Fight Fear, Build Power: Community Defense Works

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“This kind of repression, part of its intention is to isolate people,” says organizer Nikki Marín Baena. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Baena talks with host Kelly Hayes about community defense organizing and how communities are fighting back against Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Music by Son Monarcas and Heath Cantu

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about community defense and how we can organize in opposition to Trump’s mass deportation agenda. We will be hearing from Nikki Marín Baena, who is a co-founder and co-director at Siembra NC, a Latine base-building organization in North Carolina. Nikki was previously finance director at Mijente, where she also helped coordinate the organization’s Sin El Estado work with activists in the U.S., Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America. She is currently a core trainer at Training for Change.

In January, Siembra NC published a crucial resource — the Defend and Recruit Playbook, which is a guide to organizing communities in defense of immigrants. Nikki emphasized the importance of this work in a piece she authored for Teen Vogue, writing:

ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Nikki, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Nikki Marín Baena: Thank you so much for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

NMB: I’m hanging in there. How about you?

KH: About the same. I think we’re all just clawing our way through the day right now. Is there anything you find particularly helpful at the moment?

NMB: There’s two things. One is I have a 6-year-old kid, and so there is some of my day that just has to be [about] that, and that really helps. It’s really grounding. And I’ve started, I’m a not-musically-inclined person, but I have started trying to teach myself Bon Jovi ukulele covers and that’s helping.

KH: That sounds so delightful.

NMB: It’s really fun.

KH: I love that for you. We need that kind of energy right now. I don’t have children, but I do have cats, and I really appreciate that they don’t give a damn about what I am dealing with politically. They want to play. They want attention. They want to be guest stars on Zoom, and I really appreciate the disruption. They don’t care about meeting agendas or deadlines. They just want to be perceived and attended to.

NMB: They’re like, “I’m alive.” Yes.

KH: So, we still have cats and children amid all of the terrible things.

NMB: And the poetry of Jon Bon Jovi.

KH: Yes, and the poetry of Jon Bon Jovi, because “you live for the fight when that’s all you’ve got.” But we’ve also got children, cats, Bon Jovi and ukuleles — and that’s a lot.

And speaking of the fight, can you tell the audience a bit about yourself and your work?

NMB: Yeah. I am co-director at an organization called Siembra NC and we started in 2017 right at the beginning of the first Trump administration. And a lot of what we were doing at that point was we were going into neighborhoods here in North Carolina and doing Know Your Rights trainings so that people would know what rights they had in the event of coming into contact with an ICE agent. And also, one of the things that we saw was actually that rumors were really pervasive, and so people would see something on Facebook or they would get a message on WhatsApp, and then they would stay home from work or keep their kids home from school because they were afraid that ICE presence was being reported in different places. And so we started a hotline where people could call and report these rumors and we trained volunteers as verifiers who could go out and check and see if there was actual ICE presence in the community or if it was just a rumor.

Nine times out of ten it is just a rumor. And so part of the goal was really to just help people be able to go about their day as normally as possible. From that point, we also, there’s a support system that people need if they are experiencing immigration detention. In most of the cases of immigration detention that we saw in North Carolina, the person who was detained was the primary income earner for that family. And so helping people pay their bills, helping people figure out paying for immigration lawyers. We saw a big upswell of support from the community, so people would do food sales for each other for people they didn’t even know. They would put on food sales, or they would have Zumbathons, or different ways of raising money to pay for each other’s legal fees and stuff like that. And so we saw that setting up those community support networks were also a great organizing opportunity.

And one of the things that I believe is that this kind of repression, part of its intention is to isolate people. And so even just going into a neighborhood and helping them set up a WhatsApp group, it made them, people in that community, meet their neighbors. And I’m still in a bunch of these WhatsApp groups from 2018, and some of them now are mostly like, “Has anyone seen my dog?” Or, “I got an Amazon package that’s not mine.” So, I think that just seeing the way that something that started out of a place of a lot of fear also becomes a thing that can help bind a community together in the long term, it feels like a big part of the work.

KH: I think that’s such an important point. The connections that we form in moments of crises make us stronger and more well connected in our day to day lives. Similarly, connections we form for more mundane reasons can become lifelines in a crisis. Overcoming isolation always makes us stronger.

With regard to confronting Trump’s deportation agenda, events are unfolding quickly, and some things may have changed by the time this airs, but to give people a general picture, what are you seeing, right now? What’s changed since he’s taken office and how are those changes affecting targeted communities?

NMB: So, some of the things that we are seeing… I’ll start with things that we’re seeing here in North Carolina and then a little bit about things that we’re seeing in other parts of the country. So in North Carolina, we’re seeing a continuation of, actually, the types of detentions that we saw during the Biden administration, and I think, that actually comprise the majority of detentions that happen generally anyway. Seventy percent roughly of detentions that we see here in North Carolina are actually from the jails. And so people get booked at the jail for something and then end up in ICE custody. And we’re still seeing a lot of that. And the calls we’ve gotten in the last few weeks that have been confirmed detentions have either been things like that or things like someone got detained at a probation appointment, which was also something that we saw during the Biden administration.

I think that what people are most afraid of is what we call community arrests, where ICE goes into the community and just detains people directly. We have not seen community arrests. We at Siembra have not seen community arrests on our hotline as of when we’re recording this. But, we are seeing in other parts of the country, we’re beginning to see community arrests happen. We’re beginning to see workplace raids happen. Tom Homan has said that he wants to do more workplace raids, so we expect that those may happen in the future here in North Carolina. And we’re also seeing some things that are different from the first Trump administration. One is that from reports we’ve heard in other parts of the country, ICE agents are going into places, like workplaces, without presenting judicial warrants, and that’s different. And the other thing is that they’ve said that they’re lifting the protected status of places like churches, schools, hospitals.

We have not seen detentions at those places yet, but I think that that has created a lot of fear in the community. And another goal that Tom Homan has expressed, and that Stephen Miller has expressed, is this idea of self-deportation, so people deciding to leave on their own. So one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about is, well, one way that you make self-deportation happen is you create an environment where there’s a lot of panic and fear and chaos. And so I think even the idea of lifting this protected status from churches, schools, and hospitals kind of contributes to creating that fear.

And the other thing is we’ve seen more rumors in the last three weeks than we saw, I think, at any point during the first Trump administration, so all over the place, people sharing stuff on Facebook, people sharing stuff on WhatsApp, people sharing things on TikTok, and some of them are just text and it says “ICE is at the supermarket,” or some of them are, “I heard through my grapevine of intelligence that ICE will be in Winston-Salem tomorrow.” And these things end up not being true, but by the time we are helping people sort out whether it’s true or not, they’ve been shared hundreds of times. So we’re seeing that in a way that we didn’t see it before.

KH: In this panicked environment, providing people with a structured, reasoned approach to assessing threats and taking action is critical work. Your group has created an amazing resource, toward that end, in the Defend and Recruit Playbook. Can you tell us a bit about this resource?

NMB: Yeah. I think we had a few reflections from the work that we did in the first Trump administration, and one of them was that we were able to use some of our community defense work to recruit people in and to build a base.

And I really believe, and we at Siembra really believe that base building is really important to getting out of the situation that we’re in, in the long term. And so I think that some of our assessment of the moment is that, look, this is going to be a time when a lot of people are paying attention to ICE detentions and there’s going to be a lot of panic in the community, but there’s also going to be a lot of people who want to get involved and be helpful. And so we put out the Playbook so that people who want to start an organization or want to figure out how to recruit more people into their organization can have some tips and people who are trying to do the same thing in different parts of the country can kind of have each other as a resource.

KH: It’s such a crucial offering and I have shared it with so many people. I find the “recruit” aspect of this effort especially helpful, because I think a lot of people in the social media age misunderstand recruitment and what it requires of us. Can you talk about your group’s approach to recruiting and how has it shaped your work?

NMB: Yeah. I mean, I was just talking to some of the organizers at Siembra about this because the last four years we did not stop recruiting. We have been out here, and most of the work that we did in the last four years was actually around wage theft. So after 2021, we did a big survey of Latina people across North Carolina and we were like, “What’s going on? What’s happening in the communities?” And consistently we kept hearing wage theft, workplace abuses, wage theft, workplace abuses, and we were like, “Okay, this is a place where we can actually be helpful. This is a thing we can organize people around.”

And so we started organizing people around their wage theft cases and “can you find more workers who are going through this?” And then “can we find more people to support this worker at their wage theft action?” And so we did a lot of that work, and in some ways I think it was good training for this moment when I think that there are lots of people, like I said, who want to get involved and want to help, or there’s lots of people who are reaching out and saying, “Hey, can you come do a Know Your Rights workshop in my neighborhood?”

And what the playbook does is it helps people be like, “I can help you do a Know Your Rights workshop in your neighborhood if you find some people, and I can help you go find some people who will come to the workshop.” And so this is how we’re always working. We’re always trying to, the people who reach out to us and say, “Hey, can you come to my place of work?” Like, “Yes. How many workers can you get to come to the workshop?” And so we’re trying to encourage people to see themselves as recruiters in their communities. And then, we really believe a lot in leadership development, so people who reach out to us and are excited about something, we’re really into supporting them to take the lead on actually doing the thing, with our help of course.

But yeah, so I think that things like Know Your Rights workshops or things like raising funds for someone who has a family member in detention, these are things that we can actually encourage people to do in their own communities and we can support them to do them. And then usually what we find is that once someone gets a little taste of that, of like, “Oh, I pulled that off,” then they want to do more of it, and then sometimes they become people who want to get other people to do more of it, and then that’s how we think about recruitment.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about listening and responding to community needs as a means of building power. I think a lot of people need to hear this, because I think, too often, people think of organizing as some kind of casting call — like we’re looking for people to play the parts we want them to play. And too often, people also think that means searching for people who are in perfect, long-term agreement with them about political matters and what needs to happen next.

In reality, building with people means listening to their concerns and trying to solve the problems they face. That’s how we broaden our ranks. I also love what you’re saying about empowering people to do work that they think they need to bring in some kind of expert to facilitate, and how that empowerment can get people hyped to do more. I’ve had so many people tell me, over the years, “I’m not a trainer” or “I’m not an organizer,” when of course they can share information or skills with their neighbors, and of course they can help bring people together with a shared purpose. They absolutely have that capacity. It’s an exercise in agency that makes us aware of what we’re capable of. People just need some help and guidance, while they build up their confidence and learn what they need to know.

NMB: Yeah, I mean, we’re in the middle of a cycle of doing Know Your Rights workshops in some of the different counties where we work. And I heard a story yesterday that one of our members, it was her first time really presenting something at a workshop, and she got up in front of everyone and she was like, “Hey, if I seem nervous, it’s because it’s the first time that I’m doing this. But for all of you who are sitting here in this workshop, one day you might be up here like me.” And so it’s just so moving to see people have that experience in real time.

KH: That’s so wonderful, and I hope that everyone who is listening is internalizing this. You could lead a Know Your Rights training, or another kind of training that’s relevant in your community. You can do so awkwardly at first. You can learn. It’s really about connecting with trusted people who can share knowledge and show you the way, and then, in time, you can show others the way, so we have ever-expanding networks of people deconsolidating knowledge that helps keep us safe. In your Teen Vogue piece, you talked about how upon realizing their stakeouts are being observed, ICE agents would sometimes just abandon a stakeout, and about the importance of knowing the difference between judicial and administrative warrants. Can you speak to the importance of this on-the-ground knowledge?

NMB:  First and foremost, I think it’s really important for people who might feel like there’s nothing that they can do or that they just have to give all of their information to an ICE agent or any other law enforcement officer — we think it’s really important that people know what rights are guaranteed to them by the Constitution.

So people knowing that they can ask for a judicial warrant, and knowing what a judicial warrant looks like, we think is really important. We have already seen examples in this administration of people saying that they will not open the door until they see a warrant. And that keeps people safe.

The other thing about, and I may have mentioned this, but in the past, we’ve seen a lot of people get detained who are not the people that ICE said they were looking for. ICE calls that a collateral arrest. And so, that’s one of the things that we think is incredibly unfair and ends up being devastating for communities. And so asking for a judicial warrant is a thing that can help people avoid that kind of interaction with ICE.

KH: I also want to talk a bit about lessons learned. In the toolkit, you all mention that not every tactic your group tried in 2017 wound up being useful. Can you talk a bit about what worked and what didn’t during the first Trump administration?

NMB: Yeah, I think one of the things that worked, some of us had been trained as old-school organizers. I didn’t really have any formal training, but some of the other people who helped found Siembra did. And it was very controversial, this “let’s raise money for people who have a family member in detention,” since so much of old-school community organizing is like, “Never give people money.” But having community fundraisers and putting that money into a pool that anyone could apply to and get some money to help pay for bills or legal costs ended up being a surprisingly good organizing tool. It got so many people involved. You were talking earlier about you don’t really have to agree politically with everything someone says to feel like, “Yeah, we should help people who are having a tough time paying their bills.” So it’s a low-barrier-to-entry thing, and you can do fundraisers that are really fun.

And so then you end up with the bonus of it’s a fun community event that people go to and eat really good food at, and you did all these other things. You developed people’s leadership. You raised money. So that was a surprise for us. One tactic that we tried in the early, early days that did not work for us was we were knocking doors in neighborhoods to invite people to power-of-attorney clinics, and that just … People came to the clinic and then we never saw them again. And so I think we got a little bit sharper about what are the kinds of asks that are organizing asks, and what are the kinds of asks where what we might end up doing is providing a service in the community, and that might be helpful, but it might not keep people with us.

KH: That really resonates. I know that back in 2017, here in Chicago, a lot of people here in the city got trained up to form teams and put their bodies on the line to stop deportations. These were blockades-style trainings where people were preparing to physically intervene to prevent the removal of folks from our communities — and people got really hyped about these trainings. It felt good to rehearse moments when we imagined we would all be brave together and try to stop this violence. But what I’ve heard from longtime immigration organizers in our city is that these tactics just didn’t wind up coming into play much. Arrests happened quickly, and in ways that didn’t lend themselves to people getting to mobilize and intervene in this way.

When the skills people had geared up to deploy didn’t wind up being relevant to what was happening on the ground, a lot of people simply fell away from the issue. So now, local immigration organizers here are really focused on training people to do Know Your Rights education work, and to be part of the rapid response networks that verify ICE sightings and provide direct support for people impacted by raids.

It’s more challenging to recruit people to participate in the day-to-day legwork of organizing than it is to get people excited about rehearsing a moment when we can all imagine being brave together. I mean, who doesn’t want to imagine themselves teaming up with others to physically bring injustice to a halt? That’s beautiful, satisfying stuff, and I am certain there will be contexts when that kind of action is necessary in the coming months and years. But in these deeply uncertain times, I think we need to think about courage more expansively. Like, finding the courage to overcome our isolation, and take a chance on building relationships with people who might disappoint us. Or, learning a new skill — like leading a Know Your Rights training — and practicing it in front of people. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not terribly dangerous or exciting, that also requires us to mess with our routines, break patterns and take chances, and I hope people are willing to think in those terms. Because dramatic outcomes are often built on a lot of actions that, by themselves, don’t feel drastic or exciting. There is a lot of brave patience involved with building possibilities one piece at a time.

NMB: Yeah, I relate a lot to the experience that you’re saying that people had in Chicago. I feel like one of our other reflections on the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2020 is that we did do all of this ICE Watch training and all of this training around rapid response, and we saw it kind of as, “Oh, it’s solidarity work.” And so people who are not necessarily immigrants themselves, this is a way that they can pitch in in this time that people are really afraid, and it’s really inspiring, and it’s really beautiful, but we didn’t really have a longer play than that. And so after the Trump administration ended, a lot of those people fell away and we didn’t really have things to ask them to do, or we didn’t think we did. And so, one of our big lessons has been, okay, we can actually get people interested in ICE Watch. And that’s great, and it brings out… I don’t know if it’s unlikely people or likely people, but it brings out a lot of faith community, it brings out a lot of people that you might not otherwise think of as activists. And I think that that’s really great.

And the other part of it is that now we’re trying to think a few more steps ahead. So for example, we’re trying to think through if we know that 70% of the detentions are happening at the jails, can we use this as an opportunity to have cite and release campaigns in different places so that less people are actually getting booked at jails in the first place, because that’ll make it less likely that they’ll end up in ICE custody. So there’s things like that that we’re like, “Okay, great. If you’re interested in ICE Watch, that’s great, but actually we have a few other plays in this community for things that would help make us all safer.”

Also, I was talking about the wage theft stuff and we’re trying to figure out, “Okay, you want to help out with ICE Watch. Immigrant workers are actually now having to face not just the threat of ICE, but the threat of employers who are going to harass them, mistreat them, not pay them, and use the fact that they are afraid of ICE as a bargaining chip. What are you going to do about it? Who are you going to call?”

And so trying to figure out in different parts of North Carolina, what are the ways that we can have more protections for immigrant workers? And so, I think that that’s one of our reflections in terms of, “What does this moment require of us?” It’s like, yes, what are the different gaps that we have to fill? And also, I think that all of these rumors and all of this panic, it is, in some ways it’s very real. And in some ways it’s also a distraction from thinking about the longer view. And so how do we not totally lose sight of the long view while we are living in this reality? So I think it is one of the challenges, and I think it is one of the kinds of courage that this moment requires, is that balance between reacting to things in real time and thinking about where do we want to be in four years, in eight years, in 12 years?

KH: Absolutely. And as I hear you talking about what this moment demands, I’m also thinking about confronting the role of criminalization in deportations. Criminalization has long been a primary means of siphoning undocumented people into the deportation machine, and that mechanism has been supercharged by the Laken Riley Act, which calls for the expedited deportation of any undocumented person charged with a crime. This new legal standard basically makes police the arbiters of who can be deported at any given time. All they have to do is make an allegation and an arrest, and they don’t even have to concern themselves about whether the charge would hold up in court, because their power to designate someone as criminal is enough to kick start the deportation process. For anyone who knows much about how police operate, this is obviously alarming.

It also makes me think about the need to confront our attitudes towards criminalization and what it means to us in our communities. I am thinking about how, in addition to asking people to participate in ICE Watch, and rumor control, and support targeted families, we need to convince people to push back on the idea of criminalization as a knee-jerk response to the problems our communities face. If we want undocumented people to be safer, and to avoid people being kidnapped and forced onto planes out of the country — some of whom are winding up in Guantánamo Bay, in prison camps in El Salvador, and in other life-threatening conditions — we need less contact between the police and community members, period.

And that also brings up the importance of having our own community safety projects, including the kind of chat groups you were talking about, where people reach out to each other directly about what’s happening. We need more connection, and more experiments in creating safety among ourselves, and we really need to reject the idea of police as a go-to problem solving mechanism. These purveyors of violence, in our communities, are also now potential arbiters of who gets deported and who doesn’t, and we have to operate with that awareness. When there’s a problem, it can’t be our first move to call the most racist, transphobic and violent people around, who also might kill or kidnap someone for absolutely no reason. We have to be more organized, creative and capable than that. That is ultimately going to be so important, in terms of helping us prevent deportations.

NMB: What happened here in North Carolina in the first Trump administration in 2018, there was this big wave of progressive sheriffs that got elected into office in most of the major cities, like most of the major population centers in North Carolina. Many of them were Black sheriffs, and many of these sheriffs either campaigned or, after they got elected, agreed to stop their 287(g) agreements. And so part of what we then saw in North Carolina was in 2019, ICE came and did a big operation where they did their own detentions and they put up billboards in places like Mecklenburg County, which is where a lot of people in North Carolina live, the county where Charlotte is, with “here’s this criminal that the sheriff let out, and then he did something else.” And so we saw a lot of that, and they actually did a press conference, ICE did, about like, “Yes, we are doing this operation in North Carolina because your sheriffs are not collaborating with us.”

And so I think that the thing that became [the] Laken Riley [Act], we got to see them play it out. And I would say probably that people in Arizona saw them play it out, just like this narrative about migrant crime. We saw them try this out in real time in our communities, and I’ve heard people say, I’ve heard immigrant people say, “Well, they’re going to deport the criminals. That’s not the worst thing.” But I think what people don’t realize is it’s anyone. It’s like you were driving with an expired license, it’s you had a DUI, and then you paid the fine, and you went to court, and you went to probation, and you went to all your appointments. That’s a criminal.

And we’re seeing more and more encroachment on migrating at all is a crime. And I think that it’s a big change that we’re seeing, and I think that it’s really important for us to get stories out there about how real people are getting detained and how it impacts our communities. Because I think there’s also a way that this migrant crime narrative has become really dominant in a way that actually hides who this is actually happening to.

KH: Absolutely. And in addition to the low-level kind of offenses you just mentioned, I think people really need to consider how dishonest law enforcement can be, and what it means to empower them to flag people for deportation by simply making an allegation. People are wrongfully arrested all of the time. I told a story in a recent piece about being on the beach years ago with friends, and how one of the people I was with annoyed a cop by asserting his rights, when the cop approached us. The cop announced that we were all under arrest for being on the beach after hours. When I pointed at his own watch, which indicated that it wasn’t after hours yet, he said, “It’s whatever time I say it is.” That is how law enforcement functions in this country: with impunity. And there are no consequences for the lies they tell or the damage they cause with these casual abuses. Now, we’re in a situation where a casual assertion of dominance like that could get someone deported much more easily. I’m also thinking about how, in my area, people ride their bikes on the sidewalk all the time. Middle-aged white people do it, and the police look the other way. Young people of color do it, and they are in danger of arrest — all because they don’t want to get struck by reckless drivers on the road. The dragnet of criminalization is so wide, and cops are such dishonest narrators — which has been documented, again and again — we really need to tackle the role criminalization is going to play in everything this administration wants to do, because it is the beast that people are being fed to. It is the social fabric of fascism in this country.

It’s also how everyday people are going to be made complicit in things they claim to abhor, because people in the U.S. are already conditioned, as you mentioned, to say, “Oh, maybe it’s not so bad if they’re doing these things to criminals.” That is how they’re going to tear apart families, and punish people for ending their pregnancies, and punish trans people and their parents for seeking health care — by weaponizing our complicity with a violent system.

We really need to understand criminalization for what it is in this moment, which is a means of disposal, and a means of dehumanizing people such that the rest of us are told that we can stop thinking about them and we don’t have to care about what’s happening to them. We really need to understand that dehumanizing force for what it is, and rage against this culture of forgetting, so we can organize ourselves in opposition to the disposal of human beings.

NMB: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we talk a lot about here at Siembra is how immigration law works. Immigration law is part of our administrative legal code in the U.S. It’s like tax law. So when people violate immigration law, they’re violating administrative legal code. It is kind of like not paying your taxes, or making a mistake on your taxes, or you’re in some weird place with your taxes.

But, increasingly, we are hearing people in mainstream media talk about people who are violating immigration law as being “illegal.” And we’ve had this happen before, but I am experiencing it in a different way with more and more people supporting this idea that if you are here and you are undocumented, you are a “criminal.”

And so, because so much of the mass deportation language gets justified as who’s getting deported are criminals, it’s really confusing to have it be like, who’s getting deported are criminals and anyone who’s here undocumented is a criminal, which is not actually true.

And I think this feels kind of like the whole birthright citizenship executive order, in the sense that it feels like slowly over time they are moving so much nuance around the conversation of who gets to be in this country, who gets to be American, and what it means to be in compliance or not in compliance with immigration law.

KH: So if people are hearing all of this, and they’re hyped, and ready to take action, where should they start? How are community defense groups formed?

NMB: Yeah. Well, one thing is when we started, we really did just go out and talk to our neighbors, and we asked if our neighbors had heard about what was going on with immigration detention and if they wanted to know more. And we would do Know Your Rights workshops in our neighborhoods, and we would put together WhatsApp groups. And so I think it really can be that simple as in my neighborhood, in my apartment building, can I talk to my neighbors? Can I get us together? Can we have a WhatsApp group? And I think then the next layer after that is, the next layer that we had after that was starting the hotline, which our early hotline was a Google Voice number.

It’s not a Google Voice number anymore because it’s gotten more complicated, but it really doesn’t take a lot to start to be like, “Okay, now we have a phone number that people can call.” And so it really can be something that simple, and if people want to know more about the experience that we had and the different tactics that we tried, you can go to defendandrecruit.org and download the Playbook. And we are doing trainings online to talk about the different parts of what we tried and the different things that we’re seeing come up now so that people can try out different stuff in their own communities.

KH: Well, I am so grateful for that resource and for how generous you all have been with your time and the knowledge that you’re sharing. Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

NMB: I think there’s a couple of things. One is that, I think I might’ve said this earlier, but I think it’s really important for us to really put faces on what’s happening and tell the stories about the people who are getting detained as much as we can. I think it’s really important that more people see what this really is, so who’s really getting detained and how this is really happening. I think that that’s really important because I think even though there was some amount of public support for the idea of mass deportation, I don’t think that there is support for what is actually happening. And so I think that that’s really important. I think the other thing is, yeah, I think I might’ve said this earlier too, but yeah, just how do we not lose sight of the bigger picture?

So I think I want to encourage us in these moments to really pace ourselves. And as much as it feels like there’s a lot to react to and respond to, and it feels important, and it is important, I think at the same time, just holding onto the bigger picture of I really do think that an organized community is what will get us through this time. And so finding the different ways….

There’s so many things in my life that are not this, that also feel important to our survival. So every weekend we pile our children with a bunch of other children, and all the parents take turns getting a break basically from their kids. And those kinds of things that we can do in our neighborhoods and in our communities just feel really important to getting through this time. And they feel related to me because I think sometimes we think about organizing as work or a thing that we do for a few hours a day, but I think just what are the different ways that we let organizing be a part of our lives? Because I think that those kinds of connections are really important to getting us through.

KH: I really appreciate that example of collective care and support. I completely agree that to get through these times, we are going to need collective practices and ways of living that make life a little easier, or joyful, or tolerable, or whatever we can manage on any given day. We need to hold each other, and those efforts to hold each other have to be interwoven with the work we’re trying to do together. That is going to make our efforts sustainable, and enable us to hold each other in our humanity as we push through these times. So, I appreciate you uplifting that, and I really appreciate you joining me to talk about the work that you’re doing. I’m so grateful for it, and so grateful for the Defend and Recruit Playbook, which I hope everyone will check out. I know this is a heavy and extremely busy time for you, so I just want to thank you so much for making the time to talk today.

NMB: Thanks so much, Kelly.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for Nikki, for Siembra NC, and for the Defend and Recruit Playbook, which is a fantastic resource for people interested in community defense organizing. I talked to Nikki this week to check in about whether or not anything had changed in the days since we had this conversation, since events are moving quickly in these times. Nikki shared the following.

NMB:  We’re already seeing different things happen this time around. So for example, there was a detention a couple of weeks ago here in Durham, North Carolina, where the law enforcement agency that was carrying out the detention was U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. We’re in Durham, North Carolina, we’re not particularly near a border, so we’ve never seen Border Patrol in this area before, but we’re seeing other agencies get pulled into these operations. Then there are other examples we’re hearing about of people who went to an ICE check in or people at the courthouse getting detained by ICE agents.

These are still kind of isolated examples and people are really afraid to speak out about them. And so those are some of the things that we’re seeing. And so we’re trying our best to figure out how to support those families, and help them know that they are not alone with what they’re going through.

We haven’t seen more community arrests. So, that’s the other thing that we’re keeping an eye out for.

KH: So, we are seeing a sprawling effort by this administration to demonize, target and remove immigrants from the U.S., as hesitant countries are pressured into accepting deportation flights, and countries like Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama are serving as holding areas for deportees from other countries. The administration has already begun holding some detainees at Guantánamo Bay, where officials say they ultimately plan to incarcerate 30,000 migrants.

To protect our neighbors from this violent apparatus, we need to get organized. Whether that means joining an existing formation, or using resources like the Defend and Recruit Playbook to create our own community defense effort, now is the time. I would also encourage people to examine how they can resist the deportation machine in their workplaces. Some teachers and health care workers are already engaged in those efforts, and if you need help thinking about how your workplace can resist criminalization, and the seizure of our neighbors, the Resisting Criminalization Help Desk, hosted by my friends at Interrupting Criminalization, may be able to help — and we will provide a link that to that resource in the show notes of this episode.

I know that many of us are fixated on the catastrophic spectacle in Washington, D.C., right now, as Elon Musk and his minions continue to loot the federal government, but it’s crucial that we continue to organize our communities constructively to create as much safety and justice as we can, wherever we are. If you’re doing that work, I want to thank you, and I hope that we can continue to learn from each other as we build.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• If you’re interested in community defense, be sure to check out the Defend and Recruit Playbook.
• Interrupting Criminalization offers a Resisting Criminalization Help Desk for organizers and groups looking for thought partnership and one-on-one consultation around strategies to interrupt criminalization, staffed by IC co-founder Andrea J. Ritchie.
• The Chicago Teachers Union has created a Sanctuary Schools Toolkit for educators who want to protect students from attempted ICE raids.
  
  Further reading:
• ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood — Here’s What to Know by Nikki Marín Baena
• Health care workers strategize to protect undocumented patients amid rollback of ‘sensitive locations’ guidelines by Tamar Sarai