such claims because it does not preserve the personal details of its contacts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/9.jpg\")
A photograph from a BOAK action.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/10.jpg\")
A photograph from a BOAK action.
\nBut although BOAK members have been able to evade the Russian authorities, several have been forced to flee Russia or to tone down their activities. This has largely reduced BOAK to a propaganda organization promoting direct action and anarchism.
\n\nAnarchists have established several organizations to support anarchists facing repression. Currently, the oldest is the Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow, established in 2003. For more than two decades, ABC Moscow has supported repressed anarchists, anti-fascists, anti-authoritarians and their supporters. As of now, ABC Moscow lists 23 anarchist and anti-fascist political prisoners in Russia, of whom 14 are in prison for alleged actions against industry or the military. Most of the rest were imprisoned prior to the full-scale invasion in 2022. During the first years of the war, ABC Moscow spread information about and supported diverse anti-war direct-action prisoners, but lately, their efforts have been confined to supporting anarchist and anti-authoritarian prisoners, due to the sheer number of anti-war prisoners.
\n\nIn 2025, ABC Moscow (and all the other ABC groups) were declared “undesirable” in Russia, which means that donating to them can result in a three-year prison sentence. Eventually, ABC Moscow moved all of its activities and members abroad; today, it focuses on spreading information and raising funds outside Russia. News about ABC Moscow activity appears regularly on the Avtonom website and via the group’s own Telegram channel. ABC Moscow can receive donations via Paypal and cryptocurrencies.
\n\nAs ABC Moscow’s activities inside Russia have become impossible, another organization has emerged to support anarchist and anti-authoritarian prisoners, named Fires of Freedom. You can follow its Russian-language Telegram channel here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/12.jpg\")
Fires of Freedom.
\nSolidarity Zone is another initiative started by anti-authoritarians to support anti-war direct action prisoners of various political convictions (excluding the far right). It was established in 2022, at a time when mainstream human rights organizations were not willing to support those sentenced for arsons and “terrorist” charges. Since then, the situation has changed; now, Russian opposition and human rights organizations have a more positive attitude towards direct action. However, Solidarity Zone is still providing support for 15 prisoners serving lengthy sentences for allegedly carrying out direct action, and the organization is following the cases of many more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/13.jpg\")
Solidarity Zone.
\nAlthough the mainstream democratic opposition has become more supportive of prisoners accused of direct action, in practice, the sheer number of prisoners has overwhelmed all prisoner support structures. The most significant Russian human rights organization, Memorial, has declared 1715 prisoners to be political, of whom 674 are anti-war prisoners. It has also listed 5608 people with “politically motivated charges.” Their process of identifying political prisoners has been slowed down severely by the number of cases. For example, Memorial designated the anarchist Alexandr Snezhkov as a political prisoner only two years after his case was submitted to them. In reality, the number of political prisoners in Russia is probably twice as many as they list.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/14.jpg\")
The growth of the number of political prisoners in Russia from 2012-2025, according to Memorial. Graph by Riddle.
\nIn the first half of 2026, 1234 people were sentenced for “terrorism” (including incitement)—an increase of 38% compared with the first half of 2025. The median prison sentence was 13 years. By the end of 2025, there were 5412 prisoners in Russia with “terrorism” charges, an annual growth of 40.9%. This number includes Ukrainian prisoners of war, who are routinely charged with ”terrorism,” sabotage as a service, provocateur victims etc. Motivations may also overlap.
\n\nAltogether, 21,600 people are listed as “terrorists and extremists” on the blacklist of the Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian Federal Service of Financial Monitoring. In addition to prisoners, this list includes people whose sentences expired long ago, and people who have emigrated. Ending up on this list means a lifetime ban on receiving almost any bank services. In practice, those on the list can only earn a living in cash.
\n\nAlthough supporting political prisoners has been a top priority for the Russian opposition, the avalanche of cases has caused prisoner support structures to collapse, and political prisoners have been reduced to statistics. More and more political prisoners have to face court without any financial support or lawyers.
\n\nAt this point, it is also worth asking what the point of such support even is, as no charges against political prisoners have been thrown out as a consequence of the efforts of lawyers, no matter how skillful. The outcome of every case has been decided long before they make it to the court. Nonetheless, lawyers provide a critical—albeit expensive—means of communicating with prisoners during the periods of investigation. Often, the authorities have stopped torturing prisoners after lawyers have become involved in their cases.
\n\nLegal work sometimes secures some minor victories. For example, in summer 2023, Ivan Kudryashov, who was supported by Solidarity Zone while imprisoned for putting up anti-war posters in his hometown of Tver, won a hunger strike after 40 days, gaining the promise that he would have access to vegan food and vitamins sent to him in parcels. Viktor Filinkov, who was arrested in January 2018 and sentenced to seven years in prison on the accusation of being a member of a supposed underground anarchist “Network,” was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement in his prison colony. But with help of lawyers, he managed to challenge these policies and spent last years of his imprisonment in general population.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/15.jpg\")
Ivan Kurdyashov.
\nDmitri Syutkin is a young anarchist, and as many of the younger anarchists, encountered with anarchist ideas online and was rather isolated from the anarchist movement. He is from a small city in the Sverdlovsk region, and he maintained a small telegram channel advocating anarchism and independent Ural region. Three years ago, at the age of 17, he was entrapped by the FSB, who deceived him, claiming to represent Russian volunteers fighting in Ukraine. Anarchist prisoner support groups only became aware of him this year. Accused of terrorism and other charges, he may face up to 10 years in prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/16.jpg\")
Dmitri Syutkin.
\nAnother anarchist prisoner who was discovered relatively recently is Alexey Grigorev from Novotroitsk in the Orenburg region. Accused of planning to burn an FSB building and military recruiting center and of having contact with the Ukrainian authorities, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2025, before any prisoner support group learned of his case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/17.jpg\")
Alexey Grigorev.
\nPerhaps the most successful of the lone anarchist partisans is Ruslan Sidiki, who, unlike the prisoners listed above, had connection with the anarchist movement, having been active in a small and longstanding anarchist rural commune in the Leningrad area, close to St. Petersburg. He attempted to use drones to destroy strategic bombers, but failed as a consequence of electronic jammers. A second action against freight train was more successful, completely derailing a train transporting chemical ingredients. However, due to a small mistake, Ruslan was caught following a massive manhunt and sentenced to 29 years in prison in May 2025. This year, Ruslan’s lawyer was arrested, but Fires of Freedom managed to raise funds to pay for new lawyer to file his appeal.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/18.jpg\")
Ruslan Sidiki visiting the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in better times.
\nAlexey Rozhkov, another lone anarchist partisan, was one of the first people to attack military enlistment offices. He attempted an attack with Molotov cocktails on March 11, 2022, just two weeks after the war began. He was soon arrested, but because minor sabotage did not yet result in automatic terrorist charges during the first months of the war, he was released pending court and escaped to Kyrgysztan. Unfortunately, he was kidnapped there, brought back to Russia, tortured, and charged with terrorism. In May 2026, he received a sentence of 16 years in prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/19.jpg\")
Alexey Rozhkov
\nEventually, this and other actions against enlistment offices inspired a massive wave of arson attacks. Mediazone listed 94 such attacks during the first year and a half of the war. During that early phase of the war, many enlistment offices did not have their files digitized, so burning an office could protect everyone from an urban neighbourhood or rural region from being sent to war for several months. Eventually, the authorities began a hurried effort to digitize all the conscript files; although actions against enlistment offices still occasionally take place, the value of the target is now doubtful. Currently, most anti-war sabotage is targeted against transport and energy infrastructure such as railroads.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/20.jpg\")
Alexey Rozhkov with Molotov Cocktail. CCTV camera footage, scan from print of the court documents.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/21.jpg\")
Arson attacks against military enlistment offices and other administrative buildings during the first year of the war, according to Mediazona. Blue signifies before the August mobilization, orange signifies after.
\nCurrently, the most significant case against anarchists is the Tyumen case, which is still in court. Six anarchists from Yekaterinburg in the Ural region and Tyumen and Surgut of Siberia are accused of establishing a clandestine anarchist organization. In August 2022, Kirill Brik and Deniz Aydin were arrested in a forest in Tyumen, allegedly while attempting to test explosives. Arrests followed in Yekaterinburg and Surgut. All of the arrestees were brutally tortured; they confessed, but eventually all of them except Kirill Brik recanted their testimony. Still, with a cooperating witness, the situation of the others accused is dire. Nikita Oleynik, the founder of the anarchist library Burevestnik (“Storm Petrel”) in Surgut, is accused of being “a leader of a terrorist group” and is in a danger of receiving a life sentence.
\n\nThe life sentence was introduced in Russia in 1992 as a replacement for the death penalty. For 34 years, no one with a life sentence has ever been released in Russia. The other defendants in the Tyumen case face up to 25 years in prison each.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/23.jpg\")
Deniz Aidyn.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/24.jpg\")
Yuri Neznamov.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/25.jpg\")
Danil Chertykov.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/26.jpg\")
Nikita Oleynik.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/27.jpg\")
Roman Paklin.
\nAleksandr Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova were arrested in Chita in the far east of Russia in October 2022, while only 19 and 16 years old. Allegedly, they painted graffiti reading ”Death to the regime.” They were also suspected of administering a Telegram channel with anarchist and anti-war messages. Snezhkov was sentenced to six years in prison and Lizunova to three and a half years in April 2024. This year, Aleksandr received an additional sentence for “incitement” because he allegedly read his legal papers to other prisoners; he has been sent to a stricter prison for the remaining two years of his sentence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/28.jpg\")
Lyubov Lizunova and Aleksandr Snezhkov.
\nSolidarity Zone tracked down the anarchist Roman Shvedov in the court system in autumn 2024. He was accused of anti-war arson. However, he refused the support that Solidarity Zone offered, insisting that there was nothing that could be done for him and emphasizing that he would prefer for the resources to be directed to other victims of repression. After being sentenced to 16 years in prison, he committed suicide in a Rostov jail in December 2024. The face of this fallen anarchist comrade remains unknown to us. Solidarity groups do not even have a proper photograph of him, only a pixelated face from Russian mainstream media.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/29.jpg\")
Roman Shvedov.
\nThe most straightforward way to act in solidarity with Russian prisoners is by spreading information—for example, translating news and carrying out banner drops, graffiti, and other forms of direct actions. A great deal of news about Russian anarchist prisoners is available on the English section of the website of Autonomous Action, the former Russian Libertarian Communist federation, which is now working as a media project.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/09/30.jpg\")
The logo of Autonomous Action.
\nWith automatic translation tools available for free online, it is easy to write letters even when the prison censors only allow prisoners to receive letters in Russian. It is possible to write to a number of anarchist prisoners via the prisonmail.online service at a small cost; the service also provides the opportunity to receive replies. It is possible to write other prisoners via snail mail. A full list of addresses is available via the ABC Moscow website.
\n\nPrisoner solidarity groups are in constant need of funds to pay for lawyers and other costs of imprisonment. You can donate to fundraising campaigns and projects that support prisoners—Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow, Fires of Freedom, and Solidarity Zone.
\n\nIt is also possible to donate to direct action initiatives such as BOAK using cryptocurrency. Last but not least, you cansupport the anarchists of Belarus (such as the Anarchist Black Cross of Belarus and Pramen) and Ukraine (such as Solidarity Collectives). All three countries are now locked in a common struggle against war and Russian authoritarian imperialism.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/08/27/us-government-designates-host-of-noblogsorg-a-global-terrorist", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/08/27/us-government-designates-host-of-noblogsorg-a-global-terrorist", "title": "US Government Designates Host of NoBlogs.org a \"Global Terrorist\"", "summary": "The US government has classified the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati as a \"Specially Designated Global Terrorist,\" citing the collective's \"far-left\" politics. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/27/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/27/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-08-27T08:30:51Z", "date_modified": "2026-09-04T02:52:35Z", "tags": [ "Censorship", "repression", "internet" ], "content_html": "On August 26, 2026, the United States government classified the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” citing the collective’s “far-left” politics to justify the designation. They announced similar designations of the British group Palestine Action and the transnational Palestinian movement Masar Badil in the same statement.
\n\nFounded in 2001, Autistici/Inventati is a volunteer-run provider of privacy-oriented email, websites, mailing lists, blogs, and communications tools for users who prefer not to rely on corporate platforms. According to the US State Department, Autistici/Inventati hosts “roughly 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, and 10,000 ‘blogs’ on its custom-built platform.”
\n\nAutistici/Inventati explain their values and goals in their manifesto:
\n\n\n\n\nWe believe that communication must be free—and for free—and, therefore, universally accessible.
\n\nWe try to accomplish all this by offering internet services (web sites, e-mail, mailing lists, chats, blogs, newsletters, and more) using our best skills and knowledge to defend both individuals or groups sharing our same aims or ideals. […]
\n\nWe believe that media and communication should not be the exclusive domain of information professionals. We believe in the value of self-management: this is why we have no sponsors or funding of any kind, apart from voluntary donations from those who believe that our project is important and must survive. None of us earns a cent from this project (in fact, quite the opposite).
\n
Many book fairs, radio programs, and other cultural projects rely on the Autistici/Inventati platform noblogs.org for website hosting. According to one anti-fascist research group, “Some of the most well-known NoBlogs sites belong to researchers who solely report on far-right hate and radicalization, never doing anything aside from showing you what exists.” Such researchers helped to identify the fascists who participanted in the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, during which one Neo-Nazi murdered Heather Heyer in an actual act of terrorism.
\n\nThe US State Department is rationalizing this designation by alleging that Autistici/Inventati “provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups,” including Portland-based Rose City Antifa. Their claim about Rose City Antifa seems to be false, however, conflating Rose City Antifa with another project called Rose City Counterinfo.
\n\nOn the basis of this error, the State Department rushed to proclaim an alleged “Portland Antifa connection to Hamas” and “Iran’s IRGC” [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], with the sole justification being the allegation that an unnamed “extremist media group”—which they do not allege had any relationship to Rose City Antifa—had republished statements from Hamas and the IRGC on a website hosted by noblogs.org. This is representative of the dishonesty and erroneousness of the State Department press release as a whole.
\n\nWhen a military force carries out an attack on a village, the first thing they do is attempt to cut the communication lines that connect it to the outside world. We have to understand the attack on Autistici/Inventati the same way. Now that tech corporations from Meta to the platform formerly known as Twitter have showed that they are willing to ban whoever the US government instructs them to, the US government is going after groups that provide web services on a non-commercial basis.
\n\nBecause there is no “domestic terrorist organization” designation in the United States, the Trump administration began its criminalization of anti-fascists by designating European anti-fascist groups as “terrorists.” They are targeting an Italian tech project for the same reason: they aim to put the pieces in place to criminalize domestic protesters by associating them with designated “Global Terrorist” groups.
\n\nAccording to the United States Department of the Treasury, starting on September 25, 2026, any transactions with Autistici/Inventati will be “prohibited\nby the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations.”1 The press release from the Treasury stipulates:
\n\n\n\n\nViolations of US sanctions may result in the imposition of civil or criminal penalties on US and foreign persons.
\n
Autistici/Inventati have released a short statement about the designation:
\n\n\n\n\nWe deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.
\n\nWe will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from their own violence and warmongering.
\n\nAnti-fascism and anti-capitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.
\n
Building on the social media bans of the preceding years, the terrorist designation of Autistici/Inventati is an effort to suppress dissident media and a significant step towards state repression on the basis of ideology alone. This will not stop with anarchist projects, but will eventually extend across the political spectrum to everyone who does not fall in line with the administration—unless the administration is removed from power. The danger to all will increase until that occurs.
\n\nOf course, Donald Trump’s successors could keep repressive policies like this in place, much as Joe Biden did. In addition to mobilizing against the Trump administration, we must make sure that there is enough political pressure on any political formation that could succeed the Trump presidency to compel them to roll back the repressive measures that Trump‘s administration introduced.
\n\nFor a legal analysis of this designation, you could start here.
\n\nThe specific threat from the Treasury Department reads as follows: “As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the designated or blocked person described above that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC [the Office of Foreign Assets Control]. In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, 50 percent or more by one or more blocked persons are also blocked. Unless authorized by OFAC, or exempt, OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by US persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of blocked persons.” ↩
\nSince the George Floyd Rebellion of summer 2020, police have continued to murder people at a steady pace, largely without provoking a significant response. Public attention has shifted to the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, treating police violence as ordinary and acceptable. Yet when police in Madison, Wisconsin murdered Corey Ruiz, demonstrators established a weeks-long occupation in response—raising the possibility that the movement against police could return with a vengeance alongside the movement to abolish ICE. Here, participants in the response to the murder of Corey Ruiz recount their experiences and discuss what it would take to establish a movement capable of putting an end to police violence.
\n\nThe Madison Police Department murdered Corey Ruiz on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 22, 2026. They killed him in broad daylight on Williamson (Willy) Street. A crowd gathered in horror, recording the gruesome state-sanctioned execution. While this is certainly not the only murder that Madison cops have committed, the attention it received catalyzed a surprisingly large and long-running response for the town of Madison, Wisconsin—a city known for its supposed progressivism and the university’s history of student activism. In the course of these events, it has become abundantly clear that the narratives about social change and “radicalism” that fuel the egos of activists in Madison ultimately offer no way forward in the fight against police violence. We need a movement that is capable of improvisation and attack, not just a politics of grievance with a flashy show of numbers.
\n\nHere, we aim to review the larger context of the murder of Corey Ruiz, exploring the political tensions in Madison, the history of the city’s treatment of unhoused Madisonians, and how political organizers and non-profits have failed to get to the root of these issues by making impotent demands. Police violence towards the unhoused community in Madison and towards people of color is rampant in the city; the execution of Corey Ruiz is a continuation and escalation of that violence. Corey’s execution, recorded in cell phone footage, was horrific, and his blood will forever stain the hands of city officials, legislatures, and politicians, as well as the police who carry out their orders.
\n\nIn 2023, the city government intensified its long war with the houseless by raiding encampments while closing down shelters, defunding them, and moving them outside of the city in order to conceal poverty and struggle from tourists and wealthy residents. Sadly, Corey’s death is only one of many deaths. The names of many that we will never know; our eyes have met, walking to work, on our commute, at bus stations—who knows what has become of them?
\n\nThose of us who have witnessed this war unfold in Madison remember the 2020 uprisings, Reindahl Park, and the university occupations for Palestine. What do all of these have in common? They all share the erasure of the houseless and the imposition of a division between the houseless and activists, which short-circuit the logic of an identity politics that becomes incompatible with the moralism of activism.
\n\nCorey Ruiz was Black, he was houseless, and he was one of many.
\n\nOur opposition to police murder is not dependent upon the moral character of the slain or the identity categories they fall into; it is based in our opposition to police violence itself. If a crowd of 500 people cannot mobilize against the police in a meaningful way, then what the fuck are we doing? We must attack, not just for Corey, but for those who have not yet been killed, for ourselves. Focusing solely on the individual victim of each specific act of police violence leads only to moral positioning. Social movements against police killings and anti-Black violence are limited by their tendency to focus on martyrdom. We must develop a systemic analysis of policing as an institution and seek to act effectively against it.
\n\nWe do not care what Corey’s legal record is. We are concerned with the role of the police, which is to act as an extended arm of state violence. The law is founded on violence—its entire promise of safety rests on a monopoly of violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/20/4.jpg\")
The encampment around the memorial for Corey Ruiz on Williamson St. and S. Baldwin St., seen from the top of 328 S. Baldwin St. on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, featuring the fist statue from George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photograph by Owen Ziliak.
\nTo understand Corey Ruiz’s murder and the context in which the public response to it unfolded, we must look at the forces stripping people of their housing in Madison and the ways that activists and non-profit organizations are entangled with them.
\n\nIn 2020, when the state failed to protect and provide for its citizens at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid projects proliferated across the country, particularly in the Midwest. The government did not deliver on its promises of protection and resources; eviction moratoriums eventually ran out, and the number of evictions skyrocketed. As various mutual aid projects focused on houseless encampments and resource distribution responded to this situation, this influenced the outcome of subsequent struggles.
\n\nWhen local politicians or non-profits—which are usually silently allied with politicians—try to perform radicalism, we must be prepared to show where they have been and what their true interests are. If they are able to convince their followers that they are “in it with the people,” they will be able to shape the trajectory of social movements to prevent them from pursuing real change. This is not a matter of political purism but a recognition of the political contradictions at play.
\n\nWhenever a social movement or occupation begins, pay attention to how people use the words “security” and “safety.” This rhetoric is often used to divide movements and suppress their radical potential. We have repeatedly witnessed how a certain core of activists have co-opted struggles in this city for themselves and their professional gain.
\n\nIn 2020, the Reindahl Park encampment on the East Side of Madison was huge. It was impossible not to notice it while driving down East Washington, one of the city’s busier roads. Social workers, non-profit representatives, mental health specialists, and mutual aid groups attempted to establish a foothold within it. At the time, many considered the park to be an autonomous community. Yet the encampment was not without problems: Madison police were known to take people who were under the influence or having a mental health crisis to the encampment and drop them off there, where they would provoke conflict among the residents. It also appeared that undercover cops were selling drugs to people staying at Reindahl.
\n\nThe city government shut down the Reindahl encampment in winter 2021, using rhetoric about “safety,” “risk” and “violence” to justify doing so, as well as alleging that the inhabitants were selling drugs. Those of us who were present during those struggles saw how the city began to redirect the social workers and non-profit assignments to a new location, Dairy Drive, which was outside of the city and beyond the reach of Madison public transportation at that time.
\n\nIn November 2021, emergency federal funds were allocated towards an Emergency Shelter on Dairy Drive. Yet due to the limited availability of places in the Dairy Drive shelter, Reindahl inhabitants became divided as to whether to remain at the park or leave. Those who chose to stay were given short-term vouchers by the city to stay in local hotels. One hotel on the East side, which was gutted and renovated after many unreported deaths of houseless people that winter, has since been turned into “lifestyle apartments.”
\n\nThe city’s Dairy Drive Emergency Shelter was comprised of an enclave of tiny homes—enclosed by a fence and heavily surveilled by cameras—that housed about 35 people (17 official residents) with pandemic-era emergency funds. The local non-profit Madison Street Medicine operated it. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has attempted to organize in Madison, the non-profits fell for the city government’s plan to push poor people out of the city, interpreting the Dairy Drive shelter as a dignified way of maintaining the community of the evicted Reindahl Park. The Dairy Drive Emergency Shelter remained open until October 2025, when it was shut down after Madison city alders decided by one vote not to renew its funding.
\n\nAt that time, many of us already knew that the only way to maintain community was to fight together in solidarity. There were many conflicts around the transition from Reindahl Park to Dairy Drive; unfortunately, little documentation of that social struggle exists for future comrades to learn from.
\n\nBefore Dairy Drive was evicted, in summer 2024, Madison police violently evicted the Palestine solidarity occupation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The attack on the encampment for Palestine illustrates how consistently houseless struggles and broader social justice struggles intersect in Madison social movements. Many who were present at the Palestine encampment witnessed how the student organizers struggled to handle the realities of the houseless population that showed up to support the encampment. The police were regularly called because of altercations and the University of Wisconsin-Madison police flooded student emails for weeks during and after the occupation with alerts about “dangerous activity” in the area. Without exploring the complexities of that particular social movement, we can summarize that the police and the city have consistently weaponized the language of safety and security whenever any semblance of autonomous organizing emerges in Madison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/20/3.jpg\")
The night of August 4: protesters fought back, lighting fires and scattering trash and recycling bins to block the police.
\nMadison Police Officer Kiel Peterson executed Corey Ruiz on July 22, 2026 at the intersection of Willy and Baldwin Streets in Marquette Neighborhood—a gentrified, predominantly white area just east of downtown and the capitol district. Immediately after police left the site of the murder, people assembled there in grief, mourning, and anger, occupying the intersection. What began as a small memorial vigil with candles, flowers, and art quickly grew into an encampment; people brought in tents and started grilling food and building trash-can barricades.
\n\nThat evening, a large group of protesters marched to the capitol, disrupting the planned Concerts on the Square. Photographs of this protest were shared widely on multiple national news outlets.
\n\nThe encampment and vigil continued to grow over the following days. People hung several banners up, set up tents to sleep in, and expanded the barricades on all four sides of the intersection. The site of the murder itself was covered in flowers, candles, pictures, and paint, growing larger every day. Several more tame, controlled marches occurred over the following few days, and a fist statue from George Floyd Square in Minneapolis arrived at the site. Madison non-profits, community leaders, and representatives from political organizations including PSL, DSA, and Freedom Inc. increased their presence and pushed their platforms in an attempt to gain numbers for their groups, taking ownership of the marches. A city employee brought port-a-potties to the occupation—voluntarily, not contracted by the city government—and the city government lent numerous salt trucks to reinforce the barricades in the name of protester safety.
\n\nThroughout the growth and expansion of the encampment, the city seemed oddly complaisant. Police presence was minimal, although people spotted police drones doing flyovers almost daily.
\n\nOn Saturday, July 25, over 1000 people marched across the city. The organizers ultimately led them downtown to yell at bargoers around midnight to remind them that “No one parties till Corey’s killer is arrested.” Unsurprisingly, they began to lose numbers, and turnout for subsequent marches dwindled.
\n\nIn the absence of police and seeming indifference from the city government, the occupation maintained its presence but not its momentum. Though the encampment served as a relatively safe space for unhoused folks to set up their tents alongside activists, activists met this with palpable tension. As had occurred during the Palestine solidarity encampments and other local mobilizations, these activists were uncomfortable when forced to interact with the unhoused community. As the days passed, the vigil site became a site for feel-good white liberal and Black community leader activism rather than grassroots community organizing. People held yoga classes, concerts, and offered support for grieving community members.
\n\nBeginning on Friday, July 31, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a centrist liberal, started asking people to end the encampment voluntarily. This was unsuccessful. Mayor Rhodes-Conway continued to issue increasingly threatening demands for the encampment to disperse; these appeared on August 1, 2, and 3 to no avail.
\n\nOn Tuesday, August 4, almost two weeks after the murder, city vehicles began circling the encampment at about 3 am. The city government did not officially announce the raid, though activists echoing the mayor’s sentiments had implied that a raid was likely. The presence of city vehicles increased until 5 am, when the sweep began.
\n\nBobcats fashioned with bulldozer blades tried to circumvent the barricades by advancing on the sidewalks. Protesters who feared that they would run over people sleeping in the tents managed to stop some of them. Hundreds of police set up blocks away to prepare for the raid, while city street workers with CAT bulldozers cleared everything in their path.
\n\nSome people left, but a group stayed on site as more police arrived. They gathered around the fist statue, locking arms. Having fully prepared the raid, the police attacked violently and in huge numbers, tearing down and destroying the rest of the encampment and arresting several protesters. After the police cleared the encampment, officers maintained a massive presence at the intersection and in the areas surrounding it. They staged at nearby locations such as the City of Madison Metro Transit Office three blocks away, at which you could see between 20 and 40 police cars at any time, and maintained surveillance of the intersection with undercover minivans and drones.
\n\nFor the rest of August 4, a cat and mouse game played out between police and protesters. People stayed at the intersection of Willy and Baldwin the entire day. Protesters re-occupied the site, marching in a circle at the intersection and chanting with megaphones. Around 4 pm, apparently without provocation, police violently arrested at least two of the more vocal demonstrators. At least once officer deployed pepper spray, injuring several people—many of whom were complying with police orders. Police aggressively threw people to the ground as they shoved the crowd back.
\n\nAfter police cleared the occupation of the intersection, traffic continued to flow, though protesters remained present and tensions continued to rise. Protesters started taking over the curb and the street. Police violently detained one protester, shoving them to the ground and restraining them. Outrage and attempted intervention prompted further detentions, some of which led to arrests. At some point, mounted officers arrived. Police again seized the intersection and began writing citations for jaywalking in an effort to discourage any attempts to reoccupy it. Police also significantly escalated their responses to any homeless or drunk person, with ten or more officers swarming the individual and immediately arresting them.
\n\nThat afternoon, Madison Police Officer Alex Gonzalez, who killed Madison resident Richard Johnson while on duty in 2024, arrived on site. Protesters demanded Gonzalez’s immediate removal and another officer escorted Gonzalez away. As protesters followed Gonzelez towards the police car, Gonzalez threatened them with pepper spray. People then reoccupied the intersection and gathered around the car with Gonzalez in it. Police threw several protesters to the ground and cuffed and arrested them. One officer nearly fell off his horse in the skirmish. Officers refused to let bystanders collect the names of the arrested and forced protesters back.
\n\nThat evening, people gathered and marched, eventually reoccupying the intersection. Several trash can fires and at least one dumpster fire appeared in the street. Police arrested several more people.
\n\nThroughout Wednesday, August 5, and especially on the evenings of August 5 through August 9, a continuous presence of between ten and forty protesters remained at the Willy and Baldwin intersection, expressing ongoing antagonism towards the police, who made additional arrests whenever people got into the street.
\n\nOn the evening of Saturday, August 8, local clergy and Black community leaders collaborated with the local organization The Pressure Movement to hold a vigil on the theme of “standing together for justice and human dignity” at the Capitol building. Community leaders made speech after speech urging the crowd to pay attention, hold police accountable—with no suggestion as to how to actually do this—and vote in the primaries “like your life depends on it.” The low attendance at this event felt like the symbolic nail in the coffin for the movement.
\n\nOver the days and nights leading up to Corey Ruiz’s funeral on Friday, August 14, and for a few days after, small groups of protesters gathered sporadically at the Willy and Baldwin intersection. But the dwindling numbers of idling protesters assuaged the concerns of cops, who eventually ceased policing the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/20/2.jpg\")
The night of August 4.
\nWe must understand the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison police in the context of the long-running local struggle of the houseless. We are aware of the proximity between the murder of Tony Robinson in 2015 and Corey’s murder, and we understand the significance of the fact that Corey was a Black man. But activists and organizers failed to draw attention to the fact that Corey Ruiz was unhoused, which could have changed the nature and outcome of the occupation on Willy Street. This parallels the way that the “progressive” city of Madison, Wisconsin has failed to acknowledge its role in the rising houselessness in the city, where more high-rise apartments go up every day.
\n\nWe saw that a lot of young comrades, radicals, and anarchists who tried to engage in the struggles in Madison were ultimately used as foot soldiers to advance the agenda of a small number of activists and organizers. Grievance-based politics with empty demands almost immediately drained the insurrectionary potential of the occupation. The problem was not mutual aid. It wasn’t white liberals. It was the movement policing that started immediately and the egos of the organizers themselves.
\n\nTo the young ones we saw there, we want to say:
\n\nTrust your intuition, trust your friends, and, most importantly, trust your rage.
\n\nDo not listen to police of any kind, whether it be the police themselves or movement police.
\n\nFind others who are fed up with the endless marches around the capital, the megaphone wielding, the lifeless chants.
\n\nAct. Proceed under the assumption that others will, too. Do not hesitate out of fear that they won’t.
\n\nDo not trust the non-profits in the city, do not trust the careerist activists who seek to funnel your rage into their political platforms.
\n\nAnother lesson that we sincerely hope people have learned is not to entrust your plans to the non-profits and careerists in this city, or any liberal city like Madison. They are not our friends; our ideas and tactics should not be extracted into aestheticizing or reinforcing their vanity projects.
\n\nNext time the police kill in this city, locate their infrastructure. Block, attack, and show them we are not to be fucked with again.
\n\n—Some Madison anarchists
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/20/1.jpg\")
The night of August 4.
\nMy time at the encampment has shaped new perspectives and sharpened existing thoughts. Witnessing community come together how it did was something I never expected. Being already entrenched in the revolutionary space in Madison, I was shocked to see this pop up. This wasn’t the first time I had to eat my words, however.
\n\nAlthough I praise the space for what it was, I can’t help but criticize it for the same reason. First, it was a space for the houseless and housed alike to get together and mourn a member of the community that was lost to the ever-violent arm of the state. A space where food, water, and shelter were provided and mutual aid (although not glamorous) was prioritized. A space where rage and anger matched the sorrow and anguish that many of us felt, the revolutionary energy was immense, our potential was ready to come to fruition. Then… nothing, all that energy got channeled to endless marches to nowhere, with no goals or demands (or at least no demands backed by the threat of action). Chants were as unserious as they were catchy. The attitude shifted quickly to “How do we fix this incrementally?”
\n\n“We need to hurt they pockets!” is what I heard when yelling at someone with a bullhorn.
\n\n“Fuck that,” I replied. “We have five of them right here! Scared!”
\n\nThat was before we marched to the capitol square to interrupt an event that was being held there. Around five police officers were at the mercy of the growing crowd on Corey (what was Baldwin) and East Wilson, tensions were flaring and the potential for tangible action was upon us—only to be relinquished by a person who I can only describe as “a fed without a check.” That theme continued to the eventual end of the Corey street encampment.
\n\nBeing African American myself, I would often look to other AA activists and organizers for guidance, but what I found was that many AA organizers and activists in Madison were there for the wrong reasons. Many already had connections to the city government or were working for or with them directly, a traitorous act, but some did the city’s dirty work for free, which is even more unforgivable. Not to mention the attitudes that some of the “activists” held towards our unhoused community. The truth is, there will always be opportunities to be made from this, more orgs to be built, clout to be chased, and pockets to be lined. Unfortunately, I was naïve and had hoped that the patterns I recognized from 2020 were just in my head. Black leadership in Madison will always sell out to the highest bidder, or worse, for free.
\n\nAs the days went by, internal struggles and contradictions that were festering started to explode left and right. Rage that should be used against the state started to direct itself internally—we were eating ourselves alive.
\n\nThe time we had to mend these issues wasn’t enough, and the city knew it. Because it wasn’t a matter of if, but when they would raid us.
\n\nThe raid itself was violent, as many could guess. I myself had to block city vehicles from running over tents that were occupied. Many people chose to give it up without a fight, and who could blame them? The numbers weren’t on our side.
\n\nAs I watched the city workers and police advance, my eyes fixed on the fire started near the co-op. Behind it, the intimidating silhouette of a CAT bulldozer emerged. I instantly thought of the struggle in Palestine in that moment.
\n\nAs the police surrounded us, we linked arms and were steadfast in our commitment to protect the George Floyd memorial. Hundreds of officers from different departments were there to do what they love to do: brutalize and displace. I had my head pushed into the concrete by five or six officers. Still, that was tame compared to what happened to some people.
\n\nNothing to note about jail, it was boring. After the initial arrests, folks started to rally at the corner of Willy and Corey. After hearing about that, all I and the others I was with could think about was how fast we could get back out there.
\n\nOver the hours and days following the raid, there were much of the same sidewalk protests going on. There was one night where there was a “riot” (using that term very loosely). I was only present an hour or so after the initial spark, but it wasn’t much. Certainly not enough to get anything meaningful done.
\n\nWith all this being said, there is still no place I’d have rather been two weeks ago than at the encampment. It was a very powerful space with very revolutionary people. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t do more in those moments.
\n\nThe movement will live on, and the fight will continue regardless of the setbacks.
\n\nDare to struggle, dare to win.
\n\nACAB, Fuck ICE, 161.
\n\nCorey Ruiz was brutally murdered by Madison cops nine days after ICE officers shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero to death in Maine. Local police, ICE, sheriff’s deputies: simply different administrative layers of a single, murderous regime. Police killings are the sharpest expression of the violence at the heart of its operation, the same oppressive force that robs us of healthcare, puts us on the street, fills the bosses’ accounts, and compels us to sell ourselves daily for food and shelter. Blue and red public officials and members of the nearly 18,000 police agencies in the US have all sworn to protect this integrated order of dispossession.
\n\nPolicing is the enemy’s essential “solution” for the problems the regime itself is largely responsible for creating. Therefore, we are forced to acknowledge that it’s only a matter of time before the cops kill again. Given this state of affairs, what does it take to get killer cops off the street, or to make their peers think twice before pulling the trigger? Beyond that, what would it mean to actually stop police terror?
\n\nWe think an adequate answer to these questions will include two elements.
\n\nFirst and foremost, the authorities only go out of their way to avoid or effectively address these killings when they face a serious threat of popular retaliation. Experience shows they must be made to know such murders will really damage their rule. George Floyd’s killer, for example, was only arrested after the destruction of Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct. The timing isn’t coincidental. Until then, investigators had avoided taking action, saying they needed more time, despite having had days to review clear footage of an obviously heinous act.
\n\nWe don’t discount the genuine risks at play when we acknowledge the connection between militant direct action and police accountability. We’re simply pointing out that confrontation is a strategic necessity for anyone who would like to make these murders less likely and obtain a shred of accountability after the fact.
\n\nSecond, there is a need for community self-defense infrastructure that proactively monitors neighborhoods for all varieties of police presence, a network that lets the cops know they’re being watched and enables folks to mobilize quickly when necessary. The anti-ICE groups that have popped up in recent months are a step in this direction.
\n\nWithin these groups, priority could be given to community patrols that view all agents of state violence (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Madison Police Department, Dane County Sheriff’s Office) for what they are: lethal threats to people’s well-being. Participants must understand that the anti-ICE and Justice for Corey movements are complementary aspects of a more general, anti-authoritarian struggle. Only then can individuals be clear-eyed about building the power necessary to keep the regime’s abuses in check.
\n\nBeyond patrols, this will likely include socializing with previously unfamiliar neighbors, educating them as to how to avoid unnecessary 911 calls, and developing autonomous methods for effectively addressing anti-social behavior.
\n\nThis is risky, difficult, unglamorous work, but no one can stop police terror without it. Given the gravity of the undertaking, we’d like to end this reflection by drawing attention to some pitfalls observed recently that undermine the movement. We do so from a place of solidarity and hope it will strengthen ongoing efforts in the long term.
\n\nForgoing debate while dismissing tactical suggestions as the likely work of provocateurs deprives the movement of beneficial conversation. Heated, good faith disagreement about the direction of a movement is necessary for a movement’s growth. Such disagreement should accordingly speak to the movement’s goals and capacities and the ways in which certain proposals (don’t) further them.
\n\nA corrollary point relates to snitch- or cop-jacketing. Vigilance is a must for everyone, but suspicion of someone’s being a cop or snitch should never be aired publicly without concrete evidence justifying the claim. Raising such accusations in the absence of compelling evidence not only sows unnecessary discord, it potentially paralyzes the movement. In short, it’s the enemy’s work.
\n\nLastly, we can’t help but be concerned by incessant calls to “follow Black leadership.” To state the obvious, Black people are not a monolith. They hold diverse and often divergent opinions. So who do you “follow?” Madison’s Shelia Stubbs? Alex Gee or Brandi Grayson? Barack Obama? Mumia Abu-Jamal? The fight against racist oppression is its beating heart, but the movement needs critical thinkers, not followers ridden with unhelpful amounts of white guilt.
\n\nIn solidarity,
\n\n—Some local comrades
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/08/12/the-border-is-an-open-wound-a-tree-sit-in-lochiel-arizona-halts-border-wall-construction", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/08/12/the-border-is-an-open-wound-a-tree-sit-in-lochiel-arizona-halts-border-wall-construction", "title": "The Border is an Open Wound : A Tree Sit in Lochiel, Arizona Halts Border Wall Construction", "summary": "A report from the tree occupation in Lochiel, Arizona that is halting the construction of the border wall.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-08-12T10:30:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-09-03T20:19:20Z", "tags": [ "arizona", "border", "border patrol", "forest occupation", "tree" ], "content_html": "At the border with Mexico in Arizona, for the first time in history, a tree sit is blocking the construction of the border wall that Trump promised his voters. The wall is the knife of Gloria Anzaldua’s metaphor, when she wrote in 1987:
\n\n\n\n\n“The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”
\n
The border fence is a knife that cuts through a “living tissue,” as she writes, leaving a ragged wound across the precious and diverse ecosystems that defy the myth that the border represents a natural division between worlds.
\n\nTwo weeks ago, one protester decided it was time to block the machine that was about to destroy the last of four ancient cottonwood trees that stood in the way of the wall’s construction. A sheriff arrested him; he was released twelve hours later with no charges filed. This arrest galvanized the community.
\n\nLess than two days later, friends installed a platform in the tree. Since then, it has been impossible to level this one part of the land because there is someone living in a tree and many supporters on the ground making sure everybody knows it. If the tree is felled, our friend in the tree is likely to be killed along with it. Knowing this, the general contractor, Fisher Sand and Gravel, as well as their private security, Vision Quest, the United States Army, Border Patrol, and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff have not yet been able to remove us from the shade of the old growth cottonwood that has likely stood here since before the land was acquired by the United States.
\n\nWe invite you to join us in refusing the border regime—whether that means coming here to Lochiel, Arizona or taking action wherever you are. The border is everywhere that their networks of violence extend.
\n\nWhat follows here is an account from within this emerging struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/3.jpg\")
\nWe have been experiencing a moment of relative stillness within a historical eddy. This summer has been full of fleeting conflagrations, weather hotter than we remember last year, and the feeling, never quite departing, that all of this can’t stay as precariously stable as it seems. The stability of the United States project has felt suffocating. We hear whispers of true resistance and see photos of joyful rupture, but our day-to-day lives have largely remained the same, with perhaps a few more friends, commitments, and Signal chats to keep up with than this time last summer.
\n\nGathered under the last of four ancient cottonwoods in the path of the new double border wall construction, we have found a moment of possibility. For now, we have managed to stop the regime in its tracks. The wall cannot be built where this grandmother stands so long as we, too, stand here.
\n\nFor over a year, environmentalists and local community members have been spending time together in Lochiel, Arizona. This town is all but abandoned. Many buildings here are becoming ruins, illustrating Lochiel’s peripheral relationship to the metropolis just a few hours to the northwest. These gatherings have built a compassionate and cohesive network that stretches far beyond the roads, buildings, fences, livestock, and ecology of the valley in which Lochiel is located. A few individuals have brought together many people to witness the splitting of this valley, and our world, apart.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/1.jpg\")
\nLochiel sits directly adjacent to the US-Mexico border. One of the houses in the town, the old customs house for the now-closed port of entry, butts up so close to the border that the owner was concerned that it too would be demolished to make room for the double wall. People on both sides of the border fence live much the same way, raising cattle and singing together under the same shade of cottonwoods in the same valley, under the same bright blue dome of the sky. The many very old cottonwoods at the bottom of this valley used to reach across the border, creating a continuous canopy over the road. This high-elevation prairie ecosystem is one of the most biologically diverse in the world, with countless varieties of insects and grasses, flowering plants, and many threatened bird species along with coatis, coyotes, bears, and jaguars. All of this life is at risk here.
\n\nA few years ago, in the fall and early winter of 2022, in the Coronado National Forest, which lies east of Lochiel, a similar composition of people resisted another attempt to build a border wall. This effort to block then-governor Doug Ducey’s container wall was ultimately successful. The participants employed much the same rhetoric and similar tactics.
\n\nYet today, the political climate has changed dramatically. In 2022, during the Biden years, Governor Ducey broke many laws to use shipping containers to “fill the gaps” left by Trump’s first ineffectual effort to build the wall he had promised his voters. Miles and miles of national forest—where the state government does not have jurisdiction—were clear-cut and graded without any permits or concern for the law or the environment. The project cost millions of dollars and inflicted untold impacts on this precious ecosystem.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/4.jpg\")
\nWith protesters standing in front of the vehicles doing this construction, crews were forced to work through the night. Protesters responded by setting up a camp in the border road itself. But at that time, Ducey was only tacitly supported by the United States government. After two weeks of occupation, the courts finally moved to intervene. Ducey was stopped not only by blockaders, but by the authority of federal law.
\n\nToday, in Lochiel, there is no lawsuit, no salvation from the courts to wait on. This wall, which is no less monstrous than that one, has been engineered for its purpose, and the law has been re-engineered as well. Under Trump’s second term, what was recently mere illegal buffoonery has become a blunt force supported by the law. All of us in Lochiel now, regardless of ideology, see that the power consolidated in the last four years indicates the state’s absolute disregard for life of all kinds. We are fighting for life. The state brings only death.
\n\nA few hours west of Lochiel, in a place called Quitobaquito Springs or A’al Vaipia by the O’odham people, Indigenous communities and environmentalists are also preparing for struggle against imminent border wall construction. The springs are a sacred ceremonial site for the O’odham people, some of whom lived there until the 1950s, when the national parks service annexed the land to form Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/7.jpg\")
\nThis spring relies on ancient aquifers that the construction will likely deplete to such an extent that the spring will cease to exist. This desecration is an existential threat to the O’odham people’s traditional religious geography; it also spells extinction for wild populations of Sonoyta pupfish and springsnails, which can only be found in the waters of A’al Vaipia. Resistance is mounting in the form of O’odham-led prayer runs and endangered species lawsuits, among other efforts, but the sense of doom is growing as surveyors arrive and construction crews make preparations.
\n\nAdjacent to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is Tohono O’odham Nation. The US border has divided O’odham land since the initial process of colonization. The government of Tohono O’odham Nation recently released an announcement declaring all border wall contractors trespassers. “No Trespassing” signs are being placed to notify contractors of their illegal entry of the land. The border has already desecrated O’odham land, and this wall would destroy sacred sites and make connection across the border even harder than it is already.
\n\nBefore, a construction project would have been compelled to address these issues, but the Real ID act has freed the government of the responsibility to conduct archeological and environmental studies. The border wall is materially dissolving all history, life, and culture that could get in its way.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/6.jpg\")
\nAs I write, the fence that marks the border near Lochiel is being removed, panel by panel. I watch as the same machine that tore up three ancient cottonwoods in this valley carefully stacks up the fence panels.
\n\nIn a collective daydream encouraged by the heat of the sun, we imagined that this could the last time the valley will be divided by violence. That the valley could one day become whole again. That the mythology of the state might give way to land, sun, soil, abundance, freedom.
\n\nThis daydream ended as quickly as it started. The double wall now reaches almost to the edges of the roots of the fourth grandmother cottonwood that has been marked for death to make way for this monstrous infrastructure. Dust clouds from construction billow over her leaves as her roots are crushed by countless trucks and drowned by water stolen from the aquifer below in an attempt to keep the disturbed soil on the ground.
\n\nOn Monday, July 27, a local person decided to stand in front of the machinery that is supposed to take this last of four border trees out of its soil and all of our lives. For this act of care, he was arrested by Santa Cruz County Sheriff Hathaway’s deputies and put in jail for the day. He was released without any charges being filed. This act of bravery resounded in southern Arizona.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/8.jpg\")
\nAs the news spread, many more people turned towards this small town with their hearts and minds alight. A window opened into the possibility of stopping the construction of the wall and properly grieving the ecosystem that is being split in two. Journalists, environmental NGOs, humanitarians, and anarchists flooded into the small town in response to this invitation.
\n\nIn less than two days, the network spread its roots far enough that it was possible to establish a tree sit in the arms of that last of four grandmothers. People rigged a platform in the top of the tree and raised a banner.
\n\nOld cottonwoods are huge—and fragile. At any moment, any limb could drop without warning; the stress that this tree is enduring only makes that more likely. But that risk is worth it to the tree sitter and those supporting from below. This moment of freedom is worth the risk.
\n\nThe tree sit is both a symbol and an intervention. It draws on the activists’ experience with historic forest defense tactics and environmental militancy—and on a commitment to the more-than-human world. The tree sit in this particular place has done what few other tactics have been able to, completely halting the progression of the border wall construction in this small part of the San Rafael Valley. On three sides of the tree, construction is continuing, but still she stands with one of us held in her wide arms.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/9.jpg\")
\nJust after the sit went up, the sheriff was called once again. An employee of a private security firm called Vision Quest attempted to intimidate the sitter and the camp that blossomed under the tree. The sheriff did not come. We are told that he is also against the building of this wall. That day, it appeared that there was nothing that the private security guards, border patrol, or even the marines stationed at this part of the border driving back and forth in a golf cart could do to us without the sheriff’s cooperation—at least legally, at least for now. Once we realized this, we walked the border road easement without fear.
\n\nIn the two weeks since then, construction nearby has been largely disrupted due to people’s commitment to standing in the way as well as the miraculously full and regular monsoon season that has made the San Rafael valley so lush this year. The summer rain still falls here, unlike in Phoenix and Tucson. Lightning, downpours, and high winds have blessed us with breathing space in this moment of opportunity.
\n\nNo one knows what to do with us. While I can still feel the sun on my skin, the pressure of the heat of summer has lifted. Finally, we can run, play, and learn to defend the world of the real within the small power vacuum that we have created together under this cottonwood. We are at the edge of the false world that we are told we belong to, piercing its thick rubbery skin and feeling the breeze of freedom in the midst of the violence of ever-escalating border fascism. The margins and hinterlands of capital remain places that can offer enough space to move for those of us willing to puncture the illusion of state control.
\n\nNews from the margins quickly reached one of many centers of control. On Wednesday, August 5, we received news from Phoenix that some “anarchists and troublemakers of the metropolis” had carried out an action at the office of the general contractor awarded with the border construction project, Fisher Sand and Gravel. This company has made a billion dollars on the wall construction contract. The “troublemakers” trashed the office and posted a people’s eviction notice on the door, sending a message that just as the border is everywhere, there is a way for anyone to push back against it anywhere.
\n\nThe reportback from this action, originally posted on a regional noblogs site, begins, “The border is like an open wound,” recalling Anzaldua. There is no truer statement. Everywhere that the border is developed, maintained, and expanded, there is blood. We are only trying to heal this wound.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/10.jpg\")
\nMuch of the mainstream media rhetoric around the tree sit relies on neoliberal understandings of what is possible. If only there were one wall under construction rather than two, these cottonwoods might have been saved. If only the border could be maintained more abstractly, it would seem less violent from afar. If only these cottonwoods could have all been saved, the ecosystem would have stayed intact. If only the construction would be stopped by active nests that Border Patrol stated would prevent the callous removal of the grandmothers standing in the way. The studies abound, and all of it is true. There is irreparable harm being enacted on this ecosystem by the wall and its construction.
\n\nOn the ground, many people have a simpler outlook. As the banner hanging on the still-standing tree reads, “BORDERS KILL.” We deny any line that divides us. We oppose any force that prevents people, animals, and water from moving and dwelling where they will. We refuse to believe that this wall will stand forever. We know that with our continued refusal, we can tear it down. We know that the roots of these cottonwood trees remain, although torn and slowly decaying, deeper than the wall is anchored by cement into the thick soil of the San Rafael Valley. The cicadas sing with us. They tell us that rain is coming to make the road too muddy for heavy machinery to pass.
\n\nIn this moment, we do not know how long the tree sitter will be able to remain in the grandmother cottonwood we’ve grown to love. Many leaves have grown yellow and fallen due to the stress, yet there is new growth at the tips of the smallest branches. At any moment, the sheriff may decide that it is time for him to do his job. Perhaps more willing arms of state power will be commanded to remove us.
\n\nBut we will be here to stop this intervention, to stop the extension of the wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, to stop the real world from being separated by an imaginary line imposed through raw violence. We welcome you to join us here in Lochiel; we invite you into the freedom we have found here, to fight the border where you are. We need you to help us to expand this space of possibility that we feel so clearly in this moment from the margins to the whole world.
\n\nWe know you can feel it too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/11.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/12.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/08/12/13.jpg\")
\nIn response to the statement we published from Fire Ant Movement Defense,1 we received the following submission from Eric King, an anarchist and former political prisoner who spent nearly a decade behind bars.
\n\nNonconsensually providing information to police, prosecutors, or others involved in the criminal justice industry is one of the most damaging things a person can do, because it exposes people to danger from a vast structure that exists for the purpose of systematically inflicting violence.
\n\nThose who have provided testimony incriminating others must never be trusted with information that can put anyone else at risk again. And because it is not possible to be sure which information falls into that category, that means keeping them out of a wide array of spaces and relationships.
\n\nWhen questioned by police or prosecutors, the only ethical decision is to refuse to incriminate others. When everyone does so, this limits the amount of harm that the state can inflict. Those who consider informing on others must understand that when they do so, they are crossing a line from which there is no return.
\n\nLikewise, no defendant should be compelled to depend on a support committee that supports anyone who informed on them.
\n\nAt the same time, we should trust non-cooperating defendants to decide how best to conduct their defense and how best to engage with those who provided testimony against them. Federal agencies are attempting to use the Prairieland case to both criminalize and divide all who resist. State repression is intended to inflict harm not only at the point of immediate impact but also via the ruptures it opens up.
\n\nControversy about the decisions of the support committee in the Prairieland case must not discourage people from supporting the non-cooperating defendants. Please donate to their support funds, write to them, and spread awareness about their plight.
\n\nWhat follows is Eric King’s submission.
\n\nI’m writing this response to Fire Ant Movement Defense’s recent statement, “Manufactured Betrayal,” not as a confrontation but in the spirit of opening dialogue and clarifying the values we stand on. This is not an attack. I’m sharing my personal views that are based on my personal experiences. I am not an expert or an arbiter on revolution, I am simply someone who has been directly impacted by a loose-lip piece of shit and have seen people I love experience the same.
\n\nPrison is a truly horrible place. It is a place where people can die, brutally. It is a place that forces violences upon you every second of the day. It is a place that activates your fight or flight reaction to the point where it never stops being fight. It is a place that changes you––how you view the world, how you handle stress, etc. It makes you do things that you cannot forget and have to live with. It takes your families’ hearts and smashes them over and over, every day, as they worry if you are OK, if you are still around. I have been free for two and a half years, and I still think about all the circumstances I was forced into and all the trauma that still lives within me to this day.
\n\nThe Fire Ant statement regarding Meagan Morris felt like a insult to everyone who has ever been impacted by the prison system. It was confusing, enraging, and painful. Fire Ant has done great work in regards to prisoners, which is why this statement confused me so personally and hurt me so deeply.
\n\nI will never understand, and I don’t want to understand, the need to be a snitch apologist. Meagan Morris having regrets, or anyone who cooperates with the police feeling regrets, means nothing compared to the lives she helped to destroy. The fact that Meagan ultimately chose not to testify means nothing. She gave the state ammunition to use against us, not just the Prairieland prisoners, but all of us. In every single case against leftists in the future, the state will be able to use her words to portray our friends, our comrades, as violent terrorists, doing the state’s job for them. She gave the state information for HOURS. What the fuck are we doing?
\n\nAs Fire Ant said, many new radicals will join the struggle after the horrendous state repression they are witnessing. And the conversations we are having now are ones that need to be had––but AHEAD of time. What risks are you willing to take? What are the worst possible consequences, even if you think you’re safe and no matter how legal those risks are at the time? What will you do if you get caught up? Who are the most vulnerable? Who are the most ready? These are conversations that should be had. But never should we plan to allow snitches back into the community, never should there be a path of understanding, never should there be the justification that they paid their price and their remorse is enough. Honestly, fuck that. As an abolitionist, I do not want snitches or anyone else to be in prison. I do not want them to be hurt or harassed, attacked online, none of that shit. I do not have time for it. But I also will never comprehend the idea that they should be allowed back into radical communities. Why on earth would we risk the safety of ANYONE, just to appease someone else’s betrayal and guilt? What is the point of that? That is the line I hold. If my best friend became friends with a snitch because the snitch apologized, I would never talk to that friend again.
\n\nMaking space for their re-entry means spitting in the face of every single captive and all of their families as well. It means looking at people who dedicated their ENTIRE LIVES to the movement and saying, “I know that someone selfishly destroyed your life and betrayed everything they said they stood for, but they feel bad.” Ask yourself, would Kuwasi Balagoon be OK with that mindset? Would Emma Goldman or anyone else? We are living at a moment in time where people who are established and in good graces with the movement are making space for betrayers. Those who snitch are cops. They are prison guards. They are judges and prosecutors. They took the lives of others in their hands and tore them to shreds. There is no space in any organization or movement I love for people who would do that. It is unfathomable. Would Fire Ant Movement Defense be able to look my family in the face and tell them that the person who assisted in getting me tortured, sexually assaulted, and hospitalized had actually suffered enough? That it wasn’t fair to have them removed for the safety of others? That their feelings were more important than the brutality they would allow to happen to all of us?
\n\nImagine if the FBI read that statement (we have to assume they read literally all of them), would they be happy that we were contemplating allowing cooperators back into the fold? They would be elated. 1) They already know that those who flipped are vulnerable to pressure and would probably do it again, but also 2) They could easily see it as a continuous open door, without fear of consequences. How much easier it would be to convince someone to “do the right thing,” when they can show folks there are no lasting consequences to their betrayal. It is a complete erosion of trust within our movement as well. How on earth could I ever trust a comrade who has a soft line on something so dangerous? These are life or death decisions they are making. This isn’t a small ideological stance, it is putting the entire community in jeopardy. The door to return after even the smallest cooperation needs to remain closed and people need to know that. It’s the bare minimum that should happen to those who aid the police in ruining our lives and maintaining their fascist status quo.
\n\nI don’t understand the thought process behind writing this statement. The “why” of it all makes no sense to me. It hasn’t even been two months since the Prairieland sentences and we’re already dropping statements of support for the snitches? People can have their own thoughts and live their own lives and I can disagree with that. It was almost triggering, though, picturing the people who alerted the cops to where I was hiding out, and picturing a comrade I cared about and trusted asking me to be the rat’s friend again. The scars on my head, the blood in my mouth, the pain in my heart, would never allow this to happen. Because I have empathy for those whose lives were ruined by snitches, I could never be friends with a snitch. To snitch is to decide that your comrades’ lives mean less than your own.
\n\nThese are my views. I hope I’m sharing them respectfully. But I am hurt. I want to scream, “WHAT WORLD IS THIS?” Some of my closest friends and people I admire and support have been snitched on, and I hope we never see or hear from those rats again. There should never be space for that, in my opinion. It is a betrayal of all I stand for to give them an inch when they took away decades.
\n\nLove and respect to everyone who supports prisoners. I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine.
\n\nTowards Liberation
\n\nEK
\n\nTo be clear, Fire Ant Movement Defense is not the Fire Ant prisoner solidarity collective from Maine, which is another group entirely. ↩
\nOn July 4, 2025, roughly a dozen people participated in a demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center, a facility serving Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At the conclusion of the demonstration, a participant named Benjamin Song saw a police officer aim a gun at a participant named Nathan Baumann and fired warning shots at the ground in response. Since then, police have arrested 22 people on widely publicized conspiracy and terrorism charges, subjecting many of them to long-term solitary confinement and other pressure tactics. The first eight of the 17 non-cooperating defendants went to trial in March; they were found guilty and sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison each, with one of them receiving a 30-year sentence simply for having moved a box of zines.
\n\nThe Prairieland prosecution is a flagship effort intended to criminalize opposition to fascism per se in line with the Trump administration’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. The prosecution’s approach hinges on the idea that the defendants constitute an “antifa cell,” despite many of them not knowing each other at all.
\n\nThis is not unprecedented. On the contrary, it is a strategy of repression that is familiar elsewhere in the world, under even more authoritarian regimes. In Russia, for example, it has become common for officers from the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, to use electrical shock torture to attempt to coerce arrestees suspected of anarchism into signing false confessions affirming the existence of invented conspiracies.1
\n\nThe playbook is to fabricate an association, then pressure defendants to plead guilty, manufacturing evidence of the supposed conspiracy. In Russia, they do this with cattle prods; in the Prairieland case, they are attempting to accomplish the same thing via less flagrant means, including solitary confinement and threats.
\n\nIn the year since the demonstration at the Prairieland facility, federal agents have tried to expand on this precedent. Prosecutors continue to indict new defendants in the Prairieland case; federal agents continue to raid houses. In May 2026, three people in Spokane, Washington were convicted on felony conspiracy charges for protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity. On June 16, federal agents carried out aggressive house raids across the Twin Cities, arresting twelve people and indicting fifteen on federal conspiracy charges.
\n\nWhat is possible in Texas will not necessarily work in Minnesota. In parts of Texas, far-right and outright fascist state officials control much of the judicial bureaucracy and police, and have the support of much of the population; in Minnesota and other parts of the country, ICE and other elements of the Trump administration are so unpopular that even grand juries, long known as a tool that prosecutors can use for any purpose, sometimes refuse to indict arrestees. The local culture that prevails within the judicial infrastructure of different districts, the amount of leverage that local social movements exert, and the perspectives of the available jury pool all make a significant difference in the outcome of cases like these.
\n\nThe outcome of the first Prairieland trial should not intimidate us out of organizing and taking action; rather, it shows how high the stakes are. Both direct support for the defendants and general efforts to organize, popularize, and legitimize resistance can play a role in blocking federal efforts to normalize the Prairieland model. Even if the appeals courts show themselves to be just as corrupt as the courts that have convicted and sentenced Prairieland defendants, if we build a strong enough movement, whoever succeeds Donald Trump in power could be compelled to commute their sentences.
\n\nIf we withdraw from organizing, if we shrink from resistance, this will embolden the Trump administration and its supporters and they will intensify their attacks. Rather than permitting them to frighten us out of trusting each other, we must build deep personal ties and widespread community support in order to endure campaigns of repression. We can win this fight.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/5.jpg\")
\nThis bears repeating over and over: Never talk to police or the FBI. They wouldn’t ask you in the first place if they didn’t need your assistance to ruin your life and the lives of others. Remember: “I am going to remain silent. I would like to speak with an attorney.”
\n\nWhat follows is a statement from Fire Ant Movement Defense. Fire Ant has revised it since the original publication. You can read a response Eric King wrote to the original version here.
\n\nOn June 23, witnesses across the country watched in horror as the non-cooperating defendants in the Prairieland trial were given staggering sentences in the most blatant case of political persecution in a generation. Like the Haymarket trial, the Red Scare, and the repression of the Black Panther Party before it, the Prairieland case has come to define a new era of state terror intended to crush dissent.
\n\nIt is critical to understand the conditions under which this trial took place. The defendants were humiliated, denied medical care, and repeatedly tortured by state officials throughout the duration of their custody. They were wheeled into court rooms shackled to chairs, forced to clean human feces off of cell walls, subjected to vile human rights offenses that reflect the complete immorality of the American judicial system. The point of these violations was both to punish and to coerce, in hopes that the defendants would turn on one another and abandon their values—the very existence of which this trial was designed to condemn. The majority of the defendants resisted these efforts, demonstrating incredible resilience in the face of overwhelming violence. However, others chose to forsake their values, reject their communities, and betray their comrades in acts of cowardly self-preservation. Without these cooperators, it is entirely possible that the Prairieland trial would have ended with almost all of the defendants winning their freedom.
\n\nMuch of the state cooperation in the Prairieland trial was manufactured through torture and motivated by fear. It manifested in different forms, occurred in different degrees, and, like all matters of political importance, resists simple moral categorization. Of the nineteen defendants facing federal charges, five of them—Seth Sikes, John Thomas, Nathan Baumann, Lynette Sharp, and Susan Kent—took the stand at trial and condemned others to years in prison for their own benefit. Two additional defendants—Joy Gibson and Rebecca Morgan—took plea agreements. While these were non-cooperating pleas, the text of the deals affirmed the existence of a fictional “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which some in the movement have characterized as potentially damaging to other defendants. One other defendant, Meagan Morris, initially gave hours of testimony to federal agents, before rejecting cooperation, refusing a plea agreement, and standing trial with her comrades.
\n\nAll of these cases are materially different from each other. Taking the stand in a courtroom is not the same thing as giving an interview immediately after arrest; full-fledged cooperation is not the same as taking a plea deal that affirms the state’s fabricated narrative. We reject simplistic generalizations that frame all mistakes as unforgivable, rendering it impossible for those who have previously cooperated with the state to change course and restore their commitment to struggle.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/3.jpg\")
\nWe believe that Meagan Morris made an indefensible choice in giving hours of testimony to federal agents. By corroborating John Thomas’s testimony, she contributed to the arrests of Rebecca Morgan, Benjamin Song, and Autumn Hill. After that, she ceased cooperation. She did not take a plea deal. She did not take the stand against her codefendants.
\n\nDespite her initial cooperation, the state was happy to punish her alongside the non-cooperating defendants after she chose to change course. For months, she has faced harassment, starvation, and humiliation like the other defendants. Other cooperators who continued betraying their values received sentences as short as 22 months—but she, rediscovering her courage, rejected that possibility. This does not erase what she did. The depth of her betrayal will be measured by the days, years, or decades that those who once called her a comrade spend in cages.
\n\nMorris has made the strongest course correction that is possible in her position. Her refusal to cooperate further landed her a fifty-year sentence. If we cannot offer those who have begun to cooperate any incentive to stop doing so, that all but ensures that once someone starts cooperating, they will become a permanent addition to the state’s arsenal against us.
\n\nThere are lines that, once crossed, render return impossible. Baumann, Thomas, Sikes, Sharp, and Kent chose their side long ago. There are revolutionary contexts in which totalizing zero-tolerance policies are necessary. But at this moment, thousands of inexperienced new participants are flooding into the fight for liberation. We probably won’t be able to educate all of them before they find themselves in confrontations with the state. Some of them will experience intense repression designed to scare them into cooperating before they fully understand the political implications, the options available to them, or their basic rights. When they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, some may well say something they shouldn’t. If we immediately make permanent enemies of everyone who do so, this may further endanger others.
\n\nWe face a serious question: do we make demands of those who cooperate, or simply cut them off immediately? Do we attempt to intervene and try to alter their behavior, or do nothing?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/4.jpg\")
\nTwo defendants accepted pre-written plea deals confirming the state’s fictions. The text invents a fictional antifa cell, takes for granted that antifascist activity is “terrorism,” and argues that wearing black is proof of criminal intent, among other absurdities. After the defendants had spent months in torturous conditions, the state pushed a deadline for agreeing to the pleas under threat of still worse federal indictments. Both Rowan Gibson and Rebecca Morgan, who signed those pleas without giving interviews, have been sentenced to 15 years each.
\n\nOn an individual level, signing the pleas limited their options. Their potential defenses in regards to their state charges are weakened, and they could be more vulnerable to certain kinds of targeting in the lead up to the state trials, since the state views them as more pressurable.. The pleas could also be damaging for their codefendants. Some argued that the pleas would be levied against the defendants at trial, cited as proof that some participants agreed to language describing the fictionalized “antifa cell” and supposed plans for an “ambush.” As it turned out, at the federal trial, prosecutors relied more on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, but the pleas remain available to introduce when the state-level charges go to trial.
\n\nIn addition, the pleas are a liability for the movement as a whole. It has been clear since the Department of Justice’s first press release on July 8 that their chief goal is to use this case to set a precedent and establish a narrative. This is the core of their strategy, and these pleas help them to advance it. However, these deals came after the cooperating witnesses signed their initial pleas, which make the same claims. Undeniably, Baumann’s testimony furthers the fiction more than Rowan or Rebecca’s signature ever could.
\n\nRowan Gibson and Rebecca Morgan took these deals, despite the bleak outcomes, primarily because of vile jail conditions, mental and physical health problems, and pressure from their lawyers. In a desperate situation, with cops and feds lying to them and coercing them, they remained principled. They did not give up information, or agree to take the stand. And as of yet, their pleas have not furthered the state’s agenda. Their deals show what can happen in the worst circumstances when defendants do not have enough collective legal support. If their lawyers had been willing to work with the defense committee, take advice from legal experts with a better understanding of the politics around the case, or enter joint defense agreements, these pleas could have been avoided. Rowan’s and Rebecca’s plight demands that we reckon with the weaknesses in the legal infrastructure of our movements.
\n\nThe five testifying witnesses sold out their friends at their most vulnerable. They endangered people in their community who remain free for now, people who lie awake at night, fearing the crash of officers breaking down their doors. They damaged the precious faith built and tenderly guarded by all those brave enough to fight for a new world. They deserted the war against ICE as emboldened goons watch blood pool beneath their boots in the streets. At once shocking and mundane, they have thrown themselves in with all the despicable traitors that history is lucky to forget. Nothing more needs to be said about their morals, as there are no words that would make their ethical depravity and the depth of their betrayal clearer to the world than their actions already have.
\n\nHow the state rewarded them tells us something new. All five of the testifying witnesses have now been sentenced. Thomas and Sharp got just over nine years, Sikes and Kent got six, and Baumann got less than two. Across both of the courtrooms, on both sentencing dates, the conservative judges spoke explicitly about sending a message. As for the nine defendants who went to trial, their total of 500 years of prison time represents a clear threat: associate with this ideology in any way and we will bury you. But what message can we read in the disparities among the sentences of the five defendants who testified for the state?
\n\nSentencing for cooperating defendants has traditionally been based on the criminal acts they’re accused of, the timing and extent of their cooperation, and the amount of new and actionable information they provided. This case diverges from the historical precedent.
\n\nThomas was not present in Alvarado, Texas on July 4, 2025. He began cooperating very early in the investigation after his house was raided, and consistently provided evidence following his arrest. His interview on July 12 led to Sharp’s arrest on the 13th, and his subsequent interview on the 14th led to the arrests of Song and Morgan on the 15th, as detailed in the criminal complaints against Rebecca Morgan and Susan Kent. Thomas’s cooperation also contributed to the arrest of Dario Sanchez. Thomas and Sharp pled to one count of material support for terrorism for sheltering Song. Ordinarily, harboring a fugitive can land someone up to a year in prison.
\n\nIn contrast, Sikes was present at the demonstration, armed, and lit fireworks, which the state argued are explosive devices. He began cooperating with the state in October or November 2025. Based on the timing of arrests, it seems unlikely that Sikes’ cooperation provided much additional actionable information.
\n\nBaumann was present at the demo, stayed through the arrival of police lieutenant Thomas Gross, admitted to bringing spray paint, and is the only person on video damaging any property. He agreed to cooperate very early on, but knew none of the participants and could provide very little identifying information.
\n\nPrecedent would suggest that Baumann would get the heaviest sentence, while Sikes and Thomas would get less. In fact, the reverse occurred. Their sentences set a precedent overwriting the old norms, replacing the old criteria with a loyalty test. In testifying, both Thomas and Sikes willingly betrayed their values. Yet Thomas contradicted the state’s narrative under cross-examination, and Sikes held back on even the most basic key elements, such as the definition of anti-fascism. Baumann didn’t betray his beliefs; he apparently had none. Nor did he betray his comrades—he apparently had no comrades, either. Instead, he proved himself to be an enthusiastic vessel for the state’s most poisonous lies.
\n\nThe state’s legal argument for terrorism hinges on the property destruction that Baumann alone admitted to. In their flagship NSPM-7 test case, they were willing to let him off easy because he helped them to advance their agenda. NSPM-7 creates a carveout in the judicial system where thought crimes are more important than material acts.
\n\nEffective repressive strategies are designed to target specific tactics of resistance, such as the emphasis that our political movements place on refusing to cooperate. This era of authoritarianism introduces a form of repression in which action is practically irrelevant, for it is ideology that is on trial. Previous judicial norms, flawed as they were, are being abandoned in favor of litigating the thoughts, beliefs, and orientations that the Trump regime believes pose a threat to its reign of terror. In this legal purgatory, action becomes irrelevant, evidence becomes optional, and cooperators are not rewarded for contributing to investigations so much as for their readiness to affirm outrageous lies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/2.jpg\")
\nThe pages of revolutionary history are full of ordinary people who chose to embody courage, fortitude, and commitment, no matter the cost. They are equally full of people—like the cooperating defendants in this trial—who once claimed to believe in freedom, liberation, and struggle, but later proved that they cared more for themselves than for justice.
\n\nWe are enduring some of the worst authoritarianism that this country has seen in the past fifty years. The actions that people have taken in Prairieland, the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and elsewhere remind us that even in the midst of killings, torture, and life sentences, radicals across this country will continue to choose the path of resistance, rejecting fear, even if it means risking everything. We recognize that experiencing repression is an inevitable consequence of striving for freedom in a social order that is tightening its grip on us.
\n\nThe Prairieland trial has shown us the very best and worst of our communities. Benjamin Song could die in prison for potentially saving Nathan Baumann’s life. Baumann will soon walk free for betraying Song’s. Neither one of these things had to be. We must hurry to adapt to this new era of repression. We must educate as many people as possible about the crucial importance of refusing to answer questions from police or federal agents; we must build awareness about grand juries and how to resist them; above all, we must establish stronger legal support infrastructure, including media outreach, to put at the disposal of everyone who may end up in the crosshairs of the state.
\n\nFinally, we must continue to support the Prairieland defendants. This case is far from over; the appeals process remains ahead, and how that goes will shape state and federal policy. Repression destroys lives and rips apart families; it is designed to break us. But make no mistake—at its core, their system of violence relies less on what it can do to us than on what it can make us do to each other.
\n\nThis statement has been slightly edited for clarity and in response to appreciated feedback. In the interest of transparency, an archive of the original version of the statement before the edits can be found here.
\n\nFire Ant Movement Defense is an anti-repression collective made up of former political defendants and members of defense committees. We believe in mass defense strategies and advise defendants and their supporters on how to fight their cases from a political angle.
\n\nWe are not lawyers. Through repeated experiences, we have gained skills in media work and in synergizing political and legal strategies. In every case, we work towards building a response to repression that approaches the judicial system as an arena where we can fight—and win.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/07/07/1.jpg\")
\nFor June 11, the day of International Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners, we want to offer a glimpse of the repression that the anarchist movement is facing in Greece and the ways that people are resisting it. For that purpose, we present interviews with members of two groups, the Solidarity Assembly for Imprisoned Fugitives and Persecuted Combatants and the Squatted Community of Koukaki.
\n\nThe neoliberal immiseration of Greece is taking its toll. The descendants of those who collaborated with the Nazis are in power once again here.
\n\nThey are out of touch with the lives that most of us lead in these precarious lands. They imitate the fascist narratives that are at work in the United States, pushing for the same “quality of life policing” and “law and order” doctrines while enjoying corruption and excess at our expense.
\n\nThis is taking place all across the world, and everywhere, relentless judicial repression plays an integral part.
\n\nBecause of this, for the sake of our integrity, it is critical that we engage in solidarity, learning from each other’s struggles and preserving our revolutionary communities and bonds. These are victories in and of themselves that we can grasp, even if they don’t always leave us smiling.
\n\nSolidarity is not just a means of self-preservation, but a thread connecting everyone across the world who seeks liberation rather than settling for a society dictated by domination, exploitation, and an unrelenting death cult.
\n\nSolidarity is our weapon!
\nAll we have is us!
—Anarchists
\n\nIntroduce the project you’re involved with.
\n\nWe are members of the “Solidarity Assembly for Imprisoned Fugitives and Persecuted Combatants.” Our group is an anarchist assembly, in the sense that it functions according to the principles of self-organization and without hierarchy. We are also open and have met publicly every week for the past seven years.
\n\nOur aim is to provide political support to comrades who find themselves in the hands of the state and to elevate the various battles that take place in the courts and prisons against false indictments, abuses from the guards, or for general political solidarity.
\n\nWe strive to make the demands of those inside the prisons known and to show the inherent connections they have with struggles that take place in other spheres of society. We also try to put a stop to the repressive mechanisms that the state uses against the anarchist movement. We do this by distributing political texts, fliers, and posters, but also by planning direct actions and demonstrations.
\n\nIn 2024, Kyriakos Ximitiris passed away due to a tragic accident in Athens. This also resulted in the arrests of others, who now have been taken to trial. The trial has become known in local media and by many around the world as the “Ampelokipoi case,” with some of the defendants recently being acquitted and released and others convicted and sentenced to many years in prison. Could you explore what this case was about, what happened with the loss of Kyriakos, and the arrests, prosecution, and recent verdicts that followed?
\n\nThe Solidarity Assembly was one of the main support structures that was involved in the “Ampelokipoi case,” with Kyriakos being a member of the assembly up to the point of his death and Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta continuing to be members to this day from inside prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/2.jpg\")
\nConsequently, it was very important for us to preserve the memory of Kyriakos Ximitiris, show solidarity to all the prosecuted comrades, and build a general political wall of solidarity for struggle, armed struggle, and the choices some of our comrades made and continue to make.
\n\nKyriakos was a dear comrade and friend. He was active in many parts of the movement. He actively demonstrated revolutionary solidarity with political prisoners, engaged in anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and was active in the anti-gentrification movement in Exarchia as well as the anti-fascist movement in general.
\n\nHe had also chosen to participate in armed revolutionary struggle. It was this choice that led to his tragic death at an apartment in Ampelokipoi (a neighborhood in Athens), where an explosion took place under unknown circumstances. This explosion seriously injured his comrade in the movement and in life, Marianna Manoura, and prompted the anti-terrorist unit to devise a non-existent terrorist group, arresting Marianna Manoura, their friend and comrade Dimitra Zarafeta, and three other comrades: Nikos Romanos, Dimitris, and A.K.
\n\nThe loss of Kyriakos and the subsequent hospitalization and imprisonment of Marianna Manoura were grave incidents for the anarchist movement in Greece and abroad. The deeply divided anarchist movement of Athens came together, after many years, to grieve our fallen comrade Kyriakos, and to support Marianna Manoura, Dimitra Zarafeta, and the other three arrested in the case.
\n\nThe movement tried to deal both with the difficult issue of the political defense of armed revolutionary struggle and with critically intensifying state repression. There is a discussion to be had about what went right and wrong in all this, but as the daily mass solidarity gatherings at the courts showed, Kyriakos’ death and the Ampelokipoi case in general remain issues that deeply concern us all.
\n\nFrom the beginning, Marianna Manoura assumed responsibility for helping Kyriakos find a place to process explosive materials that would be used for the revolutionary cause. She made clear there was no terrorist organization and that the other four detained people had nothing to do with the case. Dimitra Zarafeta declared that the accusations by the state against her were false and that she was being persecuted politically, as an anarchist, as a comrade of Kyriakos and Marianna Manoura, and as a person who ideologically supports the choices and actions of Kyriakos. Dimitris, Nikos Romanos, and A.K. all declared their innocence and repudiated any connection with the case.
\n\nThe actual information that the state presented as evidence was either false or completely insufficient even by their own standards. There was none supporting the existence of a terrorist organization. The state presented some normal exchanges of apartment keys and phones between friends and partners relating to Dimitra Zarafeta and Dimitris, and claimed that partial fingerprints of Nikos and A.K. were discovered, among many others, on a plastic bag containing a gun.
\n\nNevertheless, all the accused were detained for 17 months and in the end, Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta were convicted, resulting in a 19-year prison sentence for Marianna Manoura and 8 years for Dimitra Zarafeta. The large sentences, especially for Marianna Manoura, were chiefly due to the application of anti-terrorist legislation. Dimitris, Nikos Romanos, and A.K. were declared innocent and released.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/3.jpg\")
\nIs there an appeal? Will the sentences be served in full?
\n\nMarianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta were recently transferred to the women’s prison of Thiva, since Korydallos prison, where they were held during their pre-trial detention, is only for those awaiting trial. This is an expected but bad development, as they are now much further away from the movement, their families, and their friends.
\n\nAn appeal has already been made, but the second-degree court is not expected to take place any sooner than one to two years from now. Depending on how the secondary court goes, we will then be able to make a better guess as to how much actual time our comrades will have to serve in prison. In general, it is standard that three- to four-fifths of the actual sentence will be served, but there are many legal factors that could affect both the actual sentence and the percentage of it that they will need to serve in prison.
\n\nThe main factor that makes these computations difficult is that since the final days of the SYRIZA administration in 2019, the penal and correctional codes have been constantly changed, making it confusing to determine how each law will affect each individual case.
\n\nWhy did Greek media report differently on Nikos Romanos than on the other defendants in this trial?
\n\nWe do not know if there was a clear intention or plan from the state in this. The comrade, Nikos Romanos, is an important figure not only for the anarchist movement but for large parts of the Greek left as well. His close friendship with Alexis Grigoropoulos, whose murder by a cop in 2008 inspired the biggest insurrection in recent Greek history, and his hunger strike in 2014 made him a point of reference for the broader “progressive” movement. This creates a social pressure that the state takes into consideration, for better or worse.
\n\nAnother aspect that makes his situation different is, in our view, the fact that he proclaimed his innocence, in contrast with the positions that Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta expressed in court. This enabled some parts of the left, which long ago lost its ability to affirm any political choice and stance that the state deems illegal, to support him. In conjunction with the lack of evidence against him, that forced some of the more left-leaning media to try to be a bit more “objective” or considerate of his case.
\n\nAn action in solidarity with the defendants in the Ampelokipoi case.
\nDoes this case have broader implications regarding the Greek state’s approach to repression?
\n\nWe do not think that there was anything really new in how the Greek state handled this case, considering the recent years of escalated repression. Solely because there was an explosion and there were two anarchists in the place where it happened, the Greek state concluded that there was a “terrorist organization.” A pure fabrication. To invent the other members of the supposed “terrorist organization,” they accused the close comrades of the deceased or known individuals in the movement.
\n\nThis is a common method of the Greek anti-terrorist unit, with the courts following suit and engaging in an almost routine pattern: the first-degree court is usually harsher, convicting at least some of the accused for terrorism with lengthy sentences—at least by Greek standards—and the second-degree courts refine the sentences or acquit. There are, of course, notable exceptions.
\n\nOne thing of particular importance in this case are the very high sentences the court handed down, especially for Marianna. This was a direct result of the court convicting both Marianna Manoura and Dimitra Zarafeta for all the charges, including the one concerning “the supply of a terrorist organization with arms and explosives.”
\n\nThis is an accusation that even the prosecutor argued could not logically be proven for a member of this supposed “organization.” This will be a very important legal and political battle for the second-degree court, in order to shorten our comrades’ sentences.
\n\nWhat is the 187a law? We have seen the Greek state fabricating narratives and creating groups, as they did with the “comrades” case which was recently dropped after five years in the courts. Is this law enabling the state to engage in more repression without evidence?
\n\nFirst of all, the essence of this law is political. It is the law that the state uses to repress the armed struggle movement as much as possible. Using specialized courts with no jurors, harsher sentences, and an ever-growing list of crimes that can be prosecuted under the 187a law, the state aims to suppress and silence the “internal enemy.”
\n\nWith this goal in mind, the anti-terrorist law is intentionally vague, giving both the anti-terror unit and the courts enough leeway to adjust it for each case and fabricate evidence as needed.
\n\nThe law was a direct byproduct of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. Infamously, it was first used against an accused member of the N17 (November 17th) revolutionary organization. Since then, the Greek state continuously revises and expands it according to the European anti-terror law standards, just like the 129b law in Germany.
\n\nAlthough it began as a law targeting those who enter armed revolutionary struggle, over the last few years, it is used more and more to target a wide range of practices.
\n\nAre many of these cases postponed, or are charges fabricated, in order to drain the movement of resources and time or use trauma and pre-trial detention as a means of punishment without conviction?
\n\nFirst of all, the postponement of cases has been a reality in Greece for as long as anyone can remember. Many times, the defendants choose this, so that the trial will take place long after the event it concerns, in order to make it more difficult for the state to use the trial in a retaliatory way.
\n\nOther times, trials are postponed because the prosecution does not wish for them to happen. In general, the courts are overburdened with cases, and even though the ruling New Democracy party (ND) has taken measures to force the courts to close up cases faster—at the expense of course of what the state calls “due process” and the “rights” of the accused—this is not always feasible for the judges.
\n\nHowever, it is undoubtedly true that the state uses a number of other tools to make life difficult for the accused, with pre-trial detention, restrictive pre-trial conditions, and court bonds being the most prominent of these. And it is also true that since ND returned to power, these are becoming stricter and are used more often.
\n\nAs for fabricated cases, this strategy has been used to target people of interest to the authorities; Nikos Romanos’ involvement in the Ampelokipoi trial is a case in point. We cannot say whether this indicates a broader plan to deplete the movement’s resources; there is certainly a difference of opinions regarding how organized the state and the police are, as well as how much interest they have in long-term operations against the anarchist movement. But again, what is certain is that the legal consequences of both political activism and low-level crime are becoming harsher by the day—thanks to the new repressive laws that ND passed, which are more aligned with European standards, and the “zero-tolerance for crime” slogan that brought ND to power.
\n\nWe have comrades accused of forming a criminal organization to throw paint at government buildings, people appearing many times a month at the police department because they were arrested at a demonstration, and, at the same time, the prison population is at a breaking point due to petty theft and small debts in broader Greek society.
\n\nAn action in Heraklion in memory of Kyriakos Ximitiris.
\nTwo comrades are on hunger strike to defend Prosfygika, a large squatted complex in the center of Athens. Can you explain these hunger strikes? We have usually seen hunger strikes as a last resort. Are these hunger strikes a sign of critical times and heightened repression?
\n\nWe are not the appropriate assembly to discuss this issue, as there are open assemblies to stop the eviction of the Prosfygika community. For our part, we see the squatting movement as an integral part of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement; this is why the state has become fixated on destroying it with ever increasing intensity over this past decade.
\n\nAristos and Souzon, the two hunger-strikers acting to resist the demolition and development of the Prosfygika squat complex, know this better than anybody. That’s why they put their lives and their bodies on the line, so it is shown in every perspective that they mean what they say, what they believe, and what the community means to them. As an assembly, we support the struggle to defend Prosfygika and we stand in solidarity with our comrades.
\n\nHave surveillance and repression increased in recent years? Has the state readjusted its priorities? Did the COVID-19 lockdown play a role in this, or is it simply a reflection of the times?
\n\nAs we said, repression has increased swiftly over the last decade, coming to keep pace with the European standards. Cameras, drones, and cops are everywhere, with new divisions of police appearing all the time—for public transportation, courts, universities, immigration, and more. Low-level crime and political activism are also punished harshly, and the scope of the anti-terrorist laws expands with every new piece of legislation. Not to mention the additional repressive capabilities that the AI frenzy may provide in a future just around the corner.
\n\nCOVID-19 is one of the big issues that divided our movement. Despite the different takes on how this whole issue was perceived, which we cannot get into here, it is evident that the lockdown was at the very least, a perfect opportunity for the state to take complete control of public space and to accustom society at large to a broad scale of repression. The safety of the population has supposedly become the number one priority, with the police always somehow being the answer to every question.
\n\nThe discourse that was emerged in the COVID period, enhanced by the far-right and aggressively neo-liberal government of ND, seeks to overcome the historically deep mistrust with which Greek society regards the state. At the same time, the pace of economic and legal scandals has risen to an extreme. The state presents itself as the only thing standing between the population and chaos—demonizing anyone who disagrees or “poses a threat to the society.” In the new era of warfare that we have entered, these same arguments are used more and more to justify military equipment upgrades and the direct involvement of the Greek state in the NATO-Israel mass killings and bombings in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/1.jpg\")
\nHouse raids for small charges seems to be frequently be in the news. Are they occurring more often in Greece? How should we understand this?
\n\nHouse raids have always been a tool in the hands of the state, and for good reason. The pressure and fear that they inflict on the people whose privacy is attacked, along with whatever circumstantial evidence and intelligence they can collect inside our houses, are obviously beneficial for the police. They also exert financial pressure on the movement, since in most house raids, the police steal our electronic devices. Again, it is a matter of discussion how well planned or thought out these raids are, especially when they are not organized by the anti-terrorist unit.
\n\nNevertheless, we should mention some recent developments that, if they are permitted to become normalized, will certainly have a grave impact on the movement. On one hand, we have seven comrades who are suspected of “forming a criminal organization that destroys government property” due to some paint that had been thrown many months ago at a government building in Kipseli, a neighborhood in Athens. Usually, when you are a suspect, the cops call you to the General Police Department of Athens to give a statement, under threat that if you do not comply, they will charge you. This is usually an empty threat. This time, however, the cops decided to enter our comrades’ houses, in some cases by force.
\n\nIn another case, three comrades are accused of attacking a court building with hammers and paint. Again, even though there was evidence collected at the scene which, by the cops’ standards, would be more than sufficient to proceed to trial, the cops decided to raid to their houses.
\n\nWhat do you think is behind the Greek state shifting so many resources towards repression, including pushing to expand the Greek military and tighten conscription laws? Is this a broader tendency in the European Union?
\n\nYou answer the question by pointing out that these are issues in modern societies all over the world. War is everywhere, closer to us (as “Europeans”) than it has been since the Second World War, and it seems that will continue. All Europe is re-arming, as the program informs us.
\n\nIn Greece, this is constantly present due to the construction of tension between Greece and Turkey at the eastern borders and the Aegean Sea. That’s how Greece has ended up being one of the countries that contributes the most to NATO financially. [Greece is one of the top defense spenders in NATO, consistently spending around 3.1% of its GDP on defense, which is among the highest in the alliance.] The goal of the Greek state, and every state, is to construct a society that believes in it and is ready to fight for the nation and the bosses. Maybe this also explains the repression directed at many parts of the movement in Greece.
\n\nIt is obvious that Greece is still in an economic crisis (although the government pretends otherwise), so the large amount of money that is spent on the military and police does not address other social needs that are not as interesting to those in power. For example, we have understaffed hospitals and universities, lacking basic provisions and in many cases closing; we have deteriorating public transport infrastructure that is causing more and more “accidents,” with the worst one in recent times being the Tempi train crash.
\n\nThere is also a serious problem with the cost of housing, as well as with the costs of basic needs and products. Life in Greece is difficult, and it will continue to be so unless we come together to fight back.
\n\nIt has been seven years since New Democracy abolished the university asylum policy that originated after the fall of the Junta in the 1970s. How has this impacted the anarchist movement and broader radical communities in Greece?
\n\nAgain, this is a subject regarding which political opinions vary. On one hand, it is true that now it is easier for police to enter university grounds to hunt for people after clashes at a demonstration or to break up a university occupation established by students or political groups. But there is an argument that this is a more general issue that is only exacerbated by the end of the asylum policy.
\n\nSince the right-wing government of New Democracy came to power in 2019, the state has been carrying out an attack on the movement and its symbols; this is much broader than the anarchist movement. The remnants of the left have proven themselves to be completely incapable of defending the political and symbolic ground they won after the fall of the Junta in 1974. To put things in perspective, anarchists always threw Molotov cocktails from inside the universities and the police always had the legal right to enter the universities when this happened, even with the asylum policy in place.
\n\nOne can argue that the main thing that kept police from entering the universities was not a public misconception about a piece of legislation (that obviously would never cover Molotov cocktails being thrown at government workers), but rather what strong and broad political and ideological support there was for the clashes with the police, which was merely represented and symbolized in the idea of the university asylum. It is that support that the New Democracy government has successfully put into question.
\n\nRegardless of how we analyze this subject, this has caused a big problem for the anarchist and student movements. Apart from taking a powerful political tool—university occupations—from the students’ hands, this enabled police to apply repressive measures inside the universities with ease, taking advantage of the cameras, barriers, and private security already in place. Now, discussions about a special police force for the universities are advancing, even though the first attempt to put them in place failed.
\n\nThis also impacts the anarchist movement, which uses universities for assemblies and various kinds of political events, such as events to raise money for persecuted comrades and various political causes.
\n\nLast year, the Trump administration placed multiple revolutionary groups allegedly in the European Union on its terror watch lists, equating anti-fascists and anarchists with fundamentalist groups such as the Islamic State. Two of these alleged groups allegedly originate in Greece. Has that had any effect in Greece?
\n\nThese moves haven’t made a noticeable impact here in Greece until now. Of course, the United States has always offered the Greek state a paradigm for repression, but for now, only extreme far-right groups make these analogies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/4.jpg\")
\nAre there any other cases that you would like to mention?
\n\nThere are a number of cases affecting many comrades, relating to defending squats, solidarity actions with imprisoned comrades, and clashes with the police in demonstrations or in Exarchia. Here, we select, almost at random, a few that have or might have a serious impact on the comrades involved.
\n\nThe newest big case involves eight arrests that took place on May 11, 2026, with the arrestees being accused of various robberies. The case is still open, so the charges—and perhaps the list of defendants, as well—are not finalized. Six of the eight comrades are in pre-trial detention in various prisons in Greece, while two were let out under restrictive provisions.
\n\nThere is also the case of the comrades Yannis Karatsolis and Sofoklis Toutziarakis. The state accused them of forming a criminal organization with five other people in order to perform robberies. Even though the allegations of criminal organization did not stand up in court, as the other defendants were acquitted, Yannis Karatsolis and Sofoklis Toutziarakis received extreme sentences—21 and 23 years, respectively. The aim is now to pressure the second-degree court to reduce these vindictive sentences when it hears the case in October.
\n\nFinally, there are the arrests from the first big demonstration in response to the mass murder of immigrants by the state, when the Greek coast guard sank a boat transporting more than 500 immigrants close to the town of Pylos. The trial was set to take place in May, but was postponed until spring 2027.
\n\nHow can people outside Greece express international solidarity?
\n\nEvery move, intervention, text, poster, or post could make people here feel the solidarity. The continuation of political struggle in every place is inspiring for everyone. And of course, even though the Greek state is not a big one, there are related targets of economic or political interest in many countries, which is a traditional way of showing international solidarity in this movement.
\n\nFor financial support, the main fund is Tameio, which provides economic support to political prisoners on a monthly basis. Over the years, it has become one of the most important structures of the anarchist movement in Greece. In addition, there are many specialized funds for specific cases, usually to cover the legal costs of arrested comrades. These funds can be found on websites like Athens Indymedia and Firefund.
\n\nOne active Firefund campaign concerns the appeal trial for an act of solidarity during the last hunger strike of our anarchist comrade G. Michailidis.
\n\nFinally, to stay up to date with what is happening in Greece, the counter-information options are sadly not very good. The main website that the anarchist movement uses to publish its positions and actions is Athens Indymedia, which is in Greek and does not formally offer non-Greek translation, though you can use a translation-friendly browser to navigate it. The best way to keep in touch is probably by establishing direct contact with the assemblies and individual comrades that participate in the movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/6.jpg\")
\nIn addition, we spoke with one of the “Koukaki Squatted Community” defendants about their situation.
\n\nAround the same time as the conclusion of the Ampelokipoi case, members of the “Koukaki Squatted Community” were also facing trial; however, it was postponed. Could you explain the case and its implications for the broader anarchist movement?
\n\nOur project consisted of three anarchist squats that acted as a revolutionary community in the Koukaki neighborhood of Athens. The reclaimed spaces helped to foster multiple assemblies, various organizing efforts towards the broader anarchist movement, and local mutual aid projects. Our community also offered housing to members of the squat’s assembly and comrades and also to houseless individuals, refugees, struggling migrants, trans people rejected by their communities, and those who are deemed “excluded” by capitalist society.
\n\nThe houses acted as a sort of intentional community, eliminating the need to work to pay rent, so that we could direct all our efforts to resistance and organizing. This brought together an array of revolutionary individuals who were committed to rejecting property and ensuring that having “free housing” via liberated space would enable us to further the struggle for liberation.
\n\nUnfortunately, one comrade was lost in 2018 while hanging a banner in solidarity with political prisoner Marios Seisidis. His death resulted from the general commitment that defined many of those involved in the Koukaki squats. But while we all still face trial and the endless bureaucracy and opportunism of the state, I want to mention our lost comrade, Dimitris, who was an incredible and passionate comrade, to give recognition that his struggle lives on in our commitments and actions today.
\n\nThe Greek state violently evicted the squats in a coordinated assault. One of the three spaces, “Panaitoliou,” was resquatted twice, and “Matrozou” was resquatted three times.
\n\nThree of my comrades and I have been convicted for the defense of the Panaitoliou squat, but will likely not face jail time. We continue to have court obligations, and the constant stress of not knowing our fate takes its toll. At the same time, as the final defense of the Matrozou squat involved a more intense defense effort, multiple comrades remain on trial facing small charges that could potentially add up to years in prison if the state gets its way.
\n\nThis escalation of repression is the result of our efforts to defend our revolutionary community, while having sought, through our actions, to inspire the broader anarchist movement at a time when the state was attempting to destroy all the squats. The state wants to make an example of us in order to discourage the militant defense of occupied spaces. They are trying to break our will. They are dragging us through the courts with charges of using less extreme resistance than that which brought imprisonment prior to the escalated campaign against the squats that the New Democracy administration started when they came to power in 2019.
\n\nFive comrades on trial for militantly defending Matrozou were convicted of two misdemeanors each and originally sentenced to 77 months in prison. However, the sentence was suspended, and imprisonment will depend on the outcome of the current appeal. The prosecution is demanding that that the defendants serve the full sentence. Facing such a sentence for two misdemeanors is legally unprecedented in Greece. The reality is that the two misdemeanors would typically not bring imprisonment. However, because this is related to defending a squat, they will try to make an example of the comrades to demonstrate that the action itself is not what the prosecution seeks to repress, but rather the motivations and revolutionary desires behind the actions—criminalizing their goals and ideas.
\n\nIn the lead up to the most recent trial, multiple demonstrations took place across Greece to support the Matrozou defendants. However, the appeals trial was postponed until November 9. This is the second postponement of the second trial of the appeal.
\n\nNot only is postponing the trial a way of exhausting the defendants, they also hope that it will make the waves of solidarity leading up to the trial fizzle out. The state seeks to isolate the defendants, outwaiting solidarity and public attention, and then to prosecute to the fullest extent possible. They are waiting for a moment when the movement is quieter, when repression is out of the headlines, when people are overwhelmed responding to other repression.
\n\nThe momentum building up to trial was substantial, and this type of solidarity organizing does not come without effort. They aim to continue to force the defendants and the movement supporting them to constantly act in a defensive anti-repressive approach rather than engage in offensive revolutionary organizing, in order to drain our resources and consume our energy.
\n\nThe two misdemeanors are related to paint that was thrown on police officers, damaging their uniforms and allegedly inflicted bodily harm against police. Yet the police did not even bother to show up to the first trial, in December 2025; that is why it was postponed. All the Matrozou defendants face the same charges, accused by eight officers.
\n\nThis case is of political interest to the New Democracy regime. The original prosecutor is a member of New Democracy and in the law firm of Plevris; she also unsuccessfully ran for parliament as an aspiring ND politician. After the original trial, she wasn’t able to continue in the appeals court due to bureaucratic reasons. Yet she continues to escort the police who show up as witnesses and guide them as to what to say—free of charge, and without a formal legal position. She also defended the cops who faced neglect charges for doing nothing to save the queer activist Zackie Oh from being murdered. She even went on television, on a mainstream national morning talk show, and claimed that the defendants went straight from court to prison, despite the fact that the appeal actually prevented imprisonment. Once again, the point of this case is to make an example.
\n\nHowever, the hearts and revolutionary integrity of the defendants remain intact. While we lost our housing years ago, our community lives on in our revolutionary relations and committed support to one another as we overcome repression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/11/5.jpg\")
Fire to the prison cells.
\nStarting on May 22, a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey catalyzed daily demonstrations outside the facility, creating the most visible flashpoint in the fight against the brutality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since the fight in Minnesota in early 2026. Here, we offer an appraisal of the tactics that protesters have employed outside Delaney Hall, anonymously provided by participants, followed by two interviews exploring the events in detail.
\n\nPhotographs by Talia Jane.
\n\nThe struggle to free the detainees from Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey has become the most significant sustained inside/outside protest movement at a detention center of Donald Trump’s second term. On May 22, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike to demand their release. Supporters immediately mobilized outside to support them. For days, people rallied yards away from the building in which GEO Group holds approximately 1000 detainees captive under contract with the Department of Homeland Security. On May 27, viral videos showed ICE and private GEO Group security bludgeoning protesters outside Delaney Hall and pushing one man under an 18-wheeler, crushing his leg. Nonetheless, protesters bravely pushed back. Over the following days, more people rushed to the facility.
\n\nFor the first week of demonstrations, state and local law enforcement kept their distance. The weekend of May 29-31 marked a shift in the struggle at Delaney Hall, when New Jersey Democratic politicians Governor Mikie Sherrill and Mayor Ras Baraka deployed State Troopers and Newark Police Department to assist ICE and corral the protest. The collaboration of state law enforcement with ICE and GEO Group led to a much larger police presence outside the facility, coinciding with the largest protests outside Delaney Hall yet. In the following analysis, participants in that struggle recount the experiences on the ground Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, offering tactical reflections on how the protesters moved that weekend, followed by strategic reflections for the movement in general.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/3.jpg\")
Chinga la migra. Fuck Border Patrol.
\nFor the first seven days of the hunger strike, a combination of ICE agents and GEO Group employees policed Delaney Hall. On Friday, May 29, Newark Police Department and New Jersey State Police were deployed to manage the protest. Early in the day, Newark Police Department established vehicle checkpoints at the north and south intersections of Doremus Avenue, limiting car traffic to commercial trucks and ICE vehicles. Protesters could access the front entrances of Delaney by foot. By nightfall, the crowd had grown to about 150 people.
\n\nShortly after 9 pm, New Jersey State Police issued the first dispersal order. Ten minutes later, a line of fifty riot police advanced toward Delaney Hall. Protesters dragged steel barricades into the street; state troopers immediately absorbed these and tossed the barriers behind their advancing line. Riot police deployed tear gas in an effort to push back the crowd. From the main driveway, two dozen ICE agents shot pepper balls into the crowd.
\n\nThe riot line parted to let a half-dozen mounted officers into the crowd; they successfully used the horses to push protesters onto the sidewalk and past the south gate, away from the facility. It became clear that this maneuver was preparatory: shortly thereafter, eight ICE vehicles drove through the crowd, past the riot line and into Delaney Hall.
\n\nState police and protesters then entered a stalemate. Police held the road without deploying munitions; the crowd stared them down, but took no new initiatives. After about twenty minutes, once ICE completed its shift change, police covered their retreat by firing flash-bang grenades, tear-gas canisters, and pepper balls into the crowd.
\n\nWith the riot police dispersed, protesters quickly returned to the front of Delaney Hall. A few individuals dragged steel barricades in front of the active driveway. ICE agents immediately emerged, shot pepper balls into the crowd, and dragged the barricades inside the gate. Further up Doremus, protesters erected more steel barricades and reinforced them with paving stones. Despite these efforts, ICE successfully escorted four vehicles out of the facility.
\n\nThe night concluded with no further intervention from state police. One protester used a paving stone to crush the windshield of a parked ICE SUV. A brief skirmish broke out between protesters and a far-right TikTok influencer, after which armed security escorted him inside Delaney Hall. ICE agents stayed behind the retractable driveway gates. The crowd spent the final hours milling about.
\n\nBarricades: Protesters repeatedly deployed barricades with little forethought as to how to make use of them. In some cases, the consequence was that the State Police or ICE were able to immediately seize them. Only later, after failed attempts to deploy barricades directly in front of Delaney, did some people erect a reinforced steel barricade further up the road, out of the direct reach of ICE agents. However, as the crowd remained concentrated by the driveway, several ICE vehicles were able to clear that obstacle with ease.
\n\nIdle Time: Ideally, one should arrive at a protest equipped to take action, with the goal of altering the course of events for the better. Instead of merely attending the demonstration, individuals or crews should actively intervene and inspire others to do the same. The attempts to make barricades, the damage to the ICE vehicle, and the confrontation with the TikToker were gestures in that direction. However, aside from those few instances, which did not galvanize the crowd to action, most of the evening’s activity could be described as “milling around.” The abundance of idle time, especially in the absence of law enforcement, suppressed the crowd’s potential and momentum.
\n\nProximity to Delaney Hall: We should not take for granted the opportunity to be able to get within feet of a facility like Delaney Hall. The detention center sits along a sidewalk accessible to protesters, moderately protected by chain-link fence. After the State Police retreated, there was a multi-hour window during which people could have modified the façade of Delaney Hall. This opportunity diminished after Friday night: new fencing was installed around the driveway, state and local LEO began guarding the facility, and for two days, access to Delaney was blocked altogether.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/5.jpg\")
A barricade protesters built in the days before the local and state police established control around the facility.
\nSaturday night began with a scuffle. By 9 pm, approximately 250 protesters had assembled; the majority of them were equipped with gas masks, goggles, and helmets. They initiated a ten-minute tug-of-war with New Jersey State Police by pushing up against the steel barricade perimeter that had been constructed in front of the facility’s main gate. Eventually, protesters broke the barrier into two sections. The police retreated into the facility’s driveway, but the crowd did not advance on the building. Instead, it stepped back onto the sidewalk.
\n\nSome protesters re-appropriated the barriers to form a barricade in front of a line of riot police forming just south of the facility. As they had the night before, police quickly removed the barriers and shot tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades. The crowd fell back immediately. As the riot line advanced, protesters took up the remaining barricades and managed to push the police line back a few feet by shoving the barricades against the shields of the riot police. This was the only point in the night when the crowd was able to advance. The police broke the barricade at its weakest point—as there were only about a dozen people on the front line and they were spread thin—by bludgeoning protesters and deploying more flash-bang grenades.
\n\nAt the same time, a new unit of riot police marched in via the railroad tracks south of Roanoke Avenue. Filling in behind the existing riot line, they increased its depth by two to three officers and expanded it across the entire road. The rest of the night is best described as a rolling retreat.
\n\nTwo hundred riot police deployed a combination of pepper balls, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas canisters, both tossing the tear gas canisters and shooting them behind the front lines of protesters. Some protesters equipped with traffic cones and water bottles extinguished the canisters and kicked them back at the police; in one instance, protesters redirected the tear gas at the correctional officers loitering in the Essex County parking lot. The crowd continuously threw up barricades—dragging together jersey barriers, planks of wood, and abandoned trash—but were not able to fortify or defend them. Protesters maintained an average distance of 100 feet from the police line.
\n\nAt one point, a convoy of five vehicles was allowed through the checkpoint on Roanoke. The majority passed through the line of riot police without issue. The crowd swarmed the final car, which was tinted out with California plates. It accelerated forward; the police barely opened their line in time to let it through. There was a splash of glass as it passed.
\n\nDuring their final advance, the police line parted to let nine mounted units out into the crowd. They spread down Doremus in a flanking formation, rotating to push protesters onto the sidewalk. Two individuals leaped into the street to disorient the horses by waving makeshift shields and flashing bright lights in their eyes. This worked, albeit only temporarily. The crowd scrambled, then continued in slow retreat.
\n\nThe crowd retreated for ten minutes before the riot line assumed the stationary position that it maintained for the rest of the night. The crowd was spread out and thinning, 100 to 200 feet away from police. Fifteen minutes into this standoff, about 100 feet behind the line of protesters, someone ignited a flaming barricade assembled from tires, traffic cones, and debris. The majority of the protesters dispersed around 12:30 am. Mayor Ras Baraka retroactively instituted a curfew.
\n\nTear Gas: The prevalence of gas masks and goggles prepared the crowd to endure chemical dispersants. The crowd generally succeeded in tracking and neutralizing tear gas canisters. A small team with traffic cones and water bottles reliably followed the canisters and extinguished them; many other people kicked tear gas canisters back at police or away from the crowd. However, the crowd fell back at least 100 feet nearly every time officers deployed tear gas and flash-bangs, as the officers surely intended. It would have been preferable to remain close to the front line in order to retain offensive capacities.
\n\nProtester Barricades: We should appraise the value of a barricade by what it renders possible. Protesters threw up at least three barricades, but none of them significantly slowed the police line, nor were they ever fortified enough to do so. To accomplish that, protesters would have needed to maintain the initiative after deploying the barricades and immediately launch a new offensive. Instead, the protesters hung back after deploying them. Every moment spent in a staring contest with law enforcement is momentum ceded, enabling the state to determine the next move.
\n\nFlaming Barricade: The bonfire was an act of initiative on the part of the demonstrators. However, it occurred too late in the protest, which was essentially over by the time the fire was lit. At that point, the protesters had been pushed as far back as they would be by riot police and had been in a stalemate of inactivity for fifteen minutes. Because this took place at the end of the evening’s events, during a lull in activity, and with a dwindling crowd, it could not regenerate momentum. If fires had been lit earlier, they might have strengthened barricades against riot police and galvanized the energy of the crowd during the peak of the skirmishes.
\n\nProjectiles: The only way to push back a police line is to advance on it. It would have been possible for a few people to collect a few boxes of rocks from the nearby railroad tracks, encourage the crowd to tighten up, and then throw projectiles at the riot line. The crowd likely wouldn’t have regained much ground, but this would have slowed its retreat. Better prepared demonstrators might have packed fireworks.
\n\nFalse Dispersal Order: Near the end of the night, when the fire was burning lower, one individual took a megaphone and informed the crowd that they were being kettled from the rear. This was not true: nothing had changed at the north entrance. A few protesters fact-checked this detail and updated the crowd, but the announcement still induced panic. A number of people chose to disperse, including all of those marked as medics. A basic scouting system could have decreased the crowd’s susceptibility to fear and false information.
\n\nArtwork: Saturday’s activities amounted to a slow, rolling retreat, but the imagery that circulated was evocative and inspiring to those watching the struggle from elsewhere. At one point, anti-ICE graffiti appeared on the corrugated metal wall of a nearby business. Because artwork that appears in situations like this is often immediately broadcasted across the country, it offers an opportunity to offer slogans providing strategic direction.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/4.jpg\")
Clenched fists versus police batons.
\nSunday was the first night that the curfew was in effect. The police expanded the vehicular checkpoints of the previous days, reinforcing the Roanoke entrance with multiple squad cars and portable vehicle barriers and blocking off the entire length of the Wilson entrance with zip-tied steel barricades. Foot traffic on Doremus was prohibited.
\n\nAt 8:50 pm, there were roughly 100 protesters gathered at the Wilson intersection. The medics began packing up their supplies. A few individuals spread fear in the crowd, attempting to persuade everyone to disperse. At 9 pm, the police issued a dispersal order. It was unclear whether the intersection lay inside or outside of the half-mile curfew “zone.”
\n\nAround 9:15, a mounted unit of ten state police horses deployed out of the New Jersey Transit parking lot west on Wilson. The crowd rushed towards them. At the same time, riot police deployed from farther down Doremus to form a line across the intersection. The combination of these two forces pushed protesters onto the sidewalk at the southwest corner.
\n\nA third of the crowd dispersed down Wilson, followed by low-flying drones. Officers in vehicles with tinted windows shone bright flashlights at outbound traffic to intimidate the occupants. Police set up additional checkpoints along the exit routes, at first stopping drivers for violating curfew. Ultimately, they permitted these cars to leave.
\n\nRiot police kettled the 64 protesters who remained at the intersection. They were booked at Essex County Correctional Facility, adjacent to Delaney Hall within the curfew zone.
\n\nDispersal of the Medics: A handful of people demobilized the crowd by announcing that medics were leaving the scene. It was not clear whether the medics were speaking for themselves, how or why they made that call, or what their relationship was to those seeking to persuade people to leave. In any case, it is odd that a support role would be treated as a de facto tactical lead: the idea was that if the medics retreated, we should retreat, too. It makes sense that some people would feel less resilient without medics after experiencing everything from chemical munitions to bone-breaking beatings at the hands of GEO Group, ICE, and State Police. Regardless, it is worth considering whether the decisions of medics should determine what everyone else does.
\n\nKnowing When to Call It: It was immediately apparent that the balance of forces was not in the protesters’ favor. When officers issued the dispersal order, less than a hundred people lingered by the barricade, a significant proportion of which were press. The State Police behind the barricade matched the protesters almost one to one. When a bus of riot police arrived farther south, seizing the space behind the protesters, and mounted State Troopers descended from the west, there were limited options. A police force twice the size of the protest took over the whole intersection and announced a dispersal. Police cars started forming perimeters further up the street to close and monitor traffic. While it always feels disempowering to leave, protesters probably should have done so at that point. All other things being equal, when one has the opportunity, it is better to stay out of the bureaucratic legal process in order to keep one’s hands free to fight another day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/9.jpg\")
\nAbove, we suggested tactical improvements that the crowd could have implemented during the specific events of each day. Below, we offer strategic proposals based on recurring dynamics across the days of struggle outside Delaney Hall.
\n\nParticipants in protests should sensitize themselves to the difference between actions that feel productive and actions that advance towards desired outcomes. We should always strive to influence our environment and learn faster than circumstances change. Doing so requires participants to communicate simply and effectively with each other, to take and maintain the initiative, and to take responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the crowd. So far, the protests outside Delaney have not been able to metabolize lessons rapidly enough to keep up with events. The mis-application of barricades, the repeated slow retreats, and the lack of cohesion in stopping vehicles highlight this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/6.jpg\")
A barricade protesters built in the days before the local and state police established control around the facility.
\nThe implicit objective of the crowd has been to prevent ICE vehicles from entering or exiting the facility. One of the early efforts to break the strike involved transferring suspected leaders out of Delaney Hall to other detention facilities; blocking vehicular traffic presented itself to protesters as an effective response. This same tactic was employed last summer in New York City as part of an effort to prevent the removal of detainees from 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Protesters attempted to create chokepoints by throwing debris into the intersections surrounding the immigration courts as ICE vans were leaving.
\n\nDespite the persistent desire to block traffic, it is not clear what the larger goal is besides making ICE operations more costly in general. The crowd has been largely unsuccessful at blockading entry and exit to the facility. When protesters have surrounded ICE vehicles, they have usually simply banged on the car; on a handful of occasions, they have broken a window. Otherwise, the crowd has been ill-prepared to disable vehicles despite the apparent desire to do so. The crowd’s inability to pivot on the ground is symptomatic of a broader strategic vacuum.
\n\nOne sometimes whispered-about, but largely unspoken desire is to breach the facility and liberate detainees. The appetite for this is apparent, but unrealized; desired, but doubted. It is worth identifying this horizon outright. So long as it remains unspoken, it will be impossible to determine the level of organization that it would take to make this happen or to acknowledge the concrete limits of the current protest tactics.
\n\nJohn Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; the liberation of Assata Shakur; the siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis; the March 5, 2023 raid that damaged the Cop City construction site in Atlanta—such actions remind us what we are capable of. It is our duty to make daring plans together. One year ago, detainees inside Delaney Hall did just that when four people broke through the walls and escaped. It is humbling to fight at the site of a recent jailbreak; it is our responsibility to bring down the walls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/8.jpg\")
Love your neighbor; free the captive.
\nOur movement has more strategic opportunities when we face a disunified adversary. This was the case for about a week as the movement outside Delaney Hall grew. During that time, New Jersey Democrats and DHS agents were openly hostile to each other. Democrats were routinely denied entry into Delaney Hall; they were surprised that ICE treated them as protesters, not colleagues within the ruling class. ICE arrested Mayor Baraka for trespassing, charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver with assaulting a federal officer, and pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim point-blank.
\n\nDuring that time, New Jersey police were not deployed to Delaney. For a week, protesters clashed directly with ICE and GEO Group without interference from state or local law enforcement. A similar tension between state and federal agencies offered a key opportunity for resistance to the ICE to accelerate during the first two months of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. While the New Jersey governor and mayor did ultimately unite with ICE against protesters for the weekend, they have since wavered due to popular backlash.
\n\nDenouncing New Jersey state police, the Minnesota 50501 chapter posted a graphic on social media reading, “Republicans sent ICE. Democrats sent police. They shoot us all the same. Different states, same mistakes.” Shortly after, the mayor of Newark admitted to excessive and even “unconstitutional” use of force against protesters and suspended the curfew. By June 4, Baraka announced that Newark Police would further scale back their presence at Delaney, stating “It is not the responsibility of the Newark Police Division to secure a private facility. It is a clear contradiction to the City’s position with GEO group to remain there.”
\n\nDemocrat collaboration with ICE is not a foregone conclusion. It is unevenly expressed, occasionally delayed, and takes place despite the opposition of much of the party’s voter base. Any further fractures in the Democratic coalition, especially if they cause even a brief absence of law enforcement, will expand our opportunities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/11.jpg\")
\nAfter the major metropolitan ICE surges of Midway Blitz and Metro Surge, the battles inside and outside of Delaney Hall have once again directed countrywide attention to the struggle against ICE. For now, however, resistance movements lack strong organizational models to enable us to metabolize lessons, strategize, and launch stronger attacks. In the absence of those, people simply converge on spaces where they see combative actions occurring on a regular basis.
\n\nHundreds of people outside Delaney Hall and tens of thousands around the country have demonstrated tremendous courage by confronting ICE directly. Yet just as militants should not arbitrarily limit ourselves to on-the-ground tactical interventions while leaving larger political and organizational tasks to NGOs, we should not let the way that spaces of conflict currently stand in for forms of organization lock us into narrow territorial struggles. Rather than letting pitched battles over specific spaces stand in for collective strategizing, we need to create opportunities for those who have been transformed by this struggle to develop more audacious strategic goals and find the tactics to match them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/2.jpg\")
Protesters conducting a car check early in this wave of protests, before local and state police got involved and shifted the balance of power. The only thing we can ask for from any institution of authority is to stay out of the way.
\nWe interviewed Talia Jane, a journalist who has witnessed many of the protests outside Delaney Hall.
\n\nA year ago, riotous demonstrations took place outside of Delaney Hall as an uprising inside the facility enabled several detainees to escape. What has happened since then?
\n\nOver the past year, volunteers have worked around the clock to provide support to people newly released and the families of people detained at Delaney Hall. Those advocates have been attempting to raise awareness of conditions inside the facility, with little support. It was people detained inside self-organizing in protest against their conditions that set the spark that led to a surge in support.
\n\nThat support soon shifted toward direct action (attempting to block entering and exiting vehicles), which led to ICE agents attacking demonstrators, which sparked an even bigger surge in support. All of this organizing has been happening with a backdrop of growing discontent with ICE’s violent, fascist attacks on neighbors across the country.
\n\nThat served as a powder keg. People had been waiting for things to cross a certain line until the conditions outside Delaney Hall matched scenes they had been seeing in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
\n\nSeveral hundred people at Delaney Hall launched a work and hunger strike. Tell us what you know about the strike and how people have been responding on the outside.
\n\nThe strike has been a point of fixation for DHS, which continues to insist there is no hunger strike. This is intentionally dishonest. The hunger strikers avoided eating as much as possible. I observed one ambulance wheeling someone out, who smiled but looked frail, at day five of the hunger strike.
\n\nThe hunger portion of the strike has now ended, and I’m told that ICE has threatened to pursue charges against those refusing to eat, which would jeopardize their immigration cases. Since then, many more people have been wheeled out into ambulances. Volunteers have speculated that this is due to physical abuse committed by guards and ICE agents.
\n\nOver the past two weeks, hundreds of people have been mobilizing in solidarity outside of Delaney Hall. We’ve seen blockades of ICE vans and barricades. A few days ago, the removal of Martin Soto, one of the detainees on hunger strike, was temporarily halted. Tell us what has been happening in the streets outside of Delaney Hall.
\n\nOutside of Delaney Hall, there has been a battle between the state and the people in a multitude of ways: Demonstrators organically began attempting to block vehicles and barricade access to the facility.
\n\nWith access now barricaded by DHS/GEO Group, demonstrators continue trying to add friction to ICE operations. DHS and FBI agents were documented inside a white tent that volunteers use to provide aftercare to newly released people and families visiting their loved ones. The tent was trashed, with mace reportedly sprayed all over medical supplies—a war crime. Volunteers are continuing to try to clean and repair the space for family and aftercare support.
\n\nAlongside that, people continue to show up around the clock to bear witness, rally in opposition to ICE, and impede vehicles. Initially, ICE was primarily engaging protesters. After they pushed someone into a moving 18-wheeler, New Jersey State Police came in, and immediately escalated to using tear gas, flash-bangs, and horses. One of them stole a photographer’s backpack after breaking her knee and ditched it outside his house. They appear to have plotted to kettle and mass arrest demonstrators, preventing press who didn’t have specific credentials from leaving the kettle. Everyone detained was held for at least 14 hours, some more than 24 hours total.
\n\nAfter that, Newark Police Department was sent to play nice with everyone. They ended up arresting people. Then NPD was pulled out and it was decided that the situation at Delaney Hall was a federal and GEO Group issue, not one that local police should be involved with. GEO Group took to chasing people around, beating them with batons in the street, macing people, and accelerating cars into people. One person remarked, “If they’re doing this in broad daylight, what are they doing to the people inside?”
\n\nTell us more about what you’re seeing out in the streets from ICE agents.
\n\nThe violence isn’t isolated to ICE. It’s like every state or private agency associated with ICE feels emboldened to engage in excessive use of force or plainly outrageous violence because they are collaborating with or acting on behalf of ICE.
\n\nNew Jersey State Police broke a photographer’s knee and stole her gear. GEO Group hit my colleague with a car. People have been singled out, grabbed, and brutalized by ICE for doing nothing. I watched and reported when ICE decided, for no reason other than they felt like it, to escalate from simply sweeping people into the street to dumping tons of mace to using batons and aggressively shoving. NJSP appears to have simply wanted to unleash hell on people, absent any notable instigation, after ICE’s escalations. Now GEO Group is beating people in the street. ICE sets the precedent, these other agencies follow.
\n\nAs the demonstrations have been heating up, we’ve seen a wave of Democratic politicians arrive at Delaney Hall, including the Governor and a Senator, who was maced by police. Talk about this dynamic and how has it impacted the demonstrations.
\n\nThe demonstrators are split into two camps. One camp feels completely indifferent to all politicians, on the premise that the politicians are showing up for their own benefit more than they are for others. The other camp is enamored with the celebrity of politicians, interpreting their visits as a means of advocacy and building power.
\n\nDespite Governor Sherrill appearing outside the facility, she conveniently showed up on a holiday where visits were not allowed—and she has not returned since. Delaney Hall strikers are demanding Sherrill visit them inside the facility. This has become a litmus test for Sherrill that she continues failing.
\n\nThe dynamic is a classic case of spectacle. The prominence of those who visit raises awareness and can generate support among people who support those politicians.
\n\nBut spectacle can serve multiple masters. Speaking of which, far-right streamers have been on the ground more in the last few days, as you have been reporting. Tell us more how that is playing out.
\n\nFar-right streamers have been getting in people’s faces, eagerly documenting people who prefer not to draw attention to themselves. They’re there to generate propaganda, to agitate fascists, and to bleed support for the growing uprising by slandering and mischaracterizing it.
\n\nSome demonstrators ignore them; others try to buffer them; others take more aggressive measures. I suspect the latter will become more common as the streamers increasingly get caught filming things that they know will upset those they’re filming. One of the streamers—I’m not going to name him, because his whole grift relies on name recognition—had his phones taken and broken after he was running up close to people’s faces trying to identify them while verbally boasting about collecting intel in order to dox people. He was boasting aloud while surrounded by protesters, mind you! He and other far-right propagandists have also been desperately trying to infiltrate organizing and support chats in order to slander those involved. It’s annoying and stupid noise that, unfortunately, has the president’s ear.
\n\nPeople are split, as seems to always be the case, between those taking opsec precautions to stay safe and those eschewing them completely in a blend of arrogance and what they seem to believe is a strategic defiance or apathy regarding potential consequences.
\n\nThere’s been a lot of mutual aid organizing and infrastructure popping up at Delaney Hall. Tell us about what’s going on beyond just the protests and confrontations with ICE.
\n\nCosecha New Jersey and the broader Eyes on ICE coalition have been organizing to support people detained at Delaney Hall, advocating for the closure of the facility since it first opened. Their infrastructure grew rapidly as protesters surged to express support, but the foundation was built long ago. People are working to connect newly detained people with legal support and help families meet facility dress code for visitation. They are advocating for detainees to receive proper medical care and serving as a megaphone for the voices locked inside.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/10.jpg\")
\nThey’ve raised funds for people’s commissary accounts and for their families. The volunteer network has stepped up to meet every possible need that may arise, whether that be finding missing paperwork or bandaging up a paper cut. People are coming together to figure out how they can be helpful.
\n\nThe recent confrontations in New Jersey represent one of the largest flash points of anti-ICE resistance since the explosion in the Twin Cities. What do you anticipate in the coming days and weeks?
\n\nI see the state making stupid choices that further intensify the call to resist. I see support networks maturing from uncertain vulnerable spaces to highly functioning machines. I see many, many people becoming radicalized in a way few ordinarily experience. I see those with a greater depth of radical knowledge welcoming in those less informed and raising them up, not gatekeeping or judging. I see people learning a lot of awful lessons about how to withstand a waking nightmare and figuring out how to remain soft and kind despite it and because of it.
\n\nHow can people follow your work and support you?
\n\nYou can support the strikers and their families here. You can find my links here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/1.jpg\")
Celebrating a birthday outside the facility. ICE separates children from their parents. Resistance is a way of reestablishing our shared humanity.
\nTo include information about the events outside Delaney Hall up to the time of publication, we interviewed an anarchist who has participated in the protests in June. The protester chose to remain anonymous.
\n\nCan you describe what has happened at Delaney Hall in June?
\n\nOn June 1, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka held a press conference outside of Delaney Hall in response to what he admitted was “unconstitutional” use of force by officers over the previous nights. A few people tried to disrupt the press conference, but Baraka closed it to the public. Newark police established hard checkpoints leading into the facility, completely closing access to foot and vehicle traffic. He announced that he would lift the curfew from Delaney Hall.
\n\nOn Wednesday, June 3, about fifty protesters gathered in front of Delaney Hall. A “free speech zone” was set up in front of a driveway to the facility that had been closed. Newark PD guarded the other two driveways. NPD facilitated the entry and exit of ICE vehicles, getting into petty shoving matches with protesters who sought to stop cars from entering.
\n\nAt some point, protesters noticed that ICE vehicles were leaving through a back exit. About fifteen people moved to the back of the facility to try to obstruct vehicles there. The back of the facility is a dimly lit street with no foot or vehicle traffic. Suddenly, six unmarked SUVs pulled up on the protesters and fully kitted-out agents leapt from the vehicles barking “GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!” They did not identify which agency they were from. Several people escaped; the others were briefly detained and then shoved down the road and told to leave. ICE and Essex County Sheriffs arrested one person. Another was repeatedly slammed to the ground by ICE, causing an injury to the protester’s arm. An ICE agent reportedly pulled that protester’s mask back, said “Are you a fucking girl?”, and spat in their face.
\n\nOn Friday, June 5, Mayor Baraka scaled back NPD presence outside Delaney Hall, having officers mostly monitor vehicle checkpoints at the north and south entrances to Doremus Ave. At 7:30 pm that night, the mayor instituted a “ban” on those wearing face coverings or carrying backpacks passing the police checkpoint to protest in front of Delaney Hall.
\n\nOn Saturday and Sunday, June 6 and 7, with Newark PD having scaled back, a few dozen protesters clashed directly with ICE and GEO Group private security outside of Delaney Hall. On Saturday night, a few dozen protesters stood out in the rain and attempted to block ICE cars entering the detention facility. A few protesters have been followed by plain-clothes officers who photograph and occasionally handcuff protesters. These men do not identify themselves with any agency; they have not arrested anyone, only briefly detained those in masks as they leave.
\n\nWhat other strategies besides gathering outside Delaney Hall have supporters of the hunger strike employed?
\n\nTo date, there have not been many other strategies apart from the demonstrations outside Delaney Hall. A few noise demonstrations have been called, one at the Attorney General’s office and one at Mayor Baraka’s house, though the latter was called off after the curfew was lifted.
\n\nThe Democratic governor used the language of “outside agitators” to delegitimize demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, even though people are held there who have been arrested around the region. How have local participants in the grassroots organizing against Delaney Hall related to demonstrators from outside Newark?
\n\nThis has not been a tension on the ground outside the facility. The charge of “not being from here” would be tone-deaf to levy outside a migrant detention center. A handful of people active in the anti-ICE struggles in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis have come here to share lessons from those fights. This has been useful and appreciated by the crowd. We are in a nationwide struggle against ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/10/7.jpg\")
\nAcross more than a decade of unfinished revolution and civil war in Syria, Syrian activists in exile participated in organizing in other parts of the world. At last, at the end of 2024, the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell, enabling them to begin to return home. One of the projects that Syrian exiles helped to establish is the Peoples Want network, a worldwide network of organizations and collectives seeking to foster an internationalism from below. In the following interview, participants in the Syria group within the Peoples Want discuss the situation they confront in Syria today and describe how they will participate in the Mujawara campaign, a month of events intended to interweave horizontal organizing initiatives around the world.
\n\nCan you give us a brief update on the current political situation in Syria? What is the dynamic on the ground for revolutionaries, social movements, and other popular struggles? How do exiled and diasporic communities factor into these?
\n\nThe fall of the regime enabled millions of people to return to their homes and lands, reuniting families. People are starting to rebuild villages and neighborhoods. Entire towns had been entirely cleansed of their populations.
\n\nSo the first barrier has fallen—people can safely come home—but the second barrier remains: the economy. The majority of people who left are still in camps or in exile, unable to come back. The government is prioritizing attracting foreign investors and monopolizing resources over rebuilding the large areas destroyed by the Assad regime, most of which were very poor. The horrors of the old regime are still present, too, as people discover mass graves and search for the forcibly disappeared, sometimes finding death certificates without finding the remains. Syrians are still waiting for justice.
\n\nWe are also living through economic and ecological disasters. Prices are extremely high, wages very low, and the new government has raised the costs for basic necessities such as electricity and food in an unprecedented disproportional way. At the same time, after years of drought, this year saw heavy rains and storms resulting in violent floods that impacted the wheat season and damaged infrastructure in areas including Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, leading to power and water cuts.
\n\nDuring this period, forces within or allied with the new government have committed two massacres, one on the western coast of Syria in March 2025 and one in Sweida in July 2025. The perpetrators enjoy near-total impunity. Serious clashes between the new regime and Kurdish forces in the northeast in January 2026 forced through the integration of large parts of the Syrian Democratic Forces into the new central government in Damascus. In the provinces of Deraa and Qunietra, the Israeli occupation continues to annex lands and strategic positions. In some areas, we are witnessing systematic sectarian pressure on minority groups via through direct violence as well as political and economic abuse of power, including the kidnapping of women and regular clashes between different ethnic or religious groups with or without the complicity of governmental forces.
\n\nNonetheless, despite everything, the fall of the regime has opened some space for collective organizing. Those who were operating underground have started working publicly; groups functioning informally now want to get more organized, and those doing local work want to connect with other initiatives around the country. We have seen groups including an independent journalist union, agricultural cooperatives, civil peace initiatives, and even a housewives’ syndicate. That represents a gain of the revolution. Today, it is possible to organize protests in the street without barrel bombs falling on your head. The government fears demonstrations and has reversed its decisions following protests about the alcohol ban in Damascus, a contested construction plan in Homs, and the price of wheat. Each time, the government has retreated, showing that it fears even small popular mobilization.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/5.jpg\")
“If the farmer is starved, the country is starved.” A protest against wheat pricing in Raqqa on May 22, 2026.
\nStill, this will not last if there is no sustained fight to defend the gains of the revolution against a state increasingly veering into authoritarianism. The new government is building its own surveillance and repression apparatus; there are already cases of arbitrary detention, torture in prisons, and pressure to suspend political activities. The question is why it remains difficult to build an opposition capable of confronting its neoliberal, reactionary, and authoritarian tendencies. The political space is there, but the chief obstacle preventing people from organizing against oppression is not the new government per se so much as the country’s divisions along lines of identity.
\n\nIdentity-based conflicts are extremely strong. Over the past year, opposition movements have often emerged along ethnic and sectarian lines: Druze in the south demanding independence, Kurds in the northeast moving back towards a more Kurdish nationalist project, Alawites demanding separation or autonomy. At the same time, Sunni supremacism among supporters of the government leads to violence and hatred directed at entire communities. Despite the fact that anger at the government’s economic policies is growing across every community including Arab Sunnis, it remains difficult to establish concrete class-based alliances. This is a blessing for the new government: it protects it from any serious opposition, enabling it to present itself as the central balancing force able to restore order.
\n\nThe situation is further complicates by deep divisions within what used to be the revolutionary camp, especially following the two massacres, because some ex-revolutionaries have tried to justify them or downplay the horror. The chief strategic debate today is over how to position ourselves towards a new government that includes many ex-revolutionaries in public office and the new security forces. Some oppose the new government for reproducing the repressive logic of the old regime; others seek to avoid direct confrontations in a time of local, regional, and global instability.
\n\nWe believe that we should fight all expressions of authoritarianism and neoliberal policies whenever possible, while distancing ourselves from a reading of the situation that exclusively focuses on the religious ideology of those who run the state.
\n\nFor those of us who managed to return after the fall of the regime, it is important to learn to understand the context here and listen to those who did not leave the country. The transmission of experience between local activists and those returning from exile will be key, but those who were abroad, especially in Western countries, must not reproduce paternalistic attitudes like “We should teach people how things are done abroad.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/6.jpg\")
\nThe Syrian revolution received less recognition from revolutionaries in other parts of the world than struggles in Rojava, Palestine, or Chiapas have. What lessons have you derived from this? Why do you think that it is important to focus on expanding international networks of support and solidarity?
\n\nThere are a number of reasons why we did not see as much solidarity with the Syrian revolution. First, in comparison with the Kurdish movement, the Palestinian movement, or the Zapatistas, the Syrian revolution was a new awakening, which had to begin to establish international connections from scratch. All of those movements had established solidarity over a long period of time through extensive work and relationship building. In the case of the Syrian revolution, much of this work began after 2011, carried out by Syrians in exile and the diaspora, as Syrians who remained inside the country increasingly had to focus on survival.
\n\nAnother factor in the lack of solidarity for the Syrian revolution is the “campism” that has divided the left in both the West and the Arab world. Campism is the position held by those who see everything through an “anti-imperialist” lens according to which the United States, other Western states, and Israel are the only imperialist actors, or at least, the only imperialists that should be opposed. Consequently, campists invariably defend these nations’ geopolitical competitors—such as Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime (the “axis of resistance”). They ignored or justified the oppression of Syrians, refusing to support the Syrian revolution and backing counterrevolutionary forces instead.
\n\nStill another factor is the lack of a clear discourse and narrative with which to address liberation struggles and leftist groups outside of Syria. The revolutionary movement in Syria was very decentralized. Much of it lacked strong ideological underpinnings, even if various shades of Islamist currents were increasingly present. One lesson is that we can’t count on support from the “international community” that uses the language of “human rights.” We needed to develop a positive project and articulate the kind of change we wanted to make, beyond bringing about the fall of Assad.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/4.jpg\")
Syrians participate in a sit-in in the Bab Tuma neighborhood of Damascus, on March 22, 2026. “The Syrian people are one; do not divide them with discriminatory laws.”
\nIt is often easier to build solidarity and networks based on trust and mutual support in times of relative “peace” in order to strengthen our alliances for the future. This is a time for Syrians inside and outside Syria to connect and deepen our relationships, as we have much to learn from each other, and also to build relationships with others from around the world. We believe that by working together, increasing our knowledge of transnational struggles, sharing our resources, and recognizing each other as actors in a common struggle for liberation, we can strengthen and sustain our movements at home.
\n\nWhat can you tell us about the Mujawara campaign of The Peoples Want and how it relates to self-organized initiatives underway in Syria?
\n\nThe “Mujawara” campaign is not a general slogan about solidarity, but a concrete attempt to build connections between spaces and initiatives that already exist on the ground both within Syria and outside it. The idea is to look for places where something of the spirit of self-organization has survived—houses, farms, social centers, local councils, agricultural initiatives, feminist and youth groups—and to see how we can support them, learn from them, and connect them with other experiences.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/1.jpg\")
\nIn Syria, we started working in a very concrete way: visiting, meeting, discussing, and assessing the spaces we could collaborate with. For example, in a particular city, there is a space run by a local team whose members did not leave the country, with a building and a garden and the capacity to receive people and organize meetings. This space is very close to the idea of “Mujawara”: an independent place rooted in the local environment, based on relations of trust, open to social, political, and cultural activities, and capable of hosting meetings for comrades from different areas. That is why we will organize a gathering there during the month of June as part of the Mujawara campaign. Through this gathering, we will get to know more about the people running the space, and we will invite other groups and places we have visited in Syria to join us. We will cook together, listen to each other’s experiences and struggles, and talk about the role that the Peoples Want network can play in the Syrian context.
\n\nWe have also visited and discussed with other places and collectives. In one city, there is a new initiative started by some old revolutionaries returning from exile: an Arab house that hosts political, social, and cultural activities for adults and children. In June, in this space, we will organize a film screening and discussion about the Sudanese revolution, in the presence of local activists and a Sudanese comrade who is a member of a resistance committee in Khartoum. The opportunity to do this—not only in exile but in Syria—represents the fulfillment of a dream: connecting people involved in the two revolutionary experiences that inspired our manifesto “Revolutions of Our Times” and which serve as something like a political compass for the network.
\n\nWe have visited a place in one of the suburbs of Damascus, a lovely social center with a café and large spaces around it. Political events were taking place there underground before the fall of the regime. In the countryside around Damascus, we have also visited agricultural projects, nurseries, and seed collections connected to question of food sovereignty and the rebuilding of the land after destruction. In the northwest, we have connections with other agricultural and women’s initiatives focused around medicinal plants and local knowledge. Ecological farming initiatives give us a clear example of how politics can begin not only from statements but from the seeds, from the water, from the land.
\n\nIn all these places, we have discussed internal organization and political visions for the future. We did not treat these initiatives with romanticism. Every place and project has its contradictions, its problems, its social and political questions and limits. That is why we do not see “Mujawara” as a stamp of approval that we place on any space, but rather a process of building trust and joint work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/2.jpg\")
A banner for the Mujawara campaign elsewhere on the surface of the earth, displayed by other participants in the Peoples Want network.
\nWhat matters to us is connecting with and supporting self-organized initiatives, not replacing them or leading them. As Syrians, we know that people on the ground are tired of organizations that come with ready-made projects and of funding that creates a donor-recipient relationship. First, we ask: What do you need? How do you work? What is your relationship with the local environment? Can this space receive people from different areas? Does it contribute to building material and political autonomy for people?
\n\nThe connection of “Mujawara” with Syria comes from this: the Syrian revolution itself gave rise to a tremendous amount of experience in self-organization, from local councils to coordination committees, from collective kitchens to field hospitals, from justice initiatives for victims and the disappeared to farming projects and cooperatives. Today, after the fall of the regime, after all of this destruction, it is not enough to say “the revolution continues” as a slogan. The question is: where does it continue? And who carries it in a concrete way? In which house, farm, library, social center, community committee, or meeting between people from different places in Syria will it continue?
\n\nThat is why in Syria, “Mujawara” must be a small but practical step: meetings for collective thinking about how to build a long-lasting mutual support network. The goal is not to announce the “opening of a revolutionary headquarters,” but to contribute to restoring the connections between people, areas, and experiences that years of war and revolution has separated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/08/3.jpg\")
\nThis is the original call to make June a month of global outreach and connection through the Mujawara campaign.
\n\n\n\n\nJoin us for a month of internationalist organising throughout the month of June! This is a global call to all local places and collectives for gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches and rituals in honor of those who have fallen.
\n\nThe goal is to build new internationalist connections and mutualize our resources to support the creation of new shared spaces by Syrian and Sudanese revolutionaries.
\n
We could begin again with a list. A list of threats, of wars, of uprisings cut short, of incomplete revolutions. A list of all the dead, of all our dead.
\n\nBut why state again what everyone knows, reads, sees, and feels: The world, once again, is devastated by the lust for power and the greed of the powerful.
\n\nSo how do we carry on? We who have known the jubilant crowds, the ransacked palaces, and the power of our tenderness. How do we carry on in the face of horror and powerlessness? How do we carry on as revolutionaries?
\n\nThere are the cynics, the “realists,” who, blinded by the anguish of their own weakness, tell us we must choose. Choose between those who massacre their own peoples and those who believe they can slow their own downfall by declaring war on the world.
\n\nThere are those who give up or stop hoping. Exhausted, resigned. But who may one day stand with us again.
\n\nAnd then there is us.
\n\nUs who weep, us who feel weak, us who sometimes doubt. But us, too, who have not given up. Neither our compass, nor our flame. Neither the hope of avenging our own, nor the hope of seeing a dawn at the end of the night.
\n\nUs who, rather than remain trapped in the shock of the present, search everywhere for those who continue to resist. For we remember that from our uprisings, a force has awakened. And though minds tend to forget, bodies remember.
\n\nUs who see this force still alive in plain sight, carried by a pirate generation shouting in the world’s face that the game is not over.
\n\nIt is this force that our comrades in Nepal have rekindled in the open, in flames that consumed their assembly. It is this force that we have glimpsed within the plenums of Serbia, those gigantic assemblies that, for months upon months, organised the revolt from below. It is this force too that is embodied in the inhabitants of Lebanese villages who remain on their land despite yet another evacuation order from the IDF, as well as in the farmers in Palestine who replant their crops again and again after the bombs. It is this force that we feel within the Sudanese emergency response rooms, born of war to take up the mantle, both at home and in exile, of the powerful resistance committees of the revolution.
\n\nIt is this force that keeps our comrades standing firm in the jungles of Myanmar or Chiapas, in the Ukrainian trenches, and in the mountains of Rojhelat. It is this force that we see flying at the mastheads of those boats setting sail to defy genocidal Israel. It is this force, finally, that drives the crowds in Iran, Minneapolis, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, and Madagascar to brave, time and again, the death promised by all these regimes that hate their peoples.
\n\nYes, our strength is real. It is nascent, incomplete, fragmented, but real. Contrary to what counterrevolutionaries on both the right and the left would have us believe. And no party, no supreme savior, will be able to unify it in our place.
\n\nSo the task lies with us: to seek one another out, to recognize one another, and to make visible to the world—and to ourselves—the power that could emerge from our coming together.
\n\nThis is what we call Mujawara. The pooling of our efforts and our resources, through the interweaving of ropes, long and strong enough to allow us to hold together in the face of the challenges of our time. A revolutionary neighboring that we have already begun to weave from all these territories, these places, and popular powers born of our struggles. This Mujawara will not be made of empty talk or grand statements on every tremor our world experiences. It is being built, and will continue to be built, under the radar, in the tunnels of the revolutions to come.
\n\nAnd to inaugurate it, and to begin weaving this neighboring that crosses borders, we will organize, across five continents and throughout the month of June, a series of internationalist actions within all these places born before or in the wake of our uprisings and maintained over the years despite every hardship: neighboring councils, autonomous spaces, social centers, shelters, collective farms, self-managed bookshops, cooperatives.
\n\nAll that will allow us to bring into being, materially and symbolically, this neighboring we need: gatherings, actions, communal banquets, celebrations, fundraisers, marches, rituals in honour of those who have fallen.
\n\nFrom this global mutual aid that we will set in motion in June, new places will rise from the ground, safer paths will be forged, roofs will be repaired, new alliances will be woven, and from all of this, perhaps, wounds will be healed and new hopes will take root.
\n\nThis moment is but a step—yet a decisive one: that of the slow but unwavering construction of a grounded material power, linking across the four corners of the planet the fragments of our nascent strength.
\n\nFrom the places we have grown accustomed to naming:
\n\nTaipei, Mexico City, Nancy, the Beqaa Valley, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Galloway hills, Paris/Montreuil, Damascus, la Provence, the Limousin mountain
\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/06/04/inside-the-clashes-at-delaney-hall-detention-center-a-timeline-from-a-mutual-aid-volunteer", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/06/04/inside-the-clashes-at-delaney-hall-detention-center-a-timeline-from-a-mutual-aid-volunteer", "title": "Inside the Clashes at Delaney Hall Detention Center : A Timeline from a Mutual Aid Volunteer", "summary": "A participant in mutual aid efforts at Delaney Hall Detention Center recounts how the clashes with federal, state, and local authorities unfolded during the hunger strike.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-06-04T13:05:05Z", "date_modified": "2026-06-12T09:15:28Z", "tags": [ "ICE", "police", "politicians", "prisons", "borders" ], "content_html": "On May 22, 2026, amid a surge of hunger strikes in immigration detention prisons across the United States, 300 detainees announced from their cells in Newark, New Jersey that they would not eat and would not toil for their captors until their demands were met. This sparked ten days of protest and furious retaliation from federal, state, and local authorities. What began as a peaceful vigil outside Delaney Hall Detention Center in solidarity with the hunger strikers ended with New Jersey State Troopers encircling, brutalizing, and arresting scores of people.
\n\nThe series of events leading up to the strike and culminating in a marathon of violence has been densely packed. Consequently, the fog of war has obscured key details, including the complex dynamics at play between protesters and mutual aid workers, between experienced anti-ICE activists and the local terrain, between the government of New Jersey and federal mercenaries. Here, a participant in mutual aid efforts at Delaney Hall over the preceding months—who was on the ground for much of this wave of protests—recounts how the clashes unfolded.
\n\nYou can donate to support families impacted by immigrant detention here.
\n\nI am a volunteer with Eyes on ICE New Jersey, a mutual aid collective that has been providing aid and hospitality to the detainees held captive in Delaney Hall—which is one of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in the Northeast—and to the families that travel to visit them.
\n\nEyes on ICE is a coalition of volunteers and a preexisting network of aid organizations, including Movimiento Cosecha, Pax Christi New Jersey, First Friends of New York and New Jersey, Mami Chelo Foundation, and others that have emerged over decades of advocating for those subjected to an increasingly archaic immigration system. Established immigrant justice and faith-based communities with aligned advocacy goals converged on Delaney Hall soon after it reopened in May 2025. Despite the forceful retaliation of federal and local police, the protests continued, only slowing down after the arrests of faith leaders and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
\n\nOver the following weeks, protesters self-organized and refocused their efforts—shifting to assisting detainees and their families through networks of aid distribution, lawyers, and advocates, seeking to catch people before they fall through the cracks. At the same time that the aid group was being built, a ring of concertina-topped mesh-fencing sprang up around the prison. As the weather grew colder, the government of Essex County, the county that holds the detention facility, erected a permanent white tent to house Eyes on ICE. That tent has come to be called the “Radical Hospitality Zone.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/4.jpg\")
The “Radical Hospitality Zone,” where Eyes on ICE volunteers built a space for visitors coming to see people incarcerated in Delaney Hall.
\nVolunteers who do not have professional careers in advocacy participate by helping to maintain a community at the prison gates. Some of us cook or battle inclement weather. Others offer child care, collect donations of groceries and diapers, assist visiting families with transportation, or beautify the tent that houses us with art and music. All of us work together to document the detainees and their captors.
\n\nDelaney Hall Detention Center is situated in one of the busiest shipping hubs in the country. Located directly behind Newark Airport, the private prison shares the same square mile with multiple incineration plants and a busy commercial road. Periodically, a train screams by loaded with trash to be incinerated or animal carcasses for reprocessing at the facility across the street. The prison is about the size of a Costco, with a 1000-bed capacity. It is operated by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison contractors in the world. GEO Group has a poor human rights track record and is quick to dismiss any inquiries or criticisms.
\n\nThe New Jersey Globe reports that the prison is often at maximum capacity; volunteers do their best to count the number of captives inside the tinted windows of the vans that come and go. Some of the people who are released tell us they were arrested just days earlier, usually by accident or as a consequence of racial profiling. Others have been in the system for months,
\n\n\n\n\n“…transferring between detention centers in Louisiana, Texas, and then back to Delaney, seemingly with the dual purpose of keeping them hidden or underrepresented in the legal system, while also creating excuses for GEO Group (owner of Delaney and often the largest private prison company in the states) to run up quite the tab with the obsequious federal government.”
\n\n \n
The facility is built on a filled-in portion of marshland and river. Backfill and debris from old construction form the foundation for Delaney Hall and the rest of the Ironbound neighborhood. The Ironbound is a historically redlined neighborhood, meaning it has long been home to Black, brown, and immigrant communities. Consequently, the Ironbound was zoned for heavy industry, and the 16-mile stretch of land that Delaney Hall sits on has come to be known as “Chemical Corridor” due to rampant environmental contamination from every form of industry imaginable.
\n\nIn short, it is desolate. There are no homes nearby and a single bus line serves the area. This was the arena for the week of state violence that shook the country.
\n\nOn May 22, Gabriela Soto, whose husband Martin Soto was then held in Delaney Hall, announced that a protest had begun within the prison. During the early hours of the protest, she publicly shared a phone call with Martin. The privilege of speaking on the phone with detainees has since been revoked for all families, along with all other forms of visitation. During that call, Martin announced that he had coordinated with up to 300 other detainees to begin a hunger and labor strike to draw attention to inhumane living conditions and lack of due process under the law.
\n\nDetainees in Delaney Hall are forced to do all the work to maintain their own prison, receiving $1 per day in return; they regularly report receiving extremely poor quality food, including spoiled food. There are also consistent reports of mistreatment, unsafe living conditions, medical neglect, and sexual assault. Navigating the legal procedures around their detention is difficult; at best, these are intentionally opaque.
\n\nStarting months before the strike began, Eyes on ICE volunteers and participating organizations received a series of handwritten letters from detainees. In March, a letter arrived captioned with a large “S.O.S.” and undersigned by 300 detainees from across various cell units. They detailed horrendous conditions, rapid transfers and deportation hearings, and other forms of torture. Many called specific judges out by name for their cruelty.
\n\nThe strikers demanded that New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill come to Delaney Hall to meet with them and witness the conditions in the prison. They also called for the very young, very old, and medically infirm be released from the prison; an end to coercive pressure to sign voluntary deportation papers; and a meaningful review of cases and habeas corpus filings.
\n\nGabriela Soto’s announcement precipitated a coordinated call for all Eyes on ICE volunteers and their communities to participate in a 24/7 vigil in solidarity with the strikers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/3.jpg\")
May 22, 2026: the hospitality tent outside Delaney Hall. Gabriela Soto holds a sign she made with her family as she announces the hunger strike.
\nThat vigil began immediately after Gaby made her announcement at noon on May 22. At 2 pm, family members of the detainees who were on strike reported that they were unable to communicate with their loved ones. The detainees typically had access to tablets that could make video calls, but the prison guards had revoked the communication privileges of the units that were on strike in retaliation. This information was confirmed by a person detained in the striking unit 2a/b. About to be deported, he used his final phone time to validate this detail. While other detainees in other units had agreed to the strike, 2a/b was the unit Martin Soto was held in, the unit that had initially announced the strike.
\n\nBy 6 pm, the number of protesters at the vigil had swelled to between thirty and forty people. There were several local media vans on scene. The story garnered a brief mention in the evening news in relation to the other strikes across the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/6.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the evening of Friday, May 22.
\nAs protesters chanted and sang into the night, detainees could be seen silhouetted in the windows closest to the street—waving, dancing, and placing heart-shaped cutouts against the opaque glass. Their response drove home that the vigil was cutting through their isolation.
\n\nAs the evening went on, a few detainees were released, as usual, one or two at a time, often as a consequence of paying bail. The volunteers carried out their intake process and made sure they were safe and had access to transportation and legal advice.
\n\nThe protest lasted through the night and into the following days without incident. Guards and protesters exchanged insults, but neither side deployed anything stronger.
\n\nOn Saturday, May 23, Gaby shared that her husband Martin, now seen as the primary instigator of the strike, had been offered release if he would call off the strike. According to Gaby, he said, “I don’t want to talk, put me back into my cell.”
\n\nThe alarm system for the building was set off for the day and night, a tactic that Eyes on ICE volunteers have witnessed as a means of psychologically torturing the detainees. The alarm is about the volume of a fire alarm in most high schools, but left on for the entire day and night to prevent sleep.
\n\nThough guards initially denied him entry, Senator Andy Kim was eventually able to enter the facility. He spent several hours inside, speaking to dozens of detainees. In a speech he made afterwards, joined by Representative Rob Menendez, Kim confirmed most of the claims of the strikers, including the poor food and water quality, unacceptable sanitary conditions, and reports of mistreatment and medical neglect.
\n\nAnother night passed without incident as the protesters maintained a continuous presence. On Saturdays and Sundays, the facility is open for visitation and families are allowed in. Families continued to come for regular visitation throughout the weekend, bringing children and elders. This gave a familial air to the protest, with children chalking on the driveway leading to the gates and sometimes leading chants.
\n\nOn Saturday evening, Martin’s cell mates reported that ICE agents or guards came to the room to remove Martin to solitary confinement. Each twenty to thirty or more people inside. All thirty of Martin’s cellmates grouped around him and locked arms, refusing to let him be punished for his role in the strike.
\n\nAt about 4 pm on Sunday, May 24, Gaby approached the prison for a scheduled visit with Martin. Once she was inside the fence but had not entered the facility itself, she saw two ICE agents physically carry her husband out of the prison and throw him into the back of one of the white vans used for detainee transfer. Later, when she was eventually permitted to talk with him, she discovered that guards had lured him into leaving his cell by reassuring him that he was going to be released. He followed them to a second room, where ICE officials attempted to interrogate him, then prepared him for transfer and tossed him into a van.
\n\nA call went out to Eyes on ICE volunteers and to various other leftist and aid groups as far afield as New York and Pennsylvania. Because Delaney Hall receives detainees from a large area, this was not just New Jersey’s fight. The message of Eyes on ICE was simple: “They’re retaliating against the strikers, and we won’t let them disappear even a single one until their demands are heard.”
\n\nElected officials who had been planning a congressional oversight visit that week were notified. The US representative for New Jersey, Rob Menendez, arrived later that night for an unannounced visit. He had visited a week prior but had left with the impression that the prison had been prepared in expectation of his inspection. Menendez was allowed into the gates of the prison, but was barred from entry for fourteen hours while a cleaning crew came to dispose of whatever they did not want him to see. He remained in the courtyard in the rain that whole night, trying to check vehicles for transfers and relaying information to protesters outside the gate.
\n\nThe blocking action started immediately with the legal protection of a federal judge’s court order—put in place pending the review of a previously filed Habeas petition barring Martin’s removal from the facility. With the blocking action in place, protesters formed a barrier from orange plastic water tanks commonly used as construction barriers. About 150 protesters stood behind the barrier by 8 pm on Sunday night.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/5.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the evening of May 24.
\nAs the night wore on, the crowd thinned to about 75 people, but they successfully stopped each attempted transfer from the facility. Eyes on ICE volunteers attempted to persuade the crowd to respect the property boundaries and refrain from physically obstructing the personal vehicles of GEO Group employees. Newark Police were dispatched several times to escort the transport vans past the crowd; people clearly and calmly explained to them that they were participating in an illegal removal. They disengaged at about 11 pm.
\n\nSpirits were high, but several protesters argued over tactics. Many did not understand why volunteers asked that GEO Group vehicles be allowed to leave. The crowd did their best to inspect non-transport vehicles as they exited, but some protesters wanted to limit all vehicle movement in and out. Volunteers with Eyes on ICE repeatedly explained their reasoning for not wanting to engage with the police. Many volunteers had been present for the previous year’s protests at the facilities’ opening and did not want a repeat incident.
\n\nAt several points, GEO employees lurched their vehicles through the crowd, hitting people and almost pinning one against a barrier.
\n\nAt 1:30 am that night, a light rain began to fall. Protesters were formed in two groups, one by the main gate composed of between forty and fifty protesters and a smaller group of about ten by a secondary unused gate a hundred yards to the south, called gate five. It had been almost two hours since the agents attempted any transports, and the energy of the protesters was settling for a night’s vigil.
\n\nSuddenly, approximately twenty ICE agents stormed from the south gate, armed with pepper spray. They shoved through the newly assembled barriers and sprayed several people in the smaller group of sentries. The ICE agents grabbed those who attempted to defend the barrier and threw them to the ground. One woman in her sixties remained at the barrier; three agents shoved her to the ground, picked her up, and threw her back down with considerable force about ten feet away. She was taken to the University Hospital about an hour later for broken ribs and trouble breathing.
\n\nAs soon as they had cleared a pathway, a convoy of ten unmarked vehicles, mostly Jeep compasses, sped out of the facility headed north toward downtown Newark. Later, a suspicion was confirmed that one of the vehicles carried Martin Soto, illegally transporting him to Elizabeth detention center—a smaller ICE facility.
\n\nOnce the vehicle carrying Martin and an escort vehicle were clear of the main body of protesters, the remaining eight cars turned around in the entrance of the Essex County Corrections Facility, a medium-security state prison right next to Delaney Hall. The feds sped recklessly through the protesters on the street, narrowly missing several. They stopped their cars in a line directly in front of the south gate and deployed from their vehicles, one to two agents emerging from each car. Most agents were armed with telescoping batons, and about five carried large cans of pepper spray (likely MK 38, supplied by Safariland).
\n\nThe protesters at the north gate began responding to the ICE agents. Gaby was taken into the hospitality tent and instructed not to leave, as she was four months pregnant. Some protesters stayed behind at the north gate to ensure that the agents were not acting as a decoy. The rest rushed south. Just as they arrived to find that the crew at the south gate had been beaten and sprayed, the agents resumed spraying. However, the parallel parked vehicles on the street partially screened the protesters, and a truck returning from the port with a large shipping container in tow was stopped, further blocking the spray.
\n\nSome protesters and independent photographers ran into the street to confront or photograph the agents. They were sprayed and chased back to the sidewalk, where agents hit several people with batons and sprayed several more at point-blank range. The entire encounter lasted about three minutes from the ICE agents exiting the gate to the moment they returned to their vehicles and sped south for the night.
\n\nThe pepper spray had severe effects, as most of the protesters that evening lacked adequate PPE.
\n\nRepresentative Menendez maintained that he did not see the agents move Martin from the back of the van that he was believed to be in, but Menendez did not claim to have been watching it the whole time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/2.jpg\")
Graffiti directing people in New York City to show up outside Delaney Hall in Newark.
\nThe events of the previous night marked the escalation that set the tone for the following week. A continuous presence of volunteers and protesters maintained the vigil throughout that night; the following morning, approximately ten protesters remained outside the gates of Delaney Hall. Governor Mikie Sherrill was due to arrive at 10 am to attempt entry and give a press briefing at the facility. Menendez remained inside the gates, still barred from entry.
\n\nAt about 7:30 am, a group of ICE agents could be seen staging down Doremus Ave, the road on which Delaney Hall is located. The agents were joined by a BearCat—a police armored personnel carrier. The roughly twenty agents were armed with pepper spray; the agent in the turret of the BearCat sported a FTC PRO pepperball gun.
\n\nThe agents dispersed the last few protesters and tore down the temporary barriers, lifting them into the dumpster beside the south gate. They then staged in front of the gate, standing across from a slowly growing crowd of protesters and journalists.
\n\nGovernor Sherrill arrived with more media in tow to cover her press briefing. She unsuccessfully attempted to enter Delaney Hall, then delivered a speech in front of the gates. Her speech frustrated protesters, as she offered few details about how the strikers’ demands might be met. She also misrepresented some details of the demands and the operations of the facility, suggesting that she had only a superficial understanding of the conflict.
\n\nThe governor departed by 11 am, and tensions between protesters and ICE agents mounted quickly. ICE agents attempted to clear a path through the crowd for a steady stream of transport vehicles. Senator Kim attempted to intervene, negotiating with the ICE agents and the gathering crowd to allow vehicles to pass if he could check them for transfers. Some protesters continued blocking vehicles. For the most part, Kim was denied access to the transport vehicles.
\n\nWhile Kim stood between protesters and the agents, still negotiating, a transport approached from the gates. The crowd pressed forward and the agent on the turret of the BearCat opened fire indiscriminately. Afterwards, Kim reported that he felt the sting of something hitting him in the back, and then a chemical burn in his lungs and eyes. The agents also deployed pepper spray, striking many people, including Kim and several of his staffers, who required eye flushing afterwards.
\n\nKim eventually gained entry to the facility after personally calling the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayn Mullin. This was possible only because of congress is the source of funding for all DHS operations, which secures them legal power of oversight. Afterwards, Kim was able to confirm that Martin Soto had been transferred.
\n\nAfter the melee, the pressure of the crowd diminished as protesters and volunteers regrouped. Throughout the day, reports returned from family that the strikers were being collectively punishment. Most of the strikers were prevented from communicating with anyone outside, including with lawyers or with commissary accounts needed to purchase supplemental food. Some prisoners were forced to stand for extended periods of time, and many were threatened with transfer. Visitation was canceled indefinitely. The strikers reported that they were frustrated that people outside Delaney Hall were focusing on the conditions in the prison, emphasizing their desire for freedom, due process, and the closure of the detention facility.
\n\nThe agents who had attacked the crowd eventually reentered the facility. The rest of the afternoon and evening passed without incident.
\n\nThroughout the afternoon and evening, protesters built a barricade, tearing up cement bricks from a retaining wall between the prison and the sidewalk. They employed additional scrap metal and refuse from the adjacent train tracks to reinforce the barricade.
\n\nOnce again, at 7 am, ICE agents reinforced by a BearCat deployed from the south gate. Using pepper spray and batons, they cleared a path through the crowd of about twenty protesters. Confrontations between protesters and ICE agents continued.
\n\nBy 4 pm, the crowd had grown to about 60 protesters. As the number of protesters grew, more agents appeared, forming a line. They pulled up three vehicles branded with ICE logos. These vehicles are typically not used for regular immigration enforcement operations; they first showed up in Minneapolis during a retaliatory rampage Greg Bovino led on January 13. They staged the vehicles in front of the gates, with the agents shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk facing the protesters assembled in the street.
\n\nAs the sun set at 8 pm, the shoving match between agents and protesters settled into a 30-minute rhythm in which agents repeatedly lunged forward across the five feet separating the two lines. First, some agents would deploy pepper spray while others charged forward holding their batons horizontally as a bar at chest height. Once in contact with the arm-locked crowd, they would shove people to the ground, often swinging the batons at people’s knees. Sometimes this push coincided with vehicles leaving or entering the south gate, but often, there were no vehicles coming; it was as if they were adhering to a schedule.
\n\nThe agents deploying the pepper spray repeatedly sought to pull protesters’ protective masks and goggles away from their faces in order to spray directly into their eyes and mouths. At first, the medics treating those impacted by the pepper spray were baffled by how long the effects lasted and how resistant the spray was to decontamination with soap solution. They eventually concluded that ICE had switched to a pepper-gel formulation, likely to compensate for the persistently windy conditions on Doremus Avenue.
\n\nThree individuals were marked for capture in the course of the night, and agents repeatedly broke through the line of protesters in twos or threes to chase them down. ICE agents incapacitated one of these individuals with a taser, and slammed the other two to the ground. All three were carried through the prison gates. One of the detainees was a volunteer with Eyes on ICE, marked with a red cross and explicitly operating as a medic. The agents flashed their flashlights at him repeatedly, and one protester reported hearing a confirmation of location and target from the agents immediately before they attempted to detain him. Eight agents surrounded and tackled the medic about twenty yards outside the conflict line, and carried him face down back to the prison.
\n\nLater that evening, all three of the people that ICE had captured that day were left under a bridge about two miles away with all of their possessions. The medic was still marked with his red cross. One of the detainees reported being locked in an unventilated van for almost seven hours with his hands restrained and a possible concussion.
\n\nClashes continued through the night, with the agents using copious amounts of pepper spray. By morning, when many of the protesters had dispersed, the BearCat returned. During an outdoor recreation period, one of the detainees called out to the protesters: “Libertad, libertad, libertad!” Guards were observed mocking the prisoners and attempting to goad them into a confrontation, threatening them with large canisters of what volunteers suspected to be tear gas.
\n\nThe detainees who were still able to call their lawyers reported that the labor strike had forced the prison administrators to clean the bathrooms themselves. The strikers were not allowed to leave their rooms, and there were reports of a strong chemical odor emanating from the ventilation pipes. One ambulance left the facility that evening. One of the hunger strikers was released.
\n\nOnce again, the ICE agents adhered to the 30-minute intervals, repeatedly pushing protesters back, often into heavy traffic. Doremus Avenue serves as an industrial artery, with large cargo trucks comprising much of the traffic. ICE agents repeatedly shoved protesters into the wheels of passing trucks. The agents appeared to be attempting to coordinate their attacks with the passing of traffic.
\n\nThe agents mostly used their batons as barring tools to secure space while other agents swung the batons at the knees of protesters. In the course of the day, several protesters required transport to the hospital, suffering nerve and bone damage from beatings or vehicle strikes. The same woman who had been the first casualty of Sunday night required a return trip to the hospital. She was unable to walk.
\n\nThat evening, protesters intensified their defensive strategy, employing shields constructed from traffic cones. More experienced anti-ICE activists from the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and Chicago arrived to share tactical experience. Activists from Minnesota reported shock at the intensity of violence on display at the gate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/10.jpg\")
Demonstrators confront ICE agents outside Delaney Hall on Wednesday, May 27.
\nGovernor Sherrill held a press briefing on the afternoon of Thursday, May 28, announcing a need for DHS to step back from crowd control functions at the gate and declaring that the state police would take their place the following day. She also announced the establishment of a “First Amendment Zone” to “protect” the protesters. During the day, prison officials spray-painted a line marking the boundary of the property of Delaney Hall. In fact, apart from the private property of the prison, the entire sidewalk and street is public property, and should legally require no special demarcation regarding where people’s rights begin and end.
\n\nAt about 1:30 pm, advocates and family members began receiving calls from detainees relaying that about forty guards from the Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) had entered their unit and began beating selected targets among the strikers, with ICE agents joining in.
\n\nThis retaliation occurred when CERT entered the striking unit 2a/b to remove a detainee who had been translating for the strikers’ communications with advocates outside. The strikers, gathered in a common area between cells, locked arms around that person. The agents and CERT team beat them and deployed CS gas in the hallways to drive the strikers back into their rooms. Then they opened each door in the unit and sprayed a heavy dose of pepper spray into the poorly ventilated rooms. Four ambulances carried away severely injured detainees later that afternoon, and nearly all of those in the striking women’s unit (unit 1) were transferred out of the prison.
\n\nThe contact between the line of ICE and the line of protesters replicated the established pattern of the previous day, intensifying at sundown, then becoming less frequent in the early morning as the number of protesters dwindled. During the day, the agents used batons less, opting for direct hand-to-hand confrontation. They would grab demonstrators’ clothing or PPE and use it to throw the protester to the ground. The agents appeared to be rotating on a nightly basis; Thursday night’s agents were visibly larger than their predecessors. They bodily lifted smaller protesters in order to throw them at the ground or into oncoming traffic. They continued to use batons, spray, and pepper balls, but to a lesser degree. Once again, a number of protesters were injured and required medical attention.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/11.jpg\")
ICE agents prepare to brutalize protesters outside Delaney Hall on Thursday, May 28.
\nOn Friday, May 29, reports began filtering in that strikers were eating again. The strikers communicated a new demand that outside medical treatment be offered to the members of unit 2a/b who had been beaten.
\n\nA number of Facebook groups announced a counter-protest at the prison planned for Saturday at 10 am. Pro-ICE counter-protesters had been appearing in growing numbers throughout the week, though never exceeding a handful. They typically arrived during the day and stood with the ICE agents, antagonizing the protesters.
\n\nNewark Police, in coordination with New Jersey State Police, began staging at the two roads intersecting Doremus about a half mile north and south of the prison. They put new barriers in place. The ICE agents were still visibly staged at the mouth of the south gate. An additional line of state and local police formed between the protesters and the ICE agents, facing the protesters. They conducted a few arrests, but much of the day passed without conflict. All non-commercial traffic was blocked from Doremus Avenue, forcing protesters and volunteers to park on the perpendicular roads, Roanoke Avenue and Wilson Avenue.
\n\nAs 9 pm approached, the crowd of protesters, holding steady at about one hundred people, received warning that they would be subject to arrest if they remained. State Police in riot gear closed off both ends of the street. At about 9:30 pm, a third line of State Police in riot gear appeared 300 yards north of the gathered protesters. The protesters formed their own line, facing north, and waited to see what sort of assault was coming.
\n\nAssuming a shield wall formation, the police began shooting mortar-fired tear gas behind the assembled protesters, into the direction that they were ordering the protesters to disperse. The police advanced, attacking the protesters with flash-bang grenades and less-lethal 40 mm foam rounds. Throughout the confrontation, they also used stinger pellet rounds, while ICE agents fired pepper balls from their position on the flank of the retreating protesters. The CS gas was largely ineffective, as the wind was blowing the gas from the south to the north, where the police line was formed. Mounted horse units moved in front of the advancing shield wall and charged the slowly retreating protesters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/7.jpg\")
A photo supplied by a protester showing spent munitions that the New Jersey State Police fired at demonstrators on the night of May 29.
\nState Police fired tear gas directly at independent media journalists, hitting at least one person. Reporters from national media outlets suddenly disappeared into their vehicles and did not film the advance. It is possible they were instructed to do so ahead of time. As the protesters made contact with the shield wall of police, some shoving took place. The protesters eventually dispersed, retreating to their vehicles. Police arrested some of them. It was eventually learned from the police that the goal of the action was to open space for a shift change at the prison.
\n\nThe New Jersey Attorney General released a statement about the clashes between State Police and the protesters, characterizing the protesters as the instigators. Absurdly, they accused the protesters of attacking the police with tear gas, directly contradicting ample video documentation of what actually happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/1.jpg\")
A Department of Homeland Security vehicle damaged during a protest outside Delaney Hall on May 29.
\nNewark Mayor Ras Baraka announced a 9 pm curfew, calling for “order” in the streets. Newark Police erected metal corral barriers in front of their line facing the street and created a separation between the designated spaces for protest and counter-protest.
\n\nOver two hundred people assembled, despite the ban on parking on the entire street. Several hundred police were present as well, from multiple departments, both local and state.
\n\nAll this time, the volunteers at the hospitality tent had been organizing to receive people as they were released, as between one and three detainees had been released each day over the preceding three days. Volunteers also continued organizing peaceful protest events including prayer circles, singing, and dancing. Conflicts continued between volunteers and protesters who wanted to block vehicles. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America had been called to the protest by the Eyes on ICE volunteers, with the request to train and assist in marshalling the crowd.
\n\nAt the most, between twenty and thirty individuals participated in the counterprotest. About eight of them claimed to represent the Proud Boys, arriving in shirts and masks branded with their signature logo. One carried a bottle of bear mace. No physical confrontations occurred and they eventually left at about 2 pm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/8.jpg\")
Outside Delaney Hall on the afternoon of Saturday, May 30. Photograph by Fizzy Fox Photographer.
\nThe rest of the day passed without incident until the 9 pm curfew. Once again, the State Police staged to the north; but this time, they deployed the shield wall to the south of the crowd. They advanced on the crowd the same way they had the previous night, firing tear gas over the heads of protesters while throwing gas canisters and flash-bang grenades in front of them. Horse units deployed again, but this time, the protesters were less willing to give ground.
\n\nPolice pushed the protesters back to the part of the street directly in front of the south gate. At that point, Newark Police were attempting to hold the barrier fences between the police line and the street, perpendicular to the advancing shield wall. None of the local police were equipped with PPE; they began choking and covering their faces with their uniforms as clouds of gas wafted into their line. Protesters grabbed the dividing fence and pulled it away from the police, repurposing it as a barrier between themselves and the advancing shield wall. The Newark Police retreated into the prison gates.
\n\nThis time, protesters clashed more directly with the State Police, pushing back with makeshift shields and holding on to the barriers that they had pulled away from the local police. The police used same crowd control weapons again, eventually forcing the crowd of people north toward Roanoke Avenue. They made about a dozen arrests as the crowd retreated and inflicted severe injuries on several protesters, primarily by means of rubber bullets and other less-lethal rounds but also by slamming their shields into protesters.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/9.jpg\")
A confrontation outside Delaney Hall on the evening of Saturday, May 30. Photograph by Fizzy Fox Photographer.
\nAs the line of conflict moved past the hospitality tent, the police targeted several volunteers with Eyes on ICE and its affiliated aid organizations for arrest.
\n\nThe protesters slowly backed down Doremus until they reached the intersection of Roanoke and Doremus, where a second shield wall of riot police was waiting. The police stopped there and faced the remaining protesters for almost half an hour while the protesters led chants and gave speeches. Someone started a fire using the tires and debris scattered over the road. The protesters chanted “When the streets get hot, ICE MELTS! When the streets burn, ICE MELTS!” as they prepared for what appeared to be a kettling action.
\n\nThe confrontation fizzled when a person in a wheelchair, accompanied by someone pushing it, approached the police line and began asking to be let through. Both people identified themselves as press; one was an Associated Press photographer and the other, a New York Times reporter. Both were displaying press credentials on lanyards. The person in the wheelchair informed the police that their knee was broken and they needed to pass the shield wall to reach immediate medical attention. The police were silent.
\n\nThis encounter lasted for ten minutes, with the protesters offering to back up to convince the police to open a passage for the injured person. With no audible instructions from the police, the journalists continued to plead; eventually, the police opened a small hole in their line. The injured person asked several times if it was safe to approach; the police gave no discernible answer. Eventually, without instruction from the police, the two passed through the opening. Police issued warnings to the remaining protesters, arresting and charging a few of them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/12.jpg\")
A fire down the street from Delaney Hall on the evening of Saturday, May 30.
\nFar fewer protesters arrived on Sunday, May 31. The entire street was closed to nonessential traffic. Those who did show up stood at the intersections with Roanoke to the north or Wilson to the south. For the first time, police did not let in volunteers to receive released detainees.
\n\nAt midday, Governor Sherrill held a press briefing, announcing a coordinated effort to cooperate with local police to take over and eventually close Delaney Hall through legal means.
\n\nAs the curfew approached, between fifty and sixty protesters gathered at the intersection of Wilson and Doremus, facing the State Police at the new roadblock. Some protesters pleaded with the police to reconsider their actions, informing them that the protesters were unarmed and holding their hands up to demonstrate this. At one point, people on foot who had traveled to Doremus to visit friends in the Essex County Corrections Facility walked into the middle of the standoff and, not knowing what exactly was going on, joined the protesters. They down sat in front of the protesters, who gave them helmets to protect them from less lethal munitions.
\n\nAll of the medics departed, pleading with the protesters to do the same, arguing that they had sustained too many injuries and arrests to remain in danger.
\n\nAt about 10 pm, the police began firing rubber bullets sporadically. Officers could be seen coordinating to target specific protesters. Some protesters began singing, “All that we are saying is give peace a chance,” hands raised in the air. Police received the order to advance and began rushing toward the protesters, shooting rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades. The protesters turned and ran.
\n\nSynchronizing their movements, the police encircled the retreating crowd with a shield line. They formed a half circle around the protesters, backing them up against a wall. For ten minutes, they periodically picked off protesters at the edge of the kettle. Four police officers seized one of the people who had happened upon the protest while on their way to visit the Essex facility, dragging him into the wall of shields in a seated position. The wall of police closed around him, concealing the officers as they beat and pepper-sprayed him.
\n\nThe police closed in three steps in unison. Then they announced that individuals with “verified” press credentials would be allowed to leave. An officer checked press passes as at least ten independent journalists left the kettle.
\n\nAfter pushing the journalists to a distance of over a hundred yards away, the police mass-arrested the remaining detainees. They made a total of sixty-four known arrests that night, including mutual aid volunteers. All the arrestees were held overnight and released with court summonses after twenty hours in custody. Most of the charges were “disorderly persons” and resisting arrest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/06/04/13.jpg\")
Demonstrators use traffic cones to attempt to extinguish tear gas canisters on the night of May 30. We recommend immersing canisters in water to extinguish them; you can learn about how to do so safely here.
\nThe next day, Mayor Baraka announced that he would not be participating in cooperation with the State Police or ICE. He cited the misuse of police force, claiming that it was putting Newark’s own officers in danger.
\n\nGovernor Sherrill also made an announcement, presenting a plan to close Delaney Hall by bringing a lawsuit against GEO Group for illegally barring state inspectors from accessing the facilities’ medical units, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. She characterized the Eyes on ICE volunteers who had been rendering mutual aid and legal assistance to detainees and their families as “peaceful protesters, there for the past year,” implying that the Radical Hospitality Tent was some sort of state-sanctioned, palatable protest center. This is how her remarks were reported on outlets like Fox News. She also announced that she would be handing management of the street over to the Newark Police and withdrawing most of the State Police.
\n\nOn Monday, as a limited number of Eyes on ICE volunteers were allowed back to the tent, they discovered investigative units from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations inside, ransacking it. The agents had overturned everything inside the tent; many items were missing including diapers, an electric cooler, announcements of prayer gatherings posted on a bulletin board, and personal possessions.
\n\nThe hospitality tent still stands, though it will take professional cleaning crews to decontaminate it of CS gas residue. The volunteers are exhausted, but those who were arrested have been released, albeit with charges. Eyes on ICE continues working to ensure some degree of independent monitoring at the detention facility as well as supporting detainees and their families.
\n\nNew Jersey is still reeling from the week of vicious retaliation for the strike from both the state and federal governments. Narratives about the protests are regularly misrepresented in corporate news outlets. Nonetheless, centrists who were mostly sympathetic to the volunteers before this week have experienced collective disillusionment with state authority, especially with their Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill.
\n\nIt remains to be seen whether conditions will improve for the detainees in Delaney Hall. Yet their story has been elevated to a national audience, forcing another discussion about police violence and immigration enforcement. For now, ICE continues to operate from their field office in downtown Newark at 614 Frelinghuysen Avenue.
\n\nAn increasing number of people have been released from the facility, including some who managed to obtain the attention of congresspeople on oversight visits. Many of those released have expressed profound gratitude for the nationwide expressions of solidarity, and the solidarity of the protesters, which they could hear from within their cells. The strike at Delaney Hall has sparked strikes in other facilities around the country.
\n\nVisitation is set to resume soon with new restrictions. The people who stand at the gates of Delaney Hall, day in and day out, will continue to stand there. Many will continue working to dismantle the unjust immigration system, as they did before the opening of Delaney Hall.
\n\nAnti-ICE protesters will regroup and converge on the next flashpoint, wherever that may be. Their numbers will likely be bolstered by new companions from New York and New Jersey, who will add their recent experience defying ICE to the movement’s collective memory. The fight will continue as they refine their tactics and strategies.
\n\nFollowing last winter’s showdown between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the population of the Twin Cities, momentum is picking up on another front: resistance from within detention facilities. At least 51 people have lost their lives in the custody of ICE since Donald Trump took office, twice as many as died between 2021 and 2024. In response to this tragedy, as well as to unbearable conditions and the looming threat of deportation, detainees and their supporters are staging strikes and protests around the country.
\n\nOne of these fights is playing out at Delaney Hall, a federal detention facility located in Newark, New Jersey. The facility closed in 2017, but the private prison profiteering company GEO Group reopened it in February 2025 in return for a billion dollars of taxpayer money.
\n\nDelaney Hall has been a site of conflict for over a year. On May 9, 2025, a confrontation took place between ICE agents and Democratic politicians attempting to inspect the facility. On June 12, 2025, after detainees reported unacceptable conditions and lack of food, raucous solidarity demonstrations took place outside it. During an uprising inside the facility, four prisoners escaped after breaking through a sheet-rock exterior wall.
\n\nThis month, on May 22, 2026, more than 300 detainees at Delaney Hall launched a hunger and labor strike, citing rotten food and lack of medical care and legal resources. In response, hundreds of protesters mobilized outside the federal detention center, building barricades and blockading the exits in order to stop ICE from removing strike organizers from the facility. Federal officers responded by firing pepper balls and other projectiles at demonstrators, tear-gassing protesters, and once again attacking a politician who visited the facility in an effort to report on the conditions within.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/2.jpg\")
\nThe strike in New Jersey is part of a growing wave of actions across the US. In Southern California, at least 20 detainees are participating in a hunger strike at the Desert View Annex, where previous hunger strikes have occurred. Four people have died at that facility since it, too, reopened in 2025. Detainees are also participating in a hunger strike at the neighboring Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
\n\nDetainees held inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas have also announced a hunger strike. Last summer, Texan authorities sought to make an example of demonstrators who held a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center, leading to a high-profile case that Trump’s supporters intend to use to set new precedents in repression. The hunger strike currently unfolding at Prairieland highlights why those demonstrators went there in the first place.
\n\nIn New Mexico, Rogelio Bolufé launched a hunger strike to protest employees of CoreCivic, the company operating the private prison, seizing his legal documents. In retaliation for launching the strike, authorities transferred Bolufé to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The Northwest Detention Center, which is also owned by GEO Group, has itself been the scene of ongoing protests, acts of resistance, and hunger strikes for many years.
\n\nOn May 19, the Tacoma-based group La Resistencia released a statement from detainees, announcing the formation of “La Union de Secuestrados por ICE (USI),” the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. Over 140 members of the USI from both Torrence County and NWDC signed the letter, declaring that they “firmly denounce that the current operations against immigrants are not driven by security concerns… but rather by a system that has turned human suffering into a business.”
\n\nMeanwhile, private prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic are reporting record profits. Following the ignominious departures of the officials previously leading ICE, Trump tapped David Venturella—a former GEO Group executive who previously oversaw contracts for detention centers. Venturella is best known for helping to imprison and then deport the ex-girlfriend of Paolo Zampolli, a Trump associate linked to Jeffrey Epstein. It could not be clearer that what Trump calls “the largest deportation program in the history of America” is above all a means to enrich his allies in the private prison industry.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/5.jpg\")
“The ones who remained with ICE over the past year are there because they want to kidnap children, to pepper-spray grandmothers, to murder mothers like Renee Good and nurses like Alex Pretti. Not just for the money, but for the thrill of kidnapping, torturing, and killing with impunity. Every single one of them. The others already quit.”
\nAt Delaney Hall, hundreds of protesters have been mobilizing alongside family members of those locked inside to support those on strike. They have rallied in support of detainees every day for several days now. According to one report,
\n\n\n\n\nOn Friday morning, at a small rally organized by Gabriela Soto—a rising immigrants’ rights advocate who’s married to Martin Soto, a Peruvian man detained at Delaney since February—several men held at the center spoke to the crowd via video chat.
\n\nOne man said he and the nearly 300 others in his unit at the facility had decided to “stop eating and stop working” indefinitely until the inhumane conditions inside the facility improve. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom.”
\n
With pressure building, protests grew over the weekend, pushing a Democratic politician to tour the facility. The senator reported on the horrific conditions inside which include rotten food, lack of access to medical care, and echoed calls for the facility to be shut down.
\n\nMartin Soto is one of the organizers at the center of the strike. He was scheduled to be released on Sunday night. However, it soon became clear that ICE was attempting to move him to another facility in an effort to break the strike. According to another report,
\n\n\n\n\nWord of Martin’s supposed release reached [Soto’s wife] Gabriela, who immediately went to Delaney Hall… While she waited to greet Martin and bring him home, Gabriela instead saw guards put him in the van. Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE NJ, was with Gabriela at the time and previously described the scene to Gothamist.
\n\n“ We ran out [to] the van. [Martin] was banging onto the van. I clearly saw him in the van. He was the only one in the vehicle that they were trying to take out,” Pillay said. “He was still wearing his uniform. He was shackled, but he was banging furiously. He could see [Gabriela]. She was running frantically in and around the van.”
\n\nProtesters outside the fence quickly realized ICE was attempting to move Martin, and they formed a human chain in front of the gate to prevent the van from leaving. Word of the transfer attempt spread rapidly online, and the crowd of protestors grew throughout the evening.
\n\nThe effort forced the van to retreat, thwarting Martin’s transfer temporarily. Minogue declares in the filing that when Martin was brought back inside Delaney Hall, he was thrown to the ground, accused of damaging the transfer van, and placed in solitary confinement.
\n
Further protests took place on Monday, May 25, as demonstrators looking for Soto attempted to block and inspect every vehicle leaving the facility. Then it came out that Soto had been transferred to the Elizabeth Detention Center, also located in New Jersey. According to a filing from his attorney, “[Martin] remains housed in solitary confinement conditions and wildly restricted to access to counsel as well as terminated visitation for his family.” Clashes with federal law enforcement nonetheless continued.
\n\nOfficials in the Trump administration have held to their longstanding policy of blatantly lying about resistance to ICE, with acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis declaring that “There is NO hunger strike at Delaney Hall. There are NO subprime conditions or abuse at the facility.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement maintaining that “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.”
\n\nIn another letter from strikers inside Delaney Hall, prisoners addressed those demonstrating outside the prison walls: “We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility. We want you to know that you give us strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!”
\n\nOn Tuesday night, clashes between federal officers and demonstrators intensified as federal agents attempted to move detainees out of the facility, repeatedly pepper-spraying and beating protesters. Nonetheless, protesters held their ground, linking arms and pushing the agents back again and again.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/4.jpg\")
An anti-fascist flag at the barricades outside Delaney Hall.
\nThe clashes taking place in New Jersey represent the first large-scale public resistance to mass deportation since Donald Trump fired Greg Bovino and Kristie Noem in response to outrage over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, has sought to remove the agency from the spotlight, hoping that keeping a lower profile will diminish popular resistance. Even Stephen Miller, the white nationalist and former college buddy of neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer, has begun avoiding media coverage in order to dodge pushback against his efforts to build a white ethno-state.
\n\nYet people may not forget ICE so easily. Across the US, people have been mobilizing against proposed ICE warehouse prisons. The fight against Delaney Hall could return ICE to the headlines.
\n\nAs social media pundits and corporate media outlets turn their attention to the upcoming midterm elections, it is crucial to mobilize against ICE detention facilities in solidarity with those locked within them. This is an opportunity to keep the atrocities ICE is perpetrating in the thoughts of the general public—both to ensure that the plight of detainees and other immigrants are not forgotten under this or any future administration, and also because ICE agents will likely form the shock troops of any effort to use force to preserve Donald Trump’s control over the government. We should gather outside Delaney Hall and other detention centers around the country and aid the families of those who are imprisoned within them.
\n\nSupporting the resistance of detainees is a way to show that we cannot be intimidated, that solidarity is ultimately a more powerful force than greed or fear. We must stand together against this autocratic regime, from both sides of the detention centers’ walls, or be defeated and disappear behind them one by one.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/1.jpg\")
\nSome printable materials relevant to the hunger strikes inside ICE detention centers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/support-the-hunger-strikes.png\")
Detainees are engaged in hunger strikes in several facilities. This poster is circulating in support of them.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/usi-kidnapped-by-ice-poster-english.png\")
A printable version of the statement from the Union de secuestrados de ICE (USI)—the union of those kidnapped by ICE. The logo and artwork arrived with the original handwritten statement.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/usi-kidnapped-by-ice-poster-espanol.png\")
“Comunicado Oficial de USI—Union de secuestrados de ICE.” En Español.
\nWe Demand Freedom: Fourth Letter from Delaney Hall, May 31, 2026
\nThey Escalate, We Escalate: A Short History of the Fight against ICE in the Twin Cities
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/27/3.jpg\")
\n On May 18, 2026, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, two teenagers attacked San Diego’s largest mosque. They murdered three people before killing themselves. This is not just another episode of gun violence; it is an aspect of the joint terror campaign that the Trump administration and its supporters are waging against us from both within the state and outside it.
\n\nAll evidence suggests that the tragedy in San Diego is the latest in an ongoing series of white supremacist shootings. According to news reports, one of the shooters “left [a] suicide note that contained writings about racial pride”; the words “hate speech” were written on one of the firearms used in the attack. Anti-Muslim writings were reportedly found in the attackers’ vehicle. A photo is circulating that shows an “SS” sticker on a gas canister that the attackers used. The attack seems to have been at least partially inspired by the anti-Muslim Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019, which left 49 people dead and almost 100 injured
\n\nThis comes amid a year-long uptick in both autonomous far-right violence and state repression targeting immigrants and anti-ICE protesters. And at the same time, Donald Trump has been promoting the blatantly false narrative that those who oppose this violence are the real threat to the general public. For example, in their “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy,” the Trump administration alleges that “anarchists and anti-fascists” represent one of the “three major types of terror groups” endangering the public, alongside “narcoterrorists”—which, for all intents and purposes, now simply means whichever unfortunate fishermen Pete Hegseth chooses to murder on a given week—and, unsurprisingly, “Islamist terrorists.”
\n\nThe tragedy in San Diego once again shows how the institutions of power encourage far-right terror while seeking to smear anti-authoritarian protesters and social movements as the dangerous ones. In fact, those who are taking action to oppose fascism are the only ones who are responding appropriately to the dangers of our time.
\n\nRacist violence has played a fundamental role in shaping the United States for centuries, from the wave of terror that the Ku Klux Klan used to suppress Reconstruction to the bombing that the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh carried out in Oklahoma City. Today, there is no longer any distance between the Republican Party and the openly fascist street organizations through which it seeks to execute its agenda. Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party works directly with Proud Boys, neo-Nazi “groypers,” and the Christian Nationalist movement, endeavoring to popularize and weaponize anti-immigrant sentiments and conspiracy theories such as the “Great Replacement.”
\n\nPromoted by ruling-class institutions like the Republican Party, reactionary tech billionaires like Elon Musk, and elite propagandists like Tucker Carlson, the “Great Replacement” conspiracy seeks to channel anger originally provoked by the consequences of capitalist globalization and a declining standard of living against poor migrant laborers who are themselves among the worst impacted. This narrative only pretends to challenge the power of the billionaire elites. In fact, it is designed to excuse and defend it.
\n\nThe “Great Replacement” conspiracy continues to motivate horrific violence against working-class people, taking the pressure off politicians and capitalists. The attack in San Diego is only one of many mass shootings that fascists have recently carried out in the US. Alongside it, we can count the massacre that the neo-Nazi Dylan Roof perpetrated in a South Carolina church in 2015, the murder of Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the slaughter of working-class Latinos in Texas in 2019, and the attack on working-class Black community members at a grocery store in New York in 2022.
\n\nThe bloodshed shows no signs of slowing down. This past week, someone murdered a trans student on a college campus in Washington, a man in Pennsylvania was arrested for threatening to carry out attacks, and in Tennessee, where racist politicians have just redistricted to suppress Black voters following the elimination of the Voting Rights Act, a white supremacist live-streamer was arrested after shooting a Black man he had been taunting with racial slurs.
\n\nThese are part of a much broader trend. At the opening of 2025, a veteran blew up his Cybertruck in front of a a Trump high-rise in Las Vegas, leaving behind a manifesto calling for racial violence. In Florida, a Trump-suppporting white nationalist that students reported as part of a local Turning Point USA chapter went on a mass shooting spree at his university. Online followers of neo-Nazi groups carried out numerous school shootings, as did anti-vaxxers and anti-abortion activists, targeting workers at the Center for Disease Control and others.
\n\nAt the same time, neo-Nazi and Proud Boy groups have attempted to attack or intimidate participants in the No Kings and Telsa Takedown demonstrations. Trump supporters have harassed anti-ICE student walkouts, while the state rushed to silence and criminalize those who criticized Charlie Kirk.
\n\nRepublicans are increasingly embracing openly exterminationist rhetoric against Muslims and Black communities. Likewise, they have promoted neo-Nazi conspiracies about Somalian and Haitian communities. Anti-Muslim white nationalists like Laura Loomer have a direct line to Trump.
\n\nThis rhetoric has immediate real-world consequences. According to the LA Times, the San Diego shooting occurred directly on the heels of a far-right smear campaign intended to turn people against Muslims in southern California:
\n\n\n\n\nAmy “Mek” Mekelburg, a social media influencer who frequently propagates anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, had posted on X claiming that plans by the Islamic Society of Orange County to expand would create a “parallel” society and “Sharia enclave” where US laws do not apply, in service of the “Islamization” of Orange County.
\n
The Trump administration directly benefits from far-right violence. They hope that the threat of such violence will frighten people out of taking the streets, out of standing up for themselves. Just as often, however, their strategy has backfired, discrediting Trump and his allies and convincing people that they must come together and take action before things get even worse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/19/1.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
\nFrom 2016 to 2020, hundreds of thousands of people across the United States mobilized against the threat that the far right posed under the first Trump administration. At the time, Trump and his supporters were doing their best to provide cover and support to the so-called “Alt-Right” while attempting to demonize and prosecute antifascists. After a neo-Nazi murdered Heather Heyer during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, people flooded into the streets in popular mobilizations that succeeded in shutting down the emerging fascist threat. Neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys were consistently out-mobilized; for example, in Portland, Oregon, thousands bravely stood strong in the face of violent attacks from both the far right and the police.
\n\nIn 2023, anti-fascists mobilized across the US again in response to neo-Nazis and other far-right groups attacking drag shows and other queer- and trans-inclusive events around the country. Many helped to organize security for Pride demonstrations and similar community gatherings.
\n\nEvery time that popular community mobilizations have gotten off the ground, they have shown themselves to be more powerful than far-right movements, despite the fact that the latter receive direct financial, logistical, and media support from Republicans and billionaires like Elon Musk. Musk himself spent tens of billions of dollars to take over Twitter for the express purpose of preventing it from serving as a space where people could organize to resist fascism. As soon as he secured control of the platform, he immediately banned us as well as other leading anarchist and anti-fascist accounts. Yet none of these efforts have succeeded in giving fascism the upper hand in the streets, even to this day.
\n\nNow that the Trump administration is losing ground, once more, we will likely see them return to their playbook of fomenting street violence, seeking to tie down their opponents in struggles that do not engage the state itself. They are doing everything they can to shift public attention from the gruesome brutality of ICE agents to the supposed threat represented by anti-fascists. Yet as Trump and his cronies become less and less popular, being among their most visible enemies will afford opportunities, as well.
\n\nWe cannot protect ourselves by attempting to stay out of harm’s way—if we cede the streets to them, we will only see their joint campaigns of ethnic cleansing and political repression intensify, backed by billions of tax dollars stolen from us and the ill-gotten fortunes of powerful tech giants. As Trump continues to lose popularity, he will become more violent and unpredictable; we recall how in 2020, Trump goaded US Marshals into shooting the anti-fascist Michael Reinhoehl down in cold blood. Nonetheless, resistance is our best hope. The only way out is through.
\n\nWe must convey to the general public that white supremacist mass shooters and ICE agents are part of the same project, and only mass action can defeat them. This was true in the Twin Cities last winter and it remains true today. As data centers, ICE concentration camps, and Flock surveillance systems proliferate, we must articulate and demonstrate what solidarity and community defense means in practice. We can do this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/19/2.jpg\")
\nIn the following analysis, Ayman Makarem of the From the Periphery media collective reviews a century of colonial violence in Palestine and Lebanon to illuminate the current Israeli occupation and what it would take to resist it.
\n\nYou can watch a video version of this essay here.
\n\nFor the third time in my relatively short life, Israel has invaded my country. They have made it clear that they want to establish a long-term occupation of Southern Lebanon. This is not the first time that this has happened; several\nmedia organizations and social\nmedia accounts have published timelines of Israeli invasions and attacks on Lebanon. These timelines usually focus on major flashpoints like the 1982 or 2006 invasions, but fall short of demonstrating the full breadth and continuity of Israeli violence targeting Lebanon. Lebanon’s encounter with Zionism goes much further back than most know, predating the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
\n\nLet’s start with Moshe Dayan.
\n\nMoshe Dayan was an early Zionist leader, born to settler parents in Palestine in 1915. He was present at practically every major landmark event in the Zionist colonization of Palestine. He joined the Haganah—a Zionist militia in Mandatory Palestine—at the age of 21, participated in crushing the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, and fought in the 1948 war, expelling swathes of Palestinians during the Nakba. From the 1950s until his death in 1981, he moved between high-level positions within the military and then within successive Israeli governments, serving as Minister of Defense in the late 1960s.1
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/14.jpg\")
Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense, circa 1967.
\nDayan encapsulates a lot about the state of Israel. A number of quotes attributed to him indicate considerable self-awareness about what he and his colleagues were doing. The words of early Zionist leaders like Dayan cut through the smokescreen of contemporary Zionist propaganda. Here, he describes the foundation of the state of Israel:
\n\n\n\n\n“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is, a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”2
\n
He said this as a person proud of his accomplishments. For those who know the history of Palestine and its encounter with Zionism, that story is very familiar—it’s just notable that it’s coming from a Zionist leader. However, Dayan also said things that reveal parts of the history that are more obscure, parts that are muddied by the tendency to focus on major flashpoints like the Nakba or the Six-Day War.
\n\nFor instance, in the early 1950s, when he was a Commander of the Southern Command, Dayan developed a policy of dealing with what they called “infiltrators”—in some cases, expelled Palestinians trying to return home or collect things that were left behind when they were forced off their land; in other cases, unorganized Fedayeen militants who would “infiltrate” their own homeland and carry out operations against the nascent Israeli state. This is how he described his policy:
\n\n\n\n\n“Retaliation is the only method that has proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side. If we try to search for that Arab, it has no value. But if we harass the nearby village… then the population there comes out against the infiltrators… The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective… There are no other effective methods.”3
\n
There’s another term for what Dayan describes: terrorism. Or still another: war crimes. Dayan’s words shine a light on the periods between the major ruptures, a history that is often forgotten. Between 1949 and 1956, there were tens of thousands of “infiltrations” every year, and Israelis carried out hundreds of bloody retaliatory raids in other parts of Palestine, specifically Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in Jordan and Lebanon.4
\n\nIn 1955, to put an end to the returnees and attacks from the north, Moshe Dayan, then Chief of Staff under Moshe Sharett’s government, proposed a plan that shocked even his Prime Minister:
\n\n\n\n\n“All that is required is to find an officer, even a captain would do, to win his heart or buy him with money to get him to agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”5
\n
This is precisely what the Israelis did 23 years later in 1978, when Dayan himself was Foreign Minister. A few years earlier, in 1974, Moshe Dayan had summarized his goals thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”6
\n
Moshe Dayan speaking to the press as Minister of Defense in 1974.
\nIt is difficult to not see the parallels with what the Israelis are saying today. It has now been two and a half years since the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, and Israeli leaders have made statements like this over and over again. Since March 2 of this year, Israel has displaced\nover a million people, claiming\nthey will never be allowed to return, destroyed\nwhole villages, invaded with ground troops, destroyed hospitals and schools, killed\nentire families, killed\nmedics, and journalists, and academics. Put these together and they spell out one word: genocide. Their main targets are Shia Lebanese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/5.jpg\")
Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, killed by Israel on April 22, 2026 in a double-tap strike.
\nWith full US backing, the Israeli government is pursuing a policy of genocide in Lebanon. In the last two months, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued not one, but two red-flag warnings of genocide in Lebanon.
\n\nThis is an existential war on Lebanon. It has been going on for decades, but now it is reaching its logical end. The Israeli government aims to tear Lebanon apart, to dismantle its capacity to exist. To understand any of this, we have to examine the joint history of Lebanon and Zionism.
\n\nThe term Lebanese Entity many not be as familiar as the term Zionist Entity, but it emerges from an analysis of the formation of the state of Lebanon that recognizes the colonial relations that formed it and its many structural and exclusionary flaws. These aspects make Lebanon particularly vulnerable to exploitation by the Israelis as well as other regional powers. They have kept Lebanon in a state of perpetual crisis since its foundation.
\n\nHere, we will outline a chronological history of the two entities and how they intersect. As an aid, we offer this timeline, which includes Israeli attacks on and invasions of Lebanon alongside key regional events throughout the period that are essential to understanding this history.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/israels-long-war-on-lebanon.jpg\")
Click on the thumbnail to access the timeline at full scale.
\nWhat Lebanon is experiencing today is not just the consequence of Hezbollah’s actions or the Iran War or the presence of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon; it is the culmination of decades of continuous assaults by the state of Israel on our sovereignty itself. We must understand Lebanon as a key vector of the European colonization of this entire region, which the state of Israel has extended and expanded.
\n\nWe begin this story in the midst of the First World War with the secretly drawn up Sykes-Picot\nagreement, which mapped out Britain and France’s ambitions in case of a victory over the Ottoman Empire—a victory that came to pass a few years later. What followed remains one of the classic examples of white men carving up Indigenous land in Asia.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/7.jpg\")
The French mandate of Lebanon and Syria.
\nBoth the Lebanese and Zionist entities emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Both had previously existed as ideas but only became manifest at this point. Lebanon as a state was devised in this period by the French. Palestine, for its part, was taken over by the British, who openly declared their intention to create a Jewish Homeland in Palestine for European Zionists. The key document here is the Balfour\nDeclaration, which was drafted the same year as Sykes-Picot.
\n\nThe region that the two colonial powers carved up had been known for centuries as Bilad al Sham, which is often translated as “the Levant,” but more precisely translates to “the countries of the left.” If you consider the Arab Hejaz [the western coastal region of Saudi Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located] to be the center, which it was for centuries of Islamic rule beginning in the 7th century, when you look east towards the sun, Bilad al Sham will be on your left, and Yemen (from the Arabic word Yameen, “right”) on your right. Colloquially, al Sham is also an Arabic name for Damascus, as it was one of the most important cities in the region.
\n\nFor hundreds of years, Bilad al Sham passed from the hands of one ruler to another. Then, in 1918, European forces conquered the land for the first time since the Crusades. This is where our story really begins.
\n\nIn 1920, in collaboration with local Maronite elites in Mount Lebanon, France created what is known as Greater Lebanon, a colonial state under French supervision. Before this, the name “Lebanon” referred to the Mount Lebanon range. To this day, older British people sometimes call Lebanon “The Lebanon,” like “The Ukraine” or “The Gambia.” It’s because those names referred to a geographical location rather than a state.
\n\nGreater Lebanon was an expansion of Mount Lebanon to include areas around it, specifically the coastal cities of Beirut, Saida, and Tripoli, as well as Akkar to the north, Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south. The idea was to separate Lebanon from Syria and the rest of Bilad al-Sham in order to create a viable state led by a majority Christian Maronite population, as the latter was friendly to the French. Annexing those other territories ensured enough farmland, access to ports, and surplus populations for this new state. It also meant access to key water sources such as the Litani River.7
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/23.jpg\")
Lebanon was created as an expansion of Mount Lebanon via the annexation of the coastal cities—Akkar to the north, the Bekaa to the east, and Jabal Amel to the south.
\nThe British Historian, Patrick Seale, summarizes thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“[Greater Lebanon] was intended as a haven for the predominant Maronite community, France’s main clients, but, in terms of geopolitics, it was also conceived as a French fortress in the eastern Mediterranean, which could be used against European rivals as well as against Arab nationalists of the Syrian interior.”8
\n
This is the origin of the Lebanese entity. A Maronite Christian state built to advance the strategic interests of France in the region.
\n\nDuring this same period, another ethnostate was slowly being constructed south of Lebanon. But instead of allying with an existing local community, the British opted for settler colonialism, aiming to make European Zionists the dominant force in Palestine.
\n\nThe contempt that these white, colonial Europeans felt towards Indigenous populations was clear not just in these actions but also in how they described what they were doing. For example, in response to objections to using the new technology of aerial bombardments against civilian populations, Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922, is reported to have said
\n\n\n\n\n“We must reserve the right to bomb ni**ers.”9
\n
Those were the people who were now in charge of Mandatory Palestine. At that point, Zionist colonists had already been settling in Palestine for almost 40 years, though very slowly. With support of the British, that migration increased dramatically, and it soon became evident to the local Palestinian population that the British were giving favorable treatment to the new European Jewish communities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/16.jpg\")
A newspaper cover from Palestine with a cartoon depicting Balfour supporting Jewish migration and industry in Palestine, as well as the disenfranchisement of local populations.
\nExamining maps from 1918 and 1920, we can see the beginnings of the conflict over the southern part of Lebanon. The first map broadly depicts the future state of Israel, as well as Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria, without any defined borders whatsoever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/22.jpg\")
A map from 1918. Those red lines are actually train lines; there are no borders on this map. Though hundreds of miles of railway once ran through Lebanon, they were rendered inoperable by the Lebanese Civil War. The last trains ceased running in the 1990s.
\nThe map from 1920 shows three lines that could define the northern border of the future state of Israel. The first is the Sykes-Picot line; the second is the “suggested” border, extending into Southern Lebanon; the third represents a “Maximum Demand” border engulfing all the territory up to and including the Litani River.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/21.jpg\")
A map from 1920.
\nSykes-Picot wasn’t the final agreement between the French and the British. In 1923, the two powers drafted a more detailed accord, the\nPaulete-Newcombe agreement, defining the borders between Mandatory Lebanon and Palestine more precisely. This agreement moved the borders, placing several Lebanese villages under the authority of the British Mandate. Britain took over about 20 Lebanese villages—including Malakiyya, Saliha, and Hunin, all of which were inhabited by Shia Muslims.
\n\nOver the next twenty years, the colonization of Bilad al-Sham met ongoing resistance. The largest effort to oppose the colonial process during this period was the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939. The British, alongside Jewish settler militias such as the Haganah, employed a tremendous amount of violence to crush the revolt. Yet the rebellion was so powerful that in order to crush it, the British stationed more troops in Palestine than they had in the entire Indian subcontinent.10 Afterwards, they expelled its surviving leaders to neighboring countries.
\n\nWar gripped the region over the following years; it was one of the theatres in which the European powers contended in the Second World War. Lebanon was one of the few places where the British and French fought each other directly. During this period, Allied Forces armed and trained Jewish militiamen like Moshe Dayan; this ultimately left them far better equipped than the national armies in the region.11
\n\nIn the midst of the war, in 1943, after the Vichy Government was defeated in Lebanon, Lebanese elites declared independence from France. But it wasn’t a bitter breakup; they maintained a very friendly relationship with their former colonizers.
\n\nJust after the end of the Second World War, Zionist militias stepped up their own campaign for independence in Palestine. They did so by carrying out terrorist attacks against the British, most notably the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.12 By May 1948, when the British Mandate of Palestine was set to expire, the British were eager to wash their hands of the conflict they had been instrumental in creating.
\n\nThis led to what Arabs call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Palestine, with at least 100,000 heading to Lebanon. The villages mentioned above—Malakiya, Saliha, and Hunin—were among\nthe destroyed villages whose entire populations were expelled into\nLebanon.
\n\nLebanon participated very little in the war that ensued, known as the first Arab-Israeli war. In most locations, even within Lebanese territory, the Lebanese army withdrew, refusing to fight the Zionists. The only town that saw the Lebanese army resist was Malakiya, a Lebanese village with a predominantly Shia population that had been turned over to British Occupied Palestine. The Lebanese army successfully fended off assault after assault in Malakiya, lost the town, recaptured it, and thereby demonstrated that fighting back was possible. In the end, the Lebanese army only withdrew from Malakiya after intense international pressure.13 An Israeli kibbutz has stood in its place ever since.
\n\nThe Shia Lebanese inhabitants of Malakiyya, like those of the other permanently cleansed villages, became refugees in Lebanon. In fact, they had the\nsame legal status as Palestinians in Lebanon until the 1990s. To both the Zionists who perpetrated the Nakba and the bureaucrats of the Lebanese entity, the Shia of Jabal Amel were no different from the Palestinians.
\n\nZionist forces also carried out attacks in Southern Lebanon, notably during Operation Hiram. Not only did they invade the country, they also committed numerous massacres against Lebanese civilians, such as the\nHula massacre in November 1948, in which they killed approximately 60 civilians. Their forces reached deep into Lebanese territory, as far as the Litani river. Finally, in 1949, Lebanon agreed to an armistice with the state of Israel, which brings us to our first ceasefire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/13.jpg\")
A memorial in the Southern town of Hula with the names of all the martyrs of the Hula Massacre.
\nThe state that was founded through this ethnic cleansing, known to many as the Zionist entity, went on to be an expansionist, ethnonationalist, armed garrison state. This is clear to a lot of people today. But not as many people understand the nature of the state of Lebanon.
\n\nThe defining feature of the Lebanese entity is the political system of sectarianism. In 1943, the ruling Christian Maronite and Sunni elite drafted the\nNational Pact, stipulating that Lebanon should have a Maronite Christian President, a Sunni Prime Minister, and a Shia speaker of the house—an agreement that remains to this day. At the time, the President had tremendous executive power and the Speaker of the House was largely symbolic. Other posts in the government were likewise divided up along sectarian lines, with a majority going to Christian Maronites.
\n\nIt is a mistake to imagine that Lebanon has this sectarian system because of its many religious communities. The sectarian system is not simply an organic expression of the sectarian divisions in the country. It is a system that enabled the local elite from the main sects, with the Maronite elite on top, to become mediators between the colonial powers and the local populations. The Lebanese Marxist intellectual Mehdi Amel offers a concise description of this system:
\n\n\n\n\n“Sectarianism is the particular historical form of the political system through which the Lebanese colonial bourgeoisie exercises its class dominance within a relation of structural dependency on imperialism.”14
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/12.jpg\")
Mehdi Amel, Lebanese Marxist intellectual, 1936-1987.
\nThat might sound like Marxist word soup, but in fact, it is incredibly precise. This system means that different posts in the Lebanese state are divided among the sectarian elite—whether Christian or Muslim—with a disproportionate number of those positions going to Maronite Christians. That elite politics offered continued access to European finance, which came to form the backbone of Lebanon’s economy to the detriment of local productive economic activities like industry and agriculture.15
\n\nAt the level of everyday life, it means that, as citizens, we only exist to the state as members of one sect or another. When I vote in elections, I have to go to my father’s village, and I can only vote for Druze or Christian candidates, because they are the main inhabitants of my area. I don’t exist as a citizen, as an individual, but as a Druze from a specific area. This is somewhat similar to the current system in the state of Israel, where universal citizenship does not exist and the state reduces people to their ethnicity. Ultimately, this system disenfranchises the vast majority of people; it is not even representative.
\n\nThe sectarian system in Lebanon went through several crises in the 1950s and 1960s. But the greatest threat to its existence emerged a decade later: the Lebanese National Movement of the 1970s.
\n\nWe can divide the chief obstacles to the fulfilment of the sectarian system into three distinct aspects of Lebanese society. First, the existence in Lebanon of an entire sect, comprised predominantly of agricultural communities in the South and East, that had practically no representation within the sectarian or oligarchic system: the Shia. Located mostly in the South of Lebanon, in a region known as Jabal Amel, these communities also suffered an economic blow following the creation of the state of Israel, as their economy relied heavily on trade.
\n\nSecond, the real divisions between people were not based on sect, or religion, but on class—and the sectarian elite had no serious plan to deal with the contradictions of colonial or capitalist class divisions, let alone the feudal divisions that still existed.
\n\nMehdi Amel summarizes these first two issues in the same text quoted above:
\n\n\n\n\n“The foremost obstacle was the mass of toilers who belong to the downtrodden ‘sects’ and live either in the countryside or in the clutches of poverty in the capital. As their voices were raised, so did their acts of resistance. They demanded the system be changed, whether by putting an end to sectarian hegemony without destroying the system itself, or by putting an end to the system entirely.”16
\n
And the third major obstacle to the system was the introduction to Lebanon of over 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had been forcibly expelled from their country, most of whom were Sunni Muslim. Not only did this mess up the carefully arranged demographic balance within the country, it also forced Lebanon to reckon with the fact that it is not an island separate from the rest of the region.
\n\nAlmost immediately after their expulsion, unorganized Palestinian Fedayeen militants began carrying out operations against the nascent state built on the ruins of their homeland. Palestinian refugees also tried to return to their homes.17 In Lebanon, the army moved quickly to block these attacks and returnees, fearing Israeli reprisals. They did this by placing\nPalestinian refugee camps under what amounts to martial law, controlling movement and political activity.
\n\nThis was the context in which Moshe Dayan made the statement quoted above about annexing Lebanon up to the Litani river to put an end to these cross-border raids by Palestinian militants. In the end, they didn’t have to do that, as the Lebanese armies proved quite effective in suppressing Palestinian efforts.
\n\nAt the same time, Israel was occupied in conflicts with Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinian territories they had failed to capture in 1948.
\n\nA few key events led to the Israelis focusing more on Lebanon. The first was the Palestinian\nRevolution of 1965, which saw the creation of Fatah, the first serious attempt for Palestinians in exile to unify and organize around armed struggle. The largest organization was the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was mostly based in Jordan at that time but had a strong presence in Lebanon too.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/17.jpg\")
A rally involving Palestinian fedayeen militants circa 1965.
\nThe next major development was the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, and with it, the crushing of the hope that Arab nationalist regimes would liberate Palestine. Then, in 1970, Black September in Jordan saw the Jordanian army wage a war against Palestinian militants and expel them to Lebanon. That was when Israel really turned its focus to Lebanon. Wanting to quell assaults from the north, the Israelis begin implementing a multi-pronged strategy.
\n\nFirst, they attacked targets in the areas from which they suspected that assaults might emerge. This went hand in hand with indiscriminate bombing campaigns that did not differentiate between civilian and military targets.
\n\nSecond, Israel intentionally carried out attacks on civilians in order to try to turn them against Palestinian militant groups. For instance, in 1974, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire called the “Olive Truce” in hopes of enabling Lebanese farmers to harvest their olives. Israel violated it after just three days, carrying out ground raids and aerial bombardments.18
\n\nMoshe Dayan had summed up this policy of collective punishment in the 1950s:
\n\n\n\n\n“We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set a high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying… It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce ‘the policy of strength’ toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.”19
\n
And the third strategy that the Israelis implemented in Lebanon was to court Lebanese Maronite collaborators—both in Southern Lebanon and in Beirut. Already in the early 1970s, the Israelis were arming the Phalange, or Kataeb, a far-right Maronite party founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 in the image of the Nazi party in Germany.20
\n\nIn response to these conditions and contradictions, in 1969, leftists in Lebanon formed what became known as the Lebanese National Movement. This proved to be the greatest threat to the sectarian system to date. The Lebanese National Movement was an explicitly anti-sectarian, pluralistic movement with strong socialist currents; it was allied with the PLO. They understood that the Lebanese struggle against the sectarian oligarchal system had to be connected with the struggle for Palestinian liberation against Zionism.21
\n\nThe Maronite elite, organized mostly within the Kataeb Party, hated all of this because they had a lot to lose. They blocked any change to the system. The first efforts to change it took the form of political maneuvers; when those failed, armed struggle erupted. This was the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon, which ignited in 1975. As future president Amin Gemayel put it,
\n\n\n\n\n“We have tried to save institutions from any change. Although violence leads nowhere, it has helped us at least to save what could be saved. It was violence to conserve the system.”22
\n
For its part, Israel had already been supporting the Phalange for years, hosting meetings with their leaders, training their soldiers, and sending them weapons. They preferred the continued domination of the Maronite Christian elite to anything else: not only because of their mutual antagonism to the Palestinians, but also because in many ways, the sectarian system that elevated the Maronite elite to power mirrored their ethnonationalist system more than the pluralistic, leftist, and pro-Palestinian tendencies represented by the Lebanese National Movement.
\n\nWhen war broke out in Lebanon in 1975 while all other fronts functionally closed, Israel turned its full attention to Lebanon. They continued to fund the Kataeb, even though—or because—the Kataeb were massacring Palestinians. In 1976, Israel created what they called the “Good Frontier” in Southern Lebanon as a buffer zone.23 There, they installed Saad Haddad, an officer who defected from the Lebanese army to serve as Israel’s viceroy in South Lebanon. In this collaboration with Saad Haddad, the Israelis could finally fulfill the fantasy that Moshe Dayan had described twenty years earlier.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/18.jpg\")
The collaborator Saad Haddad on a tank in Southern Lebanon with Lebanese and Israeli flags.
\nThree years into the war, in 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in what they called Operation Litani. The Foreign Minister of Israel at the time was Moshe Dayan himself. Many people think of this as the beginning of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon—a period that saw Haddad’s forces commit numerous massacres in the South and solidify his hold in this newly-created buffer zone.24 But Israel’s presence in the rest of the country was short-lived. On October 10, the United States, then under Jimmy Carter, forced a ceasefire deal on Israel, which withdrew. Yet the occupation of the South continued, and so did the resistance against it.
\n\nThat ceasefire played out exactly like the ones we’ve seen more recently. Israel continued bombarding Southern Lebanon and arming their fascist Maronite Christian proxies across the country, while both the Lebanese people and the PLO acted with restraint. Eventually, this became unsustainable. On July 15, 1981, the PLO finally began firing rockets into Israel; Israel responded by carpet-bombing populated areas in the south, attacking Tyre’s port, and setting fire to an oil refinery.
\n\nOn July 24, the US brokered another ceasefire. Again, the PLO abided by it, while Israel violated it repeatedly. Then, on June 6, 1982, when the ceasefire had been in place for almost a year, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon. This time, their excuse was an assassination attempt targeting the Israeli ambassador to the UK, even though the group behind the attempt was openly opposed to the PLO. In fact, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had already been planning the invasion for months.25
\n\nThe 1982 invasion took place on a much larger scale than previous Israeli assaults. It was the first time they crossed the Litani River. The Israelis besieged Beirut and, after bombarding the city and cutting off electricity and water, managed to force a ceasefire on the PLO.26 As part of that ceasefire, the PLO agreed to evacuate Beirut, fulfilling the primary stated aim of the Israeli invasion. But the Israelis didn’t withdraw, because another aim of the invasion was to ensure the election of Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Kataeb Party, as president of Lebanon.
\n\nOn August 23, with Israeli tanks in the streets, Bashir Gemayel was elected president, a terrifying prospect for the Palestinians and the Lebanese left. Two weeks later, Gemayel was assassinated in a car bombing outside his headquarters. The assassin was later identified as a Lebanese Maronite, Habib\nShartouni, a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.
\n\nNonetheless, many who were loyal to Gemayel quickly blamed Palestinians. Christian fascist militias under the protection of the Israelis committed the most notorious massacre of the war, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which the Israelis aided their Christian allies in killing over 2000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
\n\nFollowing this horrific massacre, resistance against the Israeli occupation increased dramatically. Alongside other pressures, this compelled Israel to withdraw from Beirut in September 1982. This was the first time an Arab\ncapital liberated itself from Israeli occupation through armed struggle.
\n\nDuring this period, the Americans created the Multi-National Force, which entered to enforce the ceasefire between the PLO and Israel. In September 1983, the US sent 2000 marines into Lebanon to ensure the success of the Lebanese government under Bashir’s brother, Amine Gemayel.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/15.jpg\")
A badge of the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) with flags of all the participating powers.
\nOn October 23, 1983, two truck bombs targeting the headquarters of the US marines and the French battalion center inflicted many casualties. The former was the single largest loss of life for American marine forces since the Battle of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. The attack was claimed by a group nobody had heard of at the time, which later revealed itself as Hezbollah, the party of God.27 The US and the rest of the Multi-National Force were forced to leave Lebanon the following year, in large part because of these attacks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/4.jpg\")
The aftermath of the bombing of US marine barracks in Beirut, 1983.
\nIn 1985, Israel “withdrew” from Lebanon; in reality, the buffer zone in the South remained, where Israeli soldiers and settlers could move freely. This continuing occupation led to the rise of Hezbollah, whose guerilla fighters carried out attacks targeting Israeli troops and their proxy militia.
\n\nIsrael’s first major attempt to crush this\nresistance took place in 1993, when they unsuccessfully attempted to push them north of the Litani river. They attempted the same thing with a 17-day assault in 1996, “Operation\nGrapes of Wrath.”
\n\nThe Lebanese civil war went through many phases, ending in 1990 with the signing of the Taif Accord. But the core issues that ignited the war were never addressed, nor the issues that arose during the fifteen years of fighting. What started as a demand to end the sectarian system descended into sectarian chaos, and was ultimately resolved with some shifting of sectarian quotas and power divisions among the sectarian elite. The chief losers of the war, the Palestinians, were blamed for the war and lost almost all of their political and military presence in the country.
\n\nThe occupation of the south ended in 2000, after the resistance forces that emerged in response to that occupation—most notably Hezbollah—made it untenable. But one territory became a major sticking point, the Occupied Shebaa Farms, which the Israelis captured from Syria in 1967. Hezbollah claimed that this territory was Lebanese, arguing that the Israeli withdrawal remained incomplete.28 Others saw this as an effort to continue to validate Hezbollah’s existence as an armed resistance group after the withdrawal of occupation forces.
\n\nThus began a six-year low-level cross-border conflict, culminating in the 2006 July War. Israel once again invaded Lebanon, destroying infrastructure including oil depots, vital bridges, and the country’s only international airport. They were demanding the demilitarization of the entire region south of the Litani river. The conflict ended with a ceasefire deal brokered by the UN, stipulating that UNIFIL forces should expand their deployment as far as the Litani river.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/1.jpg\")
The destruction of a bridge in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes in 2006.
\nThe intervening period saw a relative calm between Lebanon and the state of Israel, with few clashes and attacks. At the same time, Israeli jets, reconnaissance planes, and later drones flew over our heads continuously. Between 2007 and 2022, Israel violated\nLebanon’s airspace over 22,000 times—about four flights a day.
\n\nThis was also a period of uprisings and violence in Palestine, specifically in Gaza. After the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel blockaded Gaza. Every few years, the Israelis bombarded Gaza—what they called “mowing\nthe lawn.” Israeli settlements in the West Bank expanded throughout this period. Israelis focused on consolidating hegemony over the territories they had occupied since 1967 while making threats against Hezbollah and Lebanon.
\n\nFor their part, Hezbollah expanded from simply being an armed resistance group to become a player in the Lebanese political scene and regional affairs—for example, getting involved in the Syrian Civil War.
\n\nThat was the climate leading up to 2023. Three years after the United Nations declared that Gaza was on the way to becoming uninhabitable, Hamas’s armed wing carried out the October 7 attacks, igniting the regional war that continues today. Hezbollah responded the following day by opening up what they called the Support Front, firing rockets into northern Israel.
\n\nThis fighting simmered until September 2024, when Israel dramatically escalated its attacks on Lebanon, beginning with the notorious pager massacre. In the weeks that followed, Israel displaced over a million people, massacred civilians, killed much of Hezbollah’s top leadership, and targeted weapons depots belonging to the group. On September 30, they invaded Lebanon, again with the claimed intention of pushing Hezbollah back behind the Litani River. On November 27, they reached a ceasefire agreement stipulating that Hezbollah will disarm below the Litani River and tasking the Lebanese government with overseeing this. Israel remained in five\npositions in the South, claiming that it would withdraw if Lebanon fulfilled its obligations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/2.jpg\")
The destruction of homes by Israeli attacks, 2024.
\nDuring this ceasefire, the UN estimates that the Israelis violated the ceasefire\nover 10,000 times, while Hezbollah violated it once—a single time—in response to Israeli attacks. The Israeli violations included near-daily air strikes, assassinations, demolitions of homes, and ground raids.
\n\nThen, against the backdrop of the US/Israeli war on Iran, Hezbollah fired six rockets into Israel, precipitating the new escalation that we are witnessing today. There are many theories as to why they did this. Initially, Hezbollah claimed it was to avenge the killing of Ali Khamanei the previous day, and that it was a response to fifteen months of daily Israeli bombardment during the supposed ceasefire. Some suggest that the decision to resume bilateral hostilities offered a way for them to break out of the dynamic in which Israel treated Lebanon as a free-fire zone with zero deterrence from Hezbollah, the Lebanese state, or the so-called international community. Others argue that it was a reckless attempt to reclaim legitimacy after the defeats that Hezbollah suffered in 2024.
\n\nRegardless, we are here now. The Israelis are in Lebanon and they aim to stay. They want to create a “yellow line” in Southern Lebanon, yet another\nbuffer zone. Many people see this as a land grab that could potentially establish permanent Israeli settlements there. Others believe that Israel is setting the stage for a massive resource grab—targeting not only the fertile agricultural area but also the waters of the Litani River. Based on the full-scale demolition of the villages they have captured, as well as the last two years of ecocide in the south—for example, Israel\nusing white phosphorus munitions to poison the land—it is safe to say that the Israeli military is trying to fulfil the threat that Moshe Dayan made in 1974: “We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/19.jpg\")
Israel has regularly used white phosphorus munitions in Southern Lebanon.
\nThe Israelis are trying to ethnically cleanse the entire south. Although Lebanon and Israel agreed to a new ceasefire on April 16, the Israelis have not stopped their assaults. They are wantonly destroying whole villages, making sure that life is impossible, let alone return. This raises the prospect of a prolonged displacement crisis on top of the many other crises afflicting Lebanon at the moment. This is the familiar theme of Israel’s one-sided “ceasefires,” in Lebanon as in Gaza. For the Israelis, a ceasefire is a chance to recoup, plan, and establish new facts on the ground in the areas they’ve seized. They view this as a single, continuous war, now lasting the better part of a century.
\n\nIsrael aims to destroy Lebanon. That will not change if Hezbollah disarms. The situation is pushing the country towards civil war, especially with the current government being so focused on disarming Hezbollah—both as an end in itself and in hopes of somehow deterring Israeli aggression. Civil war in Lebanon will advance Israel’s aim of fracturing and weakening the Lebanese state.
\n\nWhat are people in Lebanon supposed to do? What are the propositions on offer? Is there any feasible way to end Israeli assault and enable displaced Lebanese people to return to their homes in the south?
\n\nLebanon is at a crossroads. Two camps are forming and neither is speaking to the other. One camp, led by President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, is pursuing direct negotiations with the Israelis. They have committed themselves to the goal of monopolizing\narms in the hands of the state, while deferring anything to do with Israel to the so-called international community. The other camp, led predominantly by Hezbollah, is pursuing a course of armed struggle. Continuing on the path it set out over four decades years ago, its main strategy is continued reliance on the Islamic Republic of Iran and the military strategy of the so-called axis of resistance.
\n\nTo the former camp, the sole problem is Hezbollah: supposedly, once Hezbollah is disarmed, Israel will stop bombing us and pull its troops out of the country. To the second camp, the only recourse is directly resisting the invading Israeli army and continuing the military confrontation with Israel. Each is accusing\nthe other of treason for working on behalf of a foreign power.
\n\nThose critical of the current government accuse it of sacrificing Southern Lebanon for the sake of the rest of the country. Those critical of Hezbollah accuse them of sacrificing the rest of the country for the south. This division has a corresponding sectarian aspect as well. Added to the polycrisis in Lebanon, especially the grueling economic collapse which many claim to be one\nof the worst in a century, globally speaking, all of this is indeed a toxic recipe for civil war.
\n\nHow do we stop Israel from bombing us? How do we get them out of Lebanon? How do we reign in the militant fascism and brazen expansionism that has become mainstream in Israeli society and politics? How do we protect ourselves from the growing imperialist mania of the US empire? Apart from arming Israel to the teeth, the US has not yet gotten involved in Lebanon directly—but if history is any indication, it very well might at some point.
\n\nIt is difficult to answer these questions—not least because most of them have very little to do with us. Israel has become a deeply sick society, with poll after poll showing continued majority support for the genocide in\nGaza, the war on\nIran, the war on\nLebanon. Settlers backed by the army are conducting wholesale pogroms in the West Bank. There seems to be no internal or international mechanism to stop their expansionist and genocidal ambitions.
\n\nI left Lebanon in 2021. I left for many reasons, but the one that made remaining there unsustainable was that I saw this war coming. I was constantly terrified by the sound of Israeli warplanes overhead. I could see the growing fascism in Israeli society for what it was—a lust for domination and expansion. Israel has never declared its borders, and it’s been clear for a long time that they want to take over Gaza and the West Bank. Then what? Will they start demilitarizing their society? No. The dominant force in Israel, both politically and socially, is the need for an external enemy so they do not turn on each other. This is a recipe for violent expansionism with no internal brakes. Today, the fire that the Israelis lit in Gaza is spreading to Lebanon. Where it will stop?
\n\nI am on the record criticizing Hezbollah. The party has played a role in all of this. It has allied itself with reactionary and corrupt forces, both in Lebanon and in the region. Its military backing of the Assad regime—a significant departure from its stated goal of resisting Israel—made it unpopular in the region and may be the reason why the Israelis breached its security apparatus in the last two years. Its distinctly sectarian form of resistance and foreign backing contribute to significant strategic weaknesses.
\n\nHezbollah has proven unwilling or unable to make its case to the rest of the country. There are many valid reasons why a lot of people in Lebanon do not trust Hezbollah. A key event that contributed to this distrust, which is not well known outside of Lebanon, was the\nbrief civil war of May 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies turned their arms against pro-government parties, leading to weeks-long street battles reminiscent of the civil war.
\n\nYet in this context, I wonder about the utility of focusing on these issues. These are problems that must be discussed within the country. But the situation has changed, and we must update our analysis accordingly. Israel will not leave if Hezbollah is disarmed. History demonstrates that very clearly. The situation in Gaza shows that very clearly. The statements of Israeli leaders make that explicit.
\n\nThe fact is, Israel has been assaulting Lebanon since before Hezbollah existed. Hezbollah only exists because of Israel’s occupation. If they do successfully disarm Hezbollah, another group will form, because occupation breeds resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/14/20.jpg\")
Israel’s Yellow Line in Lebanon, a so-called “security belt” where the Israelis have stationed troops and are systematically demolishing villages.
\nHow do we stop the Israelis from bombing us? This question grips me every single day. But the most sober-minded people I know are just as perplexed as I am.
\n\nTo attempt to understand logic of the Lebanese government and the shortfalls of its approach, we can consult an essay that was published in the Lebanese daily L’Orient–Le Jour on April 6, 2026. The title is “Neutrality,\na Viable Lifeline for Lebanon.” This paper reflects the perspectives of some of the commentariat in Lebanon are saying, and the article represents a rare elaboration of the strategy that the Lebanese government is currently pursuing
\n\nThe essay begins with this short preamble:
\n\n\n\n\n“The imagery of our army evacuating posts in the south while leaving behind villagers unwilling to abandon their homes in the face of Hezbollah-Israeli conflict and Israeli incursions raises an important question: what is the role of a state that cannot defend its borders from invasion and occupation?”
\n
This question summarizes the basic contradiction. The government’s plan is to replace Hezbollah in the south with the national army, with the idea that the latter will protect civilians—but the author takes for granted that in fact, the army cannot do this. As we saw last month, the army\nwithdrew immediately when the Israelis began invading. So in fact, there is no basis for the argument that monopolizing violence in the hands of the state will bring order and protection, even though that is the premise of the path that the government is taking.
\n\nThe writer continues:
\n\n\n\n\n“The reality is much simpler: no army in the region can win at war with Israel; no proxy group can sell victory beyond survival; and Lebanon cannot function as a governable country—no matter how sophisticated its military capabilities—unless we dislodge ourselves, entirely, from regional war.”
\n
But how could the Lebanese state dislodge Lebanon from the geopolitics of the surrounding region?
\n\n\n\n\n“… that requires adopting a policy too often misunderstood: neutrality. Neutrality is neither dismissing the Palestinian plight by throwing morals away nor equating anything with Israeli crimes. It is demanding that Lebanon no longer pay an enormous price for hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict, or in this more recent round, the Iranian regime’s survivability.”
\n
The phrase “hosting the Arab-Israeli conflict” is particularly confusing. What could that mean? Where should it be “hosted”? How do we change “hosts”? The closest thing to a historical answer is the events of Black September (1970-1971), when Jordan violently expelled Palestinian groups to Lebanon. After that, in a sense, Jordanians did stop paying the aforementioned “enormous price,” but they simply pushed that cost onto Lebanon. How could Lebanon offload that onto some other polity? Surely the author isn’t suggesting that the Lebanese government should expel both Palestinians and its own citizens into Jordan or Syria?
\n\nSpeaking of the “Arab-Israel conflict” as if it is a timeless abstraction makes no sense. The very language is the rhetoric of Zionists. Framing the war on Lebanon as the “Arab-Israeli conflict” ignores Lebanon’s particular history with Israel, presenting this war as the consequence of abstract Arab antagonism toward the state of Israel rather than a continuous, intentional, and carefully orchestrated expansion on the part of the Israeli state.
\n\nIt is arguably true, as the author claims, that “no army in the region can win at war with Israel.” The failure of Arab states and societies to develop different means of engaging with this problem over the last several decades is one of the reasons we have arrived here. But this war has been imposed on us. It’s not our choice. The alternative, as we have seen time again, is surrender, occupation, humiliation. Or rather, the alternative to war is war by other means.
\n\nArmed resistance liberated the south of Lebanon in 2000—specifically, a strategy of asymmetrical warfare. They didn’t need to defeat the Israeli army, just as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria didn’t need to defeat the French Army,29 just as the Vietcong didn’t need to defeat the American army.
\n\nWhat could a “policy of neutrality” mean? The proposal implies that the Lebanese government has the agency to determine what happens, but also, that neutrality is both possible and desirable in the face of a genocidal force. What mechanisms would serve to assert this neutrality? Are there any historical precedents to suggest this is even possible?
\n\nThe writer’s sole example is the 1960s, when he claims that Lebanon was neutral and it worked. This claim is purely ahistorical. At the time, Israel was occupied elsewhere, fighting against Egypt. That was before the Palestinian revolution of 1965, before the crushing of Arab nationalism in 1967, before Black September in 1970, before the Arab-Egyptian peace treaty of 1977. It was only after those developments, when all other Arab states had been pacified and Palestinian militants had been expelled from those regimes, that Israel shifted the full force of its attention to Lebanon.
\n\nThe period the writer refers to as a period of neutrality was also a period of harsh repression targeting Palestinians in Lebanon. Until the Cairo Agreement of 1969, they were living under what amounted to martial law.
\n\nThis is a recurring theme throughout the region that the writer neglects to mention: neutrality comes at an internal cost. With substantial portions of the population opposing Israel, with many wanting to fight it militarily, the only way for states to prevent this is to crack down on their own populations via violent means. We can see this in Egypt’s authoritarian regime, in the Palestinian Authority, and in many other governments across the region. Instead of employing violence against the aggressor, Israel, these states turn that violence inward to repress those who would defend themselves as well as those who are moved to act in solidarity.
\n\nThose are in fact the stated ambitions of the current government in Lebanon. The president, Joseph Aoun, was elected on a platform of promising to monopolize arms in the hands of the state. However, it is clear that the Lebanese government cannot do that. The risk of civil war is too great.
\n\nSo the writer proposes that Lebanon should be occupied by a new international force that would replace the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL):
\n\n\n\n\n“Where UNIFIL is unable to deliver, an alternative security arrangement should fill the void. Greater powers must support Lebanon in its desired transition away from permanent war…”
\n
Without going into any detail about who those “great powers” might be, he confidently declares that they will ensure Lebanon becomes “neutral” and that “neutrality” will be:
\n\n\n\n\n“Lebanon’s shield—denying Israel a foothold on any single square meter of our geography. It remains our strongest defense.”
\n
Why does the writer believe this? How could anyone believe this? This is not dealing with the material realities at all. Look at Syria, where the Sharaa administration is attempting to demonstrate its “neutrality.” That hasn’t stopped Israel from occupying more Syrian land, bombing the country on a regular basis, and fomenting sectarian conflict.
\n\nThe writer’s only historical argument is that the siege of Beirut in 1982 ended after the expulsion of the PLO and the introduction of the Multi-National Force. He ignores the fact that it was popular armed resistance that liberated Beirut. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew and the Multi-National Force remained, there was fierce resistance against the latter as well, eventually compelling them to retreat. He ignores the fact that even after the Israelis withdrew from Beirut, they continued to occupy the South of Lebanon for eighteen years, and that that occupation only ended after fierce and consistent resistance. Finally, he ignores the fact that the 1982 siege began as a violation of a 1981 ceasefire agreement. What would a new “international force”—inevitably, an American or European force—do to guarantee security for Lebanon when the Israelis violate international law day after day, year after year, decade after decade, with complete impunity?
\n\nThe idea that what Lebanon needs is more imperialism is absolutely ridiculous.
\n\nAfter what we’ve seen the “international community” do in regards to Gaza, trusting them like this is delusional. Yet this seems to be the plan of the current Lebanese government. That is the premise of the current direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, which presumes good faith on the part of Israel (and the US) where there clearly is none. Lebanon has no leverage in this context. This is asking too much of people who have no cause to trust the US or Israel or the so-called international community—especially now with the US under Trump, who has demonstrated a complete disregard for international law. Are we supposed to work with the Board of Peace—the same people who suggested turning the entirety of South Lebanon into the Trump Economic Zone? Is this the viable alternative to Israeli occupation?
\n\nThis type of thinking is pushing Lebanon towards civil war. It insults the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon, portraying them at best as deluded by Hezbollah or at worst as complicit in dragging the rest of the country into a conflict. Are they not Lebanese? Do _they_ not deserve sovereignty? Do they not deserve protection?
\n\nThere are no easy answers as to how to accomplish protecting them. But it is certain that the kind of wishful thinking represented by the article in L’Orient–Le Jour is removed from reality and history. It serves no one. It can only perpetuate the confusion of the current moment and deepen the rifts that are already tearing apart the thin fabric of Lebanese society.
\n\nThe government’s strategy is unpopular, dangerous, and doomed to fail. Resistance to the occupation is necessary; it is also a right under international law. Hezbollah is facing issues of legitimacy in the country, in many cases for very legitimate reasons. For example, one of the reasons that the author of the aforementioned article in L’Orient–Le Jour opposes Hezbollah is because Hezbollah killed his father. A lot of Lebanese politics boils down to longstanding sectarian conflict like this. That is the result of being ruled by a coalition of warlords for the last fifty years.
\n\nMany people are saying that there needs to be space to form a popular resistance movement similar to the Lebanese National Movement of the early 1970s. Such a movement would have to combine a program of anti-sectarian social cohesion, a revolutionary political program to overcome the sectarian oligarchy plaguing the country, a progressive economic program moving away from a financialized dependence economy, and an armed wing (whether of state or non-state forces) that could defend their communities from Israeli aggression. It would also have to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.
\n\nThis is another form of wishful thinking. Who would organize this? With what resources? Lebanon has been a playground for imperialist powers for so long now that it is difficult to imagine how any form of organizing could overcome that. Nonetheless, in view of the fundamental contradictions within the Zionist colonization of Bilad al-Sham and the colonial, capitalist, and exclusionary core of the Lebanese entity, nothing less will suffice. We can still attempt to think positively, to identify what we can fight for, not just against. That is the essential thing missing in this moment of despair and humiliation.
\n\nIsrael wants to destroy Lebanon. We must all resist that by any means necessary. That means setting our priorities straight, it means unifying, it means forming communities based on common struggle. It means aiming for liberation, not just sovereignty. It also means forming connections of solidarity with other communities across the region and the world.
\n\nThe beast that is setting upon Lebanon is global and our only hope is global resistance. The fire that started in Gaza is spreading now to Lebanon. But it will not stop there. It will consume all of us—all of you, as well—unless we extinguish it.
\n\nMoshe Dayan, Story of My Life, 1976 ↩
\nFrom an address given to Technion University students (March 19, 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha’aretz (April 4, 1969), quoted in The Question of Palestine (1980) by Edward Said, p. 14 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 177. ↩
\nIbid, p. 28. ↩
\nAvi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 146. ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 142. ↩
\nKamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions_,_ 1987 ↩
\nPatrick Seale, Post-colonial Syria and Lebanon, 2007 ↩
\nFrancis Stevension, Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson, 1973 ↩
\nIllan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p. 15 ↩
\nIbid, p. 38 ↩
\nIbid, p. 25 ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p.113 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nHisham Safieddine, Banking on the State: The Financial Foundation of Lebanon, 2018 ↩
\nMehdi Amel, On the Sectarian State, 1986 ↩
\nBenny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 28 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 160 ↩
\nPart of a funeral oration Dayan gave in 1956 for a soldier killed on the front. ↩
\nFawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2007, p. 102 ↩
\nIbid, p. 187 ↩
\nIbid, p. 191 ↩
\nIbid, p. 206 ↩
\nTabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon, p. 242 ↩
\nIbid, p. 260 ↩
\nIbid, p. 278 ↩
\nDavid Hirst, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, 2010, p. 192 ↩
\nJoseph Daher, Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, 2016 ↩
\nMahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria 1830-1987, 2002 ↩
\nOn May Day, anarchists in Portland participated in two black blocs, adding a confrontational edge to public protests. As anger against the economy and the government spreads alongside desperation and despair, it’s up to us to create opportunities for collective action.
\n\nAnarchists organized various events in the lead-up to May Day in Portland, Oregon. On May Day’s eve, we held a ritual for the anarchist dead, mourning both friends and forebears. Such practices are important not just to facilitate emotional processing, but also as means of torch-carrying and world-making.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/8.jpg\")
\nIf that had been all that anarchists had organized, it would have sufficed, but it was just the beginning.
\n\nMay first proper began when a prominant reactionary, counter-protester, and streamer Tommy Allen, known on the internet as Tommyboi or Tommy4Trump, woke up to find that his car had been vandalized. Tommy Allen walks the line between MAGA and neo-Nazi, sporting apparel connected to European Kindred, a neo-Nazi prison and street gang. A few weeks ago, he was apparently bear-maced after attacking a presentation on the Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota tour.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/4.jpg\")
\nThat same morning, the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement staged a sit-in blockade at the Hilton-owned Porter Portland hotel in response to their decision to house mercenaries from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and other Department of Homeland Security agencies. The sit-in ended when Portland Police arrested eight accused participants. Sunrise Movement PDX also made the news recently for being the first chapter to experience lawfare attacks over their nighttime “Wide Awake” noise demos targeting hotels that house federal agents. It may seem tragic that these young people—who wholeheartedly desire to stop the machine that places profit above life—imagine it is useful to get arrested on purpose, but if we cannot offer points of entry for them to encounter other methods and more critical analysis, then we are partly responsible for the tragedy.
\n\nAround noon, a radical community fair got underway at the departure point of the “Workers & Migrants Unite!” march that was scheduled to begin three hours later. Groups like the Industrial Workers of the World and anarchist literature distribution projects spent three hours tabling and talking to interested passersby and demonstrators. The Free Society People’s Library brought their mobile truck and distributed books and pamphlets about abolitionist, communist, and anarchist struggle. There were many liberal and authoritarian socialist groups tabling, as well, but anarchist materials were as popular as ever.
\n\nMonths ahead of May Day 2026, a loose cluster of anarchists learned that an array of more or less radical organizations were calling for a “Workers & Migrants Unite!” May Day march. The organizers included anarchists, but also the left flanks of unions, anti-deportation groups, and hierarchical political parties ranging from social democrats to niche variants of Stalinism, Trotskism, and Maoism. With so much antagonism already in the air towards capitalism and the state, many surmised that it would worth engaging with the march as a space of encounter. Ever since federal mercenaries attacked the ICE Out of Labor march, opposition to police has been fomenting in rank-and-file unions, anti-deportation front groups, and other circles around Portland.
\n\nThe organizers of the march explicitly declared that they would not be working with the police and would use the march as an oppurtunity to highlight local sites of capitalist and police-state infrastructure. It looked like a great oppurtunity to spread anarchist ideas and action models and to join forces with other disaffected people. Of course, it was still possible that attacks on capitalist and state infrastructure would be seen as something coming from “outside” the movement, allegedly “giving them [the Trump regime and its supporters] what they want,” and self-appointed or org-deployed peace-enforcers could no doubt be a problem.
\n\nThe rough plan to deal with this political terrain was to join the big march as a black bloc with anarchist banners and flags and, at the very least, to give out zines and handbills. If the opportunity arose and the crowd seemed comfortable with it, other activities could take place, as well.
\n\nPeople made banners out of painters cloth decorated with black paint and flags out of black fabric, staples, and dowels. These can be transported in guitar cases if it is important not to attract attention.
\n\nAfter the community fair, anarchists bloc’d up, growing in numbers to about two dozen. One person who had just donned black and a mask and was making their way to the others, was stopped by a passerby, who asked, “Who are you with?”
\n\nThe question gave the lone anarchist pause. There are many different reasons someone might ask such a thing. Still, they decided to go with honesty. “I’m with the anarchists,” they answered.
\n\nThe inquirer persisted. “Who’s that?”
\n\n“We’re against corporations, capitalism, the police, and government. Oh, and racism.”
\n\n“All right, I’m with you.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/1.jpg\")
\nThousands participated in the march. Anarchists distributed zines and handbills to hundreds of them. About a dozen people made the “thank you for your service” joke, which is also a way for people who attended a march in their normal clothes to flag their support for potential self-defense or direct action. The bloc shouted chants that pushed an insurrectionary and revolutionary position amid the tepid slogans of the surrounding groups, joining the other groups for the more revolutionary chants. Some moved out of the bloc to sabotage parking meters and paint slogans and anarchist symbols. Anarchist graffiti appeared on the Portland World Trade center, which houses the Portland Metro Chamber, a pro-development, pro-cop, and anti-worker group. All of this was met with support from the crowd.
\n\nThe only person with a problem was an aggresive man filming with his phone who took issue with people sabotaging the meters, despite the fact that parking enforcement in Portland is particularly draconian and largely serves to fund transit cops. This chud was successfully rebuffed, his camera often being blocked by an umbrella. Some speculated that he was a Democrat who believed outlandish theories about anarchists and antifa. He is still a chud, insofar as a chud is anyone who engages in extra-state repression; the term comes from a science fiction movie in which Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers do what the state and capitalists cannot do themselves without dirtying their image. Other more right-wing chuds showed up, but they hid behind the small handful of uniformed cops.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/2.jpg\")
\nThe bloc at this march was less impressive than what we have previously seen on May Day in Portland, but it was undoubtly a success. After the march, the bloc dispersed with no incidents. Some left the streets for the day, while others headed to the starting location of the next demonstration, which would be marching on the infamous ICE Field Office on Macadam Ave.
\n\nBetween the two marches, Portland State University students occupied a building for a few hours in an attempt to push forward the struggle to fight cuts, obtain better adjunct working conditions, and resist repression of student activists. The students eventually surrendered in response to an overwhelming police presence; thankfully, no one was arrested. Upon leaving the building, students announced, “Nothing is over, we will be back.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/3.jpg\")
\nThe second march of the day was called for by Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the aligned group Portland Contra las Deportaciones. FRSO, for all their faults (which include peace-policing), have been trying to push the struggle against ICE to include actual interventions resisting raids, in contrast to others’ stance in favor of only observing. They have also sought to ensure that the government of the City of Portland’s collaboration and facilitation of ICE doesn’t go unnoticed, routinely organizing home demos at the mayor’s house.
\n\nThis “All out for May Day!” march to the ICE Field Office and the ensuing siege went pretty much as expected. People gathered in Elizabeth Caruthers Park and made their way to the Field Office; after night fell, there were probably a hundered or so people surrounding the front of the Office with a bloc likely twice the size of the one that attended the earlier march. The only unexpected detail was that the feds switched from using the gated front driveway to using the rear driveway, which is supposed to be for emergencies only. As the night passed, feds from inside the building did survaillance while the the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau did their dirty work. These local and state cops cleared the driveway with brute force and made several arrests; officers punched people in the head who were already on the ground and engaged in other typical cop activity.
\n\nThis contrasted with the earlier “Workers & Migrants Unite!” march, at which we had only seen a handful of uniformed cops, with some motorcycle cops tracing the march’s perimeter at a distance of about two blocks, a couple liaison cops positioned to protect chuds or key choke points, and a few plainclothes cops tailing the march. Of the cops in plainclothes, the two that were the most identifiable were Lt. Franz Shoeing and Sgt. Ty Engstrom; they also made their way to the ICE Field Office eventually, where they were accompanied by a third cop in a white hoodie rocking what could only be described as a “copstache.”
\n\nThe differing police tactics at the two marches illustrates the “good cop” and “bad cop” methods of crowd control. At the first march, where there were more witnesses, the police left the demonstrators to police each other—a strategy that usually works, thanks to march marshals, peacekeepers, and concerned citizens. At the second march, which was rowdier, potentially more actually disruptive to the logistics of the state, but also more out of the way, the police employed violence without restraint in defense of property and their compatriots in the federal forces.
\n\nPolice violence should come as no surprise. It is more surprising that there was support for confrontation at the big-tent May Day demonstration. This should inform future actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/5.jpg\")
\nOn May 2, someone apparently crashed a Nissan Rogue with pipe bombs and propane tanks inside it into the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland, which caters to a wealthy clientele. This destroyed the club’s first floor, inflicting millions of dollars in damages. The only casualty was the driver, who was found in the flaming wreckage of the car.
\n\nThis comes on the heels of several related individual expressions of anger and despair, including the Kimberly-Clark Warehouse arson in Ontario, California, the firebombing of the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home, and the attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Condemning such attacks, to paraphrase Emma Goldman, would be like condemning lightning: so long as tyranny and exploitation exist, there will probably be arsons and bombings and assassinations. This is almost a matter of physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. However, to regard these attacks as a sort of memetic path to insurrection misses the point.
\n\nAn uptick in sporadic attacks does not add up to a viable revolutionary practice. People are taking action because they are desperate, but the problem is that these actions do not make it any easier for other desperate people to act, and they send the message that the inexorable consequence of taking action is defeat and capture or death. Even Luigi Mangione, who carried out the most widely resonant and discursively generative action of this kind in years, was caught. The fact that it took some days for the authorities to catch him contributed significantly to the interest he attracted.
\n\nWe need to demonstrate that it is possible to take action together, to get away with it, and to act again—to show that action can be a basis for connection and life, rather than a final rejection of hope. We need to demonstrate an affective position and ethic that others can adopt and iterate on. The fact that people are increasingly desperate makes it all the more pressing to send a message to the disaffected—especially those who recognize the limits of conventional protest and the dead ends of electoral politics—that they are not alone, that many other people have reached the same conclusions and feel the same urgency.
\n\nThe emotional atmosphere of our time has successfully intimidated many people out of acting boldly, confrontationally, and collectively. Near the end of the Biden era, participants in the fight against Cop City in Atlanta wrote that the authorities had sought to “scoop the middle frequencies” out of the movement, creating a gulf between legal public actions and illegal individual actions:
\n\n\n\n\nBut it is precisely the middle frequencies of a movement that give it its punch—making its rhythms infectious, enabling it to move people and draw them into a process of transformation. Without these frequencies, the results will be muddy and indistinct.
\n\nIf activists cannot re-assert their right to gather publicly for “mid-range” activities, nocturnal sabotage and civic actions will drift further and further apart, becoming mutually unintelligible and incapable of reaching those outside the movement. Regardless of individual preferences, everyone must recognize the importance of participatory, confrontational activity.
\n\n \n
One of the ways we can attempt to reach the disaffected is by going to the beacons intended to draw them in, such as big May Day marches or even “No Kings!” marches. However, this may not succeed in situations where the mechanisms of political capture are already effectively implemented—for example, you’re not going to have an easy time getting proletarians to see things your way at a Trump rally. Likewise, passing out handbills at gas stations, where so many people are being forced to think about economics and geopolitics right now whether they wish to or not, would probably be more effective than trying to court people at a Democrat campaign event.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/6.jpg\")
\nAll in all, it was a great May Day, and it’s only the beginning of something, as many of us are stretching our legs and testing the waters again after a downturn in anarchist activity. Let us heed the advice of Alfredo Bonanno, with whom many anarchists may have unknowningly shared the streets on various May Days, and not abandon intermediate struggles that could mutate in an insurrectionary direction. “Dynamite can explode in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it.” Let us not leave those who are compelled to take a next step in struggle out in the cold without effective techniques or insurgent horizons. Let us demonstrate that there is something effective that we can do together.
\n\nLet’s fight for social revolution, in earnest.
\n\nCheers to comrades who took to the streets the world over.
\n\nDown with capitalism and the state.
\n\nDown with borders, prisons, and police.
\n\nAway with any future that still includes exploitation, domination, and class society.
\n\nHurrah for anarchy!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/05/03/7.jpg\")
\nIn the waning phase of Donald Trump’s reign, opportunities will open up for profound social change. Here, we explore the nature of the difficulties besetting his administration and propose a few starting places for those who aim to do more than simply replace him with another politician.
\n\nIn less than a year and a half, Trump has completely used up the advantages with which he began his second term. He has passed from appearing unstoppable to flailing pathetically. Obsessed with presenting an image of strength, Trump is indeed—as Shakespeare put it—a poor player whose hour upon the stage will soon reach its end. The stream of falsehoods and threats issuing from his administration can be seen for what it is: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
\n\nThe fiasco in Iran is already Trump’s second quagmire this year. He began 2026 with a more or less successful stunt in Venezuela—but only four days later, the murder of Renee Good supplanted it in the headlines. For almost three weeks, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries brutalized and murdered people in the Twin Cities, the entire Trump administration brazenly lied in contradiction of widely circulating video evidence. Having created a situation in which they could not risk looking weak, Trump’s cronies attempted to dictate reality by fiat as more as more residents of the Twin Cities joined the resistance to the ICE occupation. Finally, facing plunging polling numbers and the prospect of recurring general strikes, the Trump administration was forced to change course, firing Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino and trying to get Trump’s signature policy (“the largest deportation operation in American history”) out of the news.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-1-original.png\")
The mercenaries who serve the Trump regime have squandered any claim to moral authority.
\nBovino’s departure set the stage for the departures of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The fact that Trump had begun his second term determined to avoid the continuous turnover of personnel that characterized his first underscores what a defeat this is for him. As his henchmen leave in disgrace, not only does that undermine the loyalty of his remaining underlings—who can see their own future in the ignoble fates of their colleagues—it also undercuts the narratives with which the departed lackeys sought to justify the administration’s deeds. Firing Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem is tantamount to admitting that the ICE operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota were simply ham-fisted attempts to terrorize the population of the United States into submission.
\n\nIn invading Iran a month after firing Bovino, Trump sought to repair his image by repeating his apparent success in Venezuela. Instead, as in Minnesota, he stumbled into a debacle from which he has yet to extricate himself.
\n\nEveryone associated with the Trump regime is known now for continuous, pathological lying.
\nAfter continuously changing his talking points about the goal of the offensive throughout March, Trump sought to bring the conflict to a conclusion at the beginning of April by threatening massive attacks on civilian infrastructure—technically, a war crime. On April 6, Trump was still insisting that Iran’s ten-point proposal for a ceasefire was “not good enough.” The following morning, he declared “A whole civilization will die tonight,” terrifying many people into believing that he was threatening to use nuclear bombs—and perhaps unwittingly repeating the prophecy of the Oracle of Delphi, who told Croesus that if he went to war, “a great empire would fall,” not specifying that it was Croesus’s empire.
\n\nAn hour and a half before his own self-imposed deadline, Trump announced that, in dialogue with the Prime Minister of Pakistan—not with any representative of the Iranian government—he had arrived at a ceasefire, calling the ten-point proposal he had previously rejected a “workable basis” for negotiations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-2-original.png\")
From Minnesota to Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, they have nothing to offer but death and destruction for the enrichment of a few tycoons.
\nThe Prime Minister of Pakistan affirmed that the United States, Iran, and all of their respective allies had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” Yet the next day, the Israeli military was still attacking Lebanon, and in response, Iran continued to close the Strait of Hormuz.
\n\nIt’s hard to imagine a worse outcome for Trump. He has achieved none of his express objectives in Iran, neither regime change nor suppressing Iran’s nuclear program. He no longer appears to be a credible negotiating partner. Both his threat to target civilian infrastructure and his claim to have negotiated a ceasefire have been revealed to be hollow. Neither the Iranian nor Israeli governments are adhering to the agreements he claims to have arranged. He is forced into tension with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the pressure on the global economy continues unabated.
\n\nIt remains unclear whether Trump was ever seriously considering a massive strike on civilian infrastructure—or even a nuclear strike—or if he was simply making empty threats for its own sake. Regardless, having to spend a day wondering if he would deploy nuclear weapons drove home for millions of people how dangerous it is to live under a senile autocrat—and at the same time, it did not make Trump any more frightening to his enemies. He appears at once volatile and weak.
\n\nWhatever happens next in Iran, the back-to-back defeats in Minnesota and the Middle East mark another turning point for the Trump regime.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-3-original.png\")
\nWhen Trump won the 2024 election, many of the debates about how to respond hinged on the question of whether he and his colleagues were evil geniuses or witless beneficiaries of historical forces. Much of the paralysis engendered by his return to power centered around this question. Liberals warned that any kind of resistance would play into Trump’s hands, enabling him to declare martial law; centrists cynically took advantage of the situation to argue that the Democratic Party should adopt far-right positions on immigration. Scarcely seventeen months later, it’s almost impossible to remember, let alone comprehend, the extent to which his adversaries talked themselves into giving up without a fight.
\n\nThe question has since been answered conclusively. Trump has one trick—pandering to what is basest in the most cowardly and hateful elements of society—which he repeats with inhuman consistency. In a social order that is itself debased, rewarding rapacious self-interest while punishing generosity and thoughtfulness, this strategy has gotten him far. But now he is hitting one wall after another.
\n\nAssembling a government on the basis of this strategy produced agencies filled with incompetent buffoons focused chiefly on cultivating a public image and competing for Trump’s favor. Conducting state policy on this basis has turned the majority of the population against ICE and even driven people back into the arms of the Democratic Party, one of the only institutions as unpopular as Trump.
\n\nOne of the most characteristic gestures of the Trump era is willful dishonesty as a form of intentional transgression signifying strength. When Donald Trump proclaims easily-debunked falsehoods, his followers interpret this as an expression of boldness; they can demonstrate the intensity of their loyalty by proclaiming their belief in these falsehoods, just as Stalin’s henchmen did. But one cannot make military decisions on the basis of falsehoods—sooner or later, there will be consequences.
\n\nMost of Trump’s strength is comprised of the fear that he has inspired in people. His initial rapid successes, like Hitler’s blitzkrieg attacks of 1939–1941, were due to the weakness of his adversaries—politicians, executives, and administrators who, like Trump himself, are driven only by avarice and entitlement. Only after he and the mercenaries who serve him came up against real resistance did it become possible to gauge their true strength. As Mikhail Bakunin put it in a letter to Maria Reichel, “It is only in combat that we see what a person can do.”
\n\nOr cannot do.
\n\nThe chief imperative driving the Trump administration’s decisions is the need to project strength. They have staked everything on building hard power rather than soft power, on intimidation rather than persuasion. Now that they have consumed most of their political capital, the field is opening up for others.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/2.jpg\")
A demonstrator endures chemical agents in Minneapolis to stand up for what is best in humanity.
\nAfter living through the Prague Spring, Milan Kundera wrote that the ideal form of government is a crumbling dictatorship.1
\n\nAll forms of government are based in hierarchy and violence. Political and economic inequality reinforce each other: the more wealth is concentrated in a few hands, the more vertical the political structures become, and vice versa. Yet this remains largely invisible so long as people perceive the governments that rule them as legitimate, or at least inevitable. Suffering alone does not make people desire change; people desire on the basis of what they are able to imagine. Only when a discredited regime begins to collapse—creating a tension between what people see around them and what they are able to imagine—do large numbers of people begin to ask questions about how they might wish to change the structure of the society.
\n\nToday, these questions are more urgent than ever, as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widens and politicians cut away the safety nets and concessions that once offset the impact of capitalism on communities and ecosystems.
\n\nRight now, Trump is historically unpopular, with little prospect of his standing with the public improving. Yet he still has nearly three years in office ahead of him. For millions of people, Trump’s rise to power and the uselessness of the institutions that were supposed to control him are calling into question the entire political system. We can see this rage and radicalization emerging, however confusedly, among the rank-and-file participants in the massive demonstrations that have taken place over the past year.
\n\nThis is an unprecedented opportunity for anarchists, abolitionists, and others who have concrete proposals to bring about structural social change. Right now, when no institutional forces are able to propose a solution to the problem, we should be making common cause across lines of difference, demonstrating the power of solidarity and the effectiveness of direct action, sharing what we have learned in the course of our efforts to resist the administration, and spelling out our vision of a better world.
\n\nThis window of opportunity will not last long. The closer we draw to the 2026 midterm elections, the more people will be focused on electoral politics, including many of those who are currently participating in grassroots initiatives. We might be in a stronger position to address people at this moment than we ever will be again in the course of the Trump era.
\n\nOften, the moment of greatest danger—for example, when fascists or ICE agents are murdering people in Charlottesville or Minneapolis—turns out to have been, in retrospect, the moment of greatest possibility. By the time the terror has subsided and we recognize the potential of the situation, the moment is already passing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/3.jpg\")
Federal mercenaries gratuitously assaulting people in Portland. No amount of brute force will suffice to subdue an increasingly desperate population.
\nWe should remember this, because as Trump’s position weakens, he and his supporters will attempt more and more terrifying and outlandish schemes to maintain their grip on power. He and his adherents still have enough time to inflict a tremendous amount of suffering, both in the US and overseas. We should prepare for much more aggressive rounds of repression. Likewise, we have already seen that Trump will not leave office willingly.
\n\nIn all likelihood, the outcome of the mid-term elections will be determined by what happens in the months ahead—not by how successfully politicians campaign, but rather, by the extent to which grassroots resistance makes it impossible for the ruling class to imagine that Trump could continue to advance their interests and the extent to which elements of the ruling class are able to regroup around other institutional forces, such as the Democratic Party.
\n\nAs we plan for May Day and the summer, we should take a longer view. How will the tactics that we demonstrate during these events help to familiarize large numbers of people with the sort of tactics that they will need to employ alongside us to thwart Trump’s second attempt to carry out a coup? How will the narratives that we popularize position us to keep fighting against all the other proponents of capitalism and oppression after Trump is gone?
\n\nWe should hurry to lay bare all the connections between fascists, billionaires, militarists, Zionists and Christian nationalists, cryptocurrency hucksters, tech moguls, corporate and social media platforms, federal agencies like ICE and the police and sheriffs that abet them, and the centrists and Democrats who paved the way for the tragedies of the second Trump era by suppressing grassroots resistance at the conclusion of the first. We should establish red lines within the opposition to Trump, making it unthinkable to promote or excuse any of these forces, showing how toxic the compromises with them have proved.
\n\nHere are some concrete goals that our movements could adopt:
\n\nShut down all milquetoast proposals to make superficial reforms to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, arguing instead for all-out resistance with the long-term goal of abolishing them. Those who have joined or remained in those agencies under Trump have shown their hatred for the rest of the population, making it clear that these institutions exist for the express purpose of serving autocrats. Those who have been imprisoned or deported must be permitted to rejoin their loved ones.
\nConnect the fight against ICE to the abolitionist movements against police and prisons. If Democrat politicians had not put so much effort into suppressing these movements between 2021 and 2024, social movements would have been much better prepared for the second Trump era, and the regime would have had fewer weapons at its disposal with which to impose control.
\nOrganize to free prisoners and compel prosecutors to drop charges against defendants in all cases resulting from resistance to ICE and the Trump regime in general. We can build on the refusals of grand juries to indict and juries to convict those accused of resisting ICE. As it becomes apparent to more people that the law is a political instrument serving those who hold power rather than a neutral institution, many people will seek ways of addressing injustice that do not concentrate power in the hands of a Supreme Court comprised of extreme-right reactionaries.
\nConnect the fight against Donald Trump to the fight against Flock cameras and data centers and—more generally—to the resistance to profiteering techno-fascists like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
\nChannel anti-war organizing towards targeting arms companies responsible for the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
\nShow that the ways that racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry facilitate the cutthroat practices via which billionaires are impoverishing our communities.
\nBuild mutual aid projects, grassroots education projects, and other forms of social infrastructure outside the state that cannot be gutted by government austerity measures or threatened by crackdowns on academic institutions and non-profit organizations.
\nThe collapse of radical social movements at the end of 2020 is a cautionary tale. We must come out of the second Trump era stronger than we entered it. This is especially important because the real battles are only just getting underway. A wave of fascist political victories is looming in Europe, though if Trump is defeated soundly enough that may sap their momentum. Artificial Intelligence is only just beginning to drive massive numbers of people into unemployment while intensifying state surveillance and militarism.
\n\nAs we have argued before, in the 21st century, when the state can do little to mitigate the impact of capitalism, state power is a hot potato that burns whoever holds it. The same conditions that are elevating far-right parties to power around the world are also rendering it difficult for them to hold onto control. But that goes for whoever will succeed Trump, as well: if Trump is driven from office, his base will split into Zionist and neo-Nazi factions, each more virulent than the last generation of Republicans, while whatever administration succeeds him will also provoke anger and disillusionment—likely mobilizing a new wave of momentum from the far right. If what happened under the Biden administration recurs, the backlash next time will be more horrific than anything we can imagine. This is why we must address the problems that capitalism is creating at the root, not simply protest its most noxious figureheads.
\n\nWe must make sure that it is easy for everyone to distinguish our grassroots projects from any government that holds power, and continue to expand and deepen them regardless of whether there is an incompetent demagogue propelling people into the streets. As we have learned over and over—sometimes through courage, sometimes through cowardice—it is safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/1.jpg\")
A demonstrator returns a tear gas canister to the murderers who shot it during the demonstrations in Minneapolis in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd.
\nIn this text, when we speak about stupidity, we do not mean a lack of natural aptitude, but rather the question of whether one chooses to make use of one’s aptitudes or to actively suppress them. By now, it should be apparent to all that the people who paved the way for Trump’s rise—many of whom are strangely obsessed with the idea that they possess natural aptitudes that others do not—have been willfully, obstinately refusing to see what is right in front of their faces. Stupidity, in this sense, is not an intellectual condition, but a moral failing.
\n\nNo one puts this more clearly than the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who witnessed the rise of the Nazis:
\n\n\n\n\nStupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
\n\nYet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what “the people” really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.
\n\n-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “On Stupidity” in Letters and Papers from Prison
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/4.jpg\")
Those who choose to serve tyrants may be able to suppress everything wise and beautiful in themselves, but they will not succeed in destroying wisdom and beauty.
\nThe header photograph was taken by Mark Graves on Sunday, February 1, 2026, at Portland’s ICE facility. It was the second day in a row that federal agents attacked demonstrators with chemical agents.
\n\n“In Prague we used to say cynically that the ideal political regime was a decomposing dictatorship, where the machine of oppression functions more and more imperfectly, but by its mere existence maintains the nation’s spirit in maximum creative tension.” ↩
\nAhead of the third No Kings worldwide day of protest on March 28, we published a call for anarchists to engage with the rallies as an opportunity to draw people into more concrete forms of organizing and action, and offered handouts for that purpose. Here, we share highlights and reports from some of the participants in the day’s events.
\n\nOrganizers claim that a total of eight million participants in the protests, up roughly a million from the October 18 No Kings rallies, which we had also published a call to engage with. Donald Trump’s popularity has reached an all-time low, as he continues to an unpopular war with Iran after his attempt to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize cities like Minneapolis was thwarted by grassroots resistance. Yet concrete mass resistance has yet to take shape in most of the country.
\n\nThis makes anarchists’ efforts to demonstrate a way forward especially important. In Phoenix, in response to a local call for an anarchist contingent in No Kings expressing opposition to borders, ICE, and repression, anarchists displaying banners reading “Solidarity with the Prairieland Nine” and “First they came for the anti-fascists” marched at the very front of the crowd.
\n\nPhoenix, Arizona: Anarchists carry banners at the front of a march during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nMany of the flashpoints of March 28 took place at locations that have already become battlegrounds under the Trump administration. In downtown Los Angeles, protesters hurled chunks of concrete at Department of Homeland Security mercenaries outside the same federal detention center that was at the center of the clashes that touched off the uprising against ICE in June 2025. At the ICE facility in Broadview, near Chicago, Illinois, police arrested and brutalized several protesters. In Denver, protesters took over highway I-25, forcing police to respond with tear gas.
\n\nIn addition to the reports below, you can consult this report-back from anarchists in central Oregon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/4.jpg\")
\nSupporters of the Prairieland defendants attended three No Kings events in DFW this past weekend. We passed out hundreds of fliers and had lots of conversations about the case, with both random attendees and activists. It was a great opportunity to see how far awareness of the case has spread—and it does seem to have spread.
\n\nIn Fort Worth, members of the DFW Support Committee had an official table and a speaking slot. We marched together, including two random young people who felt inspired to join our crew, with the defendant signs and a large banners that read “Free the Prairieland Defendants.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/3.jpg\")
\nIn Modesto, anarchists set up a free zine table with CrimethInc. stickers and color posters at the recent No Kings rally. The rally brought out hundreds of participants. We handed out free zines about the anti-ICE struggle and rapid response networks along with information about protest safety and more. Someone from a local group brought over a big bag of homemade whistle packs they had made at a recent event, featuring the number for the local rapid response line.
\n\nWhile thousands of miles away, the struggle in Minneapolis has had ripple effects here, pushing many to embrace the fight against ICE and get involved in local autonomous efforts. Many speakers at the event encouraged participants to get involved in anti-ICE organizing and to support calls for a general strike on May 1st—efforts we can all amplify and build toward.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/19.jpg\")
\nWe printed 800 flyers. Our little team distributed something like 700 of them in about two hours.
\n\nWe found ourselves circulating alongside the usual suspects selling socialist newspapers, but had positive response rates probably over 80%, with most of us remarking that sustained one-on-one conversations were a personal highlight. X—— and I talked to one older white woman living in Harlem who was giving out quarter sheet flyers that just explained how to download Signal. Lit.
\n\nI’m starting to feel that “liberal” (a coherent historical and political position advocating for free trade and political rights for citizens) is a poor descriptor of this kind of crowd. The widespread affect was both anger and directionlessness. X—— remarked that it would have been easy and politically striking to enter the crowd with huge banners on sticks or flags saying FREE THE PRAIRIELAND DEFENDANTS. The march offered physical and political space for that kind of heterogeneous vibe; an avant-garde contingent could have made use of it.
\n\nIt would have been moving to me to do something like that. It probably been useful for creating a pole to flyer and start conversations around, assuming we had a concrete project to involve people in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/17.jpg\")
Anarchists carry banners at the front of the march on the Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nWe live in a college town of less than 100,000 people. We published an open call for an anarchist contingent in the No Kings demonstration here.
\n\nThe demonstration was to begin downtown, then march through the business district to a rally a half hour’s walk away. We knew it would be very difficult to find each other in the crowd, so we chose a convergence point several blocks away, at a location that has often served as a gathering point for previous anarchist demonstrations.
\n\nAs it turned out, however, some of us met there and proceeded to the main starting point together; others showed up at the starting point of the main demonstration, and indeed became lost in the crowd; and still others went directly to the site of the rally to set up literature tables, as they had done at the previous two No Kings demonstrations.
\n\nOnce those of us who met at the convergence point reached the crowd—which consisted of many thousands of people—we began distributing stickers and handbills promoting anarchism and an upcoming date on the Breaking the ICE speaking tour that was booked nearby. We gave out several hundred of these, but the march got underway before we could find each other again, so we marched in smaller knots, carrying our banners separately rather than in a single bloc. In the end, it may not have made much of a difference—almost everyone on the streets was in the march, so there was no crowd of spectators to witness a coherent anarchist contingent.
\n\nWhen the march reached the rally, it was easier to find each other around the folding tables that our comrades had set up and covered with zines. Throughout the rally, people came up to the tables; this turned out to be the part of the day when we were most identifiable as a political pole within the crowd. One smart tabler put up flyers throughout the rally area encouraging people to download Signal and subscribe to the local announcements-only Signal thread promoting anarchist events in the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/18.jpg\")
An anarchist literature table at a No Kings protest on March 28, 2026.
\nAmong ourselves, we took different approaches to engaging with the crowd. I spent the entire time proselytizing for the upcoming speaking event, just trying to get people into the room to learn about direct action. By contrast, one comrade got into a shouting match with a liberal carrying a sign proclaimed “I want to be governed, not looted”—the liberal simply would not understand why an anarchist would prefer to loot and not to be governed.
\n\nAlthough students at the university make up fully a quarter of the population of this town, the majority of the participants in the demonstration were in their forties or older. That underscores the fact that, while many millions of people have participated in the No Kings demonstrations, millions more who oppose Donald Trump—especially from the demographics that were the driving force behind the George Floyd rebellion—have stayed home. So far.
\n\nAfterwards, I spoke with anarchists in several mid-sized Midwestern cities whose efforts to engage with No Kings had gone similarly: they had showed up with banners and marched together in small groups, without anything happening that was especially worth reporting on. But they did distribute a lot of handbills, whether about the Prairieland case or other things.
\n\nI still think it would be advantageous to be able to show up to these demonstrations in large numbers with black flags and march together in a coherent bloc. If we want people to be interested in participating in anarchist initiatives, we have to show that we are a force to be reckoned with. When the streets are already full of people and the police have their hands full, doing so should be easier and safer than usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/5.jpg\")
A banner displayed by an anarchist contingent in a No Kings demonstration on March 28, 2026.
\nWe live in a mid-sized city, somewhere around 180,000 people. Our previous No Kings events were pretty substantial, and this weekend was no different with maybe 2000 people participating. A medium-sized group of us showed up in full black bloc. Before we even reached the protest, we were heckled by trucks and passersby. Fortunately, we were not the only anarchists there—we immediately found others in bloc that we didn’t even know. Once we combined numbers, we comprised a decent proportion of the protesters present.
\n\nWe spent much of our time leading chants and dancing to music, while the liberals around us sat in almost dead silence. We also handed out about 100 pamphlets and zines and talked to even more people about what being an anarchist means for us.
\n\nOur location in the protest was interesting—we were located on the sidewalk adjacent to a busy intersection, with us at the very end, facing the busiest corner in the area. Many drivers and passersby honked and chanted in support as they passed by. Others were less supportive. One truck dropped burning coal rocks in front of us; it was more pathetic than dangerous.
\n\nAbout 45 minutes in, we saw a crowd developing on the other side of the intersection, wearing MAGA hats and carrying flags and signs of hate. They kept shouting at us from the other side of the street and occasionally throwing things at us. Finally, some of the counter-protesters broke off from their group and walked towards our crowd.
\n\nWe interpreted this as a threat against the safety of every protester present, but also as an opportunity to show people that we don’t have to tolerate hate.
\n\nWe moved to the edge of the sidewalk and cut them off, preventing them from getting to the rest of the crowd. We yelled over them and refused to give them the opportunity to speak. When they got right up to us, they began yelling and threatening us, which caught the attention of some protest “marshals.” The marshals demanded that we let them pass and not give them any attention. We acted like we didn’t hear the marshals and continued blocking the counter-protesters off with a massive sign—poetically, it read “Fascists not welcome!”
\n\nEventually, the counter-protesters made their way back to their people. Altogether, they numbered no more than a dozen compared to our nearly 2000.
\n\nWe believed our presence at no kings was a local success. We spoke to a lot of people sympathetic to anarchism and anarchists. We made many new friends—and some enemies, but we did so unapologetically.
\n\nOne thing we did that we would like to recommend to anarchists everywhere else—stop bringing your phones to protests and instead bring Meshtastic LoRa devices. We were able to communicate effectively and efficiently without getting pinged by any cell towers. Our presence was basically invisible there, and being able to communicate that way gave us a unique advantage over our local surveillance adversaries.
\n\nThis video shows the conflict at the ICE facility in Portland on March 28, 2026.
\nAfter roughly 30,000 people flooded downtown Portland for the No Kings parade, a few hundred made their way to the ICE facility on the South Waterfront. People chanting “ICE out!” filled the driveway, stepping over the thin blue line that federal agents painted across the entrance to denote the point beyond which they are determined to arrest people.
\n\nAfter someone burned an American flag in the driveway, federal agents surged out and made an arrest. The crowd immediately pushed forward, forcing the agents to retreat back inside. Over a hundred people flooded the driveway. Projectiles flew towards the feds—water bottles, sticks, and random objects. Surprisingly, Department of Homeland Security agents did not respond with munitions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/1.jpg\")
The vicinity of the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon.
\nShortly after 6 pm, a band set up across the street, using a megaphone propped up on a mic stand. By sunset, the crowd had swelled to around 500.
\n\nAs the band played on, another rhythm took over: the rattle of the facility gates, shaking in time with the drums. Then—suddenly—they gave way. The gates burst open, and a few people stepped through.
\n\nDHS took their time responding. No Border Patrol, no Border Patrol Tactical Unit, no familiar wall of federal tactical gear—at least, not at first. For the first time in a long time, the feds in Portland hesitated.
\n\nIt turned out that they were waiting for backing from the local authorities.
\n\nSoon after DHS went back inside, Portland Police bike cops formed a line up the street at the intersection of Bancroft and Macadam. A riot van pulled in behind them and Oregon State Troopers spilled out to join the formation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/09.jpg\")
State troopers arrive.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/10.jpg\")
Police line.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/11.jpg\")
A Portland police officer known for his brutality.
\nTogether, they advanced on the crowd. The push from police was immediate and aggressive—they shoved people to the pavement, knocked older folks out of lawn chairs, barked orders to move back when there was physically nowhere to go. They forced the crowd back until they reached the edge of the facility, then declared the area closed, holding the line while the feds repaired their gate.
\n\nJust before 8 pm, nearly an hour later, police pulled back. The gate was fixed and local police had finished doing the feds’ bidding. The crowd erupted: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
\n\nThe fixed gate didn’t last two minutes.
\n\nHands were back on the gate. Metal groaned. And once again, it broke open. The crowd roared. Graffiti spread across the building: “Kill nazis,” among other tags. Within minutes, DHS returned—this time, with Border Patrol agents in full fatigues and gas masks. They carried out more arrests, bringing the total to at least four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/12.jpg\")
DHS agents at night, before they retreated.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/13.jpg\")
DHS agents guarding the gate.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/14.jpg\")
The contested territory.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/15.jpg\")
One federal mercenary displaying egregiously bad muzzle discipline.
\nProtesters attempted to pull back those the officers targeted. They successfully de-arrested some people, despite being continuously obstructed by a wall of livestreamers and photographers raising their cameras.
\n\nEven then, however, the feds held back on using munitions. This was shocking, not what people have come to expect at the ICE facility. The officers moved in, made arrests, and retreated, only to experience another barrage of projectiles. Bottles, sticks, eggs, and other objects rained down until they disappeared behind their doors. While the restraint and lack of “less than lethals” on the part of federal agents was noticeable, this didn’t make the brutality of their arrests any less violent, as multiple arrestees were slammed down to the ground, piled on, and dragged away, and at least one officer pointed his loaded sidearm directly at people’s heads.
\n\nThroughout the night, a handful of far-right instigators were identified and forced out of the crowd. One of them was pummeled with water balloons filled with pink paint to the laughter and cheers of onlookers. Flags caught fire again—one American flag and one flag bearing a swastika. At one point, someone climbed onto the awning and dismantled a security camera piece by piece. This inspired people to take down several other cameras, pulling the wiring out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/08.jpg\")
Right-wing instigators.
\nWhy did federal agents show unusual restraint? Why were local police left to do the bulk of the crowd control? These remain open questions.
\n\nBut one thing is not in question: people kept coming. They repeatedly crossed the blue line painted on the ground. They came back again every time federal agents attempted to push them back. Whatever strategy was unfolding behind those doors, it met with rage, defiance, and a refusal to back down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/16.jpg\")
Mercenaries’ exit, stage left.
\nOn March 28, millions of people around the country will participate in the third day of No Kings rallies. We are calling on everyone to engage with these rallies as an opportunity to build towards more concrete forms of organizing and action. You can read an array of options for what you could do here.
\n\nIn October 2025, we published a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the second No Kings demonstrations. Anarchists across the country engaged with the October No Kings demonstrations in a variety of ways. You can read a collection of reportbacks here.
\n\nAt that time, Trump had just declared “antifa” was a “major terrorist organization,” sowing fear among opponents of the administration. Yet the Trump administration was not able to escalate to a large-scale crackdown on radicals; federal mercenaries still had their hands full attempting to carry out mass arrests and deportations targeting immigrants.
\n\nIn January 2026, the administration tried to solve this problem by sending thousands of ICE agents to the Twin Cities, with the intention of developing a model via which they could go city to city, deporting thousands of people at a time. But the plan backfired, drawing tens of thousands of people into action against ICE and turning public opinion against mass deportations.
\n\nThe fight in the Twin Cities represents a turning point in the history of the second Trump administration. At the grassroots level, the social and political distance between the various forces opposed to Trump is shrinking. The No Kings demonstrations offer an opportunity to consolidate these connections, taking advantage of the widespread popularity of the resistance in Minnesota.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/1.jpg\")
\nRepression is ramping up in regions under the control of Trump’s allies, exemplified by the absurd conviction of nine defendants in the first Prairieland trial. Yet the federal government has picked too many fights at once and is now bogged down from Minneapolis to the Strait of Hormuz. The most effective way to maximize the security of participants in any movement is to expand the numbers of people who participate and escalate the pressure all together, so the authorities can’t isolate and target individuals. As one anarchist said after the October No Kings demonstrations,
\n\n\n\n\nWhat the hell are people talking about it being “dangerous” for anarchists to be at No Kings? It’s dangerous for us NOT to be there.
\n
Thus far, for the most part, the No Kings rallies have not functioned to connect people in active networks to build the capacity to fight. Rather, they have functioned as symbolic expressions of dissatisfaction, revealing anger with both the Republicans and the Democrats. They have shown that there is mass opposition to the regime, but it remains to us to create opportunities for that opposition to assume concrete forms.
\n\nThe time is ripe. Let’s rise to the occasion.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/crown-fire.gif\")
\nHere is an array of options, from most ambitious to easiest. Whoever you are, whatever resources you have at your disposal, there is something you can do.
\n\nGet together with your friends and form a bloc at the rally. With four people, you can paint a big banner proclaiming your politics; with a dozen or more, you might be one of the most organized and visible blocs in the demonstration.
\n\nAnnounce your bloc and tell people how to participate: for example, “meet at the black flags at [a specific intersection].”
\n\nYou could start before the main rally begins and move to it in a group, forming a “feeder march.”
\n\nIn October, a small bloc of anti-authoritarians in one small city spontaneously led the entire rally in an unpermitted march all around downtown.
\n\nIf you have good relations with the rally organizers where you are, you could coordinate with them to play a specific role in the march—for example, dealing with counter-protesters, or leading participants to an action at a local target such as a federal building or ICE facility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/crown-fire-separator.gif\")
\nPlan an event or a series of events to take place after the rally. Distribute fliers at the rally spreading the word.
\n\nYou could bring someone who has participated in resisting ICE in the Twin Cities to speak about the power of direct action, or person from the Palestinian, Venezuelan, or Iranian diasporas to speak about the impact of Trump’s imperialist ventures. You could organize a teach-in about a local issue, followed by a demonstration addressing it.
\n\nYou could organize an assembly, a skill share, a local rapid response network, or a film screening. Whatever you plan, make it accessible to the wide range of people you can expect to encounter at the No Kings demonstration but pointing the way to a more radical framework with each event building upon the last. Envision a future in which your community looks back at the No Kings rally as the beginning of a new chapter of radical resistance.
\n\nMake as many fliers as you expect to see participants at the demonstration. If the last No Kings demonstration in your town brought out a thousand people, you need at least a thousand fliers.
\n\n\nSet up a zine table at your local No Kings protest. For some people, these might be the first zines they’ve ever read. Focus on approachable and introductory texts, but don’t conceal your radical positions—many people are hungry for real alternatives now. CrimethInc. and Sprout Distro offer good selections of PDFs to print. Don’t overwhelm browsers with too many titles—focus on bringing a few solid zines that you can stand behind on the topics that will best equip you to connect with people of other walks of life. Read the material before tabling so you can answer questions and provide recommendations. Invite people to your table and engage them in conversation. Share the beauty and joy of anarchy!
\n\nIf you hurry, there is still time to order our “Immigrants Welcome” stickers here, an array of posters here, and copies of To Change Everything, our introduction to anarchism, here.
\n\nSee below for an array of zines you could use.
\n\n\nDisplay banners and distribute fliers educating your fellow demonstrators about the plight of deportees, political prisoners, and defendants and what they can do to support them. This is a good time to publicize the Prairieland case in particular.
\n\nAt one No Kings rally last October, Asheville anarchists distributed thousands of red bandanas invoking the history of labor struggles in Appalachia, inviting demonstrators to wear them as a gesture of solidarity with the Prairieland defendants.
\n\n\nConnect attendees to local struggles against ICE infrastructure, such as deportation facilities and flock cameras, or against other threats, such as AI data centers. Distribute information about the locations and vulnerabilities of these targets and a few easy actions that anyone can take against them.
\n\nFor best results, of course, connect this with “Promote a Follow-up Event,” above.
\n\n\nMany of us remember the moment when we first encountered radical politics. Maybe yours was the alter-globalization movement, Occupy, the George Floyd Uprising, or the Student Intifada. Some participants at No Kings are not going to be open to hearing radical critiques of capitalism and the state, but make it your mission to find the ones who are ready to join the struggle, who just need a framework and an idea of where to begin. Talk to them about their views and how those might fit within a larger global history of resistance. It’s not about convincing them, but sharing tools to give a name to their longing for liberation.
\n\nMay we sow the seeds of resistance to the state and capitalism. May the branches of our efforts reach towards the sky, towards liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/2.jpg\")
The crown of Empress Eugénie, the equivalent to Melania under Napoleon the Third, pleasingly damaged during the theft in the Apollo Gallery on October 19, 2025.
\nClick on each title to access the PDF for printing.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/eight-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/at-the-turning-of-the-tide_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace_front.jpg\") \n | \n
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/rapid-response-networks-in-the-twin-cities_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/seven-steps-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/the-road-to-prairieland-the-crackdown-on-anti-ice-activists-in-texas-reflects-a-pattern-of-intensifying-repression_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/theres-no-such-thing-as-revolutionary-government_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/direct-action-guide_front.jpg\") \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/3.jpg\")
\nThe war that the United States and Israel are waging in the Middle East is not solely directed at Iran. In addition to occupying the entirety of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and other parts of Syria, Israeli troops are currently occupying parts of Lebanon while Israeli airstrikes pummel the country from above. At least 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Left unchecked, the Israeli government will reduce Lebanon to uninhabitable wreckage, just as it has Gaza.
\n\nTo understand the consequences for people in Lebanon, we reached out to Elia Ayoub, who previously spoke to us about the uprising that took place in Lebanon in October 2019 against the sectarian rule of warlord oligarchs. How should we understand the latest round of hostilities in the context of the last several decades? How does this assault shape the prospects for Lebanese movements for liberation?
\n\nElia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian and researcher from Lebanon. He hosts The Fire These Times podcast, runs the Hauntologies newsletter, and hosts online classes on modern Lebanese history. You can donate to support people displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon here.
\n\nHow did Israeli policies impact your life and the lives of those around you as you were growing up in Lebanon?
\n\nI would have to go back decades to give anything close to a full picture. Israel has been bombing Lebanon for a good part of the past four decades, even if we limit ourselves to starting in 1982. They militarily occupied south Lebanon until 2000, and then bombed Lebanon again in 2006. That was when they developed their notorious Dahieh military doctrine—so called after Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahieh means “suburb” in Arabic)—which explicitly calls for disproportionate bombing of civilian areas to put pressure on Hezbollah. They bombed Lebanon again in 2023 and especially 2024. Then they signed a “ceasefire” with Hezbollah, which they have violated at least 10,000 times since, according to the UN.
\n\nAnd now they are bombing again.
\n\nIsrael violates international law as a matter of state policy. I was 15 years old during the 2006 war. I remember watching Israeli jets dropping bomb after bomb over Dahieh. Close friends who are from the South, Dahieh, and the Bekaa valley have experienced death, displacement, and trauma multiple times over. Virtually everyone in Lebanon has witnessed an Israeli bombing, regardless of their age. If you have lived in Lebanon for a long enough period, you have experienced Israeli state violence.
\n\nWe’re talking about millions of people from all walks of life, of all political persuasions—children and their parents and grandparents. For example, my 89-year-old grandmother, who fled the Nakba in 1948 as a child, has never passed more than a few years at a time in nearly a century of life without being directly or indirectly impacted by Israeli state violence. That’s all we know about Israelis. There is a widespread perception that they are incapable of existing as a political culture without war.
\n\nThis is entirely missing from most of the coverage I’ve seen, which is limited to inhuman geopolitical abstracts. What is happening right now is not just about Hezbollah (which is already unpopular in Lebanon) dragging the country into foreign wars. If this was simply about Hezbollah, Israel wouldn’t be ethnically cleansing entire villages by dynamiting them. Israel wouldn’t be spraying herbicides over large swaths of Lebanon and Syria to kill crops and wildlife in order to make the land unusable for agriculture. Israeli politicians wouldn’t be routinely threatening to bomb Lebanon back to the dark ages, or threatening to turn Dahieh into Gaza, or designating all Lebanese Shias—roughly a third of the population—as a hostile population.
\n\nHezbollah, a deeply reactionary party that I’ve long opposed—I say this simply to avoid confusion—would have never existed in the first place were it not for the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. There would have been no reason for a group that called itself the Islamic resistance to exist were it not for the fact that it was necessary to resist such a brutal foreign occupier.
\n\nAnd now, in the past few days, Israel has ordered the forced evacuation—effectively, the ethnic cleansing—of the entirety of southern Lebanon, Dahieh, and parts of the Bekaa. History is repeating itself, only now the weapons of mass destruction that the Israeli government possesses are even deadlier than before.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/1.jpg\")
Israel repeatedly struck Beirut’s southern suburbs during the first week of March 2026.
\nHow have Israeli policies and actions towards Lebanon and the region as a whole shifted over the past decade?
\n\nA sort of stalemate prevailed for most of the period following 2006, with escalations here and there. The Israelis were busy bombing Gaza from 2008 onward, especially in 2014, and Hezbollah occupied with defending the Assad regime in Syria. During that period, Israeli politicians never missed an opportunity to tell Lebanon that they can destroy us whenever they want—that they intend to do so.
\n\nWhatever Israel did in Gaza, we knew that they wanted to do the same in Lebanon. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that. Israelis tell us these things outright.
\n\nWhat has shifted is that Israeli politics has become even more explicitly genocidal than before. The attacks of October 7th provided an already genocidal political culture with the excuse it needed. We’ve all seen the results.
\n\nFrom a Lebanese point of view, seeing Israel get more and more violent made a lot of people conclude that, once they are “finished” with Gaza, they will turn their eyes to Lebanon.
\n\nRepeated Israeli incursions and air raids have created mass displacement within Lebanon. How have Lebanese people organized themselves in these chaotic moments? What groups or movements have helped people escaping the war?
\n\nWe should remember that this latest round of mass displacement comes after a similar one in 2024 that mostly affected the same areas. There are established paths for those with connections to stay with friends or relatives, for those with means to rent out a place, and so on.
\n\nAs for those who do not have these means, they are the hardest hit; many have been sleeping on the streets. We often see neighboring villages that aren’t as affected sheltering those who are fleeing, at least temporarily, while people make their way to their destination, if they have one in mind. People are adapting to an evolving situation on a daily basis. Some are fundraising on their own or as part of groups, others are volunteering with soup kitchens.
\n\nHowever, it’s impossible to “escape the war,” as the consequences are felt throughout the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/2.jpg\")
Israeli armoured personnel carriers (APCs) on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border on March 8, 2026.
\nIn 2019, there was a burst of social movement activity in Lebanon drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. What became of that time of possibility?
\n\nI wrote about this for CrimethInc. at the time.
\n\nThe 2019 moment was the biggest uprising this country had ever seen. It was only possible because of years of organizing and protests, years of governmental corruption, and—of particular importance to this conversation—a long enough period of time without Lebanon being bombed. We would have not been able to take to the streets if Israelis were bombing those streets and our homes—which is what is happening now, once again.
\n\nThis shows how Israel has been good to Lebanon’s sectarian regime.
\n\nThe horizons that opened up in 2019 were closed soon after by a combination of factors: repression (including by Hezbollah), economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. For most of the years since, most people have been simply trying to survive, with many people working on mutual aid, soup kitchens, and other forms of community building. We could reasonably attribute the emergence of those efforts to those few months in late 2019 and early 2020 that showed people—in particular, the generation that came of age after the 1975-1990 Lebanon wars—what is possible when we get together and organize.
\n\nThat’s where that time of possibility went. But I think we haven’t seen the end of that potential yet.
\n\nHow do you understand the relationship between Netanyahu’s government and Trump’s government today? Which is determining the course of events, and towards what end?
\n\nWe know from US officials, including Marco Rubio, that Israel made the call to attack Iran and the US decided to join—so in that sense, the Israeli government is the one making the call. It’s surreal that the smaller power managed to drag the much larger power into this, and that a decision made by a fairly small number of people in Israel has had such consequences for the world economy, not to mention the ongoing death toll and the environmental disaster.
\n\nThe Americans have no end goal. They did not plan ahead at all. Now we’re seeing Trump unhappy with Israel bombing Iranian oil depots, which means they didn’t even coordinate together. It’s unclear what the Israelis want beyond spreading chaos as an end in itself. It’s possible they were arrogant enough to believe that they could impose regime change in Iran via aerial bombardment alone, but as far as I can tell, they are happy simply to destroy as much of Iran as they can, while they can. This is a regime that has gotten away with carrying out genocide in view of the entire world for over two years, so it clearly believes it can act with impunity indefinitely.
\n\nThere are different ideologies on the American side as well. The Christian nationalist and Zionist Pete Hegseth is celebrating the destruction in Iran as a victory in and of itself. As for Trump, he is clearly out of his depth. He did not expect things to get this bad this quickly. He likely hoped for an outcome like the one in Venezuela, where he got rid of Maduro but kept the regime in place with Delcy Rodríguez in charge but subservient to the will of the US government. They cannot achieve that in Iran—not only because the Iranian regime is more powerful, but also because the Israelis have their own priorities.
\n\nIf the Americans were smarter, they would have understood by now that their problem is Israel. Even if your goal were simply to preserve US supremacy, American support for Israel has been a disaster. They have destroyed the illusion of Gulf security in a matter of days, destabilized the world economy, and proven to every government, once and for all, that the US cannot be trusted. However this ends, we are going to see a realigned world with reduced US influence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/3.jpg\")
The consequences of an Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on March 9, 2026.
\nOf all the responses to the US and Israeli aggression modeled by different political forces in Lebanon and throughout the surrounding region, which could point towards a horizon of liberation?
\n\nIn Lebanon, groups like Buzuruna Juzuruna, which focuses on food sovereignty, and Egna Legna, an Ethiopian migrant women-run non-profit providing shelter, food safety and more, are examples of what is possible in the country beyond the sectarian and nationalist status quo. Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon is another one, as their definition of the queer community in Lebanon is not limited to Lebanese queers only.
\n\nIn times of war, “humanitarian” discourse can either reproduce existing power dynamics—for example, by ignoring migrant domestic workers or queer Lebanese people—or depoliticize an inherently political situation—for example, reporting on how migrant domestic workers are affected without mentioning that Israel is bombing civilian areas forcing everyone to flee. Groups like the ones I have cited cut through all of this. They operate on a logic of people supporting people because they’re people. That can be a very radical act.
\n\nMilitary attacks by foreign powers—especially by imperialist nations—often produce a strong patriotic feeling among those who experience them. How should movements for liberation engage with this?
\n\nThis isn’t really happening in Lebanon because the country is already fractured. There are many people who also blame Hezbollah for responding to Khamenei’s assassination by launching rockets towards Israel, so you’re not going to see a “rallying behind the troops” situation.
\n\nWhat are the most effective things that grassroots social movements elsewhere in the world can do right now to support those enduring this violence?
\n\nI always hesitate with questions like this one, only because “effectiveness” is a criterion that involves too many different factors to consider. As a general rule, I’d say adopting an anti-authoritarian framework is a good way to avoid downplaying the suffering of people who live under regimes like the Ayatollah’s while recognizing that this war has nothing to do with liberating those people.
\n\nI also think this is a situation in which the diasporas and their supporters outside of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine can play a significant role. For example, there is very little space in Iran today for pro-Palestine activism, because the Ayatollah’s regime has long co-opted pro-Palestine discourse to its own ends—which have nothing to do with decolonizing Palestine and promoting an anti-Zionist solution that treats everyone equally regardless of religion or ethnicity. Iran has a system that can reasonably be described as gender apartheid. A state like that cannot liberate Palestinians from Israel’s ethno-supremacist apartheid.
\n\nThose of us in the diasporas can make the link between the authoritarianism of Israel and the authoritarianism of Iran without equating the two. This is crucial, because we need to be sensitive to the experience of those who are victimized by both regimes. To a Palestinian in Gaza, it could sound offensive to say that Iran is as bad as Israel, and vice versa to the Ayatollah’s victims in Iran. The absence of such nuance makes it easier for those—including parts of the Iranian diaspora—who promote the idea that Israel will liberate Iran.
\n\nThere is anti-Arab racism among the Iranian diaspora that, ironically, shares similarities with the Ayatollah regime’s repression of non-Persian groups such as Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds. It is a form of ethno-supremacy that attracts and is attracted to the Zionist ethno-supremacy that most readers of this platform are more familiar with.
\n\nOn the Palestinian diaspora side, more could be done to recognize the violence of the Ayatollah’s regime and the so-called “axis of resistance,” both of which have killed thousands upon thousands of people—including Palestinian Syrians who opposed Assad—while pretending to be pro-Palestine. Such connections are much more difficult to make in our region, but diasporas with more privileges can help build those desperately needed bonds.
\n\nWhile we’re at it, we should also be building bonds with members of the Jewish diaspora that reject Zionist ethno-supremacy in favor of building a common future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/4.jpg\")
The site of an Israeli airstrike targeting the Lebanese city of Tyre on March 6, 2026.
\nOne of the most exhausting things about horrific tragedies like this is that they force us to focus on harm reduction rather than on building the world of our dreams. If not for the US and Israeli attacks, what would you prefer to be thinking about, doing, creating?
\n\nI would be living in my home village in Lebanon, thinking about whether to go somewhere more rural where I could work on and with the land to build food sovereignty and promote mutual aid from the ground up across the country and beyond.
\n\nI would be spending more time in the woods there, learning local names for the animals and plants with my child, who has never been to Lebanon.
\n\nI appreciate this question, because it can be easy to forgot the scale of what was robbed of us. I do my best to keep hope and create roots wherever I am, but I am also always mourning what the multi-generational machines of destruction that are the Israeli and American states have done to our lives.
\n\nAs long as there is a rogue and hyper-militaristic Zionist state to our south, it is too dangerous for me to live in Lebanon with my child.
\n\nFrom February 25 to March 1, aspiring revolutionaries in the Twin Cities hosted hundreds of people who traveled to Minnesota to take part in the Melt the ICE week of action. Multiple events took place every day, including marches, blockades, noise demos, speaking events, and trainings. These actions and workshops served both to bolster the resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota and to teach activists from all over the country how to export the Twin Cities’ rapid response model to their hometowns.
\n\nIn this report, organizers reflect on the week of action and draw out lessons for the movement as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/3.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nFor three months, Minnesotans have supported our friends, family, and neighbors who shelter in place and face the constant threat of kidnapping at the hands of federal agents. We have experienced daily encounters with tear gas, high-speed car chases, and the threat of deadly violence. At the same time, we witnessed a dizzying flurry of analyses about why our resistance was so strong and robust. Where could this moment take us?
\n\nYet less than two weeks after the murder of Alex Pretti, we began to lose momentum. The international uproar following Pretti’s death forced the Trump regime to make concessions, changing tactics in Minnesota and firing Greg Bovino, the so-called “commander-at-large” of US Customs and Border Protection and the public face of Operation Metro Surge. These concessions were designed to take the wind out of the sails of the resistance—and to some degree, they worked.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/1.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nThis was only possible because our movement lacked a political horizon beyond “ICE out.” While everyday militancy and care had blossomed around the common goals of defeating ICE and supporting our neighbors, there was less momentum around demands to free the same neighbors from the concentration camps where they are now held.
\n\nOne of our comrades had the idea to organize a week of action to share the tactics at the heart of our resistance movement and to continue to build towards revolutionary struggle. It instantly made sense. Since the murder of Renee Good, we had been hearing from comrades across the country that they wanted a way to come here and plug in. And we were nowhere near ready to let go of the revolutionary potential of this moment in the Twin Cities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/8.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAs aspiring revolutionaries living in the Twin Cities, by late February 2026, we were swinging back and forth between contradicting perceptions of reality. From one perspective, we were triumphant: we had driven out a fascist paramilitary force bent on kidnapping innocent people. Alongside our neighbors, we had demonstrated that we would not tolerate authoritarianism in our cities. From another perspective, it didn’t feel like we had won at all. Thousands of Minnesotans had been captured, at least three had died at the hands of ICE, and most of the abductees were stuck in concentration camps across the country awaiting an unknown fate in horrific conditions. We had thwarted many abductions, but we were still witnessing more.
\n\nWith the exceptions of the rebellion in North Minneapolis after ICE shot Julio Sosa-Celis on January 14, and the autonomous zones that the people briefly established around the sites where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, we had seen few instances of prolonged confrontation with the state. Even the mass mobilization day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” (which union reps, bound by law, could not even call a “strike”) brought us little closer to direct conflict with ICE and its collaborators. Despite the historic participation of more than 300,000 people, the logic and power of a general strike was so obfuscated that, when some groups pressed for another strike on January 30 a week after the first one, volunteers who had been asked to spread the word to small businesses reported, “They don’t want to close again because of profit loss—is there any way we could offer financial support?”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/13.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nThe questions pressed on us: how could we push this movement towards revolutionary struggle, sharpen our collective analysis, and ensure that this moment that had been consuming our daily lives did not end in citywide burnout?
\n\nPrevious experiences had taught us the potential of bringing people together from across the country to build resistance. These included mass calls to action to Stop Cop City, the Treaty People Gathering mobilization in northern Minnesota during the construction of the Line 3 pipeline, and the legacy of summit-hopping in the early 2000s. The relationships we forged at these mobilizations have shaped our movements. Many of our closest friendships emerged from these.
\n\nWe decided to give it another shot. We hoped that if we built enough energy, the next time that ICE planned a large-scale operation anywhere in the country, this same convergence could take place again.
\n\nSo, yes, if ICE comes to your city, we will bring the heat to you.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/26.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nAs we spread the idea of the week of action, local organizers were excited despite sedimentary layers of burnout. The initial discussions confirmed that this event would reach across tendencies. Activists and organizations across the state agreed to our long-term goals of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, police, and prisons. This unity stems from the George Floyd uprisings, where police abolition became a mainstream value in Minnesota. Now, even nonprofits can be pushed to sign on to the goal of abolition.
\n\nThis demand did alienate some groups, which did not sign on. But we had more than enough collaborators. One of the mistakes of the Trump administration has been giving us something we can all work on together.
\n\nAs the week of action began to take shape, we knew that we wanted to center the tactics that we believe are most likely to continue to erode state power. The most important of these is the rapid response networks, which have been so central in disrupting ICE operations. We wanted to get as many people on the streets practicing rapid response as possible, both to give new people firsthand practice and to bolster the numbers on the streets during what the authorities claimed were the final days of the occupation. This is the part of the movement that brings people into direct confrontation with ICE and the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/19.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nWe also conceived of the week of action as a means of drawing attention to “secondary targets,” corporate and government ICE collaborators that prop up the deportation machine.
\n\nOne example of a secondary target is the predatory housing system. We knew that starting in the first week of March, many vulnerable people who had been unable to work during Operation Metro Surge would begin to face eviction. Local tenant organizers had begun calling for an eviction moratorium in January. In February, they began leveraging a call for a rent strike in defense of families facing eviction. This was a form of practical solidarity with our undocumented neighbors and a move towards flexing economic power not seen in the US for decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/5.jpg\")
\nSimilarly, we wanted to exert economic leverage on a variety of other entities that facilitate federal operations—including Hilton and various other hotel chains that contract with ICE, companies like Enterprise Rent-a-Car that provide them with vehicles, and corporations like Target and Home Depot that allow them to stage on their property at the expense of vulnerable employees. We also called for people to organize to make their workplaces as hostile to and noncompliant with ICE as possible. Nurses and other hospital workers led the charge in this arena, especially at locations that had experienced ICE attacks, such as Hennepin County Medical Center.
\n\nIn preparation for the week of action, we built out our working groups and got a website online. There has been extensive coverage of Operation Metro Surge—endless content flooding social media feeds, local news cycles dominated by various related stories, daily spots in national and global outlets. We created materials that we hoped could attract attention in this barrage, flooded the channels of our existing networks, and waited for RSVPs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/16.jpg\")
A bike patrol training on February 26, 2026.
\nThe idea for the week of action had emerged in the final days of January; the working groups did not come together until the second week of February. By the time our RSVP form was live, the opening night of this production was only two weeks away. This tight timeline was responsible for many of our efforts’ shortcomings. Had we started a few days later, it might have been impossible to organize a week of action altogether.
\n\nOne consequence of this short turnaround time was that the week of action self-selected participants for whom it was possible to leave home for several days on short notice, with no financial assistance for transportation. Although we were able to provide communal meals every day from February 24 to March 1, and we owe a debt of gratitude to locals who opened their homes to strangers so that we could house everyone who requested it, this event was still primarily accessible to white, middle-class participants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/22.jpg\")
A meeting at a church on February 26, 2026.
\nWe were grateful for feedback from a participant who pointed out a related dynamic: our events had a lack of intentional gathering space for immigrants and people of color. Community and connection are the factors that keep people grounded in movements. We could have done more to develop a collective sense of belonging.
\n\nWe do not blame these problems solely on the tight timeline. This phenomenon is a core dynamic of the movement itself, and speaks to a complex question of how to craft an interracial and intercultural movement. The overlapping cultures of white activists, the middle class, and neighborhood leaders in rapid response channels exist in profound separation from their Black and brown counterparts, who are fiercely organizing to defend their own communities. There are many reasons for this separation. Many of our neighbors of color are so vulnerable that they are sheltering in place. Many more are immobilized by poverty conditions, or do not trust white organizers who come to them with pre-formed agendas. Thus far, our failures to build a truly multiracial movement continue to hinder our effectiveness. The so-called drawdown has revealed the character of this movement: ICE is still operating, but because they are no longer so visible on the streets, where they will be directly witnessed by white people, participation in the resistance has declined.
\n\nHow can we carry this movement forward, broaden its scope, and move beyond moderation?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/17.jpg\")
An art build on February 26, 2026.
\nPolitical education is crucial to fostering the strength, militancy, and collective analysis of our movements. As part of the week of action, we put on several dozen training sessions on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. These included tutorials on how to set up rapid response networks, skillshares about basic first aid for chemical weapons, a discussion of the impact of the 2020 George Floyd uprising, presentations by teachers and parents on school patrols and school-based mutual aid networks, a panel on ICE resistance in other cities, and much more.
\n\nIn preparing these sessions, we emphasized the principles of popular education: including room for input, cultivating participant-generated discussion, and teaching through contradictions. We did this for the benefit of the facilitators as much as the participants. We knew that active reflection on our tactics through teaching would reveal as much to us as it did to those who came to learn.
\n\nTo our surprise, many people offered sessions freely, without being asked. The closer we got to the event, the more ideas began to flow about what we should discuss and how. The memorial stewards of the sites of the murders of George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti offered to present a session. For every political education session we offered, there were dozens more we wanted to offer, and thousands more people we wish had heard them.
\n\nAnother core component of the week of action was inviting participants into local rapid response systems. After attending sessions that detailed the function of rapid response systems and best practices for responding to ICE, we gave attendees the choice to participate in “commuting” (patrolling in cars) and patrolling on foot. The stewards of local rapid response networks, which operate on a geographical basis, designed systems for integrating hundreds of out-of-towners. Patrollers from various neighborhoods trained well over a hundred participants. We took them on “ridealongs” in our neighborhoods following typical patrolling routes, hosted foot and bike patrolling sessions, and ran dispatch for a Signal call for people who followed ICE vehicles as they left the Whipple Federal Building.
\n\nThroughout the week, many participants voiced concerns that local rapid response systems would prove unique to the Twin Cities context and be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Despite these reservations, they began to strategize creatively about how they might adjust rapid response structures to account for differences in demographics and the relative size of their cities. There was very little ICE activity reported that week in Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves, but consistent reports came in from the suburbs, exurbs, and rural Minnesota.
\n\nSome comrades speculate that ICE operations have moved away from the Twin Cities metro area due to the organizing here. Suburban and rural areas present different geographical and political challenges to rapid responders, but it would be wrong to say they are not organized. Neighborhoods within the metro area are increasingly partnering with suburbs and rural areas to bolster capacity and coordination. Out-of-town participants found this inspiring when thinking of ways to build rapid response networks in their home contexts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/18.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nThe decline of Operation Metro Surge poses a question: what will become of these rapid response structures?
\n\nAlongside political education and patrolling, organizers hosted a variety of actions against ICE around the Twin Cities. In our wildest dreams, the week would have involved so much action around the cities that the police would have been unable to keep up with all of it. The goals were to pressure ICE and those that work with them, raise public consciousness about secondary targets (hotels, rental car companies, county jails that are holding ICE detainees) and take action against them, disrupt ICE’s operating logistics, and offer replicable avenues for a wide range of people and organizations to join in.
\n\nOur actions were hosted by a variety of organizations. Some actions were somewhat less confrontational, such as a rally at the State Capitol and an open mic at the Whipple Federal Building. On Friday, February 27, a “March against ICE Collaborators” snaked through downtown, stopping at various corporate targets—including Target’s corporate headquarters, Hilton, Enterprise, CBS News, and a construction firm called United Properties, not to mention the Hennepin County Jail. Marchers covered the streets with slogans in chalk, and ended by throwing snowballs at effigies of Mayor Jacob Frey and “Border Czar” Tom Homan.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/2.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nAlso on February 27, hundreds of local students hosted a walkout and sit-in at the State Capitol rotunda. The students were accompanied by the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers, a Mexica-Nahua group. That same day, several protesters were indicted on charges related to the alleged disruption of a church service at a church led by a pastor who worked with ICE. Upon learning of this through the rapid response channels, the students who walked out boarded their bus and drove straight from the Capitol to the federal courthouse.
\n\nFebruary 27, 2026: march in the Twin Cities against ICE collaborators.
\nOn Saturday, February 28, neighborhoods hosted block parties to build community, spend time together, and block ICE from their streets. A local childcare collective hosted a parade for kids and families. Affinity groups hosted autonomous nighttime noise demos at the hotels where ICE agents sleep. People at one of these demonstrations later went to certain DHS officials’ home addresses.
\n\nWe invited many formal organizations to help organize these actions—Indigenous Roots, Sunrise Movement, Unidos, 50501, Democratic Socialists of America, Veterans for Peace, Black Cat Workers Collective, and more. While we remain critical of the non-profit industrial complex and progressive politics, all of these organizations agreed to the abolitionist line of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the police, and prisons. We aim to resist left sectarianism and work across party lines wherever we can. These organizations didn’t necessarily host the actions that we would have, but they collaborated with us in the coordinating committee meetings and they provided options for people to participate in a range of different kinds of activity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/7.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nSaturday also featured a demonstration at the Sherburne County Jail. In Minnesota, ICE has partnered with several county jails to imprison immigrant detainees. Sherburne currently imprisons many undocumented abductees, as well as prisoners of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising. We brought art and a speaker to the parking lot at the Sherburne, and a DJ blasted protest music. We danced to stay warm. We chanted “Fuck ICE” and “We love you,” hoping that our imprisoned sisters and brothers could hear us from inside. With hundreds more protesters, we might hope to eventually block the entrance and actually slow jail operations; for now, we remind our incarcerated relatives that we have not forgotten them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/27.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nOn Sunday, March 1, we marched to the Whipple Federal Building to demand freedom for our stolen neighbors and the return of stolen Indigenous lands. We marched through the streets just south of Whipple, and were pushed back by a line of riot cops from our attempt to block the south entrance. Dispersed interactions with sheriffs and conservation officers mounted into a standoff. In the midst of the standoff, the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli arrived to dance and to pray. Officers then declared an unlawful assembly and surged into the so-called “protest zone,” arresting 29 people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/10.jpg\")
The Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers on March 1, 2026.
\nAt the same time as this march arrived at the southeast side of Whipple, a smaller autonomous action blockaded the road on the northwest side of the building with shields and reinforced banners. Sheriffs deployed chemical weapons and arrested 11 more people, for a total of 40 arrests that day. No ICE traffic went in or out of the building for more than two hours, even after the protests on both sides had dispersed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/12.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAcross the political education sessions, rapid response trainings, and protests, we could feel considerable exhaustion from local organizers. Turnout was lower from locals than we expected, an unsurprising outcome from a drained base. Nonetheless, in the course of the week, thousands of us took various forms of offensive action against ICE. We brought the heat to targets already facing pressure; we spotlighted corporations that we will continue to campaign against. We know that our organizing and action must continue nationwide.
\n\nYou can help. You can disrupt primary and secondary ICE targets where you live, be they detention centers, Hiltons, Enterprises, Targets, or other corporations that assist ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/23.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nWhat did the week of action show about how we can build revolutionary struggle in this moment?
\n\nOur network contains many and varied approaches to revolutionary organizing. We seek to take what is best in each of these tendencies, fit them together, and attempt to address the contradictions that arise. The week of action was one attempt to address these contradictions. Many communist and anarchist groups that have throwing down here brought in their comrades from around the country.
\n\nIn the Twin Cities context, one political tendency has deeper and broader roots in poor and working class communities than communists or anarchists: progressive nonprofits and labor unions. At their best, these organizations can provide a measure of political power for some of the most oppressed members of the working class. The major drawback is that they cannot withstand the inertia of the nonprofit-industrial complex, as they are beholden to their billionaire funders and to the limitations of the law. Consequently, they rarely overcome bureaucracy or engage in real militant resistance to the ruling class.
\n\nThe Week of Action was one attempt to collaborate between the groups listed above—not out of long-term political alignment, but out of practical necessity. Creating a revolutionary movement will require coordinating across all these tendencies.
\n\nAnother potent element of the week of action was multicultural celebration. To be able to overcome the US empire, we will need a resistance movement that is welcoming and irresistible in its appeal. Together, we ate Somali sambusas, danced to the Chicano music of Las Cafeteras, witnessed the power of the Indigenous Roots danza, participated in Dakota ceremonies, and ended the week with a rave. We don’t list these experiences to emphasize multiculturalism for its own sake, but to identify them as some of the most euphoric and important parts of the week of action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/24.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nIt is crucial to integrate deeply-rooted cultural practices into our resistance. Activists in the United States must learn from revolutionary comrades in the Global South. It’s not enough for white people just to march on behalf of their undocumented neighbors—we must build deep, long-lasting, and politicized relationships across cultural boundaries.
\n\nIf everyone who has ever done a rapid response patrol signed on to the Twin Cities Tenants Union’s strike pledge, it would exceed its goal of 10,000 participants, and we could exert real leverage upon the ruling class. Likewise, if everyone who works alongside an immigrant was willing to march on the boss for them and with them, our movement would become more powerful.
\n\nWe must sharpen our analysis of the moment alongside our neighbors and coworkers. One means of achieving this is to continue to hold regular political education sessions at which to learn about and reflect on what the people of Minnesota have accomplished over the last three months and what we can accomplish together in the future. Without intentional, communal reflection, we may not be able to grow.
\n\nOperation Metro Surge is ongoing. In fact, we’ve seen an uptick in ICE activity in the days since the week of action. As federal agents shift towards more covert methods, the resistance must continue to adapt and grow. We would like to extend gratitude to everyone who contributed to the week of action and everyone who participated. We invite critique while celebrating the will, skill, and determination that brought us together.
\n\nIn the great people’s uprising against ICE, the Week of Action was just one small part. Every great historical movement is comprised of a thousand small parts.
\n\nAll power to the people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/20.jpg\")
February 26, 2026.
\nOn March 1, 2026, at the conclusion of a week of action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupation of the Twin Cities, protesters converged on the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota. At least four hundred people marched on the southeast side of the building to demand that ICE withdraw from Minnesota and that the land Fort Snelling occupies be given back to the Dakota people. Many Native people participated in the march, including members of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Chippewa tribes. On the opposite end of the building, a group of fifty protesters blockaded Minnehaha Avenue with shields, reinforced banners, homemade tank traps, and improvised barricades.
\n\nHennepin County Sheriffs and Minnesota State Troopers attacked both protests almost immediately. They tackled and dragged dozens of people out of the march on the southeast side. At the blockade on the northwest side, they beat protesters, sprayed them with bear mace, and slammed a person’s head against the pavement. One person bled from their eyes and suffered corneal damage from taking so much mace.
\n\nThe sheriffs arrested forty people in total. Ten of these arrests occurred at the blockade and thirty at the march. The first attacks on the march did not occur until after the barricades on the other side of the building were cleared away. Presumably, the blockade functioned keep pressure off the march by drawing police attention elsewhere.
\n\nFrom Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police who answer to Democratic officials have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local authorities, federal agencies would have been outmaneuvered by protest movements long ago. Every time cops and sheriffs participate in brutalizing those who oppose the ways that ICE is abducting and murdering people, this shows the complicity of Democratic officials in the rise of fascism.
\n\nDespite the hardships that the participants endured, this brave action shows that the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities is not over. In replacing so-called “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino with “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Donald Trump is trying to rebrand the agency responsible for the high-profile murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (Homan himself accepted a bag of $50,000 in return for promising to distribute government contracts in an FBI sting operation in 2024, aptly illustrating how the persecution of immigrants functions as a cover for government corruption and the military-industrial complex.) Yet even after the withdrawal of thousands of ICE agents from the Twin Cities, more than 400 remain—an unprecedented number before the surge of federal mercenaries into the city two months ago. Thankfully, people are not finished fighting ICE.
\n\nHere, an anarchist in Minneapolis who participated in the blockade action describes what happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/4.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nIt was a cold, bright morning when I got to the north lot outside Whipple. About forty people were already there. I was nervous. Our numbers were dangerously small. We knew going in this would be a smaller action, but I felt exposed. The wind buffeted us in the shadow of the seven-story concrete detention center. Were we about to get slaughtered?
\n\nWe waited a few minutes. People hugged each other and huddled in their affinity groups whispering pep talks. Eleven more comrades trickled in. I counted every one of us, then counted again. Two Hennepin County Sheriff cars were watching from the other side of the parking lot. We had scarcely more than fifty people.
\n\nA van swerved into the north lot and screeched to a halt. The first deployment team leaped out, already in gas masks, and started throwing hastily-painted plastic shields out of the back of the van. Everyone scrambled to empty the van, fastening respirators and goggles to their faces and grabbing shields. The sheriffs got out of their cars; they were yelling into their radios calling for backup. A cop car heading south towards Whipple made a sharp U-turn and plowed over the curb of the median strip to cut us off.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/10.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nWe had barely left the parking lot when a stout, mustachioed sheriff pepper-sprayed the person to my left. The person flinched and fell backwards, but did not cry out. Medics started flushing their eyes. We kept pushing forward.
\n\nA line of sheriffs blocked our path before we reached our intended blockade point. Some of them were in normal uniforms; others were in full kit tactical gear, looking almost exactly like the federal agents who guarded this area in the recent past. One of them menaced us with a can of bear spray. I fiddled with my goggles, frantically trying to stop the damn things from fogging up in the cold.
\n\n“IF YOU HAVE A SHIELD, PUT IT ON THE GROUND NOW!” a sheriff bellowed at us. He bellowed the same phrase again, and then a third time.
\n\n“Not today, asshole,” somebody to my right shouted back. “Is your family proud of you, you fucking pig?”
\n\nThe cops ran at us. They maced somebody. They started grabbing shields and wrenching them out of people’s hands. I was standing in the front. A sheriff put both his hands on the top of somebody’s shield and they wrestled back and forth over it. The person let go of the shield, and the sheriff toppled backwards and fell on his back.
\n\nSomebody started shouting instructions to fall back. Most of us did. The sheriffs tackled two brave people who were slower to retreat. Three or four officers dogpiled onto each of them. One person’s helmet flew off and they struggled to stand up. A sheriff threw himself on top of them, smashing their head onto the sidewalk with an audible crack.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/1.jpg\")
\nSomeone with a bullhorn walked out into the street, attempting to take the road a second time. She started a chant: “Whose streets? Our streets!” The cops immediately tackled her, as well. The rest of us followed, trying to get back into the street to form a shield wall. Two sheriffs flanked the person in front of me and tried to pull them forward. People on our side grabbed the person by the backpack and tried to pull them back. The sheriffs hit us with another jet of bear mace and we lost the person. Someone else in the front was holding the line as best they could, shoving back and forth with their shield. A sheriff tried to grab them by the arms, but a comrade behind them crouched and hugged them around the waist, wrenching them backwards. That person got away.
\n\nWhen the melee concluded, they had arrested ten of us. There were only forty of us left in the street. The number of cops confronting us had dropped, too, as many of them had their hands full detaining our arrested comrades and putting them into a van. We fell back again and put up a shield wall, now with a severely diminished number of shields. Somebody grabbed a pallet and a broken stop sign from the side of the road and threw them into the street in front of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/5.jpg\")
\nOnly after the arrests did the sheriffs issue a dispersal order.
\n\nThe next ten minutes felt like hours. The sheriffs kept their distance now. I think they were calling for reinforcements. Four vehicles blocked the road in front of us, and two blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Hiawatha behind us. I was afraid we were going to get kettled. We huddled together in the freezing wind, crouching behind our few remaining shields. A middle-aged woman pulled up her car behind us. For a moment, I thought she could be ICE. Then she yelled out her drivers’ side window: “You guys are all so hot and brave!!!”
\n\nOur morale was low by this point, but she helped boost it.
\n\nThen, finally, the cavalry arrived. A second deploy team pulled up in a flatbed truck. People swarmed around the back of the truck, ripped away a green tarp, and pulled out buckets of hinges, nails, and scrap metal. We dumped them onto the barricade. We also pulled out three “tankbuster” traps—four-foot-high welded jacks that looked like barricades from the beaches at Normandy, and positioned them to block the road. Piled beneath all this stuff, we pulled out two 8’ x 4’ reinforced banners made of corrugated steel. I wish we’d had this shit 20 minutes ago, I grumbled to myself.
\n\nWe held the road for another half hour. The sheriffs did not approach us again. Taken aback by the barricade, they were constantly talking into their radios. At 10:24 am, I received a text on my burner phone that the march on the other side of Whipple was no longer holding the street. This meant ICE had an egress point at Gate 3 and were no longer trapped inside. That was our cue to leave. We called our exfil team.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/6.jpg\")
\nIronically, the smoothness of our exit seemed to disorient the sheriffs more than anything we’d done at the blockade. Eight cars pulled up behind us and we piled in, abandoning the barricade and peeling off toward Hiawatha.
\n\nOne car got followed by an ICE SUV on the way out. The driver led them on a chase through South Minneapolis until they reached Powderhorn Park, where they used a local rapid response chat to call for reinforcements. Dozens of neighbors came out to the park, filming with their phones. The ICE vehicle turned around and withdrew.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/8.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nI was frightened and stressed out during most of the action on March 1, but I did it anyway. Many things went wrong during the planning and execution. We took 20% arrests, and some of the arrestees caught misdemeanor charges. We never had the numbers to properly accomplish our task—yet somehow, we managed to block the road for 52 minutes. Of every organized protest at the Whipple building in the last three months, this one was by far the smallest. It was also the first and only occasion on which we succeeded in fully blocking ICE into their headquarters for any length of time.
\n\nWhat happened on March 1 represents a new phase of the struggle against ICE in the Twin Cities. We are decidedly on the other side of the crest of movement activity that peaked in January. The so-called “drawdown”—which still leaves 407 ICE agents on our streets—was intended to demobilize our movement, and in this respect it has partly succeeded. The thousands who fought them in the streets in January are exhausted.
\n\nYet fight them we must.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/11.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though we are all determined to fight to the last.”
\n\n—Plain Words, 1919
\n
The US and Israeli attack on Iran is morally repugnant. It is calculated only to benefit an elite of racist, Islamophobic warmongers. It will not benefit Iranians or ordinary people anywhere on earth.
\n\nThere are genuine grassroots movements resisting the Iranian government, which is a blood-soaked authoritarian regime—as are the US and Israeli governments that are attacking it. But participants in Iranian social movements do not want Donald Trump to attack Iran. As some of them wrote last month,
\n\n\n\n\n“Any military or imperial intervention can only weaken the struggle from below and strengthen the Islamic Republic’s hand to carry out repression.”
\n
Social movements in Iran have been resisting an oppressive government for decades. But the establishment of a puppet regime serving the US and Israel will not help them. In attacking Iran, Trump does not necessarily seek to overthrow the government, but simply to subordinate it to his will, unseating the top figures in order to put himself in place of them. He did precisely that in Venezuela in January 2026. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro did nothing to change the distribution of power in Venezuelan society; the chief result of Trump’s intervention has been that he has put the pieces in place to loot the country of its natural resources for the benefit of elements of the ruling class of the United States.
\n\nLike other autocrats around the world, Trump aims to sideline ordinary people, reducing all politics to a matter of tyrants contending for power at the expense of those they rule. He will gladly sacrifice the lives of Iranians, Israelis, and US citizens for his own benefit.
\n\nAs capitalist profiteering is coming up against inherent limits all around the world, despots have returned to amassing wealth the old-fashioned way—by brutal state violence. One of the things that has sustained the global economy over the past few years is the boom of market speculation in a handful of tech companies trying to sell “artificial intelligence” products. In actuality, this is a rush to invest in the next generation of military technology in order to prepare for an era when it will be even more central to determining how wealth and power are distributed. We can see proof in this week’s conflict over whether the US military should be able to use AI tools produced by Anthropic to pursue the mass domestic surveillance of US citizens and to set fully autonomous weapons loose upon the world.
\n\nThe Israeli military made extensive use of AI to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. This—not saving bureaucrats the trouble of writing their own emails—is the chief use case for AI.
\n\nFor the Israeli government, the entire Mideast is now the West Bank. The attack on Iran shows that they are determined to subject hundreds of millions to the violence they have already been inflicting on Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people.
\n\nIn the US, Trump’s decision to declare war without consulting Congress shows that he already understands himself as a dictator. The attack on Iranians is meant to strike terror into Trump’s foes all around the world, including in the United States.
\n\nWe must understand this attack as a threat to us, as well. From Caracas and the Twin Cities to Tehran, it’s easy to see what sort of world they are trying to create. The same weapons that are used against Iranians today will be turned on anyone who resists Trump and his toadies tomorrow, unless we stand up to them together before it is too late.
\n\nWe must build the grassroots capacity to interrupt the war machine. The hundreds of thousands senselessly slaughtered in Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Myanmar, and Ukraine show what awaits down this road otherwise.
\n\nReal liberation can only come about through solidarity between grassroots movements. We must resist Trump’s warmongering by all means.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/28/against-all-wars_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Please print and distribute these posters far and wide.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/28/no-war-with-iran-maryjane-satrapi.jpg\")
Please print and distribute these posters far and wide.
\nIn the following analysis, participants in the resistance to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement assault on the Twin Cities chart the course of the movement from 2025 to the present day, exploring why it gained momentum despite escalating repression.
\n\nThe surge of federal mercenaries to the Twin Cities is not over. Even if it is true, as federal authorities allege, that less than 500 federal agents remain (not counting Homeland Security Investigations agents), that is still several times the number of ICE agents that were deployed to the Twin Cities before 2026. One of the classic strategies of fascism is to ramp up violence to the maximum level, then back off the most extreme measures in order to accustom people to a more repressive status quo.
\n\nNonetheless, the administration’s original objective was to normalize sending thousands of mercenaries to terrorize entire cities into submission. In that regard, the people of the Twin Cities achieved a victory, undermining the perceived legitimacy of the federal forces and forcing them to change tactics.
\n\nThe people of the Twin Cities did not turn the tide against the occupation by force of arms, but by out-mobilizing ICE. Yet this does not mean that physically fighting the occupiers has played no role in the outcome.
\n\nA mass mobilization across the entire society forced the federal government to begin to withdraw. Well over 30,000 people have participated in the rapid response networks in some way,1 utilizing a wide range of tactics. Many thousands of these people dedicated their lives to the resistance and patrolled the streets every day for over two months. Many thousands more have participated in clandestine mutual aid networks to bring food, supplies, and rent relief to undocumented families forced into hiding. One in four adults in Minnesota participated in the general strike of January 23 in some way, and an estimated 8% of all Minnesotans refused to work that day. Signs reading “Everyone welcome except ICE” appeared in the windows of practically every business in South Minneapolis.
\n\nThe scale of the resistance prompted Stephen Miller to remark,
\n\n\n\n\n“You only have to read their own words and hear their own words and judge their own conduct to understand that this is clearly an insurgency against the federal government.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-1.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the negotiations in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon in 1975, an American general reportedly told a North Vietnamese commanding officer, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
\n\nThe North Vietnamese commander replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
\n\nThe Twin Cities could offer the same retort to our enemy today. Insurgencies win by continuously wearing down a more powerful opponent. We win by not losing.
\n\nWhile the vast majority of patrollers used car horns, cell phone cameras, and whistles as their weapons, it would be incorrect to characterize the resistance as strictly nonviolent. An unknown number of brave people threw their bodies between ICE and our vulnerable neighbors. Some of them slashed the tires and smashed out the windows of ICE vehicles, pelted ICE agents with snowballs, and rescued arrestees from their clutches.
\n\nAccording to “Border Czar” Tom Homan, in January alone, nearly 160 people were arrested for impeding or assaulting federal agents. In the course of that month, ICE and Border Patrol shot one person every week, killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti and injuring Julio Sosa Celis. Undeterred, the people rose in rebellion in greater and greater numbers after each shooting: on January 7, by fighting federal agents at Roosevelt Middle School, storming the doors of a federal courthouse, and barricading off the site of Renee’s murder; on January 14, by chasing off federal agents from the Northside and looting three of their cars; and on January 24, after the murder of Alex Pretti, by erecting barricades in Whittier and fighting off both ICE and local police, compelling them to withdraw.
\n\nFrom the daily skirmishes at the sites of abductions to the riots that engulfed entire neighborhoods, these clashes played a crucial role in the development of the resistance. Without these incidents, the daily rapid response chats, the hyperlocal neighborhood groups, the late-night hotel noise demos, and even the mass work stoppages might not have cohered into a movement capable of grinding down the resolve of the federal government. The reasons for this are social, not military.
\n\nRather than looking at these moments as random occurrences of stochastic turbulence, extracurricular activities that punctuated the ongoing deep organizing with sensational headlines, we understand every engagement with enemy forces as part of an ongoing arc of escalation. Every escalation from ICE drove our own escalations in a feedback loop. Every time people fought back, that opened up a new range of possibilities and we stepped through a portal into a new phase of resistance.
\n\nEach clash with ICE propelled the movement forward in three ways:
\n\nTo show how this took place, we will briefly review the development of the movement from its origins.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-4.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the Twin Cities, the first significant confrontation with ICE took place on June 3 at Taqueria Las Cuatro Milpas. The next day, people confronted ICE agents as they carried out raids in Chicago and Grand Rapids—and two days after that, the clashes began in Los Angeles that rapidly built to the first uprising of Trump’s second term.
\n\nAfterwards, while Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and went on to target Chicago and other cities with surges of federal agents, the administration did not immediately escalate ICE activity in the Twin Cities.
\n\nAn organization called Monarca, launched in 2024, began holding legal observer trainings for people who wanted to track the movements of ICE. A similar group named MPLS Whistles emerged in October ahead of a press conference featuring Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
\n\nThe first indications that Operation Metro Surge was on the way occurred on November 18, when ICE attempted to raid the Bro-Tex paper factory in Saint Paul. They abducted two workers, pepper-sprayed onlookers, and shoved demonstrators out of the street as a crowd spontaneously formed and attempted to block their vehicles. As the mercenaries fled, somebody smashed out the back window of an ICE van.
\n\nWord of the raid and the response spread like wildfire. A week later, on November 25, another ICE raid took place, this time on the east side of Saint Paul in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood. They took two more people. This time, word spread all over the cities and a larger crowd—over a hundred people—came out to stop them. The energy of the smaller clash a week prior had primed the population. This time, some people showed up in respirators and helmets. Federal agents escalated their repressive tactics, shooting pepper balls and sponge rounds from shotguns. One protester was injured by agents who cracked their head against the pavement.
\n\nAs in June, DHS personnel tried to claim after the fact that the raid was not immigration-related, but nobody believed them. As we will discuss below, this is presumably a disinformation tactic intended to “keep the temperature down,” a priority that Republicans and Democrats share.
\n\nThe two big November confrontations forced federal agents to change their strategy to hasty snatch-and-grabs. This shift showed the limitations of the first iteration of the rapid response networks, in which organizations like Monarca would verify reports and then circulate them. The rapid response networks that were cohering on Signal and Whatsapp solved this problem by decentralizing, cutting out the bottlenecks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/11-25-1.jpg\")
November 25, 2025. The beginnings of a proportionate response.
\nA week later, ICE invaded the Twin Cities. The stories on the news said they were targeting Somali immigrants. Waves of fear spread through every immigrant community. Some people stopped showing up to work.
\n\nICE abducted twelve people in the first three days of December before the Department of Homeland Security formally announced Operation Metro Surge on December 4. Soon after, over 300 ICE agents were occupying our streets. Stories began to circulate about house raids in the suburbs. Organizers started calling face-to-face meetings to set up neighborhood defense groups. Proper anti-ICE patrols got underway. The first patrollers took to euphemistically calling ourselves “commuters.”
\n\nIn the course of the first two weeks of the occupation, a holding pattern set in. ICE would jump out of their cars in pairs and snatch someone. Sometimes, if we were lucky, a crowd would form. People would get out their phones and blow their whistles and cuss at them. The agents would pepper-spray someone and leave with an abductee.
\n\nOn the handful of occasions when we could stop abductions by sheer numbers, we did—for example, when ICE raided a construction site in Chanhassen in dangerously cold temperatures and two workers got frostbite from being trapped on a roof while a crowd faced down the feds. But for the most part, most of us were relatively passive observers in this period. Most of the abductions succeeded.
\n\nOn December 15, that began to change. Two ICE agents attempted to kidnap a pregnant woman at the corner of 29th and Pillsbury. Agent Brenden Cuni slammed her to the ground and shoved his knee into her back. This was also the first time we positively identified an ICE agent after seeing him in the field. People began throwing snowballs and big chunks of ice at the agents from all sides.
\n\nAs the thermal temperature dropped in the second half of December, the political temperature ratcheted up. It became commonplace to see ICE brutalizing people. December 22 marked the first time they fired live ammunition at us, when they shot at a man in Saint Paul after ramming his car. Reports circulated about ICE shooting out one observer’s tires. Another was arrested in a parking lot near the Whipple federal building (the staging area for practically all ICE activity in the area) and charged with “stalking.” They started brake-checking drivers who followed them, or boxing us in. They began attempting to carry out the abductions more quickly and violently. Their violence became more theatrical. The occupation created a new status quo.
\n\nFor a couple of suspiciously calm days before January 6, it appeared that the abductions in Minneapolis might finally be slowing down. Then DHS announced a surge of 2000 more ICE and Border Patrol agents. Suddenly, the streets were overrun with them. Whereas before, you needed a car if you wanted to “commute,” now there were so many agents that foot patrols around certain hotspots became effective. The abductions became more indiscriminate. We saw agents grabbing people at bus stops and using facial recognition software on random people on the sidewalk. The same day that the surge began, ICE sent detained Minneapolis resident Victor Manuel Diaz to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he died—or else was murdered—only a week later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-07-1.jpg\")
January 7, 2026. People respond to the murder of Renee Good.
\nOne day into the surge, on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good. Dozens of federal agents gathered at the site of her murder to threaten the crowd. Considering what the agents had just done, the crowd’s immediate reaction was conservative and restrained. People blocked the street and chanted at the accomplices in the killing. Unprovoked, Border Patrol “Bor-Tac” officers Michael Sveum and Edgar Vazquez opened fire with chemical weapons, touching off skirmishes at 34th and Portland in which some people threw snowballs at federal agents as they retreated.
\n\nTwo hours later, a fight broke out at Roosevelt Middle School, where people successfully stopped ICE agents from abducting an immigrant worker by swarming them in front of the building. That night, locals barricaded off 34th and Portland Avenue, the scene of the murder. Ten thousand people turned out to stand vigil for Renee Good.
\n\nOn the morning of January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, people organized by a AFL-CIO “direct action trainer” carried out the first attempt to blockade the Whipple building. The crowd was fairly tame, but officers tear-gassed them nonetheless. As the protesters were only using soft blockade tactics, they were not able to withstand the assault.
\n\nAfter Renee’s murder, a new status quo emerged. ICE ramped up its terror to new heights. It became common for them to smash out people’s car windows. They detained more observers. They started using tear gas in minor confrontations in which it would have been unusual for regular cops to deploy it. Two Target employees who were citizens were beaten and arrested for filming federal agents. ICE released people from custody in the middle of the night in sub-zero temperatures in public parks. Liberal conspiracy theories became popular alleging that Trump was trying to use this violence to provoke us into a reaction. Rapid response chats ballooned in size.
\n\nOn January 11, Greg Bovino conspicuously took a Border Patrol convoy up and down University Avenue, harassing people in crowded areas. At a Speedway gas station in Saint Paul, they beat and choked Orbin Mauricio Enriquez Serrano unconscious, and punched and tackled observers while they carried away his body. Two days later, a hundred people turned out to confront ICE when they raided a house in Powderhorn; ICE tear-gassed them. Clashes broke out at the Whipple building later on the night of January 13, when protesters and DHS police exchanged fireworks for CS gas and flashbangs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-2.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents tear-gassed an entire neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-6.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents terrorizing the neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\nWe saw an inflection point on January 14, when an ICE agent shot Julio Sosa-Celis through his own front door in north Minneapolis. Black and brown young people from the working-class Northside neighborhood came out by the hundreds and battled federal agents alongside activists. For three hours, MPD supported ICE as they fired tear gas and rubber bullets. People responded with bottles, rocks, and firecrackers.
\n\nICE withdrew first, abandoning at least three vehicles. MPD fled shortly afterwards. The youth of Northside tagged and smashed up their cars, stole a gun safe from one trunk, and turned the scene into a lively block party. Witnesses livestreamed as people rifled through the ICE vehicles, pulling out sensitive documents and “challenge coins” distributed to the mercenaries for perpetrating harm against communities. Federal agents did not return until hours later.
\n\nFor many in Twin Cities, January 14 felt like a turning point. It represented the stirring of a sleeping giant: the same social force that had produced the George Floyd rebellion rising to put its unmistakable stamp on the struggle against ICE.
\n\nAfter the riot in Northside, the number of detainees flown out of Minnesota reportedly dropped from 204 detainees flown out that day to only 114 the following day (January 15), and only 77 on January 16. The number never again reached anything like the levels seen between January 6 and January 15. The “drawdown” in the number of federal agents occupying the Twin Cities did not begin until February, but the riot of January 14 immediately put a cap on how many people the agents could abduct because it forced them to act more cautiously.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/chart.png\")
\nIt was direct action—not the decisions of officials of either political party—that turned the tide. The changes in official policy came later, acknowledging a reality imposed by courageous grassroots action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-5.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-4.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-3.jpg\")
People investigate the vehicles that federal agents abandoned after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis and terrorizing the neighborhood for hours with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.
\nThings reached a crescendo on January 23, when 300,000 people went on strike against the occupation.
\n\nThe next day, six CBP agents murdered Alex Pretti in cold blood, in broad daylight. A call went out for observers. Out of all the riots we’ve experienced, the street fighting in Whittier was notable for how rapidly it broke out. The most impressive part was that without any planning, all of the participants knew what to do at once. Barricades dotted Nicollet, Blaisdell, and 26th Street. People set dumpsters on fire. The pallets at one warehouse were all repurposed as barricade materials. Federal agents fired an astonishing amount of tear gas to cover their retreat before fleeing onto the 35W highway.
\n\nThree days later, Greg Bovino had been relieved of command and the state government was angling to make a deal for some sort of détente. That same day, Governor Tim Walz said,
\n\n\n\n\n“The politics for the White House is they cannot afford to see tear gas on the streets and they certainly can’t afford to see another incident like we saw on Saturday morning.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-3.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nToday, nearly four weeks have passed since Alex’s murder and the events in Whittier. Border czar Tom Homan allegedly withdrew 700 agents from the Twin Cities after those events, although he and the other representatives of the federal government have given us no reason to take them at their word.
\n\nAbove all, the “drawdown” represents a strategic shift intended to pacify people. The state government has given ICE access to all county jails. ICE may have become less visible, and they may be terrorizing the suburbs more intensely than the city centers, but they are still here—their motor pool is still full at Whipple and they’re still kidnapping people every day. Local organizers are calling for a week of action from February 25 to March 1 to keep the pressure on at a moment when the regime is trying to release it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-25-1.jpg\")
January 25, 2026: a federal mercenary menaces people outside a hotel housing ICE agents.
\nWe can derive three tentative conclusions from this sequence of events:
\n\nThe introduction of militant tactics did not diminish popular support for the resistance. On the contrary, the rapid response infrastructure has continued to grow and develop in each phase of the struggle. There were 3000 commuters in December; as of mid-February, some 30,000 have participated. The state has failed to convince the public to accept a dichotomy between “good protesters” and “bad protesters.” The movement remains extraordinarily popular.
\n\n“Disturbing the peace” is a form of leverage for the movement in and of itself. What forced the federal government to retreat was not only the direct surveillance and confrontation of ICE agents by commuters; it was also the general threat to public order posed by a movement of thousands of people in constant real-time communication that sometimes bleeds over into neighborhood rebellions, such as the ones that took place in Northside and Whittier in response to the shooting on January 14 and the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24. When they started negotiating, Walz and Trump both agreed that it was crucial to “turn down the temperature.” Insofar as that priority unifies the fascists within the Republican party and the false opposition represented by the Democratic establishment, it indicates how a grassroots social movement might pursue its own interests in a way that cannot be co-opted by either of the dominant forces in government.
\n\nThe old mechanisms of repression no longer work. This is why the state is resorting to brute force. The powers that be are no longer interested in practicing the kind of counterinsurgency that involves winning hearts and minds. They’re making a bid to govern by terror alone. This is historically an indicator of a weak state, one that that no longer possesses legitimacy in the eyes of those it governs.
\n\nIn other words—a government living on borrowed time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-2.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\n\n\n\n“From now on the demagogues, the opportunists, and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete.”
\n\n—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
\n
At the end of January 2026, confrontations between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the community at large reached a fever pitch in the Twin Cities, spreading to Portland and other cities around the United States—including locales less associated with high-profile protest activity. In the following account, a participant describes the outbreak of hostilities with federal agents and police that took place in Eugene, Oregon, exploring it as a microcosm of the resistance that is spreading ICE increasingly thin around the country.
\n\nI know that the new world is real because sometimes a portal opens up, showing me a small glimpse into it. Sometimes it looks like a brick flying through the air, a tear gas canister returning to sender, a police line falling back.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/3.jpg\")
\nIn Eugene, in late January, the portal to the new world opened up again and again. Clashes broke out between protesters and federal forces at their downtown headquarters, lasting hours at a time and culminating in a breach of the Federal Building on the night of Friday, January 29. These skirmishes brought together hundreds of Eugene residents, who have drawn inspiration from the clashes and protests in Los Angeles and the Twin Cities as well as a collective memory of our own history of struggle. This has been the most intense fighting with law enforcement in Eugune since 2020; it has inaugurated a new chapter in the struggle against ICE in our city.
\n\nEugene prides itself on its history of protests and counterculture. Outsiders have asked whether what is happening in Eugene in 2026 represents a return to the riotous days of the 1990s, when Eugene was widely known as a center of ecological organizing and direct action. In fact, it is both an organic community response to the federal government’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and the latest manifestation of an insurrectionary reflex that developed in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion and the riots in summer 2020. You can read a comprehensive analysis of that period here. More recently, we have seen this insurrectionary reflex emerge in street battles with the far right and in a black bloc march on the federal building on May Day 2025.
\n\nSince summer 2025, community members have convened near-daily protests at the federal building that ICE uses as its base of operations. These protests have been popular, but for the most part, like the No Kings demonstrations, they have not escalated into direct confrontations with federal agents. There have been exceptions, such as one night in fall 2025 when officers from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit of Customs and Border Protection played cat and mouse with about a hundred protesters. Unfortunately, at that time, most demonstrators were not prepared to respond effectively, and suffered considerable abuse at the hands of the officers.
\n\nThe killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti changed things in Eugene. The tension and anger reached a boiling point. On January 24, the day of that Pretti was murdered, several hundred protesters amassed at the federal building for that day’s regularly scheduled demonstration. One banner read, “Two of Ours, All of Yours.”
\n\nThe government of Eugene tried to get ahead of the anger by holding a town hall meeting at 1 pm that day with the mayor and city council in attendance. We have become familiar with this tactic in which they offer empty promises that something will be done. It usually results in a strongly worded letter, if that. Organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation led many protesters from the federal building to the town hall. As soon as everyone was inside the meeting hall, the planned session devolved into shouting and disruption.
\n\nOn Tuesday, January 27, around 2 pm, Department of Homeland Security officers in tactical gear attacked a small group of protesters who were taking part in the weekly “Love and Rage” demonstration at the federal building. Until that day, they had usually ignored protesters; this time, they attacked the protesters with pepper balls and wrestled several people to the ground in order to drag them into the building.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/2.jpg\")
\nWord spreads fast in a small city. Messages calling for support circulated over a variety of channels, along with footage showing masked DHS agents brutalizing people. Supporters trickled in as the agents pressed their attack. In the course of a few hours, they arrested half a dozen people. But this was only the first protest of the day: at 5 pm, the Oregon Nurses Association were scheduled to hold a vigil for Alex Pretti, drawing a larger crowd to the location.
\n\nThe sight of hundreds of people rushing in to support those under attack by federal agents was powerful. Hundreds filled the courtyard, which is surrounded on three sides by the federal building; more people crowded the sidewalks at the nearby intersection.
\n\nThe protest grew louder than the previous ones, with more aggressive chants. Yet at first, it lacked direction. Different groups tried to lead, pushing their own chants and efforts, all united by the sight of agents in tactical gear inside the building. Some years had passed since the last major clash and people were out of practice.
\n\nThe protesters’ primary focus was to demand that the feds release the people they had captured earlier in the day. The crowd grew confrontational. A few protesters painted walls, shined lasers, and threw water bottles at the glass panels separating protests from federal agents. Anticipating a clash, many people donned protective gear such as respirators and helmets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/4.jpg\")
“Fuck the administration.”
\nAround 7 pm, the ear-splitting sound of a flash-bang grenade resounded. Clouds of tear gas filled the plaza and spilled out into the surrounding streets. The crowd fell back without panic. Some protesters threw canisters back to the advancing line of federal agents; others extinguished the tear gas with water. Because the Oregon Nurses Association had organized the vigil, many of the participants knew how to deal with the noxious chemicals. They chanted “we are not afraid.”
\n\nOutnumbered, the feds retreated back inside the building, with hundreds advancing on them. Skirmishes between protesters and federal agents continued for several hours.
\n\nEugene police officers did not arrive until 8 pm. They arrived by truck, decked out in riot gear, piloting drones overhead. However, they did not engage the protesters. Local police have hesitated to openly support ICE, maintaining operational distance. This has enabled them to launder their reputation, presenting themselves as the “lesser evil” law enforcement institution operating within the city, despite the daily terror that they too inflict in Eugene, especially upon the unhoused population.
\n\nOver the days that followed, even liberals struggled to denounce militant protesters. Eugene’s mayor, Kaarin Knudson, denounced ICE while expressing “concern” for community safety, as if ICE agents hadn’t been abducting people from the community before this. Never missing a chance to funnel energy back into institutional channels, the mayor also announced that the City—and its police—would develop a common strategy to deal with these situations going forward and that EPD would be more involved with policing protests.
\n\nTear gas has a way of reengaging old friends and networks in the same way that the rain activates the spores that become the neon green moss for which the Pacific Northwest is known. It was inevitable that state violence would eventually bring people back into the streets. It was inevitable that the liberal city establishment would fail to calm the anger of the public, as they had no real leverage over the federal government. It was inevitable that concerted organizing, agitation, and preparation would pay off once social peace was no longer possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/1.jpg\")
\nEugene Punks United, a radical youth group known locally for organizing school walkouts, announced a demonstration at 2 pm on January 30, scheduled to coincide with the “general strike” taking place in the Twin Cities that day. Several other events were announced for this day, but the protest attracted a rowdy and prepared group hoping to “confront Nazi scum,” in the language of the call to action.
\n\nEnterprising participants in the crowd painted slogans on the federal building. Others broke windows. In response, outnumbered federal agents fired concussion grenades and tear gas into the crowd. This time, Eugene Police came to their aid. The authorities declared a riot and a pitched battle ensued. For nearly four hours, officers and demonstrators exchanged volleys of tear gas canisters, flash-bang grenades, bottles, fireworks, and other projectiles. The final salvo of tear gas canisters took place after midnight.
\n\nLike the looting and arson that followed George Floyd’s murder, the riot at the federal building represents a qualitative leap in Eugene’s recent history of struggle. It could mark a shift in the form that protests against ICE take. However, it did not receive the same widespread support that the January 27 clashes did. Public opinion is divided on whether things went “too far,” though the debate is less intense than the backlash after the looting on May 29, 2020. Some point to viral videos of federal agents breaking windows at the building to support conspiracy theories that they had broken their own windows. But in actuality, the windows had already been broken at that point—a fact that demonstrators should be proud of—and the officers were simply pushing away the wreckage in order to fire tear gas at demonstrators.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/5.jpg\")
\nThe state and local response to the events of January 30 was swift. Both of Oregon’s senators as well as Governor Tina Kotek held a press conference with the mayor of Eugene the next morning. They sought to establish a “good protester, bad protester” narrative, telling people “not to take the bait,” threatening consequences for those who engaged in property destruction or violence against the police. They implored protesters not to give the federal government a reason to target Eugene the way they have in Minneapolis, stating that Eugene could not handle a surge of thousands of ICE agents.
\n\nIt must be said that the federal government did not intervene in Minneapolis because protesters “gave them a reason”—Trump sent thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents because an extreme-right social media personality made a viral post alleging that fraud was taking place in the Minneapolis welfare system, not to mention because he has held a grudge against Minneapolis since the George Floyd uprising. If everyone everywhere fiercely resists federal agents, they will be spread too thin, with too little support, to be able to continue attacking other cities the way that they have attacked the Twin Cities. On the other hand, if people do as the aforementioned politicians urge and confine themselves to powerless symbolic protest, ICE will be able to assault one city after another, eventually reaching Eugene and countless others.
\n\nIn addition to the response from state officials, Donald Trump denounced the protesters as “highly paid Lunatics, Agitators, and Insurrectionists” [sic], threatening to deploy troops to quell the protests. Yet he has made himself so many enemies all around the country that we should not take these threats at face value.
\n\nSince that Saturday, protests have continued at the federal building, which remains boarded up. The protests are smaller than they were in late January, but there will be more opportunities soon enough. There have been both confirmed and rumored sightings of the FBI, who have asked businesses near the federal building for footage and have attempted to question at least two community members.
\n\nDespite their threats, we must stay focused on the goal. We have a chance to contribute to ending the American nightmare once and for all by stretching their forces thin, which will create openings elsewhere. For every ICE agent deployed to defend the federal building, that’s one less out on the streets terrorizing and abducting people. The more force they use, the more everyone will come to see them as an illegitimate occupying army. The more we resist them, the more the warnings of local politicians and the threats of federal officials will ring hollow.
\n\nWe hope that the growing backlash against the federal government that is unfolding around the country marks the beginning of a movement that can ultimately dismantle the techno-feudal police state that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others are trying to build. With their defeat, we can push for a deeper and more decisive victory against the state and private property.
\n\nWhatever happens, we cannot and will not allow their world to take shape. If our movement must be forged in the crucible of federal occupation, then so be it. Victory belongs to those who fight for a righteous cause. Here’s to many more nights of action in Eugene. May the portal open once again, may we pass through once and for all.
\n\nLove to our fighters!
\n\nRest in power, Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and so many more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/6.jpg\")
\nIn the following interview, Palestine solidarity activists from the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran in January 2026, comparing notes about resistance to various forms of authoritarianism.
\n\nFollowing the countrywide protests in Iran on January 8, 2025 and the bloody crackdown that followed, the Palestinian Solidarity Action Network (PSAN) conducted interviews and sustained conversations with two comrades from Roja, as well as with Iranian movement organizer Leila Hossein Zadeh. Under an unprecedented total communications blackout, the security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out systematic lethal violence against street protesters and ordinary civilians, inflicting large-scale deaths, arrests, and disappearances. Many who lived through this experienced it as a war directed against society as a whole, erasing any distinction between “wartime” and “peacetime.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/9.jpg\")
\nPSAN is an internationalist diasporic sinophone collective formed in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Since the outbreak of the 2026 Iranian uprising, Iran and Palestine have increasingly been framed as opposing issues within Western leftist discourse. The resulting divisions within pro-Palestine movements over Iran’s ongoing uprising and repression deeply trouble us.
\n\nAs activists shaped by the Chinese context, we place the experiences that Roja describe alongside our own historical and lived realities. In discussing internet shutdowns, street-level organizing, the normalization of state violence, and the ways that internationalism is hollowed out through the language of national security, we came to see that we were not confronting an unfamiliar situation, but a set of mechanisms of governance repeatedly tested, shared, and transplanted from one regime to another. Comrades from Roja also spoke about how the Islamic Republic of Iran has deployed Chinese state security technologies to suppress dissent. This resonates with PSAN’s earlier investigations, which have shown that Chinese state security technologies are not only deployed in “Xinjiang,” but have also been used in Palestine. The Iranian experience thus becomes part of a broader understanding of how contemporary authoritarian governance circulates across regions, part of a shared reservoir of experience and memory between us.
\n\nWe hope to share this experience with those who, under extreme conditions, still seek to understand, to record, and to continue acting. We believe—and we hope—that victory belongs to those who resist.
\n\nWe conducted this interview on January 23, before internet connection to Iran resumed.
\n\nRoja (روژا) is an independent, leftist, feminist collective based in Paris. Roja was born after the femicide of Jina (Mahsa) Amini and the beginning of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” uprising in September 2022. The collective is composed of political activists from a range of nationalities and political geographies within Iran, including Kurdish, Hazara, Persian, and more. Roja’s activities are not only connected to social movements in Iran and the Middle East, but also to local struggles in Paris in step with internationalist struggles, including in solidarity with Palestine. The name “Roja” is inspired by the resonance of several words in different languages: in Spanish, roja means “red”; in Kurdish, Roja means “light” and “day”; in Mazandarani, roja means the “morning star” or “Venus,” considered the brightest celestial body at night.
\n\nLeila Hossein Zadeh is a human rights defender and student activist in Iran’s contemporary social movements. In 2018, for her involvement in student activism, she was sentenced by the Tehran Revolutionary Court to five years’ imprisonment on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security,” and to an additional year for “propaganda against the state.” Although parts of the sentence were reduced on appeal, the five-year term remains pending, functioning as a long-term deterrent against her political activities. In November 2024, following her master’s thesis defense at the University of Tehran—where she researched ethnic minority issues and appeared without a headscarf—she was again charged with “propaganda against the state” and “appearing in public without sharia-compliant hijab,” and sentenced in absentia to one year of imprisonment and a heavy fine, without a hearing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/10.jpg\")
A photo of Leila Hossein Zadeh at a demonstration organized by Roja Collective in Paris on January 17, 2026, opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran and monarchists and expressing solidarity with the January 2026 revolutionary uprising in Iran.
\nIt has been more than 25 days since the nationwide protests began. Can you describe the situation on the ground, especially in terms of organization? How did people organize on January 8 without a single leadership or central command, and how did earlier cycles since 2017 shape this process?
\n\nRoja: This uprising is part of an ongoing cycle of mass protests that began in 2017, with the waves becoming more widespread, confrontational, and frequent. Major moments include the brutally repressed 2019 “Bloody November” protests over fuel price hikes, the 2021 “uprising of thirst” against water deprivation and ecological extraction, and the 2022 Jina Uprising, “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The 2022 uprising marked a peak because it united anti-colonial, feminist, and egalitarian struggles, sparked by the killing of Jina Amini, a young Kurdish working-class woman whose death resonated across social and political divisions.
\n\nLeila: When we talk about organization, there are two different levels. One is organization at the street level, and the other is organization at the level of political organizations. At the street level, people on the ground learn from previous uprisings, and each cycle has become progressively more confrontational. Neighborhood-based youth organizations played a very important role, especially during “Woman, Life, Freedom.” These were people who already knew each other, who had socialized together in the same neighborhoods. That social trust became crucial once a mass uprising started.
\n\nThe primary medium for street-level coordination is the internet. If an event occurs in a neighborhood, people can quickly organize online, allowing others to come to their aid. In the presence of repressive forces, protesters coordinate by sharing real-time information—for example, reporting which highways security forces are using—so that some can block the highways while others continue activities in the streets.
\n\nAt the level of political organizations, there is effectively no formal leftist presence due to decades of heavy repression. The main exception is Mujahedeen (MEK), though it remains marginal and lacks broad support for historical reasons. In this uprising, monarchist-aligned groups appear to be gaining influence. They maintain a strong anti-left discourse, positioning themselves against the 1979 revolution. They have substantial resources and financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Israel. According to media reports, Iran International received approximately US $250 million in start-up funding from Saudi Arabia during its founding phase.
\n\nMost of what I am describing applies mainly to central geographies, not the peripheries. Kurdistan and other marginalized regions have very different forms of organization not only because of decades of repression, but also deriving from decades of organizing. The tactics used on the streets—how to confront police, Basij [a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC], and IRGC forces—can only come from marginalized bodies, bodies that confront state violence on a daily basis, especially people working in the informal economy. Manual labor also matters in this context, because the capacity to engage in direct physical confrontation is part of the subjectivity produced by this class position.
\n\nTwo groups were especially important in street-level organization. The first was technical workers, especially mechanics. They have specific tools and skills that became extremely important for building barricades and blockades. For example, mechanics used the same instruments they normally use to fix cars to sabotage electricity towers on the streets, creating very strong barriers against repressive forces. The second group consisted mainly of young people, often between 18 and 25, who were very familiar with digital technologies. They knew how to smash surveillance cameras on the streets—the cameras that function as the eyes of the state. Many of these cameras were imported from China.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/4.jpg\")
\nRoja: In terms of broader organization, three forms were dominant during this cycle: street mobilization, university-based organization, and bazaar or merchant strikes. On the day that the internet blackout started, shopkeepers in more than 55 cities went on strike. Even conservative segments of the petite bourgeoisie joined. Kurdish parties called for a general strike, and all te shops were closed in Kurdistan. The strike extended even to Western Azerbaijan, where both Kurdish and Turkish-speaking populations participated.
\n\nOver the past ten years, union-based organizations—teachers, workers, nurses, truck drivers—have repeatedly protested and gone on strike. One persistent problem has been how to synchronize the temporality of union struggles with the sudden eruption of street uprisings. The only group that consistently kept pace with street mobilizations were university students. Students never let a mobilization opportunity on the streets pass them by.
\n\nCompared with previous movements, why have Pahlavi monarchists appeared to gain disproportionate influence in this uprising, despite lacking broad support or grassroots organization on the ground?
\n\nLeila: As a result of the heavy repression of leftists since the beginning of the Islamic Republic, there is no strong leftist revolutionary organization inside Iran. Monarchists seem to have the upper hand in this uprising, but not because they represent the majority of people or because they are more organized on the ground.
\n\nThey have money and media. They have their media and all of the main media outlets are outside the country. They have strong connections with foreign countries, and of course they are able to organize in exile.
\n\n“Iran International” is present in almost every house through satellite television, even more professional than BBC Persian. With this media power, they are able to shape what people see and hear. There are documented cases where slogans are edited, where the sound of chants is changed, and where one person shouting a monarchist slogan is shown as if the whole crowd is chanting it. If you look carefully at some of these videos, people are actually chanting something else. There was a video of Kurdish people dancing in Punak square in Tehran and there was only one person chanting pro monarchist slogans, but the media manipulation was such that it suggested the whole population is supporting Pahlavi in Tehran.
\n\nRoja: In central cities, especially Tehran, monarchist slogans are heard and seen more often. But in peripheral and marginalized regions—Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Khuzestan—there is much more hesitation and in many cases rejection.
\n\nIn some places, people did not come to the streets precisely because they felt alienated by monarchist narratives. They felt that their struggles were not represented and that everything was being rewritten through one dominant media voice.
\n\nThere is also a very dangerous political logic in this rhetoric. Monarchists say that there is no other opposition in Europe. Anyone who criticizes monarchy is accused of supporting the Islamic Republic. If you talk about ethnic minority rights, you are labeled a separatist. If you talk about leftist politics, you are equated with the regime. This logic is very familiar. It resembles the way political plurality was eliminated after 1979.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/8.jpg\")
\nDuring the blackout of the internet in Iran, which began on the night of January 8, do you still hear anything from friends and families? How did the regime’s shift from selective internet shutdowns to total communication blackout fundamentally change both the experience of repression and the possibility of collective action?
\n\nRoja: Just before this meeting (January 23), my family called me. For the first time since everything happened, my siblings and cousins were all on the phone together. It was very intense. They described how the internet shutdown completely cut people off—families, friends, even neighbors couldn’t reach each other, and many didn’t know if their loved ones were safe.
\n\nAfter protests, people deleted everything on their phones out of fear. Police randomly stopped people in the streets and checked their phones, even if they had never protested. Fear was everywhere.
\n\nFor short moments, Instagram briefly worked, then went down again. People felt this was deliberate—creating the impression that the internet was back while real communication remained impossible. ATMs and digital payments also stopped working. Anything dependent on the internet shuts down. As my cousin put it, it felt like living in prison—cut off from normal life.
\n\nLeila: During previous cycles of uprising—for example, in 2019—the international internet was shut down, while the national internet, often referred to as the “intranet,” remained operational. People were able to use the national network to coordinate, they could inhabit whatever digital space was still available. They would use state-sponsored or IRGC-affiliated Telegram channels and communicate in coded language to share information about conditions in different cities. Someone might write, “In Shiraz, the weather is still rainy,” while another would respond, “Isfahan is sunny now.” Everyone knew this was not about the weather. It was a way of talking about repression, about violence, about how intense things were in different cities, without saying it openly.
\n\nBut this time, the whole network was shut down. After January 8, the government didn’t just cut the international internet. They cut the national internet as well. Every means of communication was shut down at the same time. This had never happened like this before.
\n\nRoja: Even Starlink didn’t function during the blackout. Starlink equipment is extremely expensive, given the national currency depreciation, and it is illegal to have it. Only very few people have access to it. But even those people could not access the internet this time. There are reports that the Islamic Republic used some kind of noise or interference to block satellite signals, a new technology often associated with China and Russia. This is the first time the Islamic Republic has used this kind of technology on the population as a whole, to isolate people completely.
\n\nIran and China have a 25-year cooperation agreement. Iran has continued selling much of its oil to China, bypassing US sanctions, often at significant discounts—sometimes reported at around 20% below global market prices, though the exact figures vary and are difficult to verify. Some observers believe Iran has long sought to develop a China-style national internet and acquire related filtering and control technologies, but until now it has not been able to implement such a system fully. Many people saw the current shutdown as a test—or as a demonstration of more advanced restrictions than before.
\n\nWhite SIM cards are part of this system. These are SIM cards with no filtering and no censorship. In Iran, most websites and platforms are blocked, and people need VPNs. White SIM cards can bypass all of that. For a long time, only people close to the core of the regime had received them. After the twelve-day war with Israel, a limited number of journalists also received them, even including some who were critical to the regime.
\n\nBut during this uprising, even the white SIM cards didn’t work. Nothing worked. At one point, even government websites were down. This is why many people say this moment is radically different from anything they experienced before.
\n\nMany people, including ex-political prisoners, described the feeling during the blackout as like being in solitary confinement. Not as a metaphor, but as a lived condition. What happened in Iranian prisons in the early years of the Islamic Republic, especially the massacres of leftists in the 1980s, seemed to come out of the prisons and spread across society. The logic of the prison expanded and surrounded everyday life.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/5.jpg\")
\nCan you share more about the massacre of civilians on January 8? How did people respond to that inside Iran?
\n\nRoja: There is ongoing debate over how many people have been killed since the internet blackout, particularly during the two nights of Thursday and Friday, January 8 and 9, when people started to flood the streets, taking control of many cities across the country. Some say five thousand; some say ten thousand; others say twenty thousand, even thirty thousand. At the same time, official figures have announced roughly 2000 deaths, many of which they claim were members of their own security forces, effectively replacing the victim with the aggressor. More than 25,000 people have been arrested on the streets, many of whom face the risk of execution.
\n\nFor people inside Iran, the exact number doesn’t really change anything. Whatever the figure, the Islamic Republic of Iran—particularly the IRGC and its paramilitary branch, the Basij—has carried out a qualitatively distinct form of violence, shocking and horrific even by the standards of Iran’s long, bloody history of state repression. The only proper name for this scale and systematic targeting of protesters is massacre.
\n\nAccording to eyewitness testimony from protesters, accounts from medical staff in hospitals and clinics, and records from medical facilities, live ammunition and shotguns were used systematically—not randomly—with shots aimed directly at vital organs: people’s eyes, heads, hearts, and torsos. One of the most visible and devastating forms of injury has been the loss of eyesight suffered by large numbers of people—something that was also used on a massive scale during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022.
\n\nThis level of repression is also a form of punishment that marks collective bodies. It is oriented toward the future as well, so that the next time you begin conquering cities through mass uprising, you will remember that you were massacred—so you never forget what happened to you. The punishment is therefore inscribed on the body and marks collective memory.
\n\nOne of the crucial differences between the current uprising and previous ones is that, for the first time, the Islamic Republic of Iran is using the lexicon of “terrorism” to describe protesters. In the past, the term “rioter” (اغتشاشگر) was used to draw a distinction between “legitimate” protesters and those portrayed as seeking to destabilize the government—the latter of whom were often accused by security and intelligence services, as well as officials (including the Supreme Leader), of being linked to the US or Israel. Today, “terrorist” has become the official keyword for anyone protesting in the streets. People on the streets are no longer treated as citizens—or even as “criminals” to be policed. Instead, they are cast as outside agitators and terrorists, against whom the state claims the right to wage war.
\n\nWhile Western imperialists instrumentalize the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression to justify their own regime-change agenda, supporters of the so-called “axis of resistance” often seek to deny or downplay this repression and the mass killing it entails. This denial—common among campists, who support any force opposed to Western imperialism regardless of its own internal repression, class relations, and geopolitical interventions—is not a neutral error. It is an anti-imperialism of fools, inside Iran and abroad: so fixated on the goal of opposing imperialism that it refuses to recognize the state violence enacted under the guise of anti-imperialism. In that sense, they are not merely mistaken but complicit.
\n\nCould you say more about how the Islamic Republic understands the current uprising as a war?
\n\nRoja: Many who participated in the current revolutionary uprising describe their experience on the streets—what is happening now—as a war. Many non-Iranian commentators, based on a quantitative argument, argue that during the Twelve-Day War, one thousand were killed, but that in just two days inside Iran tens of thousands of people were killed. People even compare this to the eight-year Iran–Iraq War. Now, they say, in two days, the number is even higher.
\n\nArguments about the “quantitative scale” of war have historically served as tools of imperialist warfare. During World War II, the United States relied on precisely this logic when it bombed Hiroshima: if the war continued, one million people would die; if the atomic bomb were dropped now, fewer people would be killed. It was this reasoning that led to the use of nuclear weapons. The same type of argument has repeatedly been used to justify imperialist wars.
\n\nSo we need to be careful with the lexicon of “war.” Western imperialism often mobilizes the language of war to frame the Islamic Republic’s bloody repression in ways that serve imperial interests. That framing helps justify and normalize Western military intervention as a “response”—cast as support for the Iranian people, or even as a humanitarian necessity to “save” them. On the other hand, when the Islamic Republic calls protesters “terrorists” and “Mossad agents,” treating them as enemies, it effectively launches a war against its own subject populations. This has exposed Iranian society to outside imperial intervention through the unprecedented violence it has deployed against repeated cycles of uprising. In this sense, the Islamic Republic and imperialist powers reinforce each other. They are not equal forces, we are not equating them, but they operate in a mutual dynamic. One uses the threat of the other to justify repression. The other uses repression to justify intervention. Caught in between, real internationalist solidarities are weakened.
\n\nBetween Western imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran, there is a very narrow path. The whole difficulty is navigating between the two narratives without falling in line with either campism or imperialism. Roja has been trying its best to navigate this path through internationalism from below that prioritizes liberation struggles.
\n\nToday, many Iranians—deeply opposed to imperialist war—nevertheless say that a war is already underway: a war waged by the Islamic Republic against society itself. In this context of continuous internal violence, exhaustion, and blocked horizons of change, the logic of “lesser destruction” reappears in a tragic inversion. War from the outside comes to be imagined not as disaster, but as rescue. This is how a society pushed to the edge begins, desperately, to wait for a war imposed upon it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/3.jpg\")
\nIn many Western anti-imperialist narratives, Iranians are framed as having only two options: a “sovereign” Iran or an Iran occupied by external powers. What’s your response to the claim that “sovereignty is a precondition for liberation”?
\n\nRoja: Before turning to the question of “sovereignty”—which I understand to mean the state’s territorial integrity and “national security”—let me first say a few words about how the Islamic Republic presents itself internationally as an anti-imperialist force and a supporter of Palestinian liberation.
\n\nSince the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran has appropriated anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify both internal repression and regional interventions. It often deploys the language of “anti-imperialism” as a legitimating mask for domestic coercion. Compulsory veiling, for example, was violently imposed on women’s bodies in the aftermath of the Revolution and repeatedly framed as the embodied ideal of the Islamic woman—defined in opposition to “Western” values. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the 12-Day War, many people were executed on charges of spying for Israel. Today, protesters are routinely smeared as Mossad agents—a charge that functions less as a factual claim than as a political technology for criminalizing dissent and legitimizing violence.
\n\nAgainst the arguments advanced by campists, nationalists, and some decolonial accounts, Iran’s internal repression cannot be politically severed from its self-proclaimed opposition to imperialism. In the Islamic Republic’s political logic, “anti-imperialism” is not merely a foreign-policy stance; it is also a domestic governing strategy that records demands for freedom and equality as threats to “national security.” In this sense, geopolitics and internal repression are not parallel tracks but mutually reinforcing projects.
\n\nGeopolitically, the Islamic Republic has played an active role in shaping the Middle East through what it calls the “Axis of Resistance.” The case of Syria is illuminating: Iran—together with Hezbollah and Russia—helped sustain the dictatorship of Assad, whose methods of repression only became fully visible after its collapse. The Islamic Republic has long told society, “We fight in Syria so that we don’t have to fight inside Iran,” a claim that has no meaning after the 12-Day War. The logic of “national security first” implies that Syrian lives and Syrian blood did not matter because they were not Iranian.
\n\nAs these two interlinked processes—domestic repression and regional intervention—have repeatedly been legitimatized in the name of anti-imperialism, many inside Iran have become alienated from anti-imperialist politics and struggles. This is the case despite the fact that anti-imperialism was a crucial dimension of the 1979 Revolution.
\n\nNow let us return to the question of “sovereignty” in the state sense of the term. The discourse of “national security” has become increasingly dominant since the Syrian war and October 7 [2023], and especially after the 12-Day War. Certain campist and nationalist positions prioritize the form of the nation over its substantive content. If we understand the nation substantively, it implies social rights, democratic representation, collective autonomous self-determination, and the coexistence of different peoples. This is fundamentally different from understanding the nation as mere form—territorial integrity, centralized sovereignty, and national security.
\n\nBoth the Islamic Republic and its campist supporters have mobilized around this formulation—“national security” and “territorial integrity”—granting it absolute primacy and relegating all other struggles to the margins. But this primacy is false, because it evades the basic question: security for whom, and why is only one form of security prioritized? What about economic security? As we recently wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nWhile the state speaks relentlessly in the name of “national security,” it has itself become a central producer of insecurity: intensified insecurity of life through an unprecedented surge in executions, the systematic mistreatment of prisoners, and intensified economic insecurity through the brutal reduction of people’s livelihoods.
\n
We are repeatedly told: “This is not the time to protest; this is not the time to rebel—otherwise, we will become Syria; otherwise, we will face the same fate as Libya.” The real question is how to confront these contradictions. On the one hand, war and the imperialist fragmentation of society are real dangers. On the other hand, they must also struggle against the Islamic Republic. You cannot simply deny the right of people who have been stripped of any meaningful sense of life—whose lives barely differ from death—to speak and to act, by telling them, “Now is not the time, because national security comes first.”
\n\nHow is the idea of sovereignty contested inside Iran, especially in the Persian-dominated center by comparison with the non-Persian peripheries?
\n\nRoja: Everything depends on who we are talking about—for whom sovereignty serves as protection, and for whom it manifests as violence. Multiple nations live within the Islamic Republic, and the lived experience of “sovereignty” across these populations is profoundly uneven.
\n\nTake Baluchistan, for example. People there live under conditions of “internal colonialism.” They have been stripped of even formal citizenship. In Baluchistan, there are thousands of people who are not recognized within the state’s official system at all; some do not even have birth certificates and are deprived of the most basic conditions of life. For Baluch people, the relationship with the Islamic Republic is an extractive one, accompanied by an extremely securitized presence. When the state itself is experienced as colonial, violent, and occupying, telling people that sovereignty is more important than their lives makes no sense. This is why the claim that “sovereignty is a precondition for liberation” can only be understood—if at all—within the complex dynamics of center–periphery relations and the question of ethnic-minority self-determination.
\n\nThe “primacy” of “territorial integrity” comes out of a very strong nationalist tradition in Iran. Since the construction of the modern nation-state, sovereignty has been treated as the supreme, untouchable principle. Even nationalist leftists have often placed sovereignty above everything else. This was already a major point of division after the 1979 revolution, and it remains so today.
\n\nEven during the 2022 Jina uprising, much of the backlash centered on it: those at the forefront were repeatedly labeled separatists, accused of wanting to bring civil war into the country. Today, this same framing is used to justify a false binary—you must choose between the Islamic Republic or civil war—with civil war presented as a threat to sovereignty. This discourse shuts down any possibility for change from below.
\n\nMore importantly, this argument does not hold up empirically. Throughout the entire post-revolutionary period—from the 1980s until today—there has been no political force in Iran genuinely seeking to break the country apart. Even Kurdish political forces, in their official statements and positions, have never demanded separation from Iran. This claim is a narrative produced by the regime and by nationalist forces, not reflective of reality.
\n\nIn this sense, the sovereignty discourse also ends up reinforcing the Islamic Republic, because it mirrors the regime’s own logic. Over the past decade—especially since 2011—the regime has repeatedly told society: “You may have nothing, but you have security. You have not become Syria because of us, because we guarantee national sovereignty and national security.” This argument has been consistently used to delegitimize every uprising. Since 2017, whenever people have taken to the streets, this argument has returned: “We don’t want to become another Syria.” But the question is: why must that be the outcome? Why couldn’t there be a democratic revolution? This is not a purely imaginary fantasy; it is tied to real struggles and to democratic political imagination.
\n\nThis also helps explain why in this uprising, the calls for figures like [Reza] Pahlavi are heard more often in central regions. Ethnic minorities make up roughly 35-40% of the population. This is crucial. So when people say “Iranians think this way,” we must ask: which Iranians? Many people in peripheral regions do not share this “sovereignty-first” perspective. The claim that “the Iranian people think this way” simply does not hold.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/2.jpg\")
\nThe Palestinian struggle and the Iranian struggle are often pitted against each other—both in Western anti-imperialist narratives (such as the “Axis of Resistance” vs. “Zio-America” framing) and in liberal narratives (for example, slogans like “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran”). Inside Iran, how has the state’s monopolization and instrumentalization of Palestine shaped popular perceptions and solidarities? What has caused the two struggles to become disconnected—or even appear contradictory—and what does grassroots Iranian solidarity with Palestinian liberation look like beyond state propaganda, military alliances, and the “Axis of Resistance” framework?
\n\nLeila: When it comes to Palestine, the situation is very complicated. At a general level, among large parts of the population in Iran, sympathy for Palestine is low right now. This is not because people suddenly became pro-Israel, but because of how tensions have been mediated and instrumentalized by the state.
\n\nMany people feel that the Islamic Republic depletes the public budget and invests it into military apparatuses operating across the region instead of investing in social welfare. People are struggling with severe economic problems. Prices are going up. Subsidies are being removed. Hospitals are being privatized. The health care system is collapsing. In this situation, people attribute the state’s corruption to the Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinian Resistance. It is a very widespread misconception.
\n\nThis perception also depends very much on who we are talking to. If we move away from the central, urban, middle class, and look toward working class and marginalized regions, the picture changes. Age matters. Geography matters.
\n\nThere was a moment during the uprising when someone from a peripheral area called me and said that the catastrophe they were experiencing could only be described in one way. They said the city looks like Gaza. So Gaza became the reference. For that person, Gaza was not an abstract geopolitical symbol. It was a concrete way to describe what state violence looks like.
\n\nRoja: In Arab regions such as Khuzestan, there is strong sympathy with Palestine—and not only sympathy, but a strong connection. Palestine has been a source of inspiration for their own struggles, and their activists have been linked to Palestinian struggles. Because of this, they have been crushed repeatedly. People have been arrested simply for holding Palestinian flags or expressing solidarity. The state does not tolerate anyone else holding the Palestinian cause; it wants to monopolize it.
\n\nThis is one of the main contradictions. Even leftists inside Iran who are committed to Palestinian liberation find it almost impossible to organize any independent action in solidarity with Palestine. If they try to act publicly, they are either immediately repressed or their actions are absorbed and re-framed by the state narrative. Palestine becomes state property.
\n\nThe Islamic Republic’s relationship to Palestine—even if one accepts that it materially sustains certain forms of resistance—is fundamentally grounded in its own geopolitical and national interests, rather than in a commitment to Palestinian liberation as such. Officials themselves repeatedly invoke the notion that we fight outside our borders so that we do not fight inside. “If we don’t fight in Syria, we will have to fight inside Iran.” Palestine is treated within the same framework.
\n\nThere is a deep contradiction here. A state that massacres its own people cannot be a force of liberation for others. A state that kills people in the streets, blinds them, imprisons them, executes them, cannot claim to be fighting for justice elsewhere.
\n\nHow are these debates around Palestine and anti-imperialism experienced differently in Kurdistan and other marginalized regions?
\n\nRoja: For Kurdish people, the question of Palestine has always carried a lot of tension. It does not come from theory. It comes from political memory and lived experience. It comes from genocides.
\n\nThere are historical moments such as genocide that shape Kurdish political memory deeply. The first one is the “Anfal campaign.” It was carried out by Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war in Iraqi Kurdistan. Around one hundred and eighty thousand Kurdish people were killed—merely because they were Kurdish. The allegation to justify the genocide was that they collaborated with Iran.
\n\nWhat matters is not only the genocide itself, but also the reaction of some parts of the Arab world at the time. The majority of Arab states supported Saddam Hussein. And the Palestinian leadership supported Saddam during the Anfal campaign. Arafat supported him openly. Even Edward Said denied the Anfal campaign in his writing in the early 1980s. For Kurdish people, this created a very deep wound. It was not just betrayal. It was erasure.
\n\nThen there is Afrin in Syria. In 2018, Afrin, which is part of Rojava, was occupied by the Turkish army. The occupation involved systematic violence against civilians, including women and children. It involved displacement and destruction.
\n\nDuring this occupation, representatives of Hamas went to Afrin while the Turkish army was occupying the city. They celebrated together with the Turkish army and they said this very clearly. They said this is an example for the Middle East. They said this is something that should be replicated. For Kurdish people, that moment was devastating.
\n\nAs a result, a deep rupture has long existed between Kurdish political struggles and both Arab and Persian nationalism, as well as parts of the self-described anti-imperialist left, which have often failed to recognize the Kurdish struggle.
\n\nAt the same time, it is important to say that historically, Kurdish movements were among the strongest supporters of Palestinian liberation. The first generation of Kurdish revolutionary organizations, especially in the 1980s, declared armed struggle side by side with Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary movements. There was an organic political and military relationship.
\n\nBut today, in the consciousness of Kurdish people, questions have arisen. Why are Kurdish genocides not recognized, while other genocides are recognized? Why does nobody care when Kurdish people are killed? Why are Kurdish lives always treated as secondary?
\n\nThis is not only about the past. It is happening again now. In demonstrations in Europe, Kurdish people have seen photos of Saddam Hussein carried in pro-Palestine protests. Friends who recently returned from Syria say that Saddam’s image is appearing again there, being displayed and celebrated. For Kurdish people, this is unbearable. The person who carried out genocide against us is being brought back in the name of resistance.
\n\nIf we accept the argument that, in conditions of existential threat, a people may seek support wherever it is materially available—regardless of the nature of the supporting state—then the question must be posed consistently. Many defenders of Palestinian resistance justify tactical alignments with regional powers on the grounds of survival under siege, not because those powers are emancipatory or democratic. If that logic is considered legitimate in one case, why is it rejected so categorically when applied to the Kurds, who have likewise faced annihilation, statelessness, and repeated abandonment?
\n\nThe issue, then, is not the purity of allies, but the selective application of moral and political standards, standards that shift depending on geopolitical alignment rather than on the concrete conditions of survival faced by oppressed peoples.
\n\nI realized this clearly when a Syrian friend of mine, a member of the Druze minority that recently experienced massacres at the hands of Al-Jolani, the head of the new Syrian factional government, told me something. She said, “I have always been anti-Israel my whole life.” She was crying, showing me the Palestinian keffiyeh around her neck, and said, “I always wear the Palestinian keffiyeh wherever I go. But I have to admit, if it weren’t for Israeli support during Al-Jolani’s recent attacks on the Druze in Syria, my people would have been completely massacred. How can I allow myself to say that my people are allowed to be massacred, but should not take help from Israel?” I think she is right. Just as we, as Iranians, have no right to tell Palestinians that it’s okay to be massacred but not take help from Iran or any other repressive state. What we can say, however, is that the compulsion to accept aid in a survival situation does not mean we are endorsing the policies of Israel, Iran, or the US. It doesn’t mean we ignore the crimes these countries commit against other people. This is the logic I am talking about, and it should not be a double standard.
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\nNow that many activists are in exile, what can actually be done from outside Iran, and what limits and responsibilities shape diasporic organizing today?
\n\nRoja: As the Iranian far right is becoming a real threat to democracy, other progressive and leftist groups in the diaspora are ready to work together, which was not the case before. This common enemy (Pahlavi as well as IR) is contributing to the formation of united fronts and blocs of all sorts.
\n\nWe also work to maintain long-term connections with different collectives and organizations from Palestine to East Asia, particularly the new generation in China, Taiwan, and Bangladesh. We are building links between Baluchistan, Kurdish, and Iranian groups.
\n\nFor the first time, we organized a large, explicitly anti-monarchist demonstration against the Islamic Republic in Paris. This showed that a progressive, leftist, anti-war opposition also exists in Europe. Afterward, activists from other cities reached out, encouraging us to build broader, less dogmatic alliances capable of organizing opposition both to monarchy and to the Islamic Republic.
\n\nIn the diaspora, we are in a privileged position to fight on multiple fronts at the same time. One front is against Western imperialism. Another front is against the Islamic Republic. Another front is against the campist supporters of the Islamic Republic who deny or delegitimize the uprising.
\n\nMore importantly, we try to insist that the oppressed people and classes in the Middle East have shared destinies—that struggles in Iran, in Kurdistan, in Palestine, in Lebanon are connected, and we need to learn from each other and develop an internationalist politics based on common ground and articulations of social struggles.
\n\nInternationalism is precisely about this: I care about Palestine because it is directly and immediately connected to our lives and also shapes the destiny of social struggles. Your struggle is mine, mine is yours, despite all the differences and contradictions. It is around these questions that we in Roja are organizing today.
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