Flood the Resistance!

Three Fronts in a Winning Strategy to Stop Mass Deportation

Anti-ICE Rally in Lynn, MA. Photo by Derek White

The fight against Trump’s mass deportation of migrants has raged for some 17 months.

Immediately when he took office, Trump announced his massive deportation efforts, and just as quickly it became clear that he had no interest in deporting violent criminals (who in any case have the right to due process, documented or not). Rather, the regime was rounding up and deporting your neighbors, co-workers, fellow worshipers, and school children—all through racial profiling. In my own community of Lynn, Massachusetts, they are deporting what we can only call “the best of the best,” shredding the fabric of our community and taking away our beloved friends and community leaders.

Victories have been won, and battles lost. In the face of vicious attacks by ICE and other federal agents, there has been massive resistance, both spontaneous and highly organized. The experience is now there to sketch the outlines of the strategic and tactical resistance to ICE as it has been built on the ground by our blood, sweat, and tears.

This article describes the three legs of a “resistance triangle” for defeating ICE: mass resistance and mutual aid, demands on public institutions, and ending corporate support for ICE. It also shows how success in these fronts and a growing public outcry has forced the Trump regime to shift tactics in its ethnic cleansing campaign. In this new terrain as well, the three fronts presented here provide a framework for the powerful and creative resistance needed to end the deportation machine.

Fighting—and Winning

1. MASS RESISTANCE AND MUTUAL AID

This front includes ICE watch, whistle mobilizations and cameras, direct nonviolent confrontation, and mutual aid. The goal is to make every neighborhood a fortress. Every school a fortress. Every union a fortress. Every church/temple/mosque a fortress.

This is foundational, the base of the triangle. Without any of the three sides of the resistance, the triangle weakens and collapses. But mass direct resistance drives everything else. The Minnesota resistance is the high point so far. It has been costly, and has already been paid for in arrests, beatings, and blood. The rest of us owe them a debt that cannot be repaid. Without the mass resistance, ICE would still be surging in the Twin Cities, fascist great-coated Bovino would still be in charge, ICE Barbie would still be Secretary of Homeland Security, and the number of detentions would not be dropping.

In an essential DIG podcast, Minnesota leaders described how the resistance there was built. A dozen years of efforts to align core elements of labor, immigrant communities, and faith organizations built support for each other’s campaigns. Joint staff training, political education, and experimentation was involved. Different social movements were understood to have different strengths and weaknesses, different cultures and structures. No one organization or group of organizations tried to “brand” the movement as their own. Alignment meant agreed-upon goals and values; it did not mean agreement on everything. Rather it meant working together despite disagreements, with respect to all. And in moments of upsurge, it was understood that the resistance had to include a broader front than anything that had come before, often out of the hands of the people who had built the infrastructure of the movement.

The particularities of Minnesota history and culture backgrounded the effort. Minnesota has a long tradition of civil society activism, including the highest voting rates in the US. The labor movement in Minnesota has a proud history, from the Iron Range mines to the Teamster-led general strike of 1934 to the Local P-9 meatpacking rebellion in Austin in 1985-1986. The Minnesota resistance built, politically and organizationally, on the previous upsurge in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The state has a strong tradition of faith organizations welcoming immigrants.

While this particular history is important, most every city and state in the US has its own working class social movement history, whose footprints need to be recovered and popularized. This is certainly true here in Lynn, Massachusetts, with its labor, abolitionist, women’s, and queer history and struggle that date back 200 years.

The larger battles on this front are well known: Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte. But the stunning breadth of the support for immigrant families and efforts to protect them has not been told and may never be recorded. It took place in smaller towns as well. For instance, while attending a G-League basketball game in Portland, Maine, I met a high school teacher who had delivered class materials and food in her small Maine town of Sacco to her students’ Latino and Congolese families who were afraid to attend school or shop.

Key to success is both building a broad united front and including the voice of the most directly affected people. In Lynn that has meant both strengthening long-term relationships and developing a group of affected migrants and their families to play a leading role.

There is much discussion in our movement about what role mutual aid or other services play in all of this. I believe it is essential and powerful, even though as a Minnesota immigrant leader put it, “We can’t food bank and fundraise our way to freedom.”

Our experience in Lynn is that support for families—those threatened or those who have already lost loved ones and breadwinners to ICE—is deep and broad. The performative cruelty of Trump’s campaign has sparked disgust and anger. We have organized several events in Lynn such as baby showers for immigrant moms and received contributions even from Trump supporters. In a patriarchal society where women are at the core of caregiving and family resilience, resisting attacks on children and families resonates powerfully among women and in the largely gendered helping professions like nursing and K-12 education.

The work of power-building organizations is to take that response, build organization, educate, and create something sustainable with an upward spiral of political consciousness. This isn’t easy—we have struggled here in Lynn to build an organization out of our Food Aid program which provides support to 750 families monthly—not least because ICE kidnapped our staff driver, Manny Kenga. As a friend in North Star Socialist Organization warned me, with good reason, “In the conflict between service and power-building, service wins every time.” In a DIG podcast, SEIU’s Greg Namacher in Minnesota recommends getting any staff out of mutual aid projects as soon as possible after the program is established. It is certainly true that the pressure of sustaining aid programs can be burdensome and divert organizing resources.

But unions both service and organize. Most partner groups of our New Lynn Coalition (a permanent force of labor, community, and faith organizations), such as the Worker’s Center and the Lynn United housing organization, do both with considerable success.

A socialist approach needs to distinguish itself from the work of our allies in the nonprofit and faith worlds whose work is limited to advocacy or purely service, and from anarchist-influenced approaches that divorce mutual aid from a power-building strategy.

I would put it this way:

Mutual Aid + Organization + Political Education = Resistance

The New Lynn Coalition has held three actions against mass deportations. Working with the statewide resistance campaign organized by LUCE, we followed their lead and developed our own six elements of resistance:

1. Verification/Patrolling: The program of LUCE and Neighbor to Neighbor (N2N) in which people patrol neighborhoods to find ICE and “verify” by asking for their ID and filming them, in some cases causing them to leave.

2. Information: A WhatsApp site where people identify ICE presence to a hotline and centralize it for the community.

3. Organizing/Outreach: Neighborhood walks, store visits, contacting new organizations and individuals.

4. Material Aid/Survival: Financial and moral support for those who have lost loved ones, especially breadwinners, to ICE. New Lynn adds families to our Food Aid program where possible.

5. Electoral/Political: Asking questions during endorsement processes about what the candidate is doing to stop ICE, pushing them to uncomfortable positions beyond what is “practical.”

6. Unifying our Communities (Buen Vivir): Events like one New Lynn held for the Haitian community earlier this year, or music festivals, barbecues, potlucks. Safe spaces and joy—the joy of community, the joy of resistance. The joy of a vision of a better world.

This can be streamlined to verifying, mutual aid, organizing, and electoral work. The combined effect is to protect as many people as possible, as our forebears protected freedom seekers from the Fugitive Slave Act. Direct action can disrupt the conveyor belt of courts, police, and lack of legal support that leads our neighbors to detention and deportation.

2. DEMANDS ON PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

This front involves laws, executive orders, and resolutions.

When pressed to take a stand, state and city officials, even in blue areas, will cite federal pre-emption on immigration enforcement as a reason not to fight. Of course there are legal obstacles to states and cities blocking or disrupting ICE. But so what?

There is plenty these officials can do, and playing it safe is a betrayal. As a union officer for many years, I came to appreciate the legal advice of our attorneys, but also understood that their advice would always be conservative. They saw their job as protecting the union from any legal consequences.This was advice I should have ignored!

For our part, we make decisions in a way that will win a particular fight and build organization and class consciousness: “Win as much as possible and weaken the enemy through collective action, spread class consciousness and build the unity of the working class through education and organization, and recruit people to socialism by promoting international solidarity, agitating against capitalism, studying and providing a program to build an alternative world.” Needless to say, this approach may mean reaching for new legal ground or rejecting legal advice entirely.

After multiple meetings with undocumented migrants and their families, the mayor of my city of Lynn signed an Executive Order restricting ICE activities (jointly with several others including Boston’s Mayor Wu, which gave him political cover). It forbade ICE from using any city property (they had been assembling at the city graveyard), required local police to record and file ICE misconduct for possible legal action, and specified other positive steps. The Massachusetts state legislature, Governor Healey, and our local district attorney are working on a bill that would prevent ICE agents’ presence in district courthouses, their favorite and most effective hunting ground. It is at the courthouses where the LUCE ICE watch is focused now—volunteers identify ICE officers, expose them, scramble for legal advice, track people they seize, etc.

Other local officials have gone farther. Denver Mayor Mike Johnson has declared that local police have a duty to intervene directly when force is used by federal agents that “could cause death or serious bodily injury.” Reformer District Attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia has promised ICE agents: “This is how it works. You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia, I prosecute you...No, the president cannot pardon you.” In blue states we often have the power to refuse to follow federal policy in diverse ways.

Our experience at courthouses shows how the fields of engagement are constantly changing, and how each step is important but insufficient by itself. On the day the Executive Order was issued in Lynn, we received four reports of ICE sightings. Through the federal database, ICE can still identify people without papers who are arrested for any petty issue like running a red light, and wait for them outside police stations. If we are successful in keeping them out of the courthouse, they will lurk outside—and we will follow them there.

The strategic goal of political and legislative resistance is to split the municipal and state governments from the federal government and the New Confederacy—using the US system of federalism to our advantage. This is a critical step to stop the consolidation of the New Confederacy’s power grab at all levels of government, throwing sand in the gears of the kidnapping machine in every way possible. Cities and states (and counties) can restrict ICE activities, set up defense funds, investigate and prosecute ICE crimes, challenge warrantless home break-ins, and use their soapbox. Massachusetts has supported a bail fund for immigrants taken by ICE. Lynn set up a fund which can be used in part to defend immigrants—and through a campaign led by Neighbor to Neighbor, the City Council just rejected the Mayor’s budget, demanding more funding for immigration defense.

A sympathetic but hesitant district attorney told me, “We need the perfect case to proceed. When you go against the king…” But even symbolism matters. The breakthrough will come when local officials, police, and district attorneys arrest and prosecute ICE agents. That is the crisis we want, and a first breach happened in April, again in Minneapolis.

As with mass resistance and mutual aid, the political and legislative resistance has been varied and widespread beyond what anyone can track. In NH, the three county commissioners representing Rockingham County applied to hold ICE detainees in the Rockingham County jail. Two Republicans outvoted the one Democrat. Several citizens who became known as the “Deerfield Five” (one of whom I’m proud to say was my sister) organized turnout to speak out at county commission meetings and had several direct, thoughtful discussions with one of their Republican commissioner. After hearing all the testimony and watching the videos of the ICE murders in Minnesota, the commissioner flipped his vote. He told the town that as someone with many years of background in law enforcement he just “could not make sense” of what ICE was doing. Another small, important, and unheralded victory.

The townspeople overturning a county jail ICE hold in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and the teacher helping immigrants in Sacco, Maine, registered no national attention, but they built the resistance. We are everywhere, even when we don’t know it.

3. ENDING CORPORATE SUPPORT FOR ICE

This means shutting down the corporate profiteering that makes the terrorizing of our communities possible.

ICE relies heavily on the private sector to help carry out its Gestapo-like crusade against immigrants and their allies. Without the logistical, financial, and political support of large private corporations, its capacity to terrorize our communities would crumble.

As I stated above, it can be fruitless to search for and defeat the logic of a particular Trump policy, since he rules more by spectacle than policy. We face not goose-stepping Nazis in full regimented bloom but a contradictory clown show of Silicon Valley Psychos and Pseudo Proletarians. Yet the essential driver is always power serving profit.

Trump has made it clear that he isn’t even opposed to migrant workers in US fields—as long as they are paid even less than they are now. There is money to be made and political benefit to white supremacy. “There is now a white fear industrial complex, where many people get very rich and very powerful by telling white America that they are under constant assault,” as a recent PBS documentary (“White with Fear”) put it.

The private prison industrial complex is also part of Trump’s “we.” Our dear Lynn friend Manny from the Congo was seized by ICE when he showed up for his regular check-in at the ICE office in Burlington, MA. He has a work permit, worked two jobs in community service, and has no police record of any kind. He drove the New Lynn Coalition’s Food Aid van, delivering support to 750 families. We found him in the hell hole called the East Montana detention center in El Paso, now held in a tent with 75 other people for 23 hours out of every day—for 8 months. It was built for $1.2 billion in a secret contract handed to an unknown private for-profit company with no experience in the task at hand. The tent city has seen chilling cold temperatures and brutal desert heat, measles and tuberculosis outbreaks, multiple suicides, and at least one confirmed homicide. One billion two hundred million dollars to create a torture chamber where they put the best of the best our society has to offer. Your tax dollars at work.

We need to choke off the profiteers from their profit. And it can be done—has already been done, as shown by the Avelo “Abduction Airlines” victory. A broad coalition decided on a campaign that targeted Avelo Airlines which transported ICE detainees. The coalition aimed to shut the Avelo flights down, and set broad political goals as well for a campaign that:

1. Helps us build a BIGGER working-class base

2. Strengthens strategic alignment

3. Connects attacks on immigrants to billionaire attacks on the multiracial working class

4. Weakens the New Confederacy

The coalition also looked for a winnable campaign, which meant targeting a corporation with a public-facing brand that was vulnerable to political and economic pressure, had some financial vulnerability, and relied to some degree on government support and subsidies. Avelo Airlines fit the bill. And they are now out of the deportation business.

Organizers assembled a broad national coalition of unions, faith organizations, and others, from Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America to the Association of Flight Attendants (a CWA affiliate) to newly emerging local immigrant groups. The flight attendants pointed out that they are required to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds or less in the event of an emergency, which is hard to do when “an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death.” Churches denounced the moral atrocity of the abduction industry, and city leaders denounced the use of taxpayer dollars for subsidies. And all pointed to the corporate profits skimmed from the suffering. There were street protests across the country wherever Avelo landed or took off, 97,000 letters to corporate leadership, and the withdrawal of subsidies and municipal and union investments.

This:

Led to this:

There are similar campaigns against Citizen’s Bank, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Hilton, Palantir, and other corporations who have contracts with ICE. Direct resistance is not enough; we can actually stop ICE by eliminating corporate support, dealing material blows to the capitalists behind the attacks, not just targeting bad politicians or evil fascists (although there are plenty of them!).

The Regime Adapts to the Strength of the Resistance

We are in a new phase of the resistance. As arrogant as the Trump administration is, even they aren’t entirely ignorant of the reaction to their ethnic cleansing campaign: they now avoid the “surge” of thousands of federal agents into high-profile performative attacks on big cities. The tide has turned, and support for mass deportation has collapsed, at least with a widespread belief that Trump has “gone too far.” The issue that Steve Bannon bragged had “80-20” public support has stimulated the strongest—and fabulously multiracial—mass movement against the dictatorship so far. Court cases are collapsing and judges are openly raging at the blanket refusal of ICE to follow court orders.

When even Florida sheriffs are rejecting the draconian mass deportations of Governor DeSantis, who prides himself with being the most anti-immigrant governor in the United States—the tide has indeed turned.

But the underlying goals and methods have not changed. Mass deportations of migrants continue in service of the only consistency beneath the spectacle: power to serve profit, with white supremacy as the essential throughline.

Fewer spectacular “surges” of zombie police in some ways makes our task more difficult: mass deportations grind on in more insidious ways. Our friends and neighbors are still being kidnapped and disappeared. Warehouses are snapped up to “house” human beings. Racial profiling has been blessed by the Supreme Court. ICE officials are fired who do not kidnap enough people to meet assigned quotas, like managers at GE (where I worked for 33 years) were fired for failing to make Friday shipping quotas for aircraft engine parts. Immigration judges, in the separate court system controlled by the executive branch, are fired (100 of them) if they allow someone their freedom to live here. And while most of us were looking away, thousands of National Guardsmen from the Old Confederate states have occupied Washington, DC—something they could not even accomplish during the Civil War.

Fear of kidnapping and disappearance is just normal life here now. We’ve gone from shock and awe to WWI-style trench warfare. The machine grinds on.

The focus on the “surges” has actually misrepresented the actual impact of the mass deportations. There were more ICE detentions in the southern cities of Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, where state government fully supports ICE depravities, than there were in Minneapolis/St. Paul during the Minnesota “surge.” Trump and wannabe cowboys like Bovino rule by spectacle more than policy. But the attacks on migrants by a thousand cuts —ripping away food, housing, education, and health care—continue. The regime tried to go so far as to declare 2.7 million migrants to be officially dead at Social Security, which would cut off their ability to access bank accounts, credit cards and social services, creating,—all the more pressure to self-deport.

Migrants are widgets on a cruelty efficiency chart. But unless you live in the directly affected communities, it may be below your radar.

The Resistance Triangle Will Win

The immigrant defense campaigns are growing and multifaceted. The three fronts are of course interrelated, and a particular campaign or tactic may not fit neatly into a single category. There is no single magical response that will turn the tide until the MAGA fascists are expelled from office and eradicated as a political force—which will take midterm victories and more: years of both social mobilization and electoral organizing.

From Deerfield, New Hampshire, to Sacco, Maine, and Lynn, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minnesota, the people have spoken and ICE is in political retreat. But the abductions are changing tactics. The splashy “surges” have provided red meat to the MAGA base, but have also boosted mass resistance. The deportation machine continues in less obvious but perhaps more effective and efficient ways.

To win, to decisively defeat ICE, we need to build deeper organizations of mass resistance, sharpen and deepen the divisions between municipal and state governments on one hand and the national power of MAGA at the federal level, and go on offense against the corporate ICE profiteers. Their ethnic cleansing campaign against migrants is the cutting edge of their white supremacist imagination, and white supremacy is the brutal sinew of the MAGA program: power serving profit.

We have to win this. Flood the Resistance!

Jeff Crosby is a labor and community activist and a socialist. He worked as a grinder and elected union official at GE in Lynn, Massachusetts, for 33 years, and as Executive Director of a community/faith/labor coalition, the New Lynn Coalition, for 10 years.