Stop I.C.E. Terror
Defend Your Neighbors, Classmates, Co-Workers Against I.C.E. Raids and Deportations
Build Community Defense Guards to Stop, Block, and Drive I.C.E. Out!
Impeach and Remove Trump Now!
For a Printable Version of this Post in English Click HERE
For a Printable Version of this Post in Spanish Click HERE
Trump’s announcement two weeks ago of massive I.C.E. raids that aimed to arrest and deport 2,000 immigrant families was to create terror in our communities and to rally his racist supporters, beginning with emboldening his ICE and Border Patrol thugs. While these raids did not happen in the massive numbers he promised, it is clear that ICE is escalating their violence against immigrants. The response of communities across the country to Trump’s announcement was to become more organized, establish broader networks to alert and defend each other. Because of this heightened preparedness, people across the country protected their neighbors, people did not open their doors, did not let ICE into their homes or buildings, businesses owners and manager turned ICE agents away and refused to give them information.
Over the past two years, the immigrant rights and anti-Trump resistance has shown us glimpses of our own power and how we can defeat Trump and ICE. Every deportation that has been prevented or stopped in progress, every racist, tyrannical executive order we have halted or rendered unenforceable, are the result of heroic actions of people, trusting their own political instincts, acting on what they know to be true and right, ignoring the politicians’ bad advice calling for moderation, patience and respectability. Stories of these acts of courage have spread like wildfire as a beacon of hope and inspiration to everyone searching for actions they can take to combat the constant barrage of horrors of the Trump presidency.
Whenever we act collectively or even when we stand up alone, our leadership in action draws out the 
best in others to take action themselves. It reminds us that we have the majority of the people in the country and the world on our side in the struggle against a racist tyrant and that our power is rooted it that international struggle. We saw that power last week with the masses of people marching in the streets in Puerto Rico forcing the Governor’s resignation. We saw it in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency when we occupied and shut down airports and defeated Trump’s first attempt at the Muslim ban. In Detroit in June 2017 when ICE rounded up hundreds of Iraqi refugees, we mobilized to the ICE office and blocked the ICE prison bus for almost an hour as it was taking our loved ones to detention. That brave action and the mass mobilizations that followed brought the national spotlight on the struggle of Detroit’s Iraqi Chaldean and Muslim communities and has meant that until now Trump and ICE has overwhelmingly not succeeded in those deportations.
Now as we are facing escalated racist attacks by and emboldened Trump, and his ICE thugs are increasingly playing the role of Hitler’s SS, these acts of heroism by the resistance are beginning to be spread, popularized and adopted as the method of our whole movement. We must make a conscious effort to build on this with great urgency.
JOIN and build BAMN. BAMN exists to build the leadership and organization based on this method of fighting to win because none of these of these actions are spontaneous. Even if they are unexpected, on-the-spot responses, they have all required leadership from an individual or a group of people, whether they see themselves as leaders or not. BAMN seeks to meet all such people who are acting on BAMN’s method of struggle even if they don’t know it yet, so we can organize ourselves into a force powerful enough to defeat Trump, to defeat ICE and win full citizenship rights for all immigrant and real equality, dignity and freedom for all of the oppressed all over the world.
TAKE ACTION TO PREPARE FOR AND
DEFEND YOUR COMMUNITY AGAINST ICE:
Making our communities real sanctuaries means
making them safe for immigrants and unsafe for ICE
kidnappers
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Organize your church, mosque, synagogue, union to be a center of the movement’s new Underground Railroad. Prepare and organize community self-defense guard networks. Create a phone tree with your neighbors, classmates, friends and coworkers to mass text and call in an emergency in case ICE or Immigration comes to your house, your neighborhood, workplace, school, hospital, courts or other public settings, or if ICE tries to set a street checkpoint.
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We cannot rely on lawyer and politicians, we must mobilize our own collective power to defend ourselves and each other. Know your rights but know that ICE does not respect them. They will violate the law and the Constitution if they can get away with it.
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If ICE comes to your house, apartment building or complex, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR FOR ICE! Alert your neighbors to stay inside. In New York City and Houston this month, ICE was repeatedly run out of neighborhoods as people called and warned each other and others chased them away. COME OUT TO DEFEND YOUR NEIGHBORS. In Hermitage Tennessee, a man and his 12-year-old son were defended by neighbors who formed a human chain around them to keep ICE away.
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If you know you are facing deportation, if ICE is looking for you, take sanctuary in a church or other sanctuary. Be prepared for yourself and others by finding out sanctuary options in your area.
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If you See ICE Don’t Walk on By: Stop to take a picture and/or video, send it to BAMN and call us, post it on social media (facebook, Instagram, twitter, snapchat, etc…) with the address and invite people to join you right away. Call your friends, neighbors, coworkers, class mates, family members who are safe to come out to disrupt and obstruct ICE activities.
—bring out signs, noise makers or other helpful tools
—block the road if there’s a checkpoint to prevent ICE from stopping cars
—form a defense line to block the entrance to the apartment complex, house, school, or workplace to deny access to ICE into the area where immigrants might be
—take collective action to surround their vehicles if they have already arrested the person or group of people
—Call news media to cover the incident. Ask someone in the crowd to film and share the ongoing incident.
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Students and teachers: prepare a protocol for what to do if ICE comes to your school. At Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA, students have a protocol of amassing in the school courtyard and surrounding the undocumented students. If ICE asks for someone by name, every students raises their hand to say they are that person. Have a phone tree to alert parents if ICE is nearby and have list of volunteers who can take kids home from school if its unsafe for undocumented parents to come to the school. At businesses and workplaces, employees, managers and customers refuse to let ICE in, do not give ICE any employee records or any information.
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If you are put on a commercial flight to be deported, make a scene and alert the other
passengers, pilots and flight crew that you are being deported. In April, Oliver Awshana heroically fought and stopped his own deportation when ICE agents attempted to force him onto a plane to Iraq. He protested, fought and screamed that he was being deported to his death, as a group of ICE officers and police brutalized and threatened him with tasers. When the pilot saw this, he refused to fly with him on the plane. Increasingly, there have been people prepared to take action to stop deportations in their tracks, pilots refusing to fly, flight attendants refusing to work, passengers on planes refusing to sit down and put on their seatbelts. Last year, a video went viral of a Swedish student, Elin Errson, who refused to sit down until a man who was being deported to Afghanistan was removed from the plane. Almost 300 flights have been stopped this way in the past two years. A flight crew stopped the deportation of 92 people to Somalia because they had not had sufficient rest to continue the next leg of the flight. Call Delta, Turkish Airlines, any other commercial airlines that assist with deportations. Many airlines have stopped aiding in deportations. Those who continue must face boycotts. -
If you or someone you know is detained by ICE, DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING without speaking to an attorney. Call BAMN immediately for legal representation. Organize public campaigns, pickets, rallies at court hearings, at detention facilities, call media to cover it.
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Join BAMN. Contact us to attend our next meeting and/or to form a BAMN chapter in your neighborhood, school, college or university; to form a caucus in your workplace; or to affiliate your club or organization with BAMN.
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We stand on the fighting legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriett Tubman, John Brown and the militant struggles led by escaped slaves that led northern communities to mobilize defense guards to stop kidnappings and defend their freedom. Our movement must learn quickly and popularize the defense guard tactic to defend our campuses and communities. I.C.E. raids and deportations are racist kidnappings, like the fugitive slave laws of the 1850s. The aim is to terrorize, intimidate and undercut the political strength of immigrant communities. In 1857, the Supreme Court issued it is notorious Dred Scott decision that said a black man has no rights a white man was bound to respect.
Frederick Douglass speaking to a crowd of abolitionists in New York, said “my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be. The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world… Oppression, organized as ours is, will appear invincible up until the very hour of its fall.”
Douglass understood that the question of slavery would not be settled by this ruling; on the contrary Dred Scott intensified the struggle against slavery and pushed the country more quickly into civil war. While the slaveholders were desperately clinging to slavery, the abolitionist movement steadily grew stronger through the influx of fugitive slaves providing leadership to the northern abolitionists and forcing people to take a side, not just in words and ideals, but in action.
All over the world, the struggle and bold leadership of immigrants and refugees who are breaking down national boundaries every day, are bringing millions of people into the struggle for immigrant rights. Like the Abolitionists, our movement is fighting for our definition of citizenship: if you live here, work here, go to school here, you are a citizen and should have full citizenship rights.
We pledge to everyone in captivity and everyone around the world seeking freedom and asylum: your blood is our blood, our struggle for freedom is your struggle for freedom. The borders that separate us will not divide us. We will win as one.
