Ending the collection of vehicle location data. Campaigns to pause evictions. Strict limits on where agents can operate. Restrictions on who can collaborate with them.
As Congress has come under bitter criticism for failing to enact stringent enough restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents more broadly, these are just a few of the ways immigrant rights groups, elected officials, and other organizers at the local level are moving to insulate their neighborhoods from Donald Trump’s turbocharged deportation program. Those efforts, on both coasts and states in between, include cities hardest hit by ICE’s operations and blue hubs in red states that have been relatively untouched, and have seen anti-ICE activists employ an array of legislative tactics to blunt deportation efforts.
It’s a sign of the intensifying opposition, particularly in liberal-leaning urban areas, to deportation tactics that are simultaneously growing more aggressive and more unpopular, and which most recently in Minneapolis left a gaping hole in the city’s budget and two US citizens dead. But it also marks the latest stage in blue America’s embrace of federalism, and a shift in focus on local organizing in the face of what many Democratic voters view as both a hostile presidential administration and weak opposition to it from their own party leaders.
“People are not waiting for help to come from the outside, and certainly not from Washington DC,” says Yusra Murad, an organizer with the Twin Cities tenants currently pushing for an eviction moratorium in response to ICE raids.
In Minneapolis, three-term democratic socialist city councilmember Jason Chavez coauthored a strengthened sanctuary city ordinance that passed unanimously last December. In Portland, Oregon, Sameer Kanal, part of the socialist bloc that holds a third of the city council, has introduced an ordinance that would empower local police to detain masked…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
