Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, which ironically was passed on July 4th, will provide billions of dollars in funding to ramp up the federal government’s wide-ranging military-style campaign against unarmed civilians across the country. Prior to the bill’s passage, masked and armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were already raiding workplaces, ambushing individuals going in and out of immigration courts and other government offices, and kidnapping people off the streets. To carry out their orders to detain thousands of immigrants a day, ICE has drafted police personnel from all sorts of other agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). All told, it’s not quite a war but it’s damn close—most starkly evident when Trump ordered the National Guard and the Marines into Los Angeles and when the troops marched through the city’s MacArthur Park, located in a largely immigrant community.
Since Trump came into office again, ICE has been targeting undocumented workers and their families or individuals perceived by federal agents as looking like they are undocumented. While the government at times claims that it is only targeting those who pose a danger, it is all but completely clear that those who are routinely being seized are targets only because the government has believed that it can get away with seizing them—even when it turns out that those who have been snatched up are American citizens or people who have documents that legalize their residence in the country.
The Trump administration’s use of ICE has relied on public spectacle, from high profile raids on pro-Palestinian student protestors and alleged gang members to deporting detainees abroad to El Salvador’s mega prison and, more recently, to the South Sudan. On social media, ICE boasts about its raids, posting pictures of masked and heavily armed agents next to humiliated arrestees. Now with all the new funding, ICE will be on a social media and television recruiting blitz. We will be seeing more of Kristi Noem than we’d ever like to.
The full extent of the assaults has gradually become evident, mostly by way of stories about the different people who’ve been taken: a volleyball player in Milford, Massachusetts; a student at an ESL high school in the Bronx; a woman and her teenaged daughter in Worcester, Massachusetts; an Iranian woman in New Orleans; a Vietnamese waitress in rural Missouri. Recently, a Mexican farm worker fell 30 feet from a building after running from ICE agents who were conducting a raid at the California cannabis farm where he worked. In Chicago, responding to news that ICE has been detaining immigrants checking into immigration court in the South Loop, two brothers working for the National Guard escorted their mother to ensure she would be safe from ICE.
There are casualties beyond the immediate victims and their families, including elderly people who have lost their long-term home health attendants in Sunset Park in Brooklyn to the fear of being grabbed on the way to or from work and early childhood schools in L.A. who are thinking about closing down because their workers are afraid to go to work and parents are afraid to send their children.
Fear, anger and anxiety have also prompted righteous indignation and direct action against ICE officials. In June, LosAngeles saw militant direct action against ICE, but across the country smaller yet no less powerful organizing and direct actions are taking place. In neighborhoods, towns and cities, everyday people are joining rapid response teams to patrol and are signing up for ICE Watch, showing up at courthouses to accompany immigrants, and banging pots and pans outside of hotels where ICE agents are staying. In a moment’s notice, neighbors and passersby are mobilizing to stop ICE from kidnapping people by filming ICE agents and shaming them with their voices, blocking ICE vehicles, and even throwing their bodies in front of armed men with very serious potential repercussions. What will come of these mobilizations in the next few months and years, and how are the people participating in them being changed?
The war on immigrants is just one flashpoint of struggle in this moment. We can imagine that as Trump’s new bill passes and those tariffs finally hit, the lives of millions of Americans will get tougher, meaner and more precarious.
At Hard Crackers, we remain committed to understanding these developments and the ways in which they are affecting people’s views. We are accepting submissions that examine how immigration enforcement is playing out across America, what people are feeling about it all and, most importantly, what they are doing. Some questions and stories we are interested in:
* How are people experiencing the anxiety of ICE raids, both in terms of those who fear being kidnapped and those who fear their neighbors and friends will be? How is this anxiety impacting relationships, work and life in general?
*How are everyday people responding to ICE raids? What are people’s experiences with ICE watch and/or rapid response teams? For veteran immigrant justice activists, what are lessons from your past organizing efforts that may be important for the present? What are the seeds in the current ICE resistance efforts to build larger anti-systemic movements?
* What about MAGA defectors who may be seeing the ICE raids play out in real life and may also begin to be impacted by the weight of contradictions, the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill cuts to Medicaid, SNAP benefits, the closure of rural hospitals, etc.? How are they feeling, defecting, and doing?
*How are people in border towns being affected by ICE raids and immigration enforcement?
*How is ICE recruiting, who is joining, and who is resisting?
Let us know what you’re seeing, doing and thinking! Please send submissions to hardcrackerseditors@gmail.com