Thankful for the humanitarian response to the administration’s atrocities
Trump’s anti-immigrant offensive is bringing out the best as well as the worst in people
Welcome to an abbreviated version of Heads Up News, in honor of Thanksgiving.
Here are some of the people and groups I’m thankful, from this past week alone:
The neighbors and activists calling themselves “constitutional observers” who flooded into the street outside an ICE enforcement action in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday, holding phones in the air to record what was unfolding – and sticking with it even after getting pepper-sprayed by St. Paul police.
The 30 people, most of them young, who participated in an act of civil disobedience on Saturday, getting themselves arrested for blocking the entrance to the Krome immigration detention center in Miami. “As young people, we refuse to accept a future where our friends and family can be disappeared without notice,” Manu Guerrero told WLRN News.
The group of 70 people – mostly grandmothers – who show up weekly to commissioner meetings in a deep-red Ohio county to protest officials’ agreement with ICE. (And the Cincinnati Enquirer, for giving the story the front-page treatment.)
Chicago federal Judge Sara L. Ellis, whose 233-page opinion and order issued on Thursday cited multiple examples of why ICE and Border Patrol statements were “simply not credible.” (Read my Press Watch column about how it’s past time for journalists to stop granting any credibility to statements from the Department of Homeland Security.)
Chicago federal Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes, who after presiding over the dismissals of five cases against protesters outside the Broadview ICE facility, severely scolded prosecutors for bringing the cases in the first place.
The Rev. David Black, who was shot in the head and body with pepper balls as he was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in September, and who last week told Religion News: “I’m seeing almost a revival of Christianity through what’s happening at Broadview in Chicago.”
The Mesa, Ariz., community members who successfully demanded the release of longtime activist Martin Hernandez after police arrested him for trespassing while he was filming immigration enforcement activity.
Public Justice, the nonprofit legal advocacy organization that filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday against the sky-high civil penalties imposed on undocumented migrants as a way to compel them to depart the country.
Gabe Gonzalez (profiled here by NPR), the cofounder of a community defense network in the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park, whose guiding principle is to make the work of immigration enforcement as inefficient as possible.
Clifford “Buzz” Grambo (profiled here by Mother Jones), a veteran who patrols the streets of Baltimore on his electric scooter to keep his neighbors safe and make federal agents uncomfortable.
The protesters who held a rally outside a court hearing for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in Greenbelt, Md., on Thursday.
Faith leaders in Charlotte, who as Religions News reports, “are rushing to do what they can to protect and support immigrants in their communities,” including training hundreds of people in how to respond to immigration enforcement actions by filming them and blowing whistles.
Adrian Carrasquillo, whose “Huddled Masses” newsletter for The Bulwark has relentlessly chronicled immigration and the people fighting back against ICE occupation. See his latest post on “How everyday people are reminding the nation what it means to be American.”
Chicago’s Marimacha Monarca Press art collective, which designed and printed the laminated signs showing up on Chicago light poles that read “ICE secuestró alguien aquí” and “ICE abducted someone here,” with a date and time of the federal immigration arrest written in marker.
The Purple People Resistance of Huntsville, Alabama; NevCo Mad As Hell of Nevada City; the Good Trouble Gang of Sacramento; the Badass Feminists of Gainesville, Florida; the I Scream Social Club of Tampa; Sharp Objects 502 of Louisville, Kentucky; Coffee Compassion Action! Of Cincinnati; Be There York of York, Pennsylvania; and the Circle of Cheyenne Citizen Warriors & Friends of Cheyenne, Wyoming -- some of the more than 320 Visibility Brigades that, as Micah L. Sifry reports in his newsletter, are now active in 46 of the states (plus DC). “Every week, they get together to stand on nearby highway overpasses holding custom letter boards spelling out a message of protest and defiance,” Sifry explains.
Happy Thanksgiving.