Neighbors are standing up for immigrants

Everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 knew that he was planning to deport massive numbers of immigrants. Some had, after all, held up pre-printed signs at the Republican National Convention that said “Mass Deportation Now.” The problem was that many voters either didn’t think he meant it, or they assumed it would be an orderly process that booted only the so-called “worst of the worst” who were already under deportation orders. 

They were wrong. 

When Trump said he planned to deport 15-20 million people, which could only mean undocumented immigrants with no criminal records, he meant it. The abusive, disorderly methods of grabbing people off the streets and detaining them for weeks and months in shameful conditions were always part of the plan. 

What we have witnessed over the past 11 months has been vile. The federal government has deployed masked, armed men into the streets of American cities to brutalize people with impunity. Thousands of immigrants from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia have been detained and deported, many of them to places where they haven’t lived since they were children — and even some to countries where they have never lived. Families are being separated, communities traumatized and the country is being torn apart, all for the twisted pursuit of an America — white and Christian — that has never existed and cannot function without immigrants. 

It’s become fashionable on the right to extol the virtues of “heritage Americans,” which essentially means white Americans whose ancestors emigrated from northern Europe centuries ago. There is a lot of chatter about deporting all foreign-born people, whether they are citizens or not. (As the Associated Press reported in August, the administration is reviewing the more than 55 million people who hold valid U.S. visas for any potential violation.) 

“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Fox News earlier this month. “Again, Somalia is a clear example here. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

Miller’s claims are untrue. Just as his own immigrant forebears assimilated and their children were average, upwardly mobile, all-American citizens, so too are the more recent immigrants. But Miller speaks for people who have decided that anyone who doesn’t look like them or worship like them should be driven from the country and no more of them should be allowed to come in. The administration is making new policies every day to fulfill that agenda. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the ethnic cleansing party. Many of these “heritage Americans,” along with every other permutation of U.S. citizens, decided to fight back on behalf of their immigrant friends, neighbors and co-workers. 

In Los Angeles, the first city targeted by the Department of Homeland Security last summer when Immigration and Customs Enforcement started rousting people in Home Depot parking lots, people came out to protest at the detention center in downtown L.A. This provided some useful footage for Fox News to play on a loop and give the administration the excuse it was looking for to deploy the National Guard and, soon after, the Marines. Trump bragged that his actions saved the city from being sacked — but it was nothing more than a performance for the cameras. The troops marched around a bit and then quietly went home. We soon found out that the paramilitary ICE and Customs and Border Patrol were all the lethal force they needed. 

But that didn’t mean people weren’t protesting; it was just a different kind of protest. Average bystanders gathered when ICE showed up at Home Depots and car washes, and used their phones to photograph and document what the masked secret police were doing. Young women in yoga gear confronted the agents, asking where they were taking people and demanding to see their warrants. 

Soon, immigrant defenders were using symbolic consumer protests such as the ones in Monrovia, California, earlier this month in which dozens of activists converged at Home Depot to purchase 17 cent ice scrapers, and then immediately got back in line to return them. The protesters clogged the customer service lines for hours, trying to make the point that Home Depot is complicit in the ongoing ICE raids at their stores — unlike many smaller businesses around the country that have been active in defying ICE and CPB agents by refusing them entry to harass their customers and employees.

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Across the country, citizens have created “rapid response networks” that track ICE’s movements and alert communities about immigration enforcement. Suburban moms in Illinois created neighborhood watch groups to warn neighbors and schools when masked DHS agents are spotted. Others are putting themselves in the line of fire and enduring rough arrests at protests. As CNN reported, “crowds gather — people come out of their houses, dog walkers pause on their routes, cyclists and drivers make detours — to protest what the agents are doing and remove any element of surprise.”

High school kids in Durham, North Carolina. staged walk outs in defense of their classmates and families who are living in fear. People in Seattle built whistle kits for their neighbors to use to spread the word of impending ICE raids. In Minneapolis, organizers have used the “No Sleep for ICE” tactic, gathering outside hotels where agents are housed to make noise to disrupt their sleep (and try to pressure hotels to refuse to take their business).

All these tactics, along with many others, are being used by ordinary citizens at the grassroots level throughout the country in cities, downtown metro areas and residential neighborhoods. Acknowledging that as citizens —  and as white citizens for many of them — they have the unfair privilege of being treated more or less lawfully by their government while their friends and neighbors are not, they are coming into the streets and confronting these masked brutes on behalf of the vulnerable targets who are being hunted. 

It’s not enough by any means, and it’s unclear how much it’s helping in the grand scheme. After all, DHS is successfully detaining and deporting tens of thousands of people. But they are not meeting the lofty goals set by the administration, and everything that gums up the process slows them down. The good news is that the protests often work, forcing the agents to stand down.

No matter what, it is important that people are engaging directly on the local level — even if their efforts don’t get much national press. Immigrants know that there are citizens in their communities who stand with them and are trying to do what they can to help, and these acts of resistance should serve as inspiration and motivation for the rest of us to take action for the same purpose. 

In 2026, we should all get ourselves a whistle and start blowing it loud enough to put the people who are overseeing and enabling these policies out of office in November.