IndigenousNetwork was able to attend a briefing hosted by American Community Media that examined the rapid escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity and the expanding forms of community resistance emerging in response. The discussion came amid aggressive federal enforcement tactics across U.S. cities, including street arrests, raids near schools, and the use of force in public spaces. For Indigenous communities, where migration, jurisdiction, and state violence are already lived realities, the briefing underscored how immigration enforcement is increasingly intersecting with broader questions of public safety, civil rights, and community sovereignty.
Pilar Marrero, veteran journalist and longtime immigration correspondent, opened the briefing by situating the moment as a national turning point. “Over the past weeks, immigration enforcement in the United States has entered a far more confrontational phase,” she said, pointing to the killing of Rene Nicole Goode, a U.S. citizen and parent in the Minneapolis public school system, during protests against ICE activity. Federal authorities have described the shooting as self-defense, a claim rejected by local officials. What followed, Marrero noted, were sustained protests, legal challenges, and coordinated organizing efforts spreading across cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Portland, and Minneapolis. Polling now shows that a majority of Americans view ICE enforcement as overly aggressive, including independents and some conservative voters.
The briefing grounded these shifts in firsthand accounts from organizers working at the neighborhood level. Amanda Otero, a parent in Minneapolis Public Schools and co-executive director of TakeAction Minnesota, described a city where enforcement has moved into daily life. “We’re witnessing horrific acts in our neighborhoods and at our schools,” she said, before turning to the response she has seen. Tens of thousands of residents, she explained, have organized local networks to provide food, rides, rent assistance, and school patrols for families afraid to leave their homes. “What I’m seeing is an incredible love for our people and our communities,” Otero said, alongside “incredible courage” to act under constant pressure. She described watching federal agents deploy tear gas within sight of a preschool, an image that has since become familiar across the city.
Sari Lee, deputy organizing director at ONE Northside in Chicago, connected Minneapolis to earlier enforcement waves in her own city. Lee outlined how Chicago communities responded to large-scale ICE operations by building block-level defense networks, legal education campaigns, and mutual aid systems. “I had never seen the city more united and powerfully acting together,” she said, describing rapid responses that led to the release of detained community members. Lee emphasized that these strategies did not emerge overnight, but were shaped by years of organizing against police surveillance and earlier immigration raids. That lineage matters, particularly for Indigenous communities whose resistance strategies often draw from long histories of mutual protection outside formal state systems.
From a national vantage point, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, framed the moment as politically galvanizing. “The attacks on immigrants are the tip of the spear on attacks on all Americans,” she said, arguing that the enforcement-only agenda now unfolding affects citizens and non-citizens alike. Cárdenas pointed to the unprecedented deployment of nearly 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis as evidence of a strategy that is expanding, not receding. While public opinion has shifted, she cautioned that rejection of ICE tactics does not yet translate into consensus on immigration reform. “People are recoiling from what they’re seeing,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean they trust the alternatives.”
Legal challenges have become another front in this widening conflict. Ann Garcia, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, described a growing number of lawsuits challenging DHS tactics, including the violent suppression of protests and the detention of U.S. citizens. She detailed a recent class action case in Minnesota that resulted in a temporary injunction against DHS, later blocked by a federal appeals court. “The Department of Homeland Security is trying to create a fictitious counter-narrative,” Garcia said, one that frames peaceful protesters as domestic threats. She warned that leaked internal memos authorizing warrantless home entries signal an attempt to bypass constitutional protections altogether. “There’s nothing legal about this policy,” she said plainly.
The briefing closed with historical context from Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor and scholar of civil resistance. Tushnet drew parallels between the current moment and the Fugitive Slave Act of the 1850s, when federal law enforcement efforts sparked mass resistance in Northern cities. Legal victories were rare then, he noted, but public outrage reshaped political reality. “You couldn’t count on the courts then, and you probably can’t count on them now,” Tushnet said. What mattered was sustained public pressure that made the moral stakes visible. Courts, he argued, tend to follow social movements rather than lead them.
For Indigenous newsrooms, the relevance of this conversation is immediate. Many Indigenous people are migrants, mixed-status family members, or residents of urban areas where enforcement now overlaps with schools, housing, and public services. The expansion of ICE authority echoes older patterns of federal intrusion, jurisdictional overreach, and the criminalization of community defense. What this briefing made clear is that resistance is no longer isolated or reactive. It is organized, intergenerational, and increasingly public.
As enforcement intensifies, the work of documentation becomes critical. Not as advocacy, but as record. The stories being told now, by parents, organizers, lawyers, and educators, will shape how this period is understood later. For Indigenous communities, whose histories are often contested or erased, that record is not abstract. It is a form of protection.
