What You Can Do Right Now
What You Can Do Right Now
The most common thing I hear from people who are not directly targeted by the immigration assault is some version of: I want to do something. I just don’t know what.
That’s an honest place to start. So let me give you something honest back - not a feel-good checklist, but a real map of what action looks like at different levels of commitment, risk, and capacity. Not everyone can do everything. But everyone can do something. And the something you do matters, because in a campaign designed to make people disappear, visibility is resistance.
Start where you are. Build from there.
The Simplest Acts - Start Here
Learn the names. The administration wants immigrants to be an abstraction - a “wave,” a “crisis,” a category. The first act of solidarity is refusal to participate in that abstraction. Learn the names of the people in your community who are affected. Know their stories. Say their names when you talk about what is happening.
Talk about it - accurately. The most powerful thing most people can do is change the conversation in their own circles. When someone repeats the administration’s framing - that this is about “illegal” immigrants, that it’s about crime, that it’s about the rule of law - push back with facts.
The majority of people being detained have no criminal record. Immigrants pay $26 billion a year into Social Security they will never collect. The 14th Amendment is before the Supreme Court. These are not talking points. They are the truth, and most people don’t know it.
Follow and amplify immigrant-led organizations. RAICES, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Council, Make the Road, CASA in Action, United We Dream, the National Partnership for New Americans, CHIRLA - follow them, share their work, donate when you can. Don’t amplify only the organizations that feel comfortable to you. Amplify the ones doing the hardest work in the most exposed places.
Know your rights - and share them. ICE is conducting warrantless arrests. People have the right to remain silent. People have the right to refuse to open a door without a warrant signed by a judge. “Know Your Rights” cards in multiple languages are available from the ACLU and immigrant rights organizations. Print them. Share them. Leave them in community spaces, laundromats, churches, libraries.
Going Deeper
Support a bail fund. The administration has made it nearly impossible to get released from ICE detention while a case is under review, but bond funds are fighting that. The National Bail Fund Network and local immigrant bail funds provide direct material support to people who would otherwise be deported simply because they can’t afford release. This is among the most direct actions available.
Connect with your local sanctuary infrastructure. Most cities and many counties have some form of sanctuary policy that put limitations on local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Find out what yours is. Find out if it’s being honored. Find out who is monitoring it. The organizations enforcing sanctuary policies need supporters, volunteers, and people willing to show up publicly when those policies are challenged.
Become a legal observer or support legal defense. The ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and local immigrant legal services organizations need volunteers for legal observation at enforcement actions, courthouses, and community spaces. They also need donations to fund lawyers for people who have no access to representation. If you are an attorney, pro bono immigration representation is one of the most consequential things you can offer right now.
Show up physically when it matters. When ICE conducts a raid in your city, when a detention facility is being built nearby, when an immigrant family is being threatened the physical presence of people who are not themselves targets changes the calculus. It signals to the community under threat that they are not alone. It signals to authorities that their actions are being witnessed. It creates the social friction that the administration needs to be absent to do its worst work. You don’t have to be an experienced activist to show up. You just have to be willing to be there.
Build relationships, not just alliances. There is a difference between showing up for immigrant communities and building genuine relationships with them. The first is valuable. The second is transformative - for them and for you. Find the immigrant-led organizations in your community. Not to help them, exactly - they don’t need your help, they need your solidarity, which is a different thing. Show up consistently. Follow their lead. Let the relationships be real.
The Civil Resistance Movement
If you are ready to move beyond support into active resistance, into the kind of organized noncooperation that has historically been the decisive force against authoritarian consolidation, here is what that looks like in this moment.
Join or form a rapid response network. Rapid response networks are community-based systems that allow people to show up quickly when an ICE enforcement action is occurring. When neighbors, faith communities, and local organizations coordinate rapid response, they create witnesses, slow enforcement actions, and connect families with legal help. United We Dream’s Rapid Response Network and local equivalents operate in many cities. If yours doesn’t have one, build one.
Make your institution a sanctuary. If you are a faith leader, a school principal, a library director, a university administrator, a business owner, you have institutional power. Use it. Declare your institution a sanctuary space. Establish policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Make clear that your community is protected. Institutional sanctuary is not symbolic. It is infrastructure.
Participate in economic noncooperation. Consumer pressure on companies that provide technology, transportation, or facilities to ICE like detention facility operators, airlines that carry deportation flights, software companies that supply surveillance tools is a form of pillar disruption. Research which companies in your life are enabling the machinery. Withdraw your business. Make your withdrawal public. Coordinate with others.
Engage in electoral accountability. Every official at every level who cooperates with federal immigration enforcement is accountable to voters. Every sheriff who has signed a 287(g) agreement, every prosecutor who works with ICE, every state legislator who is building enforcement infrastructure should be publicly held to account. They can be voted out. Find out who they are. Support their opponents in both parties. Build the electoral accountability infrastructure that makes noncooperation politically safer than cooperation.
Connect your issue to this one. If you work on healthcare, housing, labor rights, the environment, LGBTQ equality, or any other justice issue, the enforcement infrastructure being built against immigrant communities is the same infrastructure that will be turned against your issue. The pillar you protect is the pillar that protects you. The springs-to-river model of coalition building requires that every organization understands: an attack on one spring is an attack on all of them. Your solidarity with immigrant communities is not charity. It’s self-defense.
The Deepest Commitment
The civil resistance tradition - from Gandhi to King to Solidarity to the movements that have beaten back authoritarianism across the world - teaches us that what ultimately decides the outcome of a struggle is not the resources of the powerful but the willingness of ordinary people to refuse. To refuse to pretend. To refuse to cooperate. To refuse to be silent.
That refusal doesn’t require a dramatic act. Otto and Elise Hampel created postcards opposing the nazis during the reign of the Third Reich. They were just handwritten notes scattered about by a couple who had decided, against every calculation of self-interest, that they would no longer participate in the erasure of his neighbors’ humanity. Almost all of those postcards were turned into authorities. Otto and Elise Hampel didn’t survive this act of resistance, but the story of those postcards, and the postcards themselves, live on. Their story was recorded in a book. That book was made into a movie. The books and the movie matter. They remind us that every act of resistance, no matter how small, can make a difference to future generations. They register opposition. They are documentary evidence of love, humanity, and courage, even in the face of horrific repression.
You have that same capacity. Most of what is being asked of you right now is much easier and much less dangerous than what they did. And the people whose lives are being dismantled by this campaign need to know - not abstractly, but concretely, through your actions - that they are not alone.
The simplest act is the first one. Take it. Build from there.
Resources:
Know Your Rights (ACLU): aclu.org/know-your-rights/immigrants-rights
National Immigration Law Center: nilc.org
RAICES: raicestexas.org
United We Dream Rapid Response: unitedwedream.org
National Bail Fund Network: bailfundnetwork.org
American Immigration Council: americanimmigrationcouncil.org
Make the Road: maketheroadny.org / maketheroadnv.org / (and affiliates)
CASA in Action: casainaction.org
Very helpful, thank you. I have been a racial justice and Immigrant Rights activist and organizer for many many years. I really appreciate your essay because I think it is such a good persuasive intro to newer folks looking for ways to engage effectively. I have shared it widely 💜💙
I always find your articles very inspiring and the strategies very useful. In reading this article I was pleased to see that a number of the things you’ve suggested my church political action group has been intuitively doing. Building relationships in our community and in the detention center with undocumented and documented immigrants. We say their names. We write them letters. We share their stories. We advocate for their rights. Thank you.