The New Antifascist Consensus

We talked just days before the massive January 23 economic shutdown, where there was a stunning amount of participation and support across the state, and somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people poured out of work, school and their homes to fill the streets.

The broad coalition of labor, community, faith and hundreds of other groups — along with more than 700 businesses — that drove the ​“Day of Truth and Freedom,” along with the networks of grassroots resistance, like the volunteer patrols, are examples of what is now a new antifascist consensus spreading like wildfire across the country.

Whether or not the term antifascist is what people use, the ideas, tactics and interventions used against ICE are what we saw honed for more than a decade as people were forced to confront far-right gangs in city streets and developed networks of labor support, community defense and mutual aid to fight back.

Now they have to answer what is perhaps the most important question facing organizers: What does antifascism look like when the fascists have state power, and when their foot soldiers don’t have Patriot Front shields, but badges and qualified immunity?

“I don’t know anyone that is not doing something,” Rosenberg said.

The Twin Cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago and many others, have learned from each other’s resistance efforts, including the creation of neighborhood-specific networks, sometimes block by block, to watch for ICE assaults, activity and abductions that can be relayed to dispatchers to assign coordinated patrols and even countersurveillance efforts on federal facilities, among others.

But after an ICE agent shot and killed unarmed legal observer Renée Good in January, more than six months after one of the first highly visible Minneapolis confrontations caught on video, the resistance efforts multiplied and expanded. Residents — including thousands that had never participated in such activism before — created mutual aid networks, built street barricades and had volunteers ready to non-violently observe, monitor and report on ICE and CBP, and for some, at times, to escalate physical interventions with officers, such as blocking the path of ICE vehicles or getting between federal agents and the people they are assaulting.

Alex Pretti was trying to help a woman who had been knocked down by federal agents when he was killed by agents in late January. Pretti was documenting officers attacking residents when he went to help the woman, and then he was attacked himself, pinned down, and shot and killed.

At a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game shortly after, a moment of silence for Pretti ended with the stadium crowd chanting ​“Fuck ICE!” The cacophony of resistance that exploded from the Target Center is significant because the new antifascist consensus has been built not just on the streets, but also through sports, at schools, in our everyday language, through our relationships and communities, and across television and social media.

The defining feature of Trump’s second term has been turning ICE and CBP into ​“King Trump’s private army,” as Bruce Springsteen shouted from the stage in his song ​“Streets of Minneapolis.” By pumping money into DHS and hiring scores of untrained, unvetted new agents to set upon mostly Blue cities as a form of punishment, Trump has accelerated the construction of the new antifascism.

If antifascism is the use of direct interventions in the fight against the far right, the struggle against ICE is what that justice movement looks like when the far right gains state power. Watching the rise of fascism on a global scale has changed the calculus for many around the United States who now see direct intervention, in most cases nonviolent but including physical resistance, as particularly necessary given the level of threats to communities. Millions across the country now see 2026 in its historical context, a moment when immediate action has to be taken to stop neighbors from being captured and sent to types of maximum security prisons.

Part of what has made fighting ICE the mass antifascist movement of the decade is that the tactics are simple; they just need to replicate and grow.

When a suspicious car is spotted, meeting a description that activists have been trained to identify, and there is concern it could be federal agents about to make an immigration raid, a notice is put into an encrypted chat thread where hundreds of other activists, usually segmented by region or neighborhood, are warned. As soon as another person confirms, a warning is put out across encrypted and non-encrypted messages and texts, social media posts, email listservs and the like: Stay away, ICE is here.

If it appears the officers are looking to arrest and abduct residents, a call to action goes out and activists flood the area, attempting to deter the capture, to tell potential targets of their rights, or even to physically block the agents from reaching them.

All around the country, there has been a mass reorientation to the work of interfering with the violent and bureaucratic business of deportation, a project of industrial-scale kidnapping funded by the U.S. government to the tune of $74.85 billion across four years. This makes it the largest law enforcement force in the country, with a budget that is larger than the militaries of many U.S. allies. This has been a gift to tech companies like Palantir and private prison operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic. The Financial Times reported that private companies made more than an astounding $22 billion from Trump’s anti-immigration regime during the first year of his current term.

When Trump won in November 2024, promising ​“mass deportations,” immigrant rights activists

immediately began preparing for an onslaught. On January 20, 2025, Trump’s first day in office, he signed Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion. It expanded the process of expedited removal, effectively allowing deportations without due process — while threatening to cut funds to so-called ​“sanctuary cities” and ramping up staffing for ICE and Border Protection.

The assault on immigrants has only accelerated. Invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act under the pretext of repelling gang crime from Venezuelans, Trump bypassed constitutional protections, and soon after pushed through what he called the ​“Big Beautiful Bill,” radically increasing ICE’s budget to rival those of allied militaries. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem then set a quota of 3,000 detentions per day, licensing ICE to tear through communities, pick up anyone possible, including targeting people at legal immigration check-ins and hearings, and stage mass workplace raids.

Residents began to be ​“disappeared,” pulled off the street without notice — even when they were legally affirmed, and sometimes even when they were citizens. By October 2025, ProPublica found that there had been more than 170 people detained by ICE who were U.S. citizens, many of whom experienced violence, and that number has likely only increased since (and that number is only people they could personally verify). One example is Army veteran George Retes, who was held for days despite reportedly offering ICE agents proof of citizenship.

But what came next is that in city after city, communities responded, sometimes with autonomous action and other times building from existing social movement infrastructure years in the making, all of which steamrolled in size and capacity as ICE has maneuvered to avoid opposition.

There are a few ways to measure the absolute breadth of what has happened around the country. Since just the beginning of 2026, we have seen dozens of school walkouts organized by teenagers, including 11 in just Portland, Oregon, most of which were relatively spontaneous since kids don’t usually emerge from deep activist networks. Since Trump’s second inauguration day, the ACLED database measured more than 8,500 demonstrations in its February 13 report. Major protests included upwards of 100,000 attendees and galvanized unprecedented contingents in some of the country’s largest cities.

But it’s gone even deeper than just blue cities that Trump has expressly declared his enemies and with whom he is using ICE as an occupying force. In Waco, Texas, 200 students walked out of University High School as part of the nationwide January 30 day of action, and we also saw not one but two schools do the same in Lynchburg, Virginia, and across Johnson County, Kansas. In the Yakima area of Central Washington, far from the deep blue coasts of the Puget Sound, the Yakima Immigrant Response Network started organizing a traditionally Republican area to begin responding to ICE assaults on their large population of Latino neighbors.

Jesse Meisenhelter, who organizes with the group Minneapolis Families for Public Schools, explains that some of the current organizing efforts began forming before Trump’s inauguration — with potlucks.

People had a sense they needed to get to know each other better, and that they should build structures of communication with their neighbors, including threads on messaging apps so they could plan for an emergency. Any emergency. When the city was swarmed by ICE, Meisenhelter and others tapped into some of those networks, along with other parents who were already working with educator unions to improve public schools. They created a network of trained patrols to keep students safe.

“Even if ICE leaves today, this has been like an absolute natural disaster on our school system,” Meisenhelter said.

When we talked, the group was training roughly 500 parents and caregivers per week. This means there can be thousands of weekly shifts as parents and allies walk and drive the streets surrounding schools while monitoring ICE with strict protocols for how to respond. The main deterrent is the parents themselves.

But students across the country have also been leading the resistance and taking action. There have been walkouts in cities across the country, from middle schoolers through university student movements.

And one thing that has allowed the new antifascist consensus to form is that, along with letting parents, teachers and students take an important role in driving the movement, there is a low bar for entry and many diverse ways for residents to get involved. After Good’s killing, for example, there were a series of ​“singing” protests where hundreds of residents walked along the road singing various anti-ICE carols. This also made it difficult for ICE to use those streets.

And all along the way, organizers and activists have been increasingly effective — though with a long way to go — at sharing strategies and tactics, learning from each other, building up their numbers and, ultimately, their capacity.

Resistance in Los Angeles sparked some of the first major national flashpoints. Unión del Barrio, a Latinx political organization, was one of the first to quickly mobilize in cities like Los Angeles. They helped to build the network of dozens of individual organizations, unions and nonprofit groups that would become the Community Self-Defense Coalition, which supported Know Your Rights trainings and built what are known as ​“rapid response” networks.

“We started to train people how to identify ICE, which federal organizations have deputized for this work, and just to support the community to defend itself against kidnappings and ethnic cleansing,” said coalition member Katara, a teacher who asked to only use her first name.

Know Your Rights trainings are a foundation of the resistance work across the country. June, an Episcopal priest in New York City, hosted an ICE Watch training at their church and was helping share, in addition to what rights people have if federal agents try to arrest them, what is called the ​“SALUTE” strategy: Size, Activity, Location, Unit(s), Time and Equipment.

These are the questions observers are trained to ask when surveying an area and considering who the officers are, what they are trying to do, and what is the best way to support the targeted individuals.

Chicago activists started early with Know Your Rights trainings, which prompted Border Czar Tom Homan to whine on national television about how immigrants have been trained on ​“how to escape arrest.” Activists across the city were taking actions like blocking ICE vans at immigration court, then the Department of Homeland Security office and the Broadview detention center outside of town.

In Los Angeles, part of the coalition’s model is for volunteers to proactively patrol areas where federal agencies may stage raids to repel arrests before they begin. If federal agents are located, small scout teams call in immediate community reinforcement and, sometimes within minutes, crowds can swell, with dozens becoming hundreds who challenge and film ICE agents. In one notable example at Home Depot and a nearby meat processing plant in Paramount, five coalition members called about 150 community supporters to what became an eight-hour standoff, with activists informing ICE, with the strength of their numbers, that no one would be taken.

One organizer in Los Angeles told me there is also a ​“swarm mentality” and ​“collective intelligence” from those outside of formal groups who are simply digging into their own networks, using community organizing skills they already have or are learning, and creating their own brands of rapid response networks and strategies to keep their communities safe.

Hotels housing federal agents have also become targets for protesters who have been holding ​“noise demonstrations” to make the facility inhospitable. The ​“No Sleep for ICE” actions careened across the summer, such as a middle-of-the-night protest at Home2 Suites, a long-term stay facility operated by Hilton in Montebello, California, which happened in the final nights of June. The aim is to either keep ICE agents up all night or for the hotel to stop housing them for fear of bad publicity. This tactic has spread across the country as a primary way

residents have responded to the influx of agents in their cities. This spread and has become a standard of anti-ICE organizing, including in Minneapolis, where it has often been taken up by students.

In another strategy that has become central for self-defense hubs, activists established clear physical locations where they would set up shop, coordinate mutual aid efforts, and do regular patrols to locate ICE and CBP agents.

“It’s a very logical, rational thing to do: Go scout places where ICE might raid, meet people, hand out resources” and help others learn of other ways to get involved, said one Los Angeles activist who declined to give his name out of fear of retribution.

The Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has become a major force in the city, was essential in building this hub model, in part because they already had been building rapid response infrastructure. LATU organizers were able to pivot and use their resources and connections to build a substantial response. They have raised money for vendors who use Home Depot parking lots to sell their goods and are often immigrants whose presence in public puts them at risk. The money allows the vendors to stay home, and then the hubs are created in the same location they previously operated in.

“We started this with the idea it could be something replicable,” said Victor, who did not provide a last name because of the risk of state repression. ​“It was always about creating some kind of template that people can follow.” He added that the decentralized nature of the organizing has allowed a ​“lot of stuff [to] bloom.”

In Detroit, activists with groups like Rapid Response Detroit, Assemblea and Las Chingonas have been using a hotline to receive tips and then passing out and posting fliers to warn residents in immigrant neighborhoods.

“I’m getting [fliers] out to postmen, the bus drivers, taxi [and] Uber drivers, delivery drivers, my neighbors, everybody,” said a local chef and organizer calling themself ​“Roscoe.”

“These people aren’t your fucking friends,” said Roscoe about ICE agents, pointing to efforts like the Day Without an Immigrant and public defense actions to build unity. ​“We need to be out on the streets more.”

In massive metropolitan areas like New York City, a strategy of ​“accompaniment” has been important to supporting immigrants through what can be an arcane process of legal hurdles and procedural nightmares. In this model, volunteers, often with stature in the community, like former New York City Comptroller and now candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, Brad Lander, accompany immigrants to their court dates. Faith leaders like Kaji Douša, senior pastor of Park Avenue Christian Church in Manhattan, and Fabian Arias, a pastor leading protests called ​“Jericho Walks,” are often involved in this work, and in Brooklyn, several dozen radical clergy started to coordinate on a Signal thread. This is how June, the Episcopal priest, got involved in the work and saw firsthand the new tactics ICE was using at immigration courts.

“ICE lawyers are seeking to get the cases dismissed … so on their way out from the building they can be grabbed since they no longer have a case,” June told me. ​“It’s literally hunting people who are showing up for their appointments.”

In other cities like Seattle and San Francisco, immigrants awaiting hearings received last-minute messages on their immigration portal instructing them to visit a federal immigration office for an unusual weekend check-in, even with the office closed. Soon, activists began organizing to be present when and where those types of check-ins were scheduled. In one example, Seattle activists set up an ad hoc series of working groups to create a day-of response that had two parts: one that would protest what was happening and hopefully to deter ICE captures, and a second to accompany and support the immigrants heading inside.

Pilar Margarita-Hernandez Escontrías, a professor of law at Seattle University, noticed there was no plan to document each person’s information on their way into the facility. So, as in so many circumstances surrounding the resistance to ICE, she improvised and built a new document to collect the information.

“I was thinking … what information would I need to have if I saw somebody go in,” Escontrías told me, ​“and I didn’t see them come out?”

Because a large presence can be enough for ICE to halt — or retreat from — some of its activity, cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, that have ongoing protests have presented another option for interfering with the state’s operations.

Building on the large-scale encampment in 2018 as part of the nationwide Occupy ICE movement, activists in Portland set up another encampment, complete with a medical tent and tables with information and other resources, and hunkered down for nightly demonstrations that have led to months of visible clashes with police. The local ICE processing facility has been their focal point, and Portland has become a model for how to engage in constant interruption

and, as activists point out, to expose how ruthless ICE officers can be in their use of munitions and treatment of arrestees.

“This is our last stand and our last chance to fight against our loss of democracy and freedom, to fight fascism,” said Jesse Burrows, an organizer who has been protesting. ​“We need to be organized, trained, militarized.”

Given the dramatic increase in ICE’s budget and the need to scale up the number of people trying to stop them, many are also looking to other interventions beyond physical disruption. One answer for organizers has been to figure out how to share resources with the communities most impacted. ​“It would be my preference for people to be more consistently involved in a local grassroots organizing effort,” a West Los Angeles-based organizer using the pseudonym ​“Mike” told me.

Alongside folks working with the Community Self-Defense Coalition, Mike has gotten involved in a network in West Los Angeles to help support a long-standing Oaxacan American community targeted by ICE. Like the coalition, the network started with trainings and patrols, but then intentionally focused on building communities that are more capable of resisting because they are stronger, prepared and supportive.

“ICE is practicing snatch and grabs, which is not something that’s conducive to having community come out,” Mike said. ​“That makes it hard to do rapid response, but at the same time, demands that we step up our strategy and make sure we have people close by, ready to go.”

Mutual aid, a staple of antifascist organizing since its earliest conceptions, is based on the idea that physical defense and resistance is only part of meeting a targeted community’s needs, and since antifascism is about building a vision for a new society, it will also require community-driven resources. This has been most obvious in Minneapolis as large-scale fundraising to support families who are in need of rent assistance and food distribution to address food insecurity have been a major part of the community response.

“Patrols and rapid response, even at its most organized, won’t be enough to save people from getting detained, which is the saddest part of our work,” says Mike. ​“But it means we step up our outreach, and we step up our mutual aid.”

Kelly Hayes, a Chicago-based organizer and podcast host, told me, ​“We’ve seen a lot of people in the street marching, and it’s heartening to see that so many people are passionate about defending our city, but we really need to welcome more of those folks into networks of support and defense for our communities.”

“If a tenth of the folks who have taken to the streets in recent days joined their local mutual aid group or rapid response network,” Hayes said, ​“we would be in a much stronger position.”

Chicago’s Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) has been building a rapid response network of trained people who can document deportation arrests as they happen, letting potential detainees know what their rights are and trying to ensure what legal protections are still in place will be observed.

“At the end of the day, we are all human,” Monse Arreola of OCAD told me, ​“and that’s an element that has grounded Chicago.”

And just as with other networks around the country, OCAD is supporting mutual aid efforts where they can, including helping with application fees for green cards and supporting the families left behind after an abduction and subsequent deportation has been made.

Escontrías, the law professor, told me that ​“mutual aid is not just a moment. It is recognizing what the whole person needs as they navigate state terror.

“It’s down to who needs diapers,” Escontrías said, ​“and who can go to Costco.”

Hayes and I spoke a week before so-called Operation Midway Blitz tore through

neighborhoods across Chicago. Profound resistance emerged from existing and sustained left-wing infrastructure, which was echoed, in part, by the mayor’s office and officials who were incensed at ICE’s attack on the city’s sovereignty.

Johnson’s former union, the Chicago Teachers Union, has also been a driving engine of the resistance, including around ICE’s terrorizing of schools and children.

The scenes of ICE’s operation in Chicago have betrayed bedlam: tear gas deployed as kids headed to a Halloween parade, shootings of civilians (such as 38-year-old father Silverio Villegas González, who was shot fleeing), the arrest of a reporter during a sweep and, more than anything, massive resistance from the city.

Another foundation of Chicago’s resistance was the Independent Political Organizations that built on and created groups in different neighborhoods, allowing for community members to have a base from which to respond to emerging issues.

Hayes says that the rapid response networks in Chicago are ​“in full swing” and are interfering with ICE’s plans, such as when residents in Albany Park and Rogers Park flooded a street to overwhelm some of ICE’s attempts at abduction. This happened after Hayes was alerted ICE was hitting a corner near where she was and she headed over and was briefed by local organizers. Soon, hundreds of people descended and began patrols, yelling as federal agents were located. Whistles and shouts have become a fluent language around the country, shrinking ICE’s ability to sneak and capture our neighbors.

None of this was accidental or spontaneous. The infrastructure in Rogers Park had been in construction not just for months, but years. This is what allowed people the sense of strength to go beyond the simple documentation and community support that happens during an arrest, but to try and take the next step of intervention.

“I think a lot of people sensed their power in this moment and realized that sometimes we can do more than document the damage done. Sometimes, we can become a deterrent,” Hayes said. 

Hayes also pointed out some of the dangers involved: tear gas deployed regularly, and said a rapid responder had been arrested shortly before we spoke, with three others having guns drawn on them.

“Sometimes, we can use our bodies to create more safety for targeted people in the streets. That can mean embracing some amount of risk ourselves,” Hayes said, ​“but the point is that we have choices, and we have power when we choose to act together.”

Protests became aggressive and so did confrontations with ICE where many people chose tactics that would immobilize the movement of agents and their vehicles. ​“Every week they would escalate it a little bit,” Noa Jay, a Rogers Park-based organizer told me. She had been blocking the ICE vehicles at the immigration court building until ICE was disallowed from staging there, then they moved to the DHS facility and eventually to the Broadview detention center, where Jay said tactics were to physically halt the traffic of ICE vehicles and stop, if only for a day, the transfer of human beings.

“Having people there in your corner … is really important,” said Jay, who emphasized the kind of community that this shared struggle built, and which helped people to move to more confrontational tactics. ​“It just really brought people together.”