Twin Cities rallies behind Anti-ICE activists
Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.
This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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This regime cannot get enough of losing to Minnesotans. Earlier this year, the Feds charged 15 anti-ICE protesters with a variety of ‘crimes’ mostly related to First Amendment protest and speech actions. Trying to turn a handful of minor infractions into a grand conspiracy, the regime sought to create a smokescreen across the violence its brownshirts generated.
In the fascist playbook this sort of targeted prosecution serves to tear holes in opposition movements and set up the left to turn on itself. Minnesotans proved them wrong again. With a strong backbone of union support, ordinary citizens have raised funds for the 15’s defense and organized protests demanding that the fabricated charges be dropped. The defendants remain strong, with all of them refusing any sort of plea deal. Most importantly, the citizens of the Twin Cities recognize that an attack on these 15 is an attack on all residents.
ACTION: Visit the Minnesota 15 site to keep up on developments and contribute support where you can.
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Trump 2.0 is targeting US protesters with ‘antifa’ charges. Activists started a union to fight back
Everyone should know there is no such organization as Antifa and that the current administration is using this chimera to accelerate its witch hunt against leftist organizers. Issued in the fall of 2025, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 proclaims “antifa” to be a “domestic terrorist organization,” legitimizing federal force against a wide swath of progressive organizations.
In the case of the Prairieland Eight, this strategy has yielded harsh sentences, punishing people who did not even attend the July 4, 2025 protest outside an ICE concentration camp in Texas. The Eight were people who engaged in such “terrorist” activities as moving a box of anarchist zines and searching online for directions on how to change a gameboy battery.
To date, the Prairieland Eight have suffered from a lack of union support. In contrast, labor unions in Minnesota have rallied to defend the Minnesota 15 (see previous story), organizers charged with terrorism-related offenses for their brave work in defending their neighbors during last winter’s Operation Metro surge.
A new union to defend those charged in the current campaign of persecution hopes to create support for organizers around the country who encounter these false terrorism charges. Middle school teacher Dario Sánchez, who has been arrested and released on charges associated with his immigrant justice advocacy three times, is one of the founders of the NSPM-7 Defendants Union. The union plans to offer access to legal clinics, media training, and support for people facing state or federal prosecution, attracting interest from organizers around the country confronting the repression authorized by current “anti-terrorist” federal policy.
By calling itself a “union”, the project shows how collective organizing can respond to the federal government’s expanding surveillance, arrests and court cases aimed at protesters. “When the police or the FBI show up at your door, it feels isolating, like it’s happening only to you,” said one organizer. “But the problems people are facing are shared; we want to help de-individualize the experience and create collective leverage – like in a union.”
There is no such thing as Antifa. But there is and has always been power in a union.
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Courageous and creative activists in Willison, Vermont, are going on offensive and targeting tech infrastructure critical to ICE’s new surge of arrests. With bold and entertaining events, they are successfully shutting down or slowing ICE’s efforts.
VT activists have been arrested for sitting in at the White Cap Business Park, home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC), its social media surveillance hub. Sadly, Vermont’s AG (a Democrat!) knuckled under and charged the sitters with trespassing.
The group Shut Down ICE VT, organized a week of protests that began with a clergy-led procession of mourners walking to the White Cap Business Park behind a hearse carrying a pine coffin. The coffin contained 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE. In front of the doors of the spy center, the names of those killed by ICE were read out, and the coffin was nailed shut.
For the next action, protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil to plant a garden, fly rainbow kites, and kick off a full dance party on Harvest Lane, where ICE’s national tip line is housed. The action successfully blocked the road, and ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day.
Later in the week, protestors arrived at dawn at the Harvest Lane facility. They taped handwritten notes to windows and doors encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. Then everyone sat down and began singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down for much of the week. Organizers say the parking lots were empty. ICE employees went home rather than face Shut Down ICE VT’s week of action.
Action item: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. Call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, thanks to the number of people calling, lines have been clogged and response slowed due to wait times of up to 2 hours plus.
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ICE is everywhere: investigation reveals more arrests than ever, with quieter tactics
As enforcement has increased and arrests have gone up in the past month, ICE makes further moves to detain people faster and with less transparency. The Government Accountability Office has found in a report that ICE officers routinely fail to have their body cameras on, even though the cameras should be automatically turned on. Yet ICE is pushing back on this too, as it continues to push back on any fronts where accountability is demanded.
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Family separation is here again, crueler and more insidious than before
CW: suicide, violence to children
Trump, Stephen Miller, Markwayne Mullin, ICE, and their fascist supporters and enablers are doing their best to not only enforce immigration injustice, but to make that injustice as harmful and cruel as possible. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of children and their parents.
Experts estimate that over 35,000 children have had both parents deported under the second Trump administration. This comes as a direct result of a 2025 policy change negating what little effort ICE had been required to make to keep children and parents together. ICE is systematically deporting parents whose children remain in the US, regardless of requests from parents, status within the system, or any other factor.
ICE has also been categorizing children as “unaccompanied” after ICE itself forcibly separates them from their parents. These so-called unaccompanied children are then placed into foster care or in ORR shelters, even though they have parents able and willing to care for them. As one father put it to ICE, “You Kidnapped My Son.”
The LA Times brings us the horrible, tragic story of Samuel Gonzalez Terrones, a 21-year-old man who struggled with mental health. ICE agents kidnapped his mother, who was his primary helper and caretaker in his mental health battles. After ICE had imprisoned Samuel’s mother for two months with no end in sight, Samuel felt unable to carry on, and took his own life.
Never Again Action was founded in direct response to family separation and intentional cruelty under the first Trump administration. Nearly a decade later we remain dedicated to the values and the shared humanity that leads us to say “never again means never again for anyone.” If you are horrified by these stories, and you should be, know that there are lots of ways you can help.
ACTION ITEM: Donate to the fund to keep Minerva Terrones, Samuel’s mother, with her family.
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Political Education Corner:
READ | This week’s Forever Wars piece on how the US War on Terror’s nativist framework in the early 2000’s paved the way for the ramped up ICE operations and deportations of today.
WATCH | ICE AIR: Inside America's Secret Deportation Network - A 50 minute documentary by Nine News in Denver, CO about ICE deportation flights, the process, the abuse, and the danger.
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