Our Basic Rights Are Under Attack. But You Don’t Have to Risk Tear Gas to Fight Back!
CALL TO ACTION: Here are a few things we can all do today…
On July 11, 2025, my friend and accomplice in immigrant rights activism, Willie Lubka, was tear-gassed.
He was one of many people attacked by heavily armed federal troops acting on behalf of the Department of Homeland “Security” (DHS) in a standoff that rocked the quiet community of Camarillo, California, and lasted for hours, right up until midnight.
Willie’s okay, but over 300 hardworking people, many from indigenous cultures with decades-long ties to the US, have been disappeared from the fields of Glass House Farms. They are now incarcerated, separated from their families, facing expulsion in chains away from the loved ones who count on them. Many were injured. One person is dead: Jaime Alanis Garcia, may he rest in power.
“He came to work that day with his lunch bucket like he had for 10 years and ended up being chased by ICE to his death. So wrong,” states agro-business journalist Catherine Saillant, who was also on the front lines with Willie that day.
Everyone was traumatized by the battlefield-style show of force carried out by men dressed for war, who appeared out of nowhere in military vehicles. Helicopters roared above, dusting heads. Troops advanced, shooting rubber bullets and canisters of tear gas, hurling flash bangs. Unarmed and peaceful protesters ran blind amid clouds of chemical smoke, coughing, shouting, begging for something to calm the pain eating out their eyes. It was purportedly a very potent batch.
“[I]mmigration actions and raids are not random acts of law enforcement, they are state-sanctioned terror,” state my contacts from the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP). They should know. In this Facebook post, they share eyewitness recordings of the incident, just one of two military raids to target their community on the very same day. The second took place in Oxnard, California.
Trump & Co are not targeting hardened criminals. They are not rooting out terrorist cells. They are not breaking up child smuggling rings. They are not stopping the trafficking of fentanyl.
They are going after the easiest targets: farmworkers. People who labor under punishing conditions to put food on our tables, who have no choice but to show up for work each day so their children have food on theirs.
They are targeting construction workers, home healthcare aides, landscapers, factory workers, hospitality professionals, and people showing up to ICE check-ins, which is to say, individuals and families playing by the rules.
They are not targeting “the worst of the worst.” They are targeting our communities.
This is how the biggest bullies in all the land — Trump, Homan, Bondi, Noem — are fulfilling outrageous quotas dictated by anti-immigrant-evil-wizard-behind-the-would-be-throne Stephen Miller.
This is cruelty for cruelty's sake. This is racism. This is dehumanization. This is hate, no matter what lies DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin funnels through the Fox News propaganda network and onto your dinner plate.
From Sea to Shining Sea, Our Rights Are Under Attack.
Trump & Co have harnessed immigration to drive US democracy into crisis. The Mega MAGA Murder Bill, enacted on July 4, 2025, provides ICE with a budget greater than the FBI, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, US Marshals Service, and ATF combined.
This means that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol — the most troubled, least transparent US law enforcement agencies in the land, as I characterize them in my book Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands — are now the largest paramilitary forces ever deployed on US soil. They know no transparency. They suffer zero accountability. And they are acting as Trump & Co’s de facto personal police.
It’s time for a paradigm shift, people. And all hands are required on deck.
But You Don’t Have to Risk Tear Gas to Fight Back!
CALL TO ACTION:
Here are a few things we can all do today…
Volunteer at a sanctuary or “detention” center at the border or in your local area. Learn the stories of those who’ve fled violence, poverty, climate breakdown, gender persecution, religious oppression, or political persecution.
Start a Welcome the Stranger program, or join one. Bring friends and family along. Introduce them to the hardworking young mother, the dedicated father, the teenager in need of a new pair of shoes. Are they so scary?
Donate funds, if you don’t have time to give, to organizations providing food and/or cash cards to our undocumented neighbors, who are too frightened of being caught up in an ICE raid and separated from their loved ones to go to work or to shop.
Attend Know Your Rights workshops. Print and distribute Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas wherever you go so that everyone, regardless of immigration status, understands the protections we all should enjoy and expect under constitutional law.
Join or form a Rapid Response Network.
Take part in your neighborhood DHS patrol. Pack your go bag and be ready to respond when ICE raids rock your workplace or neighborhood.
Accompany those affected by ICE actions.
Offer the impacted legal assistance, if you’re a lawyer, or moral support, if you’re not.
Refrain from using communications systems owned by META (WhatsApp, Facebook) and Musk. Switch to Signal instead. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so you can share confidential information without putting people's identities or locations at risk.
Prepare a room in your basement, garage, guest house, or second home. You may be needed to harbor a neighbor, colleague, family member, or friend when the Underground Railroad pulls into your town.
Skill up fast! I can help!
Protest! But keep it peaceful. They want us to get violent so they can justify their violence. In the spirit of John Lewis — may he, too, rest in power — make good trouble, necessary trouble. But don’t give “them” and the Fox News propaganda machine sound bites or images they can use against us.
Tell your elected officials in no uncertain terms: This is not how we want our tax dollars to be spent! Flood them with letters, phone calls, petitions, etc. Apply pressure.
Vote out every single member of Congress who supports for-profit concentration camps on publicly inaccessible lands and military bases.
Vote out every single MOC who supports the for-profit carceral industry, period!
Insist that DHS agencies be made accountable for their crimes against humanity: that includes ICE, CBP, and the Border Patrol, too. Justice is not possible without oversight!
Appeal, as well, to the corporate purse:
Dump the GEO Group and CoreCivic stock from your mutual fund and retirement portfolios, if you have such things. If you don’t, urge those in your circle who do.
Protest outside local jails run by them, LaSalle Corrections, Ahtna, Inc., etc.
Demand that fixed base operations and industry unions at our local airports cease to enable the ICE Air engine.
Boycott the charter airlines that fly for ICE Air by refusing to attend the games and gigs of our favorite sports teams and rock bands they also ferry.
Inform both athletes and celebrities of how they are aiding the Deportation Machine.
Harness their solidarity, requesting that, like Colin Kaepernick, they take a knee on the tarmac of their next GlobalX, Omni Air International, or World Atlantic chartered flight.
Be more alert to how corporate leadership and shareholders make us complicit in crimes against humanity when their profit-making crosses our thresholds.
Example: Until April 2025, Amazon.com, whose tentacles reach into all our homes, was the largest shareholder of Air Transport Services Group, the parent company of the long-haul mass deportation monopoly carrier, Omni Air International. In the web of responsibility, this means that during Trump’s first mass deportation campaign, the one documented in Crossing the Line, the ubiquitous service known for wrapping packages and delivering them to our doorsteps was also WRAPping people in a full-body restraint called The WRAP.
As exposed in Part V of my book, ICE is using The WRAP to lock human beings already shackled in five-point restraints into torturous stress positions, and delivering them back to their persecutors.
This made Amazon users worldwide accessories to torture and refoulement:
We have to think broadly about how the corporations aiding ICE, CBP, and DHS are also playing a part in our everyday lives.
Those of us who have money to invest can exercise better due diligence, using tools developed by the
and American Friends Service Committee’s Investigate, to align investments with values and divest from companies involved in mass incarceration, immigrant detention and surveillance, and the Border Industrial Complex.We can all, whether investor or not, let corporate leadership and shareholders alike know that we know what they’re doing with public money. And that we don’t like it!
We must put corporate and government leadership on notice: The Cruelty Is Not Okay!
We must demand that our tax dollars be spent on healthcare and education, not on human misery and pain.
We must proclaim, as German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt did back in 1951, that we should all “have the right to have rights,” just for being people. That the universality of human rights should be tied to our personhood, not to our nationhood; to the reality of our existence, not the location of our birth.
History is repeating itself in the so-called Land of the Free.
The once Nazi-sympathizer, Pastor Martin Niemöller, expresses in his famous poem, First They Came, how he lived to regret not speaking up for his neighbors when white supremacist ideology allowed the worst of humanity’s worst impulses to prevail.
So, please, speak up on behalf of newcomers to your colleagues and neighbors, your family and friends. Recall your own immigration legacy, and ask them to do so as well.
Are your stories really so different from today’s migration stories?
Remind everyone that we are all human beings; that no one chooses to pull up stakes and run unless they have no other choice; that we all deserve to live with dignity and in safety.
Point out that no one benefits from walls and division, from cruelty and fear. That fear is a trap, depriving us of empathy and human connection. That a nation without empathy cannot be great, not now, not again.
Invite one and all to join our growing chorus, singing out loud, in ever louder harmony: This is not the people we wish to be!
Don't look away. That's what they want us to do.
Keep hope. And try to appeal to humanity’s better angels, as Catherine Saillant did on the day Willie was teargassed. Speaking as a mother, and compelled from the heart, Catherine addressed the young men in riot gear wielding batons. She told them, in so many words:
Then these boys, at the urging of their supervisors, shot tear gas at her, too.
We may not be able to bring about significant social change until this reign of terror is well behind us. But we can Resist. Refuse. Reclaim.
We can become the billion tiny grains of sand that jam the gears and keep them from turning until these dark days are finally behind us, because they will end.
It will be a long, traumatic journey to throw off the criminal actors who, like autocrats since time immemorial, are consolidating the levers of power to unshackle the worst of humanity’s worst impulses once again. But we must believe that we can, and that we will. And that when we do, we will be ready to build a more humane world from the ashes.
Stay strong, my friends. The only way through this is . . . together.
In solidarity,
Sarah
PS: This Call to Action from The Intercept came out concurrent with my musings above. For additional ideas, especially for those of you willing to put your bodies between DHS paramilitary forces and the most vulnerable among us, be sure to give it a read.
Thanks so much for this, Sarah. Here in Worcester, MA, we are building a network of local faith and advocacy groups to give people as many ways as possible to intervene. We get ICE Watch training from the Massachusetts LUCE network https://www.lucemass.org/ and Neighbor to Neighbor https://n2nma.org/. We get immigration court hearing accompaniment training from BIJAN (Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network) https://www.beyondbondboston.org/. Also guidance and training and resources from MIRA Coalition (Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy) https://miracoalition.org/. I urge folks in other states to seek out comparable resources, get on their mailing lists, and share information with each other in local Signal Messenger groups https://signal.org/download/. Signal is end-to-end encrypted chat, so you can share confidential information without putting people's identities or locations at risk. Blessings, Mike Shell