![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-1-original.png\")
The mercenaries who serve the Trump regime have squandered any claim to moral authority.
\nIn the waning phase of Donald Trump’s reign, opportunities will open up for profound social change. Here, we explore the nature of the difficulties besetting his administration and propose a few starting places for those who aim to do more than simply remove him from power.
\n\nIn less than a year and a half, Trump has completely used up the advantages with which he began his second term. He has passed from appearing unstoppable to flailing pathetically. Obsessed with presenting an image of strength, Trump is indeed—to draw from Shakespeare—a poor player whose hour upon the stage will soon reach its end. The stream of falsehoods and threats issuing from his administration can be seen for what it is: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
\n\nThe fiasco in Iran is already Trump’s second quagmire this year. He began 2026 with a more or less successful stunt in Venezuela—but only four days later, the murder of Renee Good supplanted it in the headlines. For almost three weeks, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries brutalized and murdered people in the Twin Cities, the entire Trump administration brazenly lied in contradiction of widely circulating video evidence. Having created a situation in which they could not risk looking weak, Trump’s cronies attempted to dictate reality by fiat as more as more residents of the Twin Cities joined the resistance to the ICE occupation. Finally, facing plunging polling numbers and the prospect of recurring general strikes, the Trump administration was forced to change course, firing Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino and trying to get Trump’s signature policy (“the largest deportation operation in American history”) out of the news.
\n\n The mercenaries who serve the Trump regime have squandered any claim to moral authority.
\nBovino’s departure set the stage for the departures of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Trump had begun his second term determined to avoid the continuous turnover of personnel that characterized his first, but it was only a matter of time. As his henchmen leave in disgrace, not only does this undermine the loyalty of his remaining underlings—who see what will befall them, too, next—it also undercuts the narratives with which the departed lackeys sought to justify the administration’s evil deeds. Firing Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem is tantamount to admitting that the ICE operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota were simply ham-fisted attempts to terrorize the population of the United States into submission.
\n\nIn invading Iran a month after firing Bovino, Trump sought to repair his image by repeating his apparent success in Venezuela. Instead, as in Minnesota, he stumbled into a debacle from which he has yet to extricate himself.
\n\nEveryone associated with the Trump regime is known now for continuous, pathological lying.
\nAfter continuously changed his talking points about the goal of the offensive throughout March, Trump sought to bring the conflict to a conclusion at the beginning of April by threatening massive attacks on civilian infrastructure—technically, a war crime. On April 6, Trump was still insisting that Iran’s ten-point proposal for a ceasefire was “not good enough.” The following morning, he declared “A whole civilization will die tonight,” terrifying many people into believing that he was threatening to use nuclear bombs—and perhaps unwittingly repeating the prophecy of the Oracle of Delphi, who told Croesus that if he went to war, “a great empire would fall,” not specifying that it was Croesus’s empire.
\n\nAn hour and a half before his own self-imposed deadline, Trump announced that, in dialogue with the Prime Minister of Pakistan—not with any representative of the Iranian government—he had arrived at a ceasefire, calling the ten-point proposal he had previously rejected a “workable basis” for negotiations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-2-original.png\")
\nThe Prime Minister of Pakistan affirmed that the United States, Iran, and all of their respective allies had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” Yet the next day, the Israeli military was still attacking Lebanon, and in response, Iran continued to close the Strait of Hormuz.
\n\nIt’s hard to imagine a worse outcome for Trump. He has achieved none of his express objectives in Iran, neither regime change nor suppressing Iran’s nuclear program. He no longer appears to be a credible negotiating partner. Both his threat to target civilian infrastructure and his claim to have negotiated a ceasefire have been revealed to be hollow. Neither the Iranian nor Israeli governments are adhering to the agreements he claims to have arranged. He is forced into tension with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the pressure on the global economy continues unabated.
\n\nIt remains unclear whether Trump was ever seriously considering a massive strike on civilian infrastructure or nuclear attack or if he was simply making empty threats for its own sake. Regardless, having to spend a day wondering if they would see nuclear weapons deployed drove home for millions of people how dangerous it is to live under a senile autocrat—and at the same time, it did not make Trump any more frightening to his enemies. He appears at once volatile and weak.
\n\nWhatever happens next in Iran, the back-to-back defeats in Minnesota and the Middle East mark another turning point for the Trump regime.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-3-original.png\")
\nWhen Trump won the 2024 election, many of the debates about how to respond hinged on the question of whether he and his colleagues were evil geniuses or witless beneficiaries of historical forces. Much of the paralysis engendered by his return to power centered around this question. Liberals warned that any kind of resistance would play into Trump’s hands, enabling him to declare martial law; centrists cynically took advantage of the situation to argue that the Democratic Party should adopt far-right positions on immigration. Scarcely seventeen months later, it’s almost impossible to remember, let alone comprehend, the extent to which his adversaries talked themselves into giving up without a fight.
\n\nThe question has since been answered conclusively. Trump has one trick—pandering to what is basest in the most cowardly and hateful elements of society—which he repeats with inhuman consistency. In a social order that is itself debased, rewarding rapacious self-interest while punishing generosity and thoughtfulness, this strategy has gotten him far. But now he is hitting one wall after another.
\n\nAssembling a government on the basis of this strategy produced agencies filled with incompetent buffoons focused chiefly on cultivating a public image and competing for Trump’s favor. Conducting state policy on this basis has turned the majority of the population against ICE and even driven people back into the arms of the Democratic Party, rightly discredited as a false opposition responsible for the genocide in Gaza.
\n\nOne of the most characteristic gestures of the Trump era is willful dishonesty as a form of intentional transgression signifying strength. When Donald Trump proclaims easily-debunked falsehoods, his followers interpret this as an expression of boldness; they can demonstrate the intensity of their loyalty by proclaiming their belief in these falsehoods, just as Stalin’s henchmen did. But one cannot make decisions at war on the basis of falsehoods—sooner or later, it will become clear that the emperor has no clothes.
\n\nMost of Trump’s strength is comprised of the fear that he has inspired in people. His initial rapid successes, like Hitler’s blitzkrieg attacks of 1939–1941, were due to the weakness of his adversaries—politicians, executives, and administrators who, like Trump himself, are driven only by avarice and entitlement. Only after he and the mercenaries who serve him came up against real resistance did it become possible to gauge their true strength. As Mikhail Bakunin put it in a letter to Maria Reichel, “It is only in combat that we see what a person can do.”
\n\nThe chief imperative driving the Trump administration’s decisions is the need to project strength. They have staked everything on building hard power rather than soft power, on coercion rather than persuasion. Now that they have consumed most of their political capital, the field is opening up for us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/2.jpg\")
A demonstrator enduring chemical agents in Minneapolis to stand up for solidarity, generosity, and honesty.
\nAfter living through the Prague Spring, Milan Kundera wrote something to effect that the ideal form of government is a crumbling dictatorship.
\n\nAll forms of government are based in hierarchy and violence. Political and economic inequality reinforce each other: the more wealth is concentrated in a few hands, the more vertical the political structures become, and vice versa. But this remains largely invisible so long as people perceive the governments that rule them as legitimate, or at least inevitable. Suffering alone does not make people desire change; people desire on the basis of what they are able to imagine. Only when a discredited regime begins to collapse—creating a tension between what people see around them and what they are able to imagine—do large numbers of people begin to ask questions about how they might wish to change the structure of the society.
\n\nToday, these questions are more urgent than ever, as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widens and politicians cut away the safety nets and concessions that once offset the impact of capitalism on communities and ecosystems.
\n\nRight now, Trump is historically unpopular, with little prospect of his standing with the public improving. Yet he still has nearly three years in office ahead of him. For millions of people, Trump’s rise to power and the uselessness of the institutions that were supposed to control him are calling into question the entire political system. We can see this rage and radicalization emerging, however confusedly, among the rank-and-file participants in the massive demonstrations that have taken place over the past year.
\n\nThis is an unprecedented opportunity for anarchists, abolitionists, and others who have concrete proposals to bring about structural social change. Right now, when no institutional forces are able to propose a solution to the problem, we should be making common cause across lines of difference, demonstrating the power of solidarity and the effectiveness of direct action, sharing what we have learned in the course of our efforts to resist the administration, and spelling out our vision of a better world.
\n\nThis window of opportunity will not last long. The closer we draw to the 2026 midterm elections, the more people will be focused on electoral politics, including many of those who are currently participating in grassroots initiatives. We might be in a stronger position to address people at this moment than we ever will be again in the course of the Trump era.
\n\nOften, the moment of greatest danger—for example, when fascists or ICE agents are murdering people in Charlottesville or Minneapolis—turns out to have been, in retrospect, the moment of greatest possibility. By the time the terror has subsided and we recognize the potential of the situation, the moment is already passing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/3.jpg\")
Federal mercenaries gratuitously assaulting people in Portland. No amount of brute force will suffice to subdue an increasingly desperate population.
\nWe should remember this, because as Trump’s position weakens, he and his supporters will attempt more and more terrifying and outlandish schemes to maintain their grip on power. He and his adherents still have enough time to inflict a tremendous amount of suffering, both in the US and overseas. We should prepare for much more aggressive rounds of repression. We know from experience that Trump will not leave office willingly.
\n\nIn all likelihood, the outcome of the mid-term elections will be determined by what happens in the months ahead—not by how successfully politicians campaign, but rather, by the extent to which grassroots resistance makes it impossible for the ruling class to imagine that Trump could continue to advance their interests and the extent to which elements of the ruling class are able to regroup around other institutional forces, such as the Democratic Party.
\n\nAs we plan for May Day and the events of the summer, we should take a longer view. How will the tactics that we employ help large numbers of people to become familiar with the sort of tactics that they will need to employ alongside us to thwart Trump’s second attempt to carry out a coup? How will the narratives that we popularize position us to keep fighting against all the other proponents of capitalism and oppression after Trump is gone?
\n\nWe should hurry to lay bare all the connections between fascists, billionaires, militarists, cryptocurrency hucksters, tech moguls, corporate and social media platforms, federal agencies like ICE and the police and sheriffs that abet them, and the centrists and Democrats who paved the way for the tragedies of the second Trump era by suppressing grassroots resistance at the conclusion of the first. We should establish red lines within the opposition to Trump, making it unthinkable to promote or excuse any of these forces, showing how toxic the compromises with them have proved.
\n\nHere are some concrete goals that our movements could adopt:
\n\nShut down all milquetoast proposals to make superficial reforms to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, arguing instead for all-out resistance with the long-term goal of abolishing them. Those who have joined or remained in those agencies under Trump have shown their hatred for the rest of the population, making it clear that these institutions exist for the express purpose of serving autocrats. Those who have been imprisoned or deported must be permitted to rejoin their loved ones.
\nConnect the fight against ICE to the abolitionist movements against police and prisons. If Democrat politicians had not put so much effort into suppressing these movements between 2021 and 2024, social movements would have been much better prepared for the second Trump era, and the regime would have had fewer weapons at its disposal with which to impose control.
\nOrganize to free prisoners and compel prosecutors to drop charges against defendants in all cases resulting from resistance to ICE and the Trump regime in general. We can build on the refusals of grand juries to indict and juries to convict those accused of resisting ICE. As it becomes apparent to more people that the law is a political instrument serving those who hold power rather than a neutral institution, many people will seek ways of addressing injustice that do not concentrate power in the hands of a Supreme Court comprised of extreme-right reactionaries.
\nConnect the fight against Donald Trump to the fight against Flock cameras and data centers and—more generally—to the resistance to profiteering techno-fascists like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
\nShow that racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry are tools of distraction that are directly connected to the cutthroat practices via which billionaires have been impoverishing our communities.
\nBuild mutual aid projects, grassroots education projects, and other forms of social infrastructure outside the state that cannot be gutted by government austerity measures or threatened by crackdowns on academic institutions and non-profit organizations.
\nThe collapse of radical social movements at the end of 2020 is a cautionary tale. We must come out of the second Trump era stronger than we entered it. This is especially important because the real battles are only just getting underway. A wave of fascist political victories is looming in Europe, though if Trump is defeated soundly enough that may sap their momentum. Artificial Intelligence is only just beginning to drive massive numbers of people into unemployment while intensifying state surveillance and militarism.
\n\nAs we have argued before, in the 21st century, when the state can do little to mitigate the impact of capitalism, state power is a hot potato that burns whoever holds it. The same conditions that are elevating far-right parties to power around the world are also rendering it difficult for them to hold onto control. But that goes for whoever will succeed Trump, as well: if Trump is driven from office, his base will split into Zionist and neo-Nazi factions, each more virulent than the last generation of Republicans, while whatever administration succeeds him will also provoke anger and disillusionment—likely mobilizing a new wave of momentum from the far right. If what happened under the Biden administration recurs, the backlash next time will be more horrific than anything we can imagine. This is why we must address the problems that capitalism is creating at the root, not simply protest its most noxious figureheads.
\n\nWe must make sure that it is easy for everyone to distinguish our grassroots projects from any government that holds power, and continue to expand and deepen them regardless of whether there is an incompetent demagogue propelling people into the streets. As we have learned over and over—sometimes through courage, sometimes through cowardice—it is safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/1.jpg\")
A demonstrator returns a tear gas canister to the murderers who shot it during the demonstrations in Minneapolis in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd.
\nHere, when we speak about stupidity, we do not mean a lack of natural aptitude, but rather the question of whether one makes use of one’s aptitudes or actively suppresses them. It should be apparent to all, at this point, that the people who paved the way for Trump’s rise, many of whom are obsessed with the idea that they possess natural aptitudes that others do not, have been willfully, obstinately refusing to see what is right in front of their faces. Stupidity, in this sense, is not an intellectual condition, but a moral failing.
\n\nNo one puts this more clearly than the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who witnessed the rise of the Nazis:
\n\n\n\n\nStupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
\n\nYet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what “the people” really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.
\n\n-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “On Stupidity” in Letters and Papers from Prison
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/4.jpg\")
Those who choose to serve tyrants may be able to suppress everything wise and beautiful in themselves, but they will not succeed in destroying wisdom and beauty.
\nAhead of the third No Kings worldwide day of protest on March 28, we published a call for anarchists to engage with the rallies as an opportunity to draw people into more concrete forms of organizing and action, and offered handouts for that purpose. Here, we share highlights and reports from some of the participants in the day’s events.
\n\nOrganizers claim that a total of eight million participants in the protests, up roughly a million from the October 18 No Kings rallies, which we had also published a call to engage with. Donald Trump’s popularity has reached an all-time low, as he continues to an unpopular war with Iran after his attempt to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize cities like Minneapolis was thwarted by grassroots resistance. Yet concrete mass resistance has yet to take shape in most of the country.
\n\nThis makes anarchists’ efforts to demonstrate a way forward especially important. In Phoenix, in response to a local call for an anarchist contingent in No Kings expressing opposition to borders, ICE, and repression, anarchists displaying banners reading “Solidarity with the Prairieland Nine” and “First they came for the anti-fascists” marched at the very front of the crowd.
\n\nPhoenix, Arizona: Anarchists carry banners at the front of a march during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nMany of the flashpoints of March 28 took place at locations that have already become battlegrounds under the Trump administration. In downtown Los Angeles, protesters hurled chunks of concrete at Department of Homeland Security mercenaries outside the same federal detention center that was at the center of the clashes that touched off the uprising against ICE in June 2025. At the ICE facility in Broadview, near Chicago, Illinois, police arrested and brutalized several protesters. In Denver, protesters took over highway I-25, forcing police to respond with tear gas.
\n\nIn addition to the reports below, you can consult this report-back from anarchists in central Oregon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/4.jpg\")
\nSupporters of the Prairieland defendants attended three No Kings events in DFW this past weekend. We passed out hundreds of fliers and had lots of conversations about the case, with both random attendees and activists. It was a great opportunity to see how far awareness of the case has spread—and it does seem to have spread.
\n\nIn Fort Worth, members of the DFW Support Committee had an official table and a speaking slot. We marched together, including two random young people who felt inspired to join our crew, with the defendant signs and a large banners that read “Free the Prairieland Defendants.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/3.jpg\")
\nIn Modesto, anarchists set up a free zine table with CrimethInc. stickers and color posters at the recent No Kings rally. The rally brought out hundreds of participants. We handed out free zines about the anti-ICE struggle and rapid response networks along with information about protest safety and more. Someone from a local group brought over a big bag of homemade whistle packs they had made at a recent event, featuring the number for the local rapid response line.
\n\nWhile thousands of miles away, the struggle in Minneapolis has had ripple effects here, pushing many to embrace the fight against ICE and get involved in local autonomous efforts. Many speakers at the event encouraged participants to get involved in anti-ICE organizing and to support calls for a general strike on May 1st—efforts we can all amplify and build toward.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/19.jpg\")
\nWe printed 800 flyers. Our little team distributed something like 700 of them in about two hours.
\n\nWe found ourselves circulating alongside the usual suspects selling socialist newspapers, but had positive response rates probably over 80%, with most of us remarking that sustained one-on-one conversations were a personal highlight. X—— and I talked to one older white woman living in Harlem who was giving out quarter sheet flyers that just explained how to download Signal. Lit.
\n\nI’m starting to feel that “liberal” (a coherent historical and political position advocating for free trade and political rights for citizens) is a poor descriptor of this kind of crowd. The widespread affect was both anger and directionlessness. X—— remarked that it would have been easy and politically striking to enter the crowd with huge banners on sticks or flags saying FREE THE PRAIRIELAND DEFENDANTS. The march offered physical and political space for that kind of heterogeneous vibe; an avant-garde contingent could have made use of it.
\n\nIt would have been moving to me to do something like that. It probably been useful for creating a pole to flyer and start conversations around, assuming we had a concrete project to involve people in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/17.jpg\")
Anarchists carry banners at the front of the march on the Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nWe live in a college town of less than 100,000 people. We published an open call for an anarchist contingent in the No Kings demonstration here.
\n\nThe demonstration was to begin downtown, then march through the business district to a rally a half hour’s walk away. We knew it would be very difficult to find each other in the crowd, so we chose a convergence point several blocks away, at a location that has often served as a gathering point for previous anarchist demonstrations.
\n\nAs it turned out, however, some of us met there and proceeded to the main starting point together; others showed up at the starting point of the main demonstration, and indeed became lost in the crowd; and still others went directly to the site of the rally to set up literature tables, as they had done at the previous two No Kings demonstrations.
\n\nOnce those of us who met at the convergence point reached the crowd—which consisted of many thousands of people—we began distributing stickers and handbills promoting anarchism and an upcoming date on the Breaking the ICE speaking tour that was booked nearby. We gave out several hundred of these, but the march got underway before we could find each other again, so we marched in smaller knots, carrying our banners separately rather than in a single bloc. In the end, it may not have made much of a difference—almost everyone on the streets was in the march, so there was no crowd of spectators to witness a coherent anarchist contingent.
\n\nWhen the march reached the rally, it was easier to find each other around the folding tables that our comrades had set up and covered with zines. Throughout the rally, people came up to the tables; this turned out to be the part of the day when we were most identifiable as a political pole within the crowd. One smart tabler put up flyers throughout the rally area encouraging people to download Signal and subscribe to the local announcements-only Signal thread promoting anarchist events in the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/18.jpg\")
An anarchist literature table at a No Kings protest on March 28, 2026.
\nAmong ourselves, we took different approaches to engaging with the crowd. I spent the entire time proselytizing for the upcoming speaking event, just trying to get people into the room to learn about direct action. By contrast, one comrade got into a shouting match with a liberal carrying a sign proclaimed “I want to be governed, not looted”—the liberal simply would not understand why an anarchist would prefer to loot and not to be governed.
\n\nAlthough students at the university make up fully a quarter of the population of this town, the majority of the participants in the demonstration were in their forties or older. That underscores the fact that, while many millions of people have participated in the No Kings demonstrations, millions more who oppose Donald Trump—especially from the demographics that were the driving force behind the George Floyd rebellion—have stayed home. So far.
\n\nAfterwards, I spoke with anarchists in several mid-sized Midwestern cities whose efforts to engage with No Kings had gone similarly: they had showed up with banners and marched together in small groups, without anything happening that was especially worth reporting on. But they did distribute a lot of handbills, whether about the Prairieland case or other things.
\n\nI still think it would be advantageous to be able to show up to these demonstrations in large numbers with black flags and march together in a coherent bloc. If we want people to be interested in participating in anarchist initiatives, we have to show that we are a force to be reckoned with. When the streets are already full of people and the police have their hands full, doing so should be easier and safer than usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/5.jpg\")
A banner displayed by an anarchist contingent in a No Kings demonstration on March 28, 2026.
\nWe live in a mid-sized city, somewhere around 180,000 people. Our previous No Kings events were pretty substantial, and this weekend was no different with maybe 2000 people participating. A medium-sized group of us showed up in full black bloc. Before we even reached the protest, we were heckled by trucks and passersby. Fortunately, we were not the only anarchists there—we immediately found others in bloc that we didn’t even know. Once we combined numbers, we comprised a decent proportion of the protesters present.
\n\nWe spent much of our time leading chants and dancing to music, while the liberals around us sat in almost dead silence. We also handed out about 100 pamphlets and zines and talked to even more people about what being an anarchist means for us.
\n\nOur location in the protest was interesting—we were located on the sidewalk adjacent to a busy intersection, with us at the very end, facing the busiest corner in the area. Many drivers and passersby honked and chanted in support as they passed by. Others were less supportive. One truck dropped burning coal rocks in front of us; it was more pathetic than dangerous.
\n\nAbout 45 minutes in, we saw a crowd developing on the other side of the intersection, wearing MAGA hats and carrying flags and signs of hate. They kept shouting at us from the other side of the street and occasionally throwing things at us. Finally, some of the counter-protesters broke off from their group and walked towards our crowd.
\n\nWe interpreted this as a threat against the safety of every protester present, but also as an opportunity to show people that we don’t have to tolerate hate.
\n\nWe moved to the edge of the sidewalk and cut them off, preventing them from getting to the rest of the crowd. We yelled over them and refused to give them the opportunity to speak. When they got right up to us, they began yelling and threatening us, which caught the attention of some protest “marshals.” The marshals demanded that we let them pass and not give them any attention. We acted like we didn’t hear the marshals and continued blocking the counter-protesters off with a massive sign—poetically, it read “Fascists not welcome!”
\n\nEventually, the counter-protesters made their way back to their people. Altogether, they numbered no more than a dozen compared to our nearly 2000.
\n\nWe believed our presence at no kings was a local success. We spoke to a lot of people sympathetic to anarchism and anarchists. We made many new friends—and some enemies, but we did so unapologetically.
\n\nOne thing we did that we would like to recommend to anarchists everywhere else—stop bringing your phones to protests and instead bring Meshtastic LoRa devices. We were able to communicate effectively and efficiently without getting pinged by any cell towers. Our presence was basically invisible there, and being able to communicate that way gave us a unique advantage over our local surveillance adversaries.
\n\nThis video shows the conflict at the ICE facility in Portland on March 28, 2026.
\nAfter roughly 30,000 people flooded downtown Portland for the No Kings parade, a few hundred made their way to the ICE facility on the South Waterfront. People chanting “ICE out!” filled the driveway, stepping over the thin blue line that federal agents painted across the entrance to denote the point beyond which they are determined to arrest people.
\n\nAfter someone burned an American flag in the driveway, federal agents surged out and made an arrest. The crowd immediately pushed forward, forcing the agents to retreat back inside. Over a hundred people flooded the driveway. Projectiles flew towards the feds—water bottles, sticks, and random objects. Surprisingly, Department of Homeland Security agents did not respond with munitions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/1.jpg\")
The vicinity of the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon.
\nShortly after 6 pm, a band set up across the street, using a megaphone propped up on a mic stand. By sunset, the crowd had swelled to around 500.
\n\nAs the band played on, another rhythm took over: the rattle of the facility gates, shaking in time with the drums. Then—suddenly—they gave way. The gates burst open, and a few people stepped through.
\n\nDHS took their time responding. No Border Patrol, no Border Patrol Tactical Unit, no familiar wall of federal tactical gear—at least, not at first. For the first time in a long time, the feds in Portland hesitated.
\n\nIt turned out that they were waiting for backing from the local authorities.
\n\nSoon after DHS went back inside, Portland Police bike cops formed a line up the street at the intersection of Bancroft and Macadam. A riot van pulled in behind them and Oregon State Troopers spilled out to join the formation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/09.jpg\")
State troopers arrive.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/10.jpg\")
Police line.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/11.jpg\")
A Portland police officer known for his brutality.
\nTogether, they advanced on the crowd. The push from police was immediate and aggressive—they shoved people to the pavement, knocked older folks out of lawn chairs, barked orders to move back when there was physically nowhere to go. They forced the crowd back until they reached the edge of the facility, then declared the area closed, holding the line while the feds repaired their gate.
\n\nJust before 8 pm, nearly an hour later, police pulled back. The gate was fixed and local police had finished doing the feds’ bidding. The crowd erupted: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
\n\nThe fixed gate didn’t last two minutes.
\n\nHands were back on the gate. Metal groaned. And once again, it broke open. The crowd roared. Graffiti spread across the building: “Kill nazis,” among other tags. Within minutes, DHS returned—this time, with Border Patrol agents in full fatigues and gas masks. They carried out more arrests, bringing the total to at least four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/12.jpg\")
DHS agents at night, before they retreated.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/13.jpg\")
DHS agents guarding the gate.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/14.jpg\")
The contested territory.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/15.jpg\")
One federal mercenary displaying egregiously bad muzzle discipline.
\nProtesters attempted to pull back those the officers targeted. They successfully de-arrested some people, despite being continuously obstructed by a wall of livestreamers and photographers raising their cameras.
\n\nEven then, however, the feds held back on using munitions. This was shocking, not what people have come to expect at the ICE facility. The officers moved in, made arrests, and retreated, only to experience another barrage of projectiles. Bottles, sticks, eggs, and other objects rained down until they disappeared behind their doors. While the restraint and lack of “less than lethals” on the part of federal agents was noticeable, this didn’t make the brutality of their arrests any less violent, as multiple arrestees were slammed down to the ground, piled on, and dragged away, and at least one officer pointed his loaded sidearm directly at people’s heads.
\n\nThroughout the night, a handful of far-right instigators were identified and forced out of the crowd. One of them was pummeled with water balloons filled with pink paint to the laughter and cheers of onlookers. Flags caught fire again—one American flag and one flag bearing a swastika. At one point, someone climbed onto the awning and dismantled a security camera piece by piece. This inspired people to take down several other cameras, pulling the wiring out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/08.jpg\")
Right-wing instigators.
\nWhy did federal agents show unusual restraint? Why were local police left to do the bulk of the crowd control? These remain open questions.
\n\nBut one thing is not in question: people kept coming. They repeatedly crossed the blue line painted on the ground. They came back again every time federal agents attempted to push them back. Whatever strategy was unfolding behind those doors, it met with rage, defiance, and a refusal to back down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/16.jpg\")
Mercenaries’ exit, stage left.
\nOn Saturday, March 28, millions of people around the United States will gather for the No Kings demonstrations. This is a good opportunity to address large numbers of people to propose more concrete forms of resistance. To make this as easy as possible, we present three handbills you can give out to people—one about resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one introducing anarchist ideas to those who are unfamiliar with them, and one explaining the Prairieland case. Please prepare and distribute your own materials as well!
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/25/resist-ice-abolish-ice_front.png\") \n \n \n\n Click the image to access the PDF for printing and read the text of the flier. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/25/what-do-anarchists-want-with-no-kings_front.png\") \n \n \n\n Click the image to access the PDF for printing and read the text of the flier. \n | \n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/25/1.jpg\")
\nFinally, courtesy of Fire Ant Movement Defense, we offer this handbill about the Prairieland case.
\n\nYou can learn more about the Prairieland case here and donate to their support fund here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/25/No-Kings-Prairieland-Half-Sheet.png\")
Click the image to download the PDF for printing.
\nIn April, anarchists from the Twin Cities who have participated in resisting the ICE occupation there will travel the country speaking on their experiences. At each presentation, they will share what they have learned from building rapid response networks, explore how Minnesota thwarted Operation Metro Surge, and draw out lessons about how to defeat fascism.
\n\nThree different touring groups will carry out concurrent tours covering the Midwest, the East Coast, and the West Coast, for a total of two dozen events. You can find the tour schedule below.
\n\nIf you can help us to promote the event in your area, please contact us! Likewise, if you would like to set up an event like this in your community, reach out to us and we will try to include you in a future tour.
\n\nAfter travel expenses, all proceeds from this tour will go towards legal defense for ICE arrestees and mutual aid for vulnerable families in the Twin Cities.
\n\nFor background on the fight against ICE in the Twin Cities, begin here. You can find an archive of all of our coverage of ICE here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_bw.png\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in black and white.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in color.
\nWe will update these listings with more information on an ongoing basis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-03-31-Atlanta-Georgia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
March 31 Atlanta, GA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-01-Asheville-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 1 Asheville, NC
\nChicago, Illinois: 6:30 pm at Co-Prosperity, 3219 South Morgan Street
\nDurham, North Carolina: 7 pm at the Burrow, 207 North Church Street
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-02-Durham-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 2 Durham, NC
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Bloomington-Indiana__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 3 Bloomington, IN
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Richmond-Virginia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 3 Richmond, VA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Baltimore-Maryland__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE-color.jpg\")
April 4 Baltimore, MD
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Cleveland-Ohio__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 4 Cleveland, OH
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-05-Buffalo-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 5 Buffalo, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-06-Binghamton-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 6 Binghamton, NY
\nNew York City, New York—two concurrent events:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-07-Queens-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 7 Queens, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-14-Sacramento-California__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 14 Sacramento, CA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-17-Olympia-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 17 Olympia, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-18-Seattle-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 18 Seattle, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/1.jpg\")
\nIn the following analysis, Somayeh Rostampour shows how the repression that the Iranian government has carried out to crush protests, the monarchist attempt to co-opt opposition movements and push them to the right, and the military assault that the US and Israel are currently carrying out against Iran are all different fronts within a single counterrevolution, reinforcing each other and combining to suppress the possibility of real liberation.
\n\nSomayeh Rostampour is a Kurdish feminist activist from Iran who participates in an internationalist network and a feminist, anti-imperialist, leftist collective in Paris, founded in 2022 by exiled activists from Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan after the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising. The collective supports subaltern struggles in Iran.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nIn 2024, Donald Trump participates in rallies featuring slogans such as “be ungovernable” and “mass deportation now.” If fascists are our sworn enemies, it’s not just because their project is the opposite of ours. They’re our sworn enemies because they defend their project in revolutionary disguise, feeding off the impulses and aspirations of popular revolt while being the last resort of the centers. Putin, Meloni, Le Pen, like so many others, take advantage of the frustration and humiliation of the working class, undermined by the latest changes in capital, to consolidate their anti-establishment stance, so as to better defend the system. They claim to want to change everything so that nothing changes. Today, reactionaries are becoming more radical, while progressives flounder in moderation.
\n\n—Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto, The Peoples Want
\n
In late 2025, against a backdrop of economic crisis and a growing rejection of the theocratic regime, a new popular uprising erupted in Iran, rooted in the cycles of revolt that had preceded it. Since 2017, a combination of economic, social, ecological, and political crises has radicalized Iranian society beyond any reformist horizon.
\n\nOver the past decade, Iran has experienced at least five nationwide uprisings and thousands of mass protests. Rising unemployment, inflation, poverty, and inequality have made the country fertile ground for popular mobilizations from general strikes to social revolts. These recurring crises have fueled deep discontent, especially among the working class, students, retirees, and unemployed youth, who have repeatedly taken to the streets to denounce these injustices. The lack of freedom and prospects—particularly for a generation facing unemployment rates close to 50 percent—has been one of the central catalysts of the uprisings. When 80 percent of workers survive on temporary contracts lasting less than six months, when retirees and public-sector employees often earn the equivalent of just 100 dollars a month, even as rents in Tehran reach levels comparable to those in European cities, it is hardly surprising that Iran has become one of the most turbulent and contentious countries in the West Asia.
\n\nAcknowledging these structural factors does not mean reducing these uprisings to mere economic revolts. That analysis, advanced by certain campist (which is to say, selectively “anti-imperialist”) currents, is both misleading and politically conservative: it frames popular revolt solely as a reaction to hardship while obscuring the ways that protesters intentionally choose to oppose authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the regime. By externalizing the cause of the crisis and centering sanctions or imperial aggression over the regime’s own forms of domination and repression, this normalizes and excuses the Islamic Republic.
\n\nThese mobilizations are profoundly political in both form and content. They challenge not only inequality and impoverishment, but the entire architecture of rule: authoritarian state power, gendered coercion, the denial of freedoms, the closure of democratic horizons. In addition to the demand for better conditions, they express a refusal of the order that produces those conditions, hence their recurring tendency to take the form of an open demand for the overthrow of the regime.
\n\nIn each cycle of protest, repression has transformed social anger into direct opposition to the regime itself. The January 2025–2026 uprising, which was broader than the previous ones, began in the Tehran bazaar and rapidly spread to students, the urban poor, workers, small shopkeepers, and marginalized peripheries, eventually reaching more than 210 cities across 31 provinces. The regime responded to popular anger with violence unprecedented in modern Iran, shutting down telephone networks and the internet and reasserting control through a repressive apparatus strengthened by authoritarian surveillance technologies and digital-control models associated with its allies, China and Russia. The regime killed thousands of people in the span of a few nights.
\n\nSix weeks later, on February 28, 2026, a US–Israeli coalition launched an aerial assault on the country. Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, was killed in the bombing of his compound by actors who are themselves genocidal. Yet well after the confirmation of his death, Tehran launched barrages of missiles at Israel, suggesting that its chain of command remained operational even in the absence of its highest authority. Iran also expanded its attacks to other countries, particularly Gulf states hosting US military bases, including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
\n\nThis sequence of events raises an urgent question: in the aftermath of a revolutionary moment in 2022, how is it that the horizon of emancipation could be closed off in favor of a return to authoritarian order in 2026? We must explore how this is taking place not only as a consequence of state repression, but also via a more diffuse counterrevolution advanced by media narratives and new political alliances, cloaked in the rhetoric of “liberation.”
\n\nUnderstanding contemporary Iran requires more than an analysis of revolution—it also demands an analysis of counterrevolution. It is not enough to examine uprisings; one must also grasp the forces that seek to neutralize them, redirect them, hollow them out, or steer them toward an authoritarian outcome.
\n\nThe Islamic Republic’s repression of the January 2026 uprising and the US–Israeli military assault that began on February 28, 2026 are neither two separate events nor two opposing forms of violence, one “bad” and the other “liberating.” They must instead be understood as part of a single counterrevolutionary process, one that began well before it escalated to military action.
\n\nBefore the internal massacre and before the external war, an earlier phase had already opened: a political, media, and symbolic counterrevolution, driven in particular by the Iranian nationalist and monarchist right (especially within the diaspora), which sought to neutralize, distort, and appropriate the meaning of the slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî [“Women, Life, Freedom”] in order to reinscribe it within a chauvinist, authoritarian, anti-left, and ultimately militaristic agenda. Although the revolution that began in 2022 had profoundly eroded the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, the regime was able to restabilize itself after October 7, 2023 and, more decisively, after the first US–Israeli attack in June 2025.
\n\nThat renewed legitimacy was severely shaken by the January 2026 massacre. Yet only weeks later, a new assault by settler-colonial Israel and the imperial United States deepened the counterrevolutionary sequence, targeting Iran with the same machinery of violence already unleashed on Gaza and Lebanon and other parts of West Asia. Waged on false pretexts, this war has already destroyed schools and hospitals and killed hundreds of civilians in Iran. Despite the devastation, it has also restored a measure of legitimacy to the regime, particularly internationally and among sections of the global left. At times, that left has assigned greater weight to the massacre of Iranians by imperialist arms than to the massacre of Iranians by the regime’s bullets.
\n\nAs Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini repeatedly insisted during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), “War is a blessing for the Islamic Republique of Iran.” It functions to impose cohesion, silence internal dissent, and renew the regime’s legitimacy.
\n\nSo the 2026 war on Iran must be not understood as a rupture with the counterrevolution, but rather as its military fulfillment. Rather than precipitating the regime’s collapse, the war will likely only reinforce state nationalism and shut down the possibility of autonomous popular transformation. Even if the regime collapses, what comes next will be more reactionary as a consequence of this war.
\n\nThe war has already strengthened ethnonationalism and internal political cohesion. We can see this in the confirmation of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader. Internal repression and external war reinforce one another. Under such conditions, civil society is hollowed out, opposition is stigmatized, and any path out of the crisis becomes more difficult.
\n\nUnderstood in this way, the January massacre and the February war appear not as two ruptures, but as two asymmetric phases of the same armed counterrevolution—internal, through the Iranian state, and external, through imperialist powers—following the royalist attempt to push popular mobilizations to the right. In all three cases, what is being targeted is not just a regime or a population, but the very possibility of emancipatory transformation from below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/3.jpg\")
\nTo understand the sequence that runs from 2022 to 2026—without tracing it back to decisive historical events such as the 1953 coup, the White Revolution of 1963, or the Islamic Revolution of 1979—we must recognize that the counterrevolution did not begin with the January massacre, nor with the war that started in February, but earlier, in the political, media, and symbolic spheres. The Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising didn’t just challenge compulsory veiling or denounce a state killing; it opened up a feminist, popular, and decolonial revolutionary horizon, making conceivable a transformation from below, driven by women, by marginalized peripheral peoples (especially Kurds and Baluchis), by youth, workers, and neglected regions. It also destabilized both monarchist and reformist narratives by exposing the ways that gender domination, class relations, and the state’s “internal colonialism” are all intertwined.
\n\nIt was precisely this horizon that became the target of the initial counterrevolutionary offensive, led not only by the regime but also by elements of the opposition, especially nationalist and monarchist circles in the diaspora. These forces sought to empty the slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî of its substance, replacing it with formulas such as “Man, Homeland, Prosperity” and rebranding it within a masculinist, centralizing, anti-left, and pro-war grammar. This inversion went so far as to make Jin, Jiyan, Azadî appear compatible with colonial violence—for example, when it was displayed alongside Israeli flags and inscribed on the ruins of Gaza to justify genocide.
\n\nIn 2023, Iranian right-wing leaders gathered at Georgetown University in the name of unity to discuss a post-Jina Iran. Although this attempt to establish an alliance ultimately failed, it deepened existing fractures and contributed to the withdrawal of progressive forces, in direct contrast to the solidarities that had been forged in 2022. The participants systematically attempted to discredit the uprising’s vanguard forces: they insulted critical feminists, vilified students with the label “Mojahedin” (a reference to the People’s Mojahedin Organization), accused Kurds and Baluchis of “separatism,” and reduced any demand for autonomy or pluralism to a threat against “territorial integrity.”
\n\nTheir orientation towards Nowruz (the Kurdish New Year celebration) crystallized this logic. Segments of the central elites and right-wing nationalists both framed this expression of popular culture as a separatist threat. An open letter to the state signed by 800 intellectuals from the “center” (politically, geographically, linguistically, and ethnically speaking), most of them Iranian republicans, offered a paradigmatic expression of this tendency. Three consequences ensued: the further exclusion of ethno-national groups, growing distrust toward the “center” (including its patriotic left), and reduced participation of these demographics in the 2026 uprising. At the same time, the left—already weakened as a force sustaining the horizon that had opened up in 2022—was becoming even more fragmented.
\n\nThe consequences of the reversal of the meaning of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî became evident in certain leftist circles, where people pathologized the agency of oppressed nations, particularly the Kurds. Much like the misogynistic logic that blames survivors of sexual assault for “provocative clothing,” some leftist analyses implicitly framed Kurdish or Baloch mobilization as a provocation that invited state violence or foreign intervention. This is both ethically and theoretically unsound, as it abstracts struggle from its material context, displaces the responsibility for suffering from the structures of domination to those who resist them, and inadvertently aligns itself with the very forces it claims to oppose. In this climate, even the memory of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising became a battleground. Its radical promise was gradually replaced by a hegemonic order organized around militarized normalcy.
\n\nMeanwhile, the Israeli offensive and the propaganda disseminated by right-wing and far-right media outlets such as Manoto and Iran International helped neutralize the radical promise of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, suppressing its challenge to ethnic hierarchies and its redefinition of sovereignty as a common good in order to promote a racialized, centralizing, and militarized order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/4.jpg\")
\nGeopolitical realignments accelerated this shift. The “Twelve-Day War” Israel waged against Iran in June 2025 reinforced both nationalism and the state’s racializing power by making it easier to cast participants in the uprising (especially Kurds and Baluchis) as “separatists.” Gradually, the pluralist aspirations of 2022 gave way to a logic of security, exclusion, and discipline. Some former “patriots” helped legitimize state power as a “bulwark” against the external enemy; nationalism hardened, entrenching ethnic and gender hierarchies and lowering the political cost of Persian-centric and xenophobic discourse. The state campaign against Afghan migrants (including the forced expulsion of more than two million people) was supported both by regime proxies and by monarchist and nationalists, further normalizing racism within the social sphere. In this climate, the summary executions of Kurds and Afghans accused of spying for Israel met with little opposition.
\n\nThe production of Afghanophobia and Kurdophobia was not incidental. It was integral to the post-uprising order.
\n\nThis became especially clear in the case of the alliance of five Kurdish parties that was announced on February 22, 2026, which linked the fall of the regime to Kurdistan’s right to self-determination within a democratic Iran while foregrounding the values of democracy, women’s rights, ecology, and equality. The alliance was immediately branded “separatist” by both the monarchist “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic’s media platforms. The former invoked a “national duty” to defend “territorial integrity,” while the latter portrayed the alliance as “one component of a US–Israeli project.” A segment of the republicans in the Iranian opposition (mainly liberals from former reformist currents) likewise defends the idea of a secular and democratic state grounded in centralizing nationalism.
\n\nThus, a common thread runs through otherwise opposed camps: opposition to autonomy for oppressed peoples. This fault line reveals who adheres to the principles of the 2022 uprising and who does not.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/6.jpg\")
\nWithin this polarization, the opposition has increasingly been structured around two blocs: on one side, the revolutionary horizon that opened in 2022 around Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, which seeks to transform relations of power and national and gender identities from below; on the other side, a right-wing—indeed, at times, far-right—counterrevolutionary bloc led by Pahlavism (monarchists) but extending beyond it, combining centralizing statism with militarism and oriented toward restoring the old order. These are the ones in the diaspora who danced and celebrated the war in the streets of the West while imperialist bombs rained down on the people of Iran and their homes.
\n\nReza Pahlavi previously had only a limited base and lacked a solid organizational apparatus, but he seized the window of opportunity that opened after 2022. By adopting a nationalist and anti-left line, he drew together segments of the opposition that were hostile to the leading role of women, Kurds, Baluchis, and workers, while also capturing a desire for a “rapid overthrow” backed by the West. His earlier attempts to align himself with a Revolutionary Guards–reformist axis had failed, but especially after October 7, 2023, he benefited from the support of an actor that may be small but is nonetheless powerful. Namely, Israel.
\n\nThe nationalist, sexist, homophobic, racist, and anti-left slogans that emerged in 2026, both in the streets and at universities, belong to a counterrevolutionary backlash. This is an anti-left counter-offensive fueled by fear of the power of marginalized groups—the vanguards of 2022—and of those who supported them, but also by political exhaustion and a sense of helplessness in the face of the regime’s resilience. The perceived failures of earlier strategies helped to legitimize the transfer of initiative to reactionary forces, including through war if necessary.
\n\nIn fact, these formations, whether state-led or oppositional, are not just reactionary—they are also parasitic. They feed on the creative energy of uprisings only to neutralize and redirect it toward nationalist or imperial ends. This is visible not only in Israel’s disingenuous portrayal of war as “liberation,” but also in the way that the right wing of the Iranian diaspora pursues Western recognition through the erasure of the uprising’s feminist, Kurdish, and queer dimensions. These actors aim to appropriate the insurgent force that Jin, Jiyan, Azadî unleashed, even as they work to foreclose its return in emancipatory form. The parallels with other feminist uprisings, such as Ni Una Menos (“Not One More”) in Latin America, are striking. In both cases, radical visions of gender justice and collective refusal encountered carceral, military, and ideological backlash. What emerges across these contexts is what Verónica Gago describes as a global architecture of backlash: protesters are criminalized, repressive technologies circulate transnationally, and war becomes a means of disciplining political desire.
\n\nThe regime’s internal repression and the external war merely completed by force of arms a counterrevolutionary process that was already well underway. From this perspective, the recent war appears as the final phase of that process: not as a means of “liberating Iran,” but as an effort to annihilate the last remnants of the momentum unleashed in 2022 and to impose a regime change orchestrated from outside. In other words, the bombings are aimed not at emancipation, but at mobilizing counterrevolutionary forces for a new regional and global order—at the cost of massive destruction, civilian deaths, and the long-term foreclosure of the possibility of popular transformation for generations to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/5.jpg\")
\nThe repression that the regime carried out was only the first phase in the counterrevolution. One must also understand how “the left” was constructed as an all-encompassing category of the enemy. In this operation, everything that defends equality, autonomy, linguistic and political plurality, women’s rights, self-determination, the emancipation of oppressed peoples, or social justice is reduced to “the left” and framed as an existential threat.
\n\nThe regime does this. The monarchists also do this. And so do certain Iranian reformists or republicans, if in subtler ways.
\n\nThis demonization of the left has paved the way for the rise of the far right. It is not new, moreover. Under the Pahlavis (1919–1980), left-wing forces were already associated with chaos, subversion, foreign dependence, or hostility to development.1 After 1979, the Islamic Republic extended and radicalized this logic, carrying out the elimination of independent left groups; executions (to which the mass graves of Khavaran still bear witness); purges; repression in Kurdistan in the name of “jihad” against the Kurds; and the criminalization of activists under labels such as “communist,” “atheist,” “Westernized,” or “counterrevolutionary,” all while paradoxically appropriating certain language about social justice, anti-imperialism, and the Palestinian cause.
\n\nState “anti-imperialism” does not continue a tradition of emancipation or anti-colonial struggle. It appropriates the simulacrum of that struggle as a way to justify internal violence, criminalize opposition, present an authoritarian order as a posture of resistance, and legitimize gender apartheid in the name of “cultural authenticity”—a façade intended to distinguish it from the West. This extractive and dishonest appropriatiion, which may at first glance evoke models such as Stalinism or Nasserism, took on a specific form in Iran. Emancipatory concepts were reframed in a religious and mystical language, while state anti-imperialism was reconfigured as a “civilizational” opposition to the West. The left thus became an enemy both because of its secularism and because of its capacity to challenge the regime’s monopoly on the language of social justice and the question of Palestine.
\n\nIran presented itself as the core of the “Axis of Resistance” on the international stage for its own benefit while maintaining a tyrannical order at home. This opened the way for the consolidation of a patriarchal Islamist order. In this way, a discourse of liberation was inverted into a discourse of domination, suppressing women’s autonomy and criminalizing democratic opposition.
\n\nReformism—the only current emerging from the authorized political parties that has consistently shared power with the Islamists in Iran, including seventeen years holding the presidency—also played a decisive role in this demonization by spreading a more diffuse anti-left critique through journals, editorials, and various cultural productions. In the name of stability, moderation, and development, they associated the left with irrationality, dogmatism, violence, or foreign dependence, while minimizing the US-backed coup of 1953 and the repression of progressive forces after 1979.
\n\nAt the same time, reformist discourse often functioned to delegitimize the poor and the working class by portraying them as the social base of religious conservatism, or even as a politically ignorant mass available for authoritarian capture. Socio-economic revolts were framed as the expression of the supposed “nature” of the poor, a framing that we saw again during the uprisings of 2017–2018 and more recent mobilizations.2 In periods of crisis, some reformists even adopted rhetoric focused on “security,” describing protesters as “terrorists” and seeking to neutralize radical demands by spreading fear.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/7.jpg\")
\nPresented after the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) as a path of gradual change “from within”—through electoral participation, parliamentary action, and the formula of “pressure from below, negotiation from above”—reformism has consistently confined the political field to the twin alternatives of reform or collapse. This framing delegitimized any emancipatory rupture by associating it with Syrianization, extremism, and the betrayal of the national interest. After nearly two decades of experience, reformists came to appear less as an alternative to the regime than as one of the mechanisms of its reproduction. The slogan of 2017–2018—“Reformists, conservatives, the game is over for both of you”—articulates this eloquently enough.
\n\nYet despite its crisis of legitimacy, the reformist current continues to reproduce itself, both in Iran and in the diaspora, particularly among certain nationalist elites and sometimes also in campist circles. For example, Fariba Adelkhah, a French-Iranian anthropologist and academic at the French university Sciences Po who was detained in Iran from 2019 until 2023, published a text on January 14, 2026—just days after the bloody massacres of January 8 and 9—that fits squarely within a diasporic reformism which, under the guise of methodological caution, reproduces a framing that is hostile to the left and to the fall of the regime.3 According to reformist thinking, some form of internal mediation within the regime—allowing people to “debate without resorting to violence,” in Adelkhah’s words—might still be possible, despite the manifest collapse of that perspective in the slogans, practices, and forms of politicization that have shaped the recent uprisings. By rejecting any non-reformist alternative and converging with campism in the name of anti-interference, reformism has indirectly helped rehabilitate monarchism.
\n\nThe fact that certain campist decolonial or pseudo-anti-imperialist figures have spread their reading of Adelkhah in France reveals the proximity between campist talking points and counterrevolutionary Iranian reformist positions. In the name of caution and anti-interference, these positions tend to direct conversation away from repression, delegitimizing popular uprisings and providing an indirect justification for the violence that authoritarian postcolonial states exercise. Campist currents that reduce every Iranian crisis to a consequence of sanctions or Western interference end up whitewashing the Iranian regime. By subordinating struggles over class, gender, and liberation to an abstract geopolitics, this helps to empty the very idea of emancipation of its concrete content, leaving the right with a monopoly on radical critique of the existing order.
\n\nWhen one refuses to think through the internal war the regime has waged against its own people, any denunciation of external war remains politically incomplete. This was the logic that led certain decolonial campist currents to insult the revolutionary Jina uprising in 2022 by branding it “Woman, Life, Zionist,” as Paroles d’Honneur (PDH) did in France. The result is the same: the closure of the revolutionary horizon opened in 2022, the isolation of popular forces and leftists, and the displacement of the desire for rupture in favor of reactionary solutions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/8.jpg\")
\nFrom this reformist and campist perspective, any emancipatory project that departs from Realpolitik is recast as “radicalism” and pushed outside the bounds of legitimate politics. This strategy of disqualification has left the right with a monopoly on radicalism; consequently, these two currents become, if not allies, at least accomplices in the rise of the royalists, whose diasporic branch today represents a form of the far right.
\n\nWithin the diaspora, monarchists have systematized and intensified the demonization of the left. With the backing of international powers and Israel, and with considerable financial and media resources at their disposal, they rewrite history by reducing Iran’s crises to the fitna (“sedition”) of 1979 and the “betrayal of the left.” They use the errors of part of the left, such as the Tudeh Party’s support for the Islamic Republic in the name of anti-imperialism, as a pretext for this, equating the left with the Islamic Republic, much as the Russian left has historically been associated with Stalinism.4 As a label, “the left” thus becomes a smear, an instrument of exclusion targeting anyone who opposes Pahlavism—including human rights activists, republicans, liberals, and even political prisoners such as Narges Mohammadi, who has never identified as left-wing.
\n\nThis is a way to depoliticize the responsibility of monarchist structures and the West while channeling social anger towards a counterrevolutionary nostalgia. In this context, campists who support the “Axis of Resistance” through by whitewashing of the regime’s crimes become unwitting auxiliaries of the far right. In insisting that no alternative to monarchism would exist in the event of the regime’s fall, they ultimately conclude that no uprising should take place at all. This opens up space for fascist populism and the far right, especially in the diaspora, while isolating radicals in exile.
\n\nReformists and monarchists, both often situated within a neoliberal horizon and both largely intolerant of ethnonational pluralism, tend to reinforce one another, at times becoming actual allies. The popular phrase “The left never understood,” powerfully revived by both camps shortly before the revolt of 2026, illustrates the effectiveness of anti-left discourse.
\n\nA triangular convergence emerges between the Islamic Republic, the reformists, and the monarchists: despite their declared antagonisms, all tend to neutralize emancipatory alternatives emerging from the left, feminism, and oppressed peoples, thereby foreclosing the horizon that opened in 2022 with slogans such as “Neither monarchy nor Supreme Leader: freedom and equality.” The rights of these groups are framed as existential threats to different forms of authoritarianism, whether theocratic, secular-centralist, or monarchic. Designating “the left” as the principal enemy prepares the way for a right-wing counterrevolution, or, if necessary, war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/9.jpg\")
\nThe Islamic Republic’s violent suppression of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising in 2022 transformed the conditions under which “freedom” itself could be imagined across wide sectors of Iranian society. By refusing popular demands for gender justice, democratic transformation, and ethnonational autonomy, the regime deepened an already severe crisis of legitimacy and fractured what remained of the social contract. The result was not only the collapse of trust between the state and society, but also a weakening of the collective capacity to imagine liberation as an internal political project.
\n\nThis rupture created a dangerous political terrain. As avenues for reform, recognition, and participation were systematically closed, the idea of freedom became increasingly entangled with hopes for a solution from outside. War, once understood primarily as the destructive antithesis of emancipation, came—in certain quarters, even among some anticolonial thinkers—to be perceived more ambiguously: not as something desirable in and of itself, but as a possible means of dislodging a violently entrenched regime.
\n\nThis shift should not be mistaken for an endorsement of militarism. Rather, it reveals a profound transformation in political subjectivity—for which the Islamic Republic bears responsibility. Through decades of repression—and especially through its ruthless response to the uprisings of 2022 and January 2026—the regime did not simply foreclose reform; it altered the framework through which violence, rupture, and liberation are understood. In Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that when a state renders sections of the population unrecognizable or disposable, it reshapes the affective and epistemic conditions in which violence is understood. In the Iranian case, this has contributed to a dangerous erosion of the distinction between annihilation and salvation, destruction and deliverance.
\n\nThe events of January 8 and 9, 2026 offer an especially stark example of this. During the latest mass revolutionary uprising, the regime enforced a near-total shutdown of internet and telephone communications and sought to restore “order” through a combination of repression, isolation, and terror. In January, a prominent ophthalmologist released a video stating that, in a single hospital (Farabi) in Tehran, one thousand operations had been performed during the night of January 8 alone to treat protesters shot directly in the eye with live ammunition. Hospitals were turned into detention centers rather than places of care, and many of the wounded were transferred to prisons, where some were summarily executed. The bodies of slain protesters were piled into refrigerated trucks; some of them were unrecognizable as a consequence of the brutality that had been inflicted on them. Videos show families in morgues, weeping, searching for their children or trying to identify the bodies of their relatives. Among these images, one can see infants and teenagers killed by gunfire.
\n\nMany victims are still missing. According to a report from an Iranian university, at least fifty women were buried anonymously because they could not be identified. Bodies returned to families were sometimes released only in exchange for payment, often on the pretext of a “projectile fee,” or families were forced to declare that their relatives had been members of the Basij [a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and had been killed by protesters. Burials, often carried out under intense security pressure, took place in silence, very early in the morning or late at night. In some cases, the bodies were buried without the families even being informed. The figures indicate around 10,000 dead, more than 11,730 cases still under investigation, more than 25,000 injured, more than 52,000 arrests, and at least 337 forced confessions. The regime used violence not only to repress but also to terrorize society.
\n\nThe stories of death, disappearance, and arrest give concrete meaning to the slogan: “Basij, Sepah, our Daesh, that is you.” [Sepah is a term for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Daesh is a term for the Islamic State.]
\n\nIn the political vacuum produced by this state violence, monarchist and right-wing forces found an opportunity to expand. Pahlavi’s rise did not indicate a mass ideological turn toward monarchism so much as a sign of the growing conviction that no break with the regime could be possible without external intervention. As the figure most visibly associated with international backing—especially Israeli backing—he came to embody, for part of the population, the most credible vehicle for an externally imposed “liberation.” Pahlavi’s appeal stemmed less from a positive desire for monarchical restoration than from the perception that he embodied, in practical terms, a project of regime change through war.
\n\nThe regime, in turn, responded by intensifying its discourse about “security,” branding protesters “terrorists,” “spies,” and foreign agents, and paving the way for new executions under charges such as moharebeh (“waging war against God”). A vicious circle emerged: repression foreclosed emancipatory possibilities from within, while the vacuum it produced turned people towards reactionary solutions from outside. That was the context in which counterrevolution could be disguised as salvation.
\n\nThe Israeli-American military escalation against Iran in 2025 and 2026 must be understood in this context. Externally, the war was justified with rhetoric about Iranian “liberation.” This discourse was not merely imposed from outside by imperial force; to the extent that some sectors of Iranian society accepted it, that was the result of the devastation that the regime itself had produced.
\n\nThe fact that a transparently cynical appropriation of feminist and democratic language by a settler-colonial and apartheid state could appear credible to anyone is itself a measure of the depth of despair in Iran. Netanyahu’s grotesque invocation of “freedom” is a stark example of the imperial co-optation of discourse about liberation. The symbolic hijacking of the emancipatory language of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî was facilitated not only by sections of the Iranian right, but also by certain Western liberal feminists whose selective solidarity with Iranian women remained compatible with silence about genocide, colonial domination, and war in the region.
\n\nThis is not new. As scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Mahmood Mamdani have shown, imperial powers have repeatedly instrumentalized language about women’s rights, protecting minorities, and democracy to legitimize military intervention—for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is noteworthy here is the extent to which that discourse could resonate in a society damaged by authoritarian rule. Years of repression, ideological coercion, and nationalist consolidation have fractured political consciousness to such a degree that what would ordinarily be recognized as imperial aggression could appear to some as the only imaginable solution. This is the consequence of the systematic destruction of internal political alternatives. The task of analysis is therefore not to pass moral judgments on this perception, but to understand what produced it. What kind of regime drives people to the point where the bombs of an external imperialist aggressor can appear less intolerable than the continuity of domestic domination?
\n\nHad the regime responded to Jin, Jiyan, Azadî with the slightest bit of accountability, or opened up even the smallest space for democratic transformation, the narrative of war as salvation would have remained marginal. Instead, the regime criminalized dissent, intensified repression against Kurds, Baloch, women, and other oppositional forces, and framed every demand for justice as foreign infiltration. In doing so, it not only extinguished the conditions of internal change but also prepared the ground for imperial powers to dishonestly present themselves as agents of liberation. Domestic authoritarianism and external militarism do not stand in simple opposition; they are mutually enabling, even if they remain asymmetrical.
\n\nIt is crucial to emphasize that asymmetry. It is a serious analytical and political mistake to treat Israel and the Islamic Republic as equivalent actors. While enjoying the full support of the United States, Israel remains the principal external aggressor: a settler-colonial state engaged in genocide in Gaza, permanent occupation in the West Bank, and a broader project of militarized regional domination. By contrast, the Islamic Republic is not the architect of this imperial order but one of its targets—even as it remains an authoritarian and patriarchal regime deeply complicit in the militarization of the region through its own expansionist, quasi-imperial ambitions (particularly in Syria, where its intervention contributed to mass atrocities). Israel and Iran are not symmetrical powers, but they are deeply entangled. Each, in its own way, uses war to manage crisis: Israel by turning militarized violence outward, the Islamic Republic by invoking external threats to justify internal repression. In both cases, war functions as a counterrevolutionary force: it disciplines hope, narrows political imagination, and reimposes patriarchal, nationalist, and statist forms of “order” against the plural, feminist, and subaltern horizon opened by Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.
\n\nThe political challenge, then, is twofold. We must confront imperialism not only as military aggression but also as a discursive project that appropriates the language of freedom in order to destroy emancipatory politics. At the same time, we must dismantle the domestic authoritarian structures that make such imperial appropriations appear plausible. An anti-war politics adequate to the Iranian present must therefore be both anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian. It must reject the false choice between bombs and massacres, between devastation and prisons, between foreign intervention and domestic repression.
\n\nTo sustain such a politics means recovering the revolutionary content of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî as a living political horizon. That horizon rejects the reduction of politics to militarism, refuses to let liberation be defined through war, and prevents both imperial powers and nationalist elites from appropriating feminist, Kurdish, and subaltern struggles. The question is not only how to overthrow an authoritarian regime, but how to prevent the fall of today’s order from paving the way for tomorrow’s tyranny. So long as the desire for change remains trapped between domestic authoritarianism and imperial aggression, destruction will masquerade as salvation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/2.jpg\")
\nIran cannot be understood through simplistic binaries—regime versus opposition, war versus peace, reform versus revolution. It is more useful to understand the present moment as a confrontation between two horizons. The first, opened by Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, is an emancipatory horizon grounded in social justice, plurality, and transformation from below. The second is a counterrevolutionary horizon that takes different forms—theocratic, reformist, monarchist, campist, militarized, imperial.
\n\nAuthoritarianism does not rely on repression alone. It also works by capturing symbols, demonizing left alternatives, fabricating internal enemies, emptying the popular imagination of possibilities, and legitimizing war as a solution to crisis. After the repression of the Jina uprising in 2022, exhaustion and disillusionment—shaped by the memory of 2009, 2017, and 2019—enabled both the Islamic Republic and sections of the exiled opposition to reassert statist logics, whether theocratic or nationalist, and to contain the revolutionary opening within familiar discourse about security, masculinity, and ethnonationalism.
\n\nYet the violence of the counterrevolution also revealed the force of the uprising that it sought to crush. As the Peoples Want Internationalist Manifesto puts it, “Behind every fascism lies a failed revolution.” Israel’s attack on Iran, together with the limited support it has received from parts of the Iranian opposition, must be understood as a reactionary response to an aborted revolutionary process. The repression of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî was not the end of the movement, but proof of its political power. In exposing the entanglement of gender, class, race, and territory in Iran’s authoritarian order and opening up a horizon of plural solidarity, it continues to haunt the present as a latent alternative to the militarized normalcy of our time.
\n\nPanning back, we can see that the sequence of repression over the past half decade has followed a single logic. The revolutionary possibility that opened in 2022 was first attacked symbolically by nationalists—including reformist, republican, campist, and monarchist currents, especially in the diaspora—then crushed by the regime, above all in the January 2026 massacre, and finally overtaken by the imperialist war of February. In each instance, what was suppressed was the possibility of an Iran founded on equality, autonomy, plurality, social justice, the political centrality of women and queer struggles, and the self-determination of oppressed peoples.
\n\nExternal intervention does not complete the revolution. Rather, it negates it. It shifts the political center of gravity away from popular struggle, weakens the conditions for autonomous organization, and imposes a geopolitical agenda that is alien to internal dynamics. Washington and Tel Aviv do not want a free Iran, but an Iran that is weakened militarily, stabilized internally via authoritarian means, and reduced to a subordinate position within the regional and global order—an Iran that is disciplined so as no longer to constitute a geopolitical threat, an Iran re-anchored to the West and sufficiently controlled not to disrupt the regional order. They want an Iran that is not in a position to reconfigure the balances of power, that cannot exert influence on the circulation of capital, the corridors of influence, or access to energy resources, especially oil. This kind of “stability” is not the peace of peoples, but the political form required to make Iran governable and exploitable in order to integrate it into the global capitalist and imperial order.
\n\nIran’s future therefore depends on preserving the political autonomy of popular struggles. That means rejecting the Islamic Republic, monarchist restoration, accommodationist reformism, and the logics of war imposed by imperial powers. The challenge is not simply to end one regime, but at the same time to prevent another form of domination from arising.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/19/10.jpg\")
\nThe left in Iran has always been rooted in a strong historical tradition, due in part to the country’s proximity to the Soviet Union and its wider sphere of influence. During the Constitutional era (the Iranian revolution of 1905–1911), social democrats, movements for social justice, and groups shaped by the Russian Revolution were repressed by conservative religious forces, the feudal aristocracy, and, later, by the centralizing state. Over the decades that followed, particularly after the formation of the Tudeh Party in the 1940s and the spread of its influence among workers, intellectuals, women, and even parts of the military, a structural fear of communism took hold across the state apparatus and the royal court, culminating in the US- and British-backed coup of 1953 that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. This moment marked a decisive turning point in the systematic repression of the Iranian left. ↩
\nFor more on this, you can read this article by Yashar Darolshafa, a left-wing political activist who has spent more than four years in prison in Iran in recent years. ↩
\nFariba Adelkhah only acknowledges the state violence of January—an unprecedented massacre in modern Iranian history—at the margins, always framing it within concerns with order, stability, security, and the rejection of foreign interference. In extending a certain amount of trust to the government, presenting structurally rigged elections as “truly competitive,” downplaying the institutional coercion of compulsory veiling, and suggesting, at the end of a week of carnage, that “before the internet shutdown, debate in Iran had perhaps never been so open,” she excuses Iranian authoritarianism and minimizes the political rupture that has run through Iranian society since at least 2017. The text reads less as a faithful account of the situation than as an expression of personal desire. ↩
\nAmong certain national minorities, there is an additional grievance: for many Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, and Turks, the left is sometimes framed as a form of majority nationalism complicit in internal colonialism. ↩
\nOn March 28, millions of people around the country will participate in the third day of No Kings rallies. We are calling on everyone to engage with these rallies as an opportunity to build towards more concrete forms of organizing and action. You can read an array of options for what you could do here.
\n\nIn October 2025, we published a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the second No Kings demonstrations. Anarchists across the country engaged with the October No Kings demonstrations in a variety of ways. You can read a collection of reportbacks here.
\n\nAt that time, Trump had just declared “antifa” was a “major terrorist organization,” sowing fear among opponents of the administration. Yet the Trump administration was not able to escalate to a large-scale crackdown on radicals; federal mercenaries still had their hands full attempting to carry out mass arrests and deportations targeting immigrants.
\n\nIn January 2026, the administration tried to solve this problem by sending thousands of ICE agents to the Twin Cities, with the intention of developing a model via which they could go city to city, deporting thousands of people at a time. But the plan backfired, drawing tens of thousands of people into action against ICE and turning public opinion against mass deportations.
\n\nThe fight in the Twin Cities represents a turning point in the history of the second Trump administration. At the grassroots level, the social and political distance between the various forces opposed to Trump is shrinking. The No Kings demonstrations offer an opportunity to consolidate these connections, taking advantage of the widespread popularity of the resistance in Minnesota.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/1.jpg\")
\nRepression is ramping up in regions under the control of Trump’s allies, exemplified by the absurd conviction of nine defendants in the first Prairieland trial. Yet the federal government has picked too many fights at once and is now bogged down from Minneapolis to the Strait of Hormuz. The most effective way to maximize the security of participants in any movement is to expand the numbers of people who participate and escalate the pressure all together, so the authorities can’t isolate and target individuals. As one anarchist said after the October No Kings demonstrations,
\n\n\n\n\nWhat the hell are people talking about it being “dangerous” for anarchists to be at No Kings? It’s dangerous for us NOT to be there.
\n
Thus far, for the most part, the No Kings rallies have not functioned to connect people in active networks to build the capacity to fight. Rather, they have functioned as symbolic expressions of dissatisfaction, revealing anger with both the Republicans and the Democrats. They have shown that there is mass opposition to the regime, but it remains to us to create opportunities for that opposition to assume concrete forms.
\n\nThe time is ripe. Let’s rise to the occasion.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/crown-fire.gif\")
\nHere is an array of options, from most ambitious to easiest. Whoever you are, whatever resources you have at your disposal, there is something you can do.
\n\nGet together with your friends and form a bloc at the rally. With four people, you can paint a big banner proclaiming your politics; with a dozen or more, you might be one of the most organized and visible blocs in the demonstration.
\n\nAnnounce your bloc and tell people how to participate: for example, “meet at the black flags at [a specific intersection].”
\n\nYou could start before the main rally begins and move to it in a group, forming a “feeder march.”
\n\nIn October, a small bloc of anti-authoritarians in one small city spontaneously led the entire rally in an unpermitted march all around downtown.
\n\nIf you have good relations with the rally organizers where you are, you could coordinate with them to play a specific role in the march—for example, dealing with counter-protesters, or leading participants to an action at a local target such as a federal building or ICE facility.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/crown-fire-separator.gif\")
\nPlan an event or a series of events to take place after the rally. Distribute fliers at the rally spreading the word.
\n\nYou could bring someone who has participated in resisting ICE in the Twin Cities to speak about the power of direct action, or person from the Palestinian, Venezuelan, or Iranian diasporas to speak about the impact of Trump’s imperialist ventures. You could organize a teach-in about a local issue, followed by a demonstration addressing it.
\n\nYou could organize an assembly, a skill share, a local rapid response network, or a film screening. Whatever you plan, make it accessible to the wide range of people you can expect to encounter at the No Kings demonstration but pointing the way to a more radical framework with each event building upon the last. Envision a future in which your community looks back at the No Kings rally as the beginning of a new chapter of radical resistance.
\n\nMake as many fliers as you expect to see participants at the demonstration. If the last No Kings demonstration in your town brought out a thousand people, you need at least a thousand fliers.
\n\n\nSet up a zine table at your local No Kings protest. For some people, these might be the first zines they’ve ever read. Focus on approachable and introductory texts, but don’t conceal your radical positions—many people are hungry for real alternatives now. CrimethInc. and Sprout Distro offer good selections of PDFs to print. Don’t overwhelm browsers with too many titles—focus on bringing a few solid zines that you can stand behind on the topics that will best equip you to connect with people of other walks of life. Read the material before tabling so you can answer questions and provide recommendations. Invite people to your table and engage them in conversation. Share the beauty and joy of anarchy!
\n\nIf you hurry, there is still time to order our “Immigrants Welcome” stickers here, an array of posters here, and copies of To Change Everything, our introduction to anarchism, here.
\n\nSee below for an array of zines you could use.
\n\n\nDisplay banners and distribute fliers educating your fellow demonstrators about the plight of deportees, political prisoners, and defendants and what they can do to support them. This is a good time to publicize the Prairieland case in particular.
\n\nAt one No Kings rally last October, Asheville anarchists distributed thousands of red bandanas invoking the history of labor struggles in Appalachia, inviting demonstrators to wear them as a gesture of solidarity with the Prairieland defendants.
\n\n\nConnect attendees to local struggles against ICE infrastructure, such as deportation facilities and flock cameras, or against other threats, such as AI data centers. Distribute information about the locations and vulnerabilities of these targets and a few easy actions that anyone can take against them.
\n\nFor best results, of course, connect this with “Promote a Follow-up Event,” above.
\n\n\nMany of us remember the moment when we first encountered radical politics. Maybe yours was the alter-globalization movement, Occupy, the George Floyd Uprising, or the Student Intifada. Some participants at No Kings are not going to be open to hearing radical critiques of capitalism and the state, but make it your mission to find the ones who are ready to join the struggle, who just need a framework and an idea of where to begin. Talk to them about their views and how those might fit within a larger global history of resistance. It’s not about convincing them, but sharing tools to give a name to their longing for liberation.
\n\nMay we sow the seeds of resistance to the state and capitalism. May the branches of our efforts reach towards the sky, towards liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/2.jpg\")
The crown of Empress Eugénie, the equivalent to Melania under Napoleon the Third, pleasingly damaged during the theft in the Apollo Gallery on October 19, 2025.
\nClick on each title to access the PDF for printing.
\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/eight-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/at-the-turning-of-the-tide_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace_front.jpg\") \n | \n
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/the-road-to-prairieland-the-crackdown-on-anti-ice-activists-in-texas-reflects-a-pattern-of-intensifying-repression_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/theres-no-such-thing-as-revolutionary-government_front.jpg\") \n | \n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/16/direct-action-guide_front.jpg\") \n | \n
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\nThe war that the United States and Israel are waging in the Middle East is not solely directed at Iran. In addition to occupying the entirety of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and other parts of Syria, Israeli troops are currently occupying parts of Lebanon while Israeli airstrikes pummel the country from above. At least 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Left unchecked, the Israeli government will reduce Lebanon to uninhabitable wreckage, just as it has Gaza.
\n\nTo understand the consequences for people in Lebanon, we reached out to Elia Ayoub, who previously spoke to us about the uprising that took place in Lebanon in October 2019 against the sectarian rule of warlord oligarchs. How should we understand the latest round of hostilities in the context of the last several decades? How does this assault shape the prospects for Lebanese movements for liberation?
\n\nElia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian and researcher from Lebanon. He hosts The Fire These Times podcast, runs the Hauntologies newsletter, and hosts online classes on modern Lebanese history. You can donate to support people displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon here.
\n\nHow did Israeli policies impact your life and the lives of those around you as you were growing up in Lebanon?
\n\nI would have to go back decades to give anything close to a full picture. Israel has been bombing Lebanon for a good part of the past four decades, even if we limit ourselves to starting in 1982. They militarily occupied south Lebanon until 2000, and then bombed Lebanon again in 2006. That was when they developed their notorious Dahieh military doctrine—so called after Beirut’s southern suburbs (Dahieh means “suburb” in Arabic)—which explicitly calls for disproportionate bombing of civilian areas to put pressure on Hezbollah. They bombed Lebanon again in 2023 and especially 2024. Then they signed a “ceasefire” with Hezbollah, which they have violated at least 10,000 times since, according to the UN.
\n\nAnd now they are bombing again.
\n\nIsrael violates international law as a matter of state policy. I was 15 years old during the 2006 war. I remember watching Israeli jets dropping bomb after bomb over Dahieh. Close friends who are from the South, Dahieh, and the Bekaa valley have experienced death, displacement, and trauma multiple times over. Virtually everyone in Lebanon has witnessed an Israeli bombing, regardless of their age. If you have lived in Lebanon for a long enough period, you have experienced Israeli state violence.
\n\nWe’re talking about millions of people from all walks of life, of all political persuasions—children and their parents and grandparents. For example, my 89-year-old grandmother, who fled the Nakba in 1948 as a child, has never passed more than a few years at a time in nearly a century of life without being directly or indirectly impacted by Israeli state violence. That’s all we know about Israelis. There is a widespread perception that they are incapable of existing as a political culture without war.
\n\nThis is entirely missing from most of the coverage I’ve seen, which is limited to inhuman geopolitical abstracts. What is happening right now is not just about Hezbollah (which is already unpopular in Lebanon) dragging the country into foreign wars. If this was simply about Hezbollah, Israel wouldn’t be ethnically cleansing entire villages by dynamiting them. Israel wouldn’t be spraying herbicides over large swaths of Lebanon and Syria to kill crops and wildlife in order to make the land unusable for agriculture. Israeli politicians wouldn’t be routinely threatening to bomb Lebanon back to the dark ages, or threatening to turn Dahieh into Gaza, or designating all Lebanese Shias—roughly a third of the population—as a hostile population.
\n\nHezbollah, a deeply reactionary party that I’ve long opposed—I say this simply to avoid confusion—would have never existed in the first place were it not for the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. There would have been no reason for a group that called itself the Islamic resistance to exist were it not for the fact that it was necessary to resist such a brutal foreign occupier.
\n\nAnd now, in the past few days, Israel has ordered the forced evacuation—effectively, the ethnic cleansing—of the entirety of southern Lebanon, Dahieh, and parts of the Bekaa. History is repeating itself, only now the weapons of mass destruction that the Israeli government possesses are even deadlier than before.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/1.jpg\")
Israel repeatedly struck Beirut’s southern suburbs during the first week of March 2026.
\nHow have Israeli policies and actions towards Lebanon and the region as a whole shifted over the past decade?
\n\nA sort of stalemate prevailed for most of the period following 2006, with escalations here and there. The Israelis were busy bombing Gaza from 2008 onward, especially in 2014, and Hezbollah occupied with defending the Assad regime in Syria. During that period, Israeli politicians never missed an opportunity to tell Lebanon that they can destroy us whenever they want—that they intend to do so.
\n\nWhatever Israel did in Gaza, we knew that they wanted to do the same in Lebanon. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that. Israelis tell us these things outright.
\n\nWhat has shifted is that Israeli politics has become even more explicitly genocidal than before. The attacks of October 7th provided an already genocidal political culture with the excuse it needed. We’ve all seen the results.
\n\nFrom a Lebanese point of view, seeing Israel get more and more violent made a lot of people conclude that, once they are “finished” with Gaza, they will turn their eyes to Lebanon.
\n\nRepeated Israeli incursions and air raids have created mass displacement within Lebanon. How have Lebanese people organized themselves in these chaotic moments? What groups or movements have helped people escaping the war?
\n\nWe should remember that this latest round of mass displacement comes after a similar one in 2024 that mostly affected the same areas. There are established paths for those with connections to stay with friends or relatives, for those with means to rent out a place, and so on.
\n\nAs for those who do not have these means, they are the hardest hit; many have been sleeping on the streets. We often see neighboring villages that aren’t as affected sheltering those who are fleeing, at least temporarily, while people make their way to their destination, if they have one in mind. People are adapting to an evolving situation on a daily basis. Some are fundraising on their own or as part of groups, others are volunteering with soup kitchens.
\n\nHowever, it’s impossible to “escape the war,” as the consequences are felt throughout the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/2.jpg\")
Israeli armoured personnel carriers (APCs) on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border on March 8, 2026.
\nIn 2019, there was a burst of social movement activity in Lebanon drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. What became of that time of possibility?
\n\nI wrote about this for CrimethInc. at the time.
\n\nThe 2019 moment was the biggest uprising this country had ever seen. It was only possible because of years of organizing and protests, years of governmental corruption, and—of particular importance to this conversation—a long enough period of time without Lebanon being bombed. We would have not been able to take to the streets if Israelis were bombing those streets and our homes—which is what is happening now, once again.
\n\nThis shows how Israel has been good to Lebanon’s sectarian regime.
\n\nThe horizons that opened up in 2019 were closed soon after by a combination of factors: repression (including by Hezbollah), economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. For most of the years since, most people have been simply trying to survive, with many people working on mutual aid, soup kitchens, and other forms of community building. We could reasonably attribute the emergence of those efforts to those few months in late 2019 and early 2020 that showed people—in particular, the generation that came of age after the 1975-1990 Lebanon wars—what is possible when we get together and organize.
\n\nThat’s where that time of possibility went. But I think we haven’t seen the end of that potential yet.
\n\nHow do you understand the relationship between Netanyahu’s government and Trump’s government today? Which is determining the course of events, and towards what end?
\n\nWe know from US officials, including Marco Rubio, that Israel made the call to attack Iran and the US decided to join—so in that sense, the Israeli government is the one making the call. It’s surreal that the smaller power managed to drag the much larger power into this, and that a decision made by a fairly small number of people in Israel has had such consequences for the world economy, not to mention the ongoing death toll and the environmental disaster.
\n\nThe Americans have no end goal. They did not plan ahead at all. Now we’re seeing Trump unhappy with Israel bombing Iranian oil depots, which means they didn’t even coordinate together. It’s unclear what the Israelis want beyond spreading chaos as an end in itself. It’s possible they were arrogant enough to believe that they could impose regime change in Iran via aerial bombardment alone, but as far as I can tell, they are happy simply to destroy as much of Iran as they can, while they can. This is a regime that has gotten away with carrying out genocide in view of the entire world for over two years, so it clearly believes it can act with impunity indefinitely.
\n\nThere are different ideologies on the American side as well. The Christian nationalist and Zionist Pete Hegseth is celebrating the destruction in Iran as a victory in and of itself. As for Trump, he is clearly out of his depth. He did not expect things to get this bad this quickly. He likely hoped for an outcome like the one in Venezuela, where he got rid of Maduro but kept the regime in place with Delcy Rodríguez in charge but subservient to the will of the US government. They cannot achieve that in Iran—not only because the Iranian regime is more powerful, but also because the Israelis have their own priorities.
\n\nIf the Americans were smarter, they would have understood by now that their problem is Israel. Even if your goal were simply to preserve US supremacy, American support for Israel has been a disaster. They have destroyed the illusion of Gulf security in a matter of days, destabilized the world economy, and proven to every government, once and for all, that the US cannot be trusted. However this ends, we are going to see a realigned world with reduced US influence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/3.jpg\")
The consequences of an Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on March 9, 2026.
\nOf all the responses to the US and Israeli aggression modeled by different political forces in Lebanon and throughout the surrounding region, which could point towards a horizon of liberation?
\n\nIn Lebanon, groups like Buzuruna Juzuruna, which focuses on food sovereignty, and Egna Legna, an Ethiopian migrant women-run non-profit providing shelter, food safety and more, are examples of what is possible in the country beyond the sectarian and nationalist status quo. Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon is another one, as their definition of the queer community in Lebanon is not limited to Lebanese queers only.
\n\nIn times of war, “humanitarian” discourse can either reproduce existing power dynamics—for example, by ignoring migrant domestic workers or queer Lebanese people—or depoliticize an inherently political situation—for example, reporting on how migrant domestic workers are affected without mentioning that Israel is bombing civilian areas forcing everyone to flee. Groups like the ones I have cited cut through all of this. They operate on a logic of people supporting people because they’re people. That can be a very radical act.
\n\nMilitary attacks by foreign powers—especially by imperialist nations—often produce a strong patriotic feeling among those who experience them. How should movements for liberation engage with this?
\n\nThis isn’t really happening in Lebanon because the country is already fractured. There are many people who also blame Hezbollah for responding to Khamenei’s assassination by launching rockets towards Israel, so you’re not going to see a “rallying behind the troops” situation.
\n\nWhat are the most effective things that grassroots social movements elsewhere in the world can do right now to support those enduring this violence?
\n\nI always hesitate with questions like this one, only because “effectiveness” is a criterion that involves too many different factors to consider. As a general rule, I’d say adopting an anti-authoritarian framework is a good way to avoid downplaying the suffering of people who live under regimes like the Ayatollah’s while recognizing that this war has nothing to do with liberating those people.
\n\nI also think this is a situation in which the diasporas and their supporters outside of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine can play a significant role. For example, there is very little space in Iran today for pro-Palestine activism, because the Ayatollah’s regime has long co-opted pro-Palestine discourse to its own ends—which have nothing to do with decolonizing Palestine and promoting an anti-Zionist solution that treats everyone equally regardless of religion or ethnicity. Iran has a system that can reasonably be described as gender apartheid. A state like that cannot liberate Palestinians from Israel’s ethno-supremacist apartheid.
\n\nThose of us in the diasporas can make the link between the authoritarianism of Israel and the authoritarianism of Iran without equating the two. This is crucial, because we need to be sensitive to the experience of those who are victimized by both regimes. To a Palestinian in Gaza, it could sound offensive to say that Iran is as bad as Israel, and vice versa to the Ayatollah’s victims in Iran. The absence of such nuance makes it easier for those—including parts of the Iranian diaspora—who promote the idea that Israel will liberate Iran.
\n\nThere is anti-Arab racism among the Iranian diaspora that, ironically, shares similarities with the Ayatollah regime’s repression of non-Persian groups such as Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds. It is a form of ethno-supremacy that attracts and is attracted to the Zionist ethno-supremacy that most readers of this platform are more familiar with.
\n\nOn the Palestinian diaspora side, more could be done to recognize the violence of the Ayatollah’s regime and the so-called “axis of resistance,” both of which have killed thousands upon thousands of people—including Palestinian Syrians who opposed Assad—while pretending to be pro-Palestine. Such connections are much more difficult to make in our region, but diasporas with more privileges can help build those desperately needed bonds.
\n\nWhile we’re at it, we should also be building bonds with members of the Jewish diaspora that reject Zionist ethno-supremacy in favor of building a common future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/11/4.jpg\")
The site of an Israeli airstrike targeting the Lebanese city of Tyre on March 6, 2026.
\nOne of the most exhausting things about horrific tragedies like this is that they force us to focus on harm reduction rather than on building the world of our dreams. If not for the US and Israeli attacks, what would you prefer to be thinking about, doing, creating?
\n\nI would be living in my home village in Lebanon, thinking about whether to go somewhere more rural where I could work on and with the land to build food sovereignty and promote mutual aid from the ground up across the country and beyond.
\n\nI would be spending more time in the woods there, learning local names for the animals and plants with my child, who has never been to Lebanon.
\n\nI appreciate this question, because it can be easy to forgot the scale of what was robbed of us. I do my best to keep hope and create roots wherever I am, but I am also always mourning what the multi-generational machines of destruction that are the Israeli and American states have done to our lives.
\n\nAs long as there is a rogue and hyper-militaristic Zionist state to our south, it is too dangerous for me to live in Lebanon with my child.
\n\nFrom February 25 to March 1, aspiring revolutionaries in the Twin Cities hosted hundreds of people who traveled to Minnesota to take part in the Melt the ICE week of action. Multiple events took place every day, including marches, blockades, noise demos, speaking events, and trainings. These actions and workshops served both to bolster the resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota and to teach activists from all over the country how to export the Twin Cities’ rapid response model to their hometowns.
\n\nIn this report, organizers reflect on the week of action and draw out lessons for the movement as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/3.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nFor three months, Minnesotans have supported our friends, family, and neighbors who shelter in place and face the constant threat of kidnapping at the hands of federal agents. We have experienced daily encounters with tear gas, high-speed car chases, and the threat of deadly violence. At the same time, we witnessed a dizzying flurry of analyses about why our resistance was so strong and robust. Where could this moment take us?
\n\nYet less than two weeks after the murder of Alex Pretti, we began to lose momentum. The international uproar following Pretti’s death forced the Trump regime to make concessions, changing tactics in Minnesota and firing Greg Bovino, the so-called “commander-at-large” of US Customs and Border Protection and the public face of Operation Metro Surge. These concessions were designed to take the wind out of the sails of the resistance—and to some degree, they worked.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/1.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nThis was only possible because our movement lacked a political horizon beyond “ICE out.” While everyday militancy and care had blossomed around the common goals of defeating ICE and supporting our neighbors, there was less momentum around demands to free the same neighbors from the concentration camps where they are now held.
\n\nOne of our comrades had the idea to organize a week of action to share the tactics at the heart of our resistance movement and to continue to build towards revolutionary struggle. It instantly made sense. Since the murder of Renee Good, we had been hearing from comrades across the country that they wanted a way to come here and plug in. And we were nowhere near ready to let go of the revolutionary potential of this moment in the Twin Cities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/8.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAs aspiring revolutionaries living in the Twin Cities, by late February 2026, we were swinging back and forth between contradicting perceptions of reality. From one perspective, we were triumphant: we had driven out a fascist paramilitary force bent on kidnapping innocent people. Alongside our neighbors, we had demonstrated that we would not tolerate authoritarianism in our cities. From another perspective, it didn’t feel like we had won at all. Thousands of Minnesotans had been captured, at least three had died at the hands of ICE, and most of the abductees were stuck in concentration camps across the country awaiting an unknown fate in horrific conditions. We had thwarted many abductions, but we were still witnessing more.
\n\nWith the exceptions of the rebellion in North Minneapolis after ICE shot Julio Sosa-Celis on January 14, and the autonomous zones that the people briefly established around the sites where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, we had seen few instances of prolonged confrontation with the state. Even the mass mobilization day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” (which union reps, bound by law, could not even call a “strike”) brought us little closer to direct conflict with ICE and its collaborators. Despite the historic participation of more than 300,000 people, the logic and power of a general strike was so obfuscated that, when some groups pressed for another strike on January 30 a week after the first one, volunteers who had been asked to spread the word to small businesses reported, “They don’t want to close again because of profit loss—is there any way we could offer financial support?”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/13.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nThe questions pressed on us: how could we push this movement towards revolutionary struggle, sharpen our collective analysis, and ensure that this moment that had been consuming our daily lives did not end in citywide burnout?
\n\nPrevious experiences had taught us the potential of bringing people together from across the country to build resistance. These included mass calls to action to Stop Cop City, the Treaty People Gathering mobilization in northern Minnesota during the construction of the Line 3 pipeline, and the legacy of summit-hopping in the early 2000s. The relationships we forged at these mobilizations have shaped our movements. Many of our closest friendships emerged from these.
\n\nWe decided to give it another shot. We hoped that if we built enough energy, the next time that ICE planned a large-scale operation anywhere in the country, this same convergence could take place again.
\n\nSo, yes, if ICE comes to your city, we will bring the heat to you.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/26.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nAs we spread the idea of the week of action, local organizers were excited despite sedimentary layers of burnout. The initial discussions confirmed that this event would reach across tendencies. Activists and organizations across the state agreed to our long-term goals of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, police, and prisons. This unity stems from the George Floyd uprisings, where police abolition became a mainstream value in Minnesota. Now, even nonprofits can be pushed to sign on to the goal of abolition.
\n\nThis demand did alienate some groups, which did not sign on. But we had more than enough collaborators. One of the mistakes of the Trump administration has been giving us something we can all work on together.
\n\nAs the week of action began to take shape, we knew that we wanted to center the tactics that we believe are most likely to continue to erode state power. The most important of these is the rapid response networks, which have been so central in disrupting ICE operations. We wanted to get as many people on the streets practicing rapid response as possible, both to give new people firsthand practice and to bolster the numbers on the streets during what the authorities claimed were the final days of the occupation. This is the part of the movement that brings people into direct confrontation with ICE and the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/19.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nWe also conceived of the week of action as a means of drawing attention to “secondary targets,” corporate and government ICE collaborators that prop up the deportation machine.
\n\nOne example of a secondary target is the predatory housing system. We knew that starting in the first week of March, many vulnerable people who had been unable to work during Operation Metro Surge would begin to face eviction. Local tenant organizers had begun calling for an eviction moratorium in January. In February, they began leveraging a call for a rent strike in defense of families facing eviction. This was a form of practical solidarity with our undocumented neighbors and a move towards flexing economic power not seen in the US for decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/5.jpg\")
\nSimilarly, we wanted to exert economic leverage on a variety of other entities that facilitate federal operations—including Hilton and various other hotel chains that contract with ICE, companies like Enterprise Rent-a-Car that provide them with vehicles, and corporations like Target and Home Depot that allow them to stage on their property at the expense of vulnerable employees. We also called for people to organize to make their workplaces as hostile to and noncompliant with ICE as possible. Nurses and other hospital workers led the charge in this arena, especially at locations that had experienced ICE attacks, such as Hennepin County Medical Center.
\n\nIn preparation for the week of action, we built out our working groups and got a website online. There has been extensive coverage of Operation Metro Surge—endless content flooding social media feeds, local news cycles dominated by various related stories, daily spots in national and global outlets. We created materials that we hoped could attract attention in this barrage, flooded the channels of our existing networks, and waited for RSVPs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/16.jpg\")
A bike patrol training on February 26, 2026.
\nThe idea for the week of action had emerged in the final days of January; the working groups did not come together until the second week of February. By the time our RSVP form was live, the opening night of this production was only two weeks away. This tight timeline was responsible for many of our efforts’ shortcomings. Had we started a few days later, it might have been impossible to organize a week of action altogether.
\n\nOne consequence of this short turnaround time was that the week of action self-selected participants for whom it was possible to leave home for several days on short notice, with no financial assistance for transportation. Although we were able to provide communal meals every day from February 24 to March 1, and we owe a debt of gratitude to locals who opened their homes to strangers so that we could house everyone who requested it, this event was still primarily accessible to white, middle-class participants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/22.jpg\")
A meeting at a church on February 26, 2026.
\nWe were grateful for feedback from a participant who pointed out a related dynamic: our events had a lack of intentional gathering space for immigrants and people of color. Community and connection are the factors that keep people grounded in movements. We could have done more to develop a collective sense of belonging.
\n\nWe do not blame these problems solely on the tight timeline. This phenomenon is a core dynamic of the movement itself, and speaks to a complex question of how to craft an interracial and intercultural movement. The overlapping cultures of white activists, the middle class, and neighborhood leaders in rapid response channels exist in profound separation from their Black and brown counterparts, who are fiercely organizing to defend their own communities. There are many reasons for this separation. Many of our neighbors of color are so vulnerable that they are sheltering in place. Many more are immobilized by poverty conditions, or do not trust white organizers who come to them with pre-formed agendas. Thus far, our failures to build a truly multiracial movement continue to hinder our effectiveness. The so-called drawdown has revealed the character of this movement: ICE is still operating, but because they are no longer so visible on the streets, where they will be directly witnessed by white people, participation in the resistance has declined.
\n\nHow can we carry this movement forward, broaden its scope, and move beyond moderation?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/17.jpg\")
An art build on February 26, 2026.
\nPolitical education is crucial to fostering the strength, militancy, and collective analysis of our movements. As part of the week of action, we put on several dozen training sessions on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. These included tutorials on how to set up rapid response networks, skillshares about basic first aid for chemical weapons, a discussion of the impact of the 2020 George Floyd uprising, presentations by teachers and parents on school patrols and school-based mutual aid networks, a panel on ICE resistance in other cities, and much more.
\n\nIn preparing these sessions, we emphasized the principles of popular education: including room for input, cultivating participant-generated discussion, and teaching through contradictions. We did this for the benefit of the facilitators as much as the participants. We knew that active reflection on our tactics through teaching would reveal as much to us as it did to those who came to learn.
\n\nTo our surprise, many people offered sessions freely, without being asked. The closer we got to the event, the more ideas began to flow about what we should discuss and how. The memorial stewards of the sites of the murders of George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti offered to present a session. For every political education session we offered, there were dozens more we wanted to offer, and thousands more people we wish had heard them.
\n\nAnother core component of the week of action was inviting participants into local rapid response systems. After attending sessions that detailed the function of rapid response systems and best practices for responding to ICE, we gave attendees the choice to participate in “commuting” (patrolling in cars) and patrolling on foot. The stewards of local rapid response networks, which operate on a geographical basis, designed systems for integrating hundreds of out-of-towners. Patrollers from various neighborhoods trained well over a hundred participants. We took them on “ridealongs” in our neighborhoods following typical patrolling routes, hosted foot and bike patrolling sessions, and ran dispatch for a Signal call for people who followed ICE vehicles as they left the Whipple Federal Building.
\n\nThroughout the week, many participants voiced concerns that local rapid response systems would prove unique to the Twin Cities context and be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Despite these reservations, they began to strategize creatively about how they might adjust rapid response structures to account for differences in demographics and the relative size of their cities. There was very little ICE activity reported that week in Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves, but consistent reports came in from the suburbs, exurbs, and rural Minnesota.
\n\nSome comrades speculate that ICE operations have moved away from the Twin Cities metro area due to the organizing here. Suburban and rural areas present different geographical and political challenges to rapid responders, but it would be wrong to say they are not organized. Neighborhoods within the metro area are increasingly partnering with suburbs and rural areas to bolster capacity and coordination. Out-of-town participants found this inspiring when thinking of ways to build rapid response networks in their home contexts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/18.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nThe decline of Operation Metro Surge poses a question: what will become of these rapid response structures?
\n\nAlongside political education and patrolling, organizers hosted a variety of actions against ICE around the Twin Cities. In our wildest dreams, the week would have involved so much action around the cities that the police would have been unable to keep up with all of it. The goals were to pressure ICE and those that work with them, raise public consciousness about secondary targets (hotels, rental car companies, county jails that are holding ICE detainees) and take action against them, disrupt ICE’s operating logistics, and offer replicable avenues for a wide range of people and organizations to join in.
\n\nOur actions were hosted by a variety of organizations. Some actions were somewhat less confrontational, such as a rally at the State Capitol and an open mic at the Whipple Federal Building. On Friday, February 27, a “March against ICE Collaborators” snaked through downtown, stopping at various corporate targets—including Target’s corporate headquarters, Hilton, Enterprise, CBS News, and a construction firm called United Properties, not to mention the Hennepin County Jail. Marchers covered the streets with slogans in chalk, and ended by throwing snowballs at effigies of Mayor Jacob Frey and “Border Czar” Tom Homan.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/2.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nAlso on February 27, hundreds of local students hosted a walkout and sit-in at the State Capitol rotunda. The students were accompanied by the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers, a Mexica-Nahua group. That same day, several protesters were indicted on charges related to the alleged disruption of a church service at a church led by a pastor who worked with ICE. Upon learning of this through the rapid response channels, the students who walked out boarded their bus and drove straight from the Capitol to the federal courthouse.
\n\nFebruary 27, 2026: march in the Twin Cities against ICE collaborators.
\nOn Saturday, February 28, neighborhoods hosted block parties to build community, spend time together, and block ICE from their streets. A local childcare collective hosted a parade for kids and families. Affinity groups hosted autonomous nighttime noise demos at the hotels where ICE agents sleep. People at one of these demonstrations later went to certain DHS officials’ home addresses.
\n\nWe invited many formal organizations to help organize these actions—Indigenous Roots, Sunrise Movement, Unidos, 50501, Democratic Socialists of America, Veterans for Peace, Black Cat Workers Collective, and more. While we remain critical of the non-profit industrial complex and progressive politics, all of these organizations agreed to the abolitionist line of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the police, and prisons. We aim to resist left sectarianism and work across party lines wherever we can. These organizations didn’t necessarily host the actions that we would have, but they collaborated with us in the coordinating committee meetings and they provided options for people to participate in a range of different kinds of activity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/7.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nSaturday also featured a demonstration at the Sherburne County Jail. In Minnesota, ICE has partnered with several county jails to imprison immigrant detainees. Sherburne currently imprisons many undocumented abductees, as well as prisoners of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising. We brought art and a speaker to the parking lot at the Sherburne, and a DJ blasted protest music. We danced to stay warm. We chanted “Fuck ICE” and “We love you,” hoping that our imprisoned sisters and brothers could hear us from inside. With hundreds more protesters, we might hope to eventually block the entrance and actually slow jail operations; for now, we remind our incarcerated relatives that we have not forgotten them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/27.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nOn Sunday, March 1, we marched to the Whipple Federal Building to demand freedom for our stolen neighbors and the return of stolen Indigenous lands. We marched through the streets just south of Whipple, and were pushed back by a line of riot cops from our attempt to block the south entrance. Dispersed interactions with sheriffs and conservation officers mounted into a standoff. In the midst of the standoff, the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli arrived to dance and to pray. Officers then declared an unlawful assembly and surged into the so-called “protest zone,” arresting 29 people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/10.jpg\")
The Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers on March 1, 2026.
\nAt the same time as this march arrived at the southeast side of Whipple, a smaller autonomous action blockaded the road on the northwest side of the building with shields and reinforced banners. Sheriffs deployed chemical weapons and arrested 11 more people, for a total of 40 arrests that day. No ICE traffic went in or out of the building for more than two hours, even after the protests on both sides had dispersed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/12.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAcross the political education sessions, rapid response trainings, and protests, we could feel considerable exhaustion from local organizers. Turnout was lower from locals than we expected, an unsurprising outcome from a drained base. Nonetheless, in the course of the week, thousands of us took various forms of offensive action against ICE. We brought the heat to targets already facing pressure; we spotlighted corporations that we will continue to campaign against. We know that our organizing and action must continue nationwide.
\n\nYou can help. You can disrupt primary and secondary ICE targets where you live, be they detention centers, Hiltons, Enterprises, Targets, or other corporations that assist ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/23.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nWhat did the week of action show about how we can build revolutionary struggle in this moment?
\n\nOur network contains many and varied approaches to revolutionary organizing. We seek to take what is best in each of these tendencies, fit them together, and attempt to address the contradictions that arise. The week of action was one attempt to address these contradictions. Many communist and anarchist groups that have throwing down here brought in their comrades from around the country.
\n\nIn the Twin Cities context, one political tendency has deeper and broader roots in poor and working class communities than communists or anarchists: progressive nonprofits and labor unions. At their best, these organizations can provide a measure of political power for some of the most oppressed members of the working class. The major drawback is that they cannot withstand the inertia of the nonprofit-industrial complex, as they are beholden to their billionaire funders and to the limitations of the law. Consequently, they rarely overcome bureaucracy or engage in real militant resistance to the ruling class.
\n\nThe Week of Action was one attempt to collaborate between the groups listed above—not out of long-term political alignment, but out of practical necessity. Creating a revolutionary movement will require coordinating across all these tendencies.
\n\nAnother potent element of the week of action was multicultural celebration. To be able to overcome the US empire, we will need a resistance movement that is welcoming and irresistible in its appeal. Together, we ate Somali sambusas, danced to the Chicano music of Las Cafeteras, witnessed the power of the Indigenous Roots danza, participated in Dakota ceremonies, and ended the week with a rave. We don’t list these experiences to emphasize multiculturalism for its own sake, but to identify them as some of the most euphoric and important parts of the week of action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/24.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nIt is crucial to integrate deeply-rooted cultural practices into our resistance. Activists in the United States must learn from revolutionary comrades in the Global South. It’s not enough for white people just to march on behalf of their undocumented neighbors—we must build deep, long-lasting, and politicized relationships across cultural boundaries.
\n\nIf everyone who has ever done a rapid response patrol signed on to the Twin Cities Tenants Union’s strike pledge, it would exceed its goal of 10,000 participants, and we could exert real leverage upon the ruling class. Likewise, if everyone who works alongside an immigrant was willing to march on the boss for them and with them, our movement would become more powerful.
\n\nWe must sharpen our analysis of the moment alongside our neighbors and coworkers. One means of achieving this is to continue to hold regular political education sessions at which to learn about and reflect on what the people of Minnesota have accomplished over the last three months and what we can accomplish together in the future. Without intentional, communal reflection, we may not be able to grow.
\n\nOperation Metro Surge is ongoing. In fact, we’ve seen an uptick in ICE activity in the days since the week of action. As federal agents shift towards more covert methods, the resistance must continue to adapt and grow. We would like to extend gratitude to everyone who contributed to the week of action and everyone who participated. We invite critique while celebrating the will, skill, and determination that brought us together.
\n\nIn the great people’s uprising against ICE, the Week of Action was just one small part. Every great historical movement is comprised of a thousand small parts.
\n\nAll power to the people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/20.jpg\")
February 26, 2026.
\nOn March 1, 2026, at the conclusion of a week of action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupation of the Twin Cities, protesters converged on the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota. At least four hundred people marched on the southeast side of the building to demand that ICE withdraw from Minnesota and that the land Fort Snelling occupies be given back to the Dakota people. Many Native people participated in the march, including members of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Chippewa tribes. On the opposite end of the building, a group of fifty protesters blockaded Minnehaha Avenue with shields, reinforced banners, homemade tank traps, and improvised barricades.
\n\nHennepin County Sheriffs and Minnesota State Troopers attacked both protests almost immediately. They tackled and dragged dozens of people out of the march on the southeast side. At the blockade on the northwest side, they beat protesters, sprayed them with bear mace, and slammed a person’s head against the pavement. One person bled from their eyes and suffered corneal damage from taking so much mace.
\n\nThe sheriffs arrested forty people in total. Ten of these arrests occurred at the blockade and thirty at the march. The first attacks on the march did not occur until after the barricades on the other side of the building were cleared away. Presumably, the blockade functioned keep pressure off the march by drawing police attention elsewhere.
\n\nFrom Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police who answer to Democratic officials have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local authorities, federal agencies would have been outmaneuvered by protest movements long ago. Every time cops and sheriffs participate in brutalizing those who oppose the ways that ICE is abducting and murdering people, this shows the complicity of Democratic officials in the rise of fascism.
\n\nDespite the hardships that the participants endured, this brave action shows that the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities is not over. In replacing so-called “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino with “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Donald Trump is trying to rebrand the agency responsible for the high-profile murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (Homan himself accepted a bag of $50,000 in return for promising to distribute government contracts in an FBI sting operation in 2024, aptly illustrating how the persecution of immigrants functions as a cover for government corruption and the military-industrial complex.) Yet even after the withdrawal of thousands of ICE agents from the Twin Cities, more than 400 remain—an unprecedented number before the surge of federal mercenaries into the city two months ago. Thankfully, people are not finished fighting ICE.
\n\nHere, an anarchist in Minneapolis who participated in the blockade action describes what happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/4.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nIt was a cold, bright morning when I got to the north lot outside Whipple. About forty people were already there. I was nervous. Our numbers were dangerously small. We knew going in this would be a smaller action, but I felt exposed. The wind buffeted us in the shadow of the seven-story concrete detention center. Were we about to get slaughtered?
\n\nWe waited a few minutes. People hugged each other and huddled in their affinity groups whispering pep talks. Eleven more comrades trickled in. I counted every one of us, then counted again. Two Hennepin County Sheriff cars were watching from the other side of the parking lot. We had scarcely more than fifty people.
\n\nA van swerved into the north lot and screeched to a halt. The first deployment team leaped out, already in gas masks, and started throwing hastily-painted plastic shields out of the back of the van. Everyone scrambled to empty the van, fastening respirators and goggles to their faces and grabbing shields. The sheriffs got out of their cars; they were yelling into their radios calling for backup. A cop car heading south towards Whipple made a sharp U-turn and plowed over the curb of the median strip to cut us off.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/10.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nWe had barely left the parking lot when a stout, mustachioed sheriff pepper-sprayed the person to my left. The person flinched and fell backwards, but did not cry out. Medics started flushing their eyes. We kept pushing forward.
\n\nA line of sheriffs blocked our path before we reached our intended blockade point. Some of them were in normal uniforms; others were in full kit tactical gear, looking almost exactly like the federal agents who guarded this area in the recent past. One of them menaced us with a can of bear spray. I fiddled with my goggles, frantically trying to stop the damn things from fogging up in the cold.
\n\n“IF YOU HAVE A SHIELD, PUT IT ON THE GROUND NOW!” a sheriff bellowed at us. He bellowed the same phrase again, and then a third time.
\n\n“Not today, asshole,” somebody to my right shouted back. “Is your family proud of you, you fucking pig?”
\n\nThe cops ran at us. They maced somebody. They started grabbing shields and wrenching them out of people’s hands. I was standing in the front. A sheriff put both his hands on the top of somebody’s shield and they wrestled back and forth over it. The person let go of the shield, and the sheriff toppled backwards and fell on his back.
\n\nSomebody started shouting instructions to fall back. Most of us did. The sheriffs tackled two brave people who were slower to retreat. Three or four officers dogpiled onto each of them. One person’s helmet flew off and they struggled to stand up. A sheriff threw himself on top of them, smashing their head onto the sidewalk with an audible crack.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/1.jpg\")
\nSomeone with a bullhorn walked out into the street, attempting to take the road a second time. She started a chant: “Whose streets? Our streets!” The cops immediately tackled her, as well. The rest of us followed, trying to get back into the street to form a shield wall. Two sheriffs flanked the person in front of me and tried to pull them forward. People on our side grabbed the person by the backpack and tried to pull them back. The sheriffs hit us with another jet of bear mace and we lost the person. Someone else in the front was holding the line as best they could, shoving back and forth with their shield. A sheriff tried to grab them by the arms, but a comrade behind them crouched and hugged them around the waist, wrenching them backwards. That person got away.
\n\nWhen the melee concluded, they had arrested ten of us. There were only forty of us left in the street. The number of cops confronting us had dropped, too, as many of them had their hands full detaining our arrested comrades and putting them into a van. We fell back again and put up a shield wall, now with a severely diminished number of shields. Somebody grabbed a pallet and a broken stop sign from the side of the road and threw them into the street in front of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/5.jpg\")
\nOnly after the arrests did the sheriffs issue a dispersal order.
\n\nThe next ten minutes felt like hours. The sheriffs kept their distance now. I think they were calling for reinforcements. Four vehicles blocked the road in front of us, and two blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Hiawatha behind us. I was afraid we were going to get kettled. We huddled together in the freezing wind, crouching behind our few remaining shields. A middle-aged woman pulled up her car behind us. For a moment, I thought she could be ICE. Then she yelled out her drivers’ side window: “You guys are all so hot and brave!!!”
\n\nOur morale was low by this point, but she helped boost it.
\n\nThen, finally, the cavalry arrived. A second deploy team pulled up in a flatbed truck. People swarmed around the back of the truck, ripped away a green tarp, and pulled out buckets of hinges, nails, and scrap metal. We dumped them onto the barricade. We also pulled out three “tankbuster” traps—four-foot-high welded jacks that looked like barricades from the beaches at Normandy, and positioned them to block the road. Piled beneath all this stuff, we pulled out two 8’ x 4’ reinforced banners made of corrugated steel. I wish we’d had this shit 20 minutes ago, I grumbled to myself.
\n\nWe held the road for another half hour. The sheriffs did not approach us again. Taken aback by the barricade, they were constantly talking into their radios. At 10:24 am, I received a text on my burner phone that the march on the other side of Whipple was no longer holding the street. This meant ICE had an egress point at Gate 3 and were no longer trapped inside. That was our cue to leave. We called our exfil team.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/6.jpg\")
\nIronically, the smoothness of our exit seemed to disorient the sheriffs more than anything we’d done at the blockade. Eight cars pulled up behind us and we piled in, abandoning the barricade and peeling off toward Hiawatha.
\n\nOne car got followed by an ICE SUV on the way out. The driver led them on a chase through South Minneapolis until they reached Powderhorn Park, where they used a local rapid response chat to call for reinforcements. Dozens of neighbors came out to the park, filming with their phones. The ICE vehicle turned around and withdrew.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/8.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nI was frightened and stressed out during most of the action on March 1, but I did it anyway. Many things went wrong during the planning and execution. We took 20% arrests, and some of the arrestees caught misdemeanor charges. We never had the numbers to properly accomplish our task—yet somehow, we managed to block the road for 52 minutes. Of every organized protest at the Whipple building in the last three months, this one was by far the smallest. It was also the first and only occasion on which we succeeded in fully blocking ICE into their headquarters for any length of time.
\n\nWhat happened on March 1 represents a new phase of the struggle against ICE in the Twin Cities. We are decidedly on the other side of the crest of movement activity that peaked in January. The so-called “drawdown”—which still leaves 407 ICE agents on our streets—was intended to demobilize our movement, and in this respect it has partly succeeded. The thousands who fought them in the streets in January are exhausted.
\n\nYet fight them we must.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/11.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though we are all determined to fight to the last.”
\n\n—Plain Words, 1919
\n
The US and Israeli attack on Iran is morally repugnant. It is calculated only to benefit an elite of racist, Islamophobic warmongers. It will not benefit Iranians or ordinary people anywhere on earth.
\n\nThere are genuine grassroots movements resisting the Iranian government, which is a blood-soaked authoritarian regime—as are the US and Israeli governments that are attacking it. But participants in Iranian social movements do not want Donald Trump to attack Iran. As some of them wrote last month,
\n\n\n\n\n“Any military or imperial intervention can only weaken the struggle from below and strengthen the Islamic Republic’s hand to carry out repression.”
\n
Social movements in Iran have been resisting an oppressive government for decades. But the establishment of a puppet regime serving the US and Israel will not help them. In attacking Iran, Trump does not necessarily seek to overthrow the government, but simply to subordinate it to his will, unseating the top figures in order to put himself in place of them. He did precisely that in Venezuela in January 2026. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro did nothing to change the distribution of power in Venezuelan society; the chief result of Trump’s intervention has been that he has put the pieces in place to loot the country of its natural resources for the benefit of elements of the ruling class of the United States.
\n\nLike other autocrats around the world, Trump aims to sideline ordinary people, reducing all politics to a matter of tyrants contending for power at the expense of those they rule. He will gladly sacrifice the lives of Iranians, Israelis, and US citizens for his own benefit.
\n\nAs capitalist profiteering is coming up against inherent limits all around the world, despots have returned to amassing wealth the old-fashioned way—by brutal state violence. One of the things that has sustained the global economy over the past few years is the boom of market speculation in a handful of tech companies trying to sell “artificial intelligence” products. In actuality, this is a rush to invest in the next generation of military technology in order to prepare for an era when it will be even more central to determining how wealth and power are distributed. We can see proof in this week’s conflict over whether the US military should be able to use AI tools produced by Anthropic to pursue the mass domestic surveillance of US citizens and to set fully autonomous weapons loose upon the world.
\n\nThe Israeli military made extensive use of AI to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. This—not saving bureaucrats the trouble of writing their own emails—is the chief use case for AI.
\n\nFor the Israeli government, the entire Mideast is now the West Bank. The attack on Iran shows that they are determined to subject hundreds of millions to the violence they have already been inflicting on Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people.
\n\nIn the US, Trump’s decision to declare war without consulting Congress shows that he already understands himself as a dictator. The attack on Iranians is meant to strike terror into Trump’s foes all around the world, including in the United States.
\n\nWe must understand this attack as a threat to us, as well. From Caracas and the Twin Cities to Tehran, it’s easy to see what sort of world they are trying to create. The same weapons that are used against Iranians today will be turned on anyone who resists Trump and his toadies tomorrow, unless we stand up to them together before it is too late.
\n\nWe must build the grassroots capacity to interrupt the war machine. The hundreds of thousands senselessly slaughtered in Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Myanmar, and Ukraine show what awaits down this road otherwise.
\n\nReal liberation can only come about through solidarity between grassroots movements. We must resist Trump’s warmongering by all means.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/28/against-all-wars_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Please print and distribute these posters far and wide.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/28/no-war-with-iran-maryjane-satrapi.jpg\")
Please print and distribute these posters far and wide.
\nIn the following analysis, participants in the resistance to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement assault on the Twin Cities chart the course of the movement from 2025 to the present day, exploring why it gained momentum despite escalating repression.
\n\nThe surge of federal mercenaries to the Twin Cities is not over. Even if it is true, as federal authorities allege, that less than 500 federal agents remain (not counting Homeland Security Investigations agents), that is still several times the number of ICE agents that were deployed to the Twin Cities before 2026. One of the classic strategies of fascism is to ramp up violence to the maximum level, then back off the most extreme measures in order to accustom people to a more repressive status quo.
\n\nNonetheless, the administration’s original objective was to normalize sending thousands of mercenaries to terrorize entire cities into submission. In that regard, the people of the Twin Cities achieved a victory, undermining the perceived legitimacy of the federal forces and forcing them to change tactics.
\n\nThe people of the Twin Cities did not turn the tide against the occupation by force of arms, but by out-mobilizing ICE. Yet this does not mean that physically fighting the occupiers has played no role in the outcome.
\n\nA mass mobilization across the entire society forced the federal government to begin to withdraw. Well over 30,000 people have participated in the rapid response networks in some way,1 utilizing a wide range of tactics. Many thousands of these people dedicated their lives to the resistance and patrolled the streets every day for over two months. Many thousands more have participated in clandestine mutual aid networks to bring food, supplies, and rent relief to undocumented families forced into hiding. One in four adults in Minnesota participated in the general strike of January 23 in some way, and an estimated 8% of all Minnesotans refused to work that day. Signs reading “Everyone welcome except ICE” appeared in the windows of practically every business in South Minneapolis.
\n\nThe scale of the resistance prompted Stephen Miller to remark,
\n\n\n\n\n“You only have to read their own words and hear their own words and judge their own conduct to understand that this is clearly an insurgency against the federal government.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-1.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the negotiations in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon in 1975, an American general reportedly told a North Vietnamese commanding officer, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
\n\nThe North Vietnamese commander replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
\n\nThe Twin Cities could offer the same retort to our enemy today. Insurgencies win by continuously wearing down a more powerful opponent. We win by not losing.
\n\nWhile the vast majority of patrollers used car horns, cell phone cameras, and whistles as their weapons, it would be incorrect to characterize the resistance as strictly nonviolent. An unknown number of brave people threw their bodies between ICE and our vulnerable neighbors. Some of them slashed the tires and smashed out the windows of ICE vehicles, pelted ICE agents with snowballs, and rescued arrestees from their clutches.
\n\nAccording to “Border Czar” Tom Homan, in January alone, nearly 160 people were arrested for impeding or assaulting federal agents. In the course of that month, ICE and Border Patrol shot one person every week, killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti and injuring Julio Sosa Celis. Undeterred, the people rose in rebellion in greater and greater numbers after each shooting: on January 7, by fighting federal agents at Roosevelt Middle School, storming the doors of a federal courthouse, and barricading off the site of Renee’s murder; on January 14, by chasing off federal agents from the Northside and looting three of their cars; and on January 24, after the murder of Alex Pretti, by erecting barricades in Whittier and fighting off both ICE and local police, compelling them to withdraw.
\n\nFrom the daily skirmishes at the sites of abductions to the riots that engulfed entire neighborhoods, these clashes played a crucial role in the development of the resistance. Without these incidents, the daily rapid response chats, the hyperlocal neighborhood groups, the late-night hotel noise demos, and even the mass work stoppages might not have cohered into a movement capable of grinding down the resolve of the federal government. The reasons for this are social, not military.
\n\nRather than looking at these moments as random occurrences of stochastic turbulence, extracurricular activities that punctuated the ongoing deep organizing with sensational headlines, we understand every engagement with enemy forces as part of an ongoing arc of escalation. Every escalation from ICE drove our own escalations in a feedback loop. Every time people fought back, that opened up a new range of possibilities and we stepped through a portal into a new phase of resistance.
\n\nEach clash with ICE propelled the movement forward in three ways:
\n\nTo show how this took place, we will briefly review the development of the movement from its origins.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-4.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the Twin Cities, the first significant confrontation with ICE took place on June 3 at Taqueria Las Cuatro Milpas. The next day, people confronted ICE agents as they carried out raids in Chicago and Grand Rapids—and two days after that, the clashes began in Los Angeles that rapidly built to the first uprising of Trump’s second term.
\n\nAfterwards, while Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and went on to target Chicago and other cities with surges of federal agents, the administration did not immediately escalate ICE activity in the Twin Cities.
\n\nAn organization called Monarca, launched in 2024, began holding legal observer trainings for people who wanted to track the movements of ICE. A similar group named MPLS Whistles emerged in October ahead of a press conference featuring Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
\n\nThe first indications that Operation Metro Surge was on the way occurred on November 18, when ICE attempted to raid the Bro-Tex paper factory in Saint Paul. They abducted two workers, pepper-sprayed onlookers, and shoved demonstrators out of the street as a crowd spontaneously formed and attempted to block their vehicles. As the mercenaries fled, somebody smashed out the back window of an ICE van.
\n\nWord of the raid and the response spread like wildfire. A week later, on November 25, another ICE raid took place, this time on the east side of Saint Paul in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood. They took two more people. This time, word spread all over the cities and a larger crowd—over a hundred people—came out to stop them. The energy of the smaller clash a week prior had primed the population. This time, some people showed up in respirators and helmets. Federal agents escalated their repressive tactics, shooting pepper balls and sponge rounds from shotguns. One protester was injured by agents who cracked their head against the pavement.
\n\nAs in June, DHS personnel tried to claim after the fact that the raid was not immigration-related, but nobody believed them. As we will discuss below, this is presumably a disinformation tactic intended to “keep the temperature down,” a priority that Republicans and Democrats share.
\n\nThe two big November confrontations forced federal agents to change their strategy to hasty snatch-and-grabs. This shift showed the limitations of the first iteration of the rapid response networks, in which organizations like Monarca would verify reports and then circulate them. The rapid response networks that were cohering on Signal and Whatsapp solved this problem by decentralizing, cutting out the bottlenecks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/11-25-1.jpg\")
November 25, 2025. The beginnings of a proportionate response.
\nA week later, ICE invaded the Twin Cities. The stories on the news said they were targeting Somali immigrants. Waves of fear spread through every immigrant community. Some people stopped showing up to work.
\n\nICE abducted twelve people in the first three days of December before the Department of Homeland Security formally announced Operation Metro Surge on December 4. Soon after, over 300 ICE agents were occupying our streets. Stories began to circulate about house raids in the suburbs. Organizers started calling face-to-face meetings to set up neighborhood defense groups. Proper anti-ICE patrols got underway. The first patrollers took to euphemistically calling ourselves “commuters.”
\n\nIn the course of the first two weeks of the occupation, a holding pattern set in. ICE would jump out of their cars in pairs and snatch someone. Sometimes, if we were lucky, a crowd would form. People would get out their phones and blow their whistles and cuss at them. The agents would pepper-spray someone and leave with an abductee.
\n\nOn the handful of occasions when we could stop abductions by sheer numbers, we did—for example, when ICE raided a construction site in Chanhassen in dangerously cold temperatures and two workers got frostbite from being trapped on a roof while a crowd faced down the feds. But for the most part, most of us were relatively passive observers in this period. Most of the abductions succeeded.
\n\nOn December 15, that began to change. Two ICE agents attempted to kidnap a pregnant woman at the corner of 29th and Pillsbury. Agent Brenden Cuni slammed her to the ground and shoved his knee into her back. This was also the first time we positively identified an ICE agent after seeing him in the field. People began throwing snowballs and big chunks of ice at the agents from all sides.
\n\nAs the thermal temperature dropped in the second half of December, the political temperature ratcheted up. It became commonplace to see ICE brutalizing people. December 22 marked the first time they fired live ammunition at us, when they shot at a man in Saint Paul after ramming his car. Reports circulated about ICE shooting out one observer’s tires. Another was arrested in a parking lot near the Whipple federal building (the staging area for practically all ICE activity in the area) and charged with “stalking.” They started brake-checking drivers who followed them, or boxing us in. They began attempting to carry out the abductions more quickly and violently. Their violence became more theatrical. The occupation created a new status quo.
\n\nFor a couple of suspiciously calm days before January 6, it appeared that the abductions in Minneapolis might finally be slowing down. Then DHS announced a surge of 2000 more ICE and Border Patrol agents. Suddenly, the streets were overrun with them. Whereas before, you needed a car if you wanted to “commute,” now there were so many agents that foot patrols around certain hotspots became effective. The abductions became more indiscriminate. We saw agents grabbing people at bus stops and using facial recognition software on random people on the sidewalk. The same day that the surge began, ICE sent detained Minneapolis resident Victor Manuel Diaz to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he died—or else was murdered—only a week later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-07-1.jpg\")
January 7, 2026. People respond to the murder of Renee Good.
\nOne day into the surge, on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good. Dozens of federal agents gathered at the site of her murder to threaten the crowd. Considering what the agents had just done, the crowd’s immediate reaction was conservative and restrained. People blocked the street and chanted at the accomplices in the killing. Unprovoked, Border Patrol “Bor-Tac” officers Michael Sveum and Edgar Vazquez opened fire with chemical weapons, touching off skirmishes at 34th and Portland in which some people threw snowballs at federal agents as they retreated.
\n\nTwo hours later, a fight broke out at Roosevelt Middle School, where people successfully stopped ICE agents from abducting an immigrant worker by swarming them in front of the building. That night, locals barricaded off 34th and Portland Avenue, the scene of the murder. Ten thousand people turned out to stand vigil for Renee Good.
\n\nOn the morning of January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, people organized by a AFL-CIO “direct action trainer” carried out the first attempt to blockade the Whipple building. The crowd was fairly tame, but officers tear-gassed them nonetheless. As the protesters were only using soft blockade tactics, they were not able to withstand the assault.
\n\nAfter Renee’s murder, a new status quo emerged. ICE ramped up its terror to new heights. It became common for them to smash out people’s car windows. They detained more observers. They started using tear gas in minor confrontations in which it would have been unusual for regular cops to deploy it. Two Target employees who were citizens were beaten and arrested for filming federal agents. ICE released people from custody in the middle of the night in sub-zero temperatures in public parks. Liberal conspiracy theories became popular alleging that Trump was trying to use this violence to provoke us into a reaction. Rapid response chats ballooned in size.
\n\nOn January 11, Greg Bovino conspicuously took a Border Patrol convoy up and down University Avenue, harassing people in crowded areas. At a Speedway gas station in Saint Paul, they beat and choked Orbin Mauricio Enriquez Serrano unconscious, and punched and tackled observers while they carried away his body. Two days later, a hundred people turned out to confront ICE when they raided a house in Powderhorn; ICE tear-gassed them. Clashes broke out at the Whipple building later on the night of January 13, when protesters and DHS police exchanged fireworks for CS gas and flashbangs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-2.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents tear-gassed an entire neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-6.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents terrorizing the neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\nWe saw an inflection point on January 14, when an ICE agent shot Julio Sosa-Celis through his own front door in north Minneapolis. Black and brown young people from the working-class Northside neighborhood came out by the hundreds and battled federal agents alongside activists. For three hours, MPD supported ICE as they fired tear gas and rubber bullets. People responded with bottles, rocks, and firecrackers.
\n\nICE withdrew first, abandoning at least three vehicles. MPD fled shortly afterwards. The youth of Northside tagged and smashed up their cars, stole a gun safe from one trunk, and turned the scene into a lively block party. Witnesses livestreamed as people rifled through the ICE vehicles, pulling out sensitive documents and “challenge coins” distributed to the mercenaries for perpetrating harm against communities. Federal agents did not return until hours later.
\n\nFor many in Twin Cities, January 14 felt like a turning point. It represented the stirring of a sleeping giant: the same social force that had produced the George Floyd rebellion rising to put its unmistakable stamp on the struggle against ICE.
\n\nAfter the riot in Northside, the number of detainees flown out of Minnesota reportedly dropped from 204 detainees flown out that day to only 114 the following day (January 15), and only 77 on January 16. The number never again reached anything like the levels seen between January 6 and January 15. The “drawdown” in the number of federal agents occupying the Twin Cities did not begin until February, but the riot of January 14 immediately put a cap on how many people the agents could abduct because it forced them to act more cautiously.
\n\nIt was direct action—not the decisions of officials of either political party—that turned the tide. The changes in official policy came later, acknowledging a reality imposed by courageous grassroots action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-5.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-4.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-3.jpg\")
People investigate the vehicles that federal agents abandoned after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis and terrorizing the neighborhood for hours with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.
\nThings reached a crescendo on January 23, when 300,000 people went on strike against the occupation.
\n\nThe next day, six CBP agents murdered Alex Pretti in cold blood, in broad daylight. A call went out for observers. Out of all the riots we’ve experienced, the street fighting in Whittier was notable for how rapidly it broke out. The most impressive part was that without any planning, all of the participants knew what to do at once. Barricades dotted Nicollet, Blaisdell, and 26th Street. People set dumpsters on fire. The pallets at one warehouse were all repurposed as barricade materials. Federal agents fired an astonishing amount of tear gas to cover their retreat before fleeing onto the 35W highway.
\n\nThree days later, Greg Bovino had been relieved of command and the state government was angling to make a deal for some sort of détente. That same day, Governor Tim Walz said,
\n\n\n\n\n“The politics for the White House is they cannot afford to see tear gas on the streets and they certainly can’t afford to see another incident like we saw on Saturday morning.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-3.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nToday, nearly four weeks have passed since Alex’s murder and the events in Whittier. Border czar Tom Homan allegedly withdrew 700 agents from the Twin Cities after those events, although he and the other representatives of the federal government have given us no reason to take them at their word.
\n\nAbove all, the “drawdown” represents a strategic shift intended to pacify people. The state government has given ICE access to all county jails. ICE may have become less visible, and they may be terrorizing the suburbs more intensely than the city centers, but they are still here—their motor pool is still full at Whipple and they’re still kidnapping people every day. Local organizers are calling for a week of action from February 25 to March 1 to keep the pressure on at a moment when the regime is trying to release it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-25-1.jpg\")
January 25, 2026: a federal mercenary menaces people outside a hotel housing ICE agents.
\nWe can derive three tentative conclusions from this sequence of events:
\n\nThe introduction of militant tactics did not diminish popular support for the resistance. On the contrary, the rapid response infrastructure has continued to grow and develop in each phase of the struggle. There were 3000 commuters in December; as of mid-February, some 30,000 have participated. The state has failed to convince the public to accept a dichotomy between “good protesters” and “bad protesters.” The movement remains extraordinarily popular.
\n\n“Disturbing the peace” is a form of leverage for the movement in and of itself. What forced the federal government to retreat was not only the direct surveillance and confrontation of ICE agents by commuters; it was also the general threat to public order posed by a movement of thousands of people in constant real-time communication that sometimes bleeds over into neighborhood rebellions, such as the ones that took place in Northside and Whittier in response to the shooting on January 14 and the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24. When they started negotiating, Walz and Trump both agreed that it was crucial to “turn down the temperature.” Insofar as that priority unifies the fascists within the Republican party and the false opposition represented by the Democratic establishment, it indicates how a grassroots social movement might pursue its own interests in a way that cannot be co-opted by either of the dominant forces in government.
\n\nThe old mechanisms of repression no longer work. This is why the state is resorting to brute force. The powers that be are no longer interested in practicing the kind of counterinsurgency that involves winning hearts and minds. They’re making a bid to govern by terror alone. This is historically an indicator of a weak state, one that that no longer possesses legitimacy in the eyes of those it governs.
\n\nIn other words—a government living on borrowed time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-2.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\n\n\n\n“From now on the demagogues, the opportunists, and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete.”
\n\n—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
\n
At the end of January 2026, confrontations between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the community at large reached a fever pitch in the Twin Cities, spreading to Portland and other cities around the United States—including locales less associated with high-profile protest activity. In the following account, a participant describes the outbreak of hostilities with federal agents and police that took place in Eugene, Oregon, exploring it as a microcosm of the resistance that is spreading ICE increasingly thin around the country.
\n\nI know that the new world is real because sometimes a portal opens up, showing me a small glimpse into it. Sometimes it looks like a brick flying through the air, a tear gas canister returning to sender, a police line falling back.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/3.jpg\")
\nIn Eugene, in late January, the portal to the new world opened up again and again. Clashes broke out between protesters and federal forces at their downtown headquarters, lasting hours at a time and culminating in a breach of the Federal Building on the night of Friday, January 29. These skirmishes brought together hundreds of Eugene residents, who have drawn inspiration from the clashes and protests in Los Angeles and the Twin Cities as well as a collective memory of our own history of struggle. This has been the most intense fighting with law enforcement in Eugune since 2020; it has inaugurated a new chapter in the struggle against ICE in our city.
\n\nEugene prides itself on its history of protests and counterculture. Outsiders have asked whether what is happening in Eugene in 2026 represents a return to the riotous days of the 1990s, when Eugene was widely known as a center of ecological organizing and direct action. In fact, it is both an organic community response to the federal government’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and the latest manifestation of an insurrectionary reflex that developed in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion and the riots in summer 2020. You can read a comprehensive analysis of that period here. More recently, we have seen this insurrectionary reflex emerge in street battles with the far right and in a black bloc march on the federal building on May Day 2025.
\n\nSince summer 2025, community members have convened near-daily protests at the federal building that ICE uses as its base of operations. These protests have been popular, but for the most part, like the No Kings demonstrations, they have not escalated into direct confrontations with federal agents. There have been exceptions, such as one night in fall 2025 when officers from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit of Customs and Border Protection played cat and mouse with about a hundred protesters. Unfortunately, at that time, most demonstrators were not prepared to respond effectively, and suffered considerable abuse at the hands of the officers.
\n\nThe killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti changed things in Eugene. The tension and anger reached a boiling point. On January 24, the day of that Pretti was murdered, several hundred protesters amassed at the federal building for that day’s regularly scheduled demonstration. One banner read, “Two of Ours, All of Yours.”
\n\nThe government of Eugene tried to get ahead of the anger by holding a town hall meeting at 1 pm that day with the mayor and city council in attendance. We have become familiar with this tactic in which they offer empty promises that something will be done. It usually results in a strongly worded letter, if that. Organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation led many protesters from the federal building to the town hall. As soon as everyone was inside the meeting hall, the planned session devolved into shouting and disruption.
\n\nOn Tuesday, January 27, around 2 pm, Department of Homeland Security officers in tactical gear attacked a small group of protesters who were taking part in the weekly “Love and Rage” demonstration at the federal building. Until that day, they had usually ignored protesters; this time, they attacked the protesters with pepper balls and wrestled several people to the ground in order to drag them into the building.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/2.jpg\")
\nWord spreads fast in a small city. Messages calling for support circulated over a variety of channels, along with footage showing masked DHS agents brutalizing people. Supporters trickled in as the agents pressed their attack. In the course of a few hours, they arrested half a dozen people. But this was only the first protest of the day: at 5 pm, the Oregon Nurses Association were scheduled to hold a vigil for Alex Pretti, drawing a larger crowd to the location.
\n\nThe sight of hundreds of people rushing in to support those under attack by federal agents was powerful. Hundreds filled the courtyard, which is surrounded on three sides by the federal building; more people crowded the sidewalks at the nearby intersection.
\n\nThe protest grew louder than the previous ones, with more aggressive chants. Yet at first, it lacked direction. Different groups tried to lead, pushing their own chants and efforts, all united by the sight of agents in tactical gear inside the building. Some years had passed since the last major clash and people were out of practice.
\n\nThe protesters’ primary focus was to demand that the feds release the people they had captured earlier in the day. The crowd grew confrontational. A few protesters painted walls, shined lasers, and threw water bottles at the glass panels separating protests from federal agents. Anticipating a clash, many people donned protective gear such as respirators and helmets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/4.jpg\")
“Fuck the administration.”
\nAround 7 pm, the ear-splitting sound of a flash-bang grenade resounded. Clouds of tear gas filled the plaza and spilled out into the surrounding streets. The crowd fell back without panic. Some protesters threw canisters back to the advancing line of federal agents; others extinguished the tear gas with water. Because the Oregon Nurses Association had organized the vigil, many of the participants knew how to deal with the noxious chemicals. They chanted “we are not afraid.”
\n\nOutnumbered, the feds retreated back inside the building, with hundreds advancing on them. Skirmishes between protesters and federal agents continued for several hours.
\n\nEugene police officers did not arrive until 8 pm. They arrived by truck, decked out in riot gear, piloting drones overhead. However, they did not engage the protesters. Local police have hesitated to openly support ICE, maintaining operational distance. This has enabled them to launder their reputation, presenting themselves as the “lesser evil” law enforcement institution operating within the city, despite the daily terror that they too inflict in Eugene, especially upon the unhoused population.
\n\nOver the days that followed, even liberals struggled to denounce militant protesters. Eugene’s mayor, Kaarin Knudson, denounced ICE while expressing “concern” for community safety, as if ICE agents hadn’t been abducting people from the community before this. Never missing a chance to funnel energy back into institutional channels, the mayor also announced that the City—and its police—would develop a common strategy to deal with these situations going forward and that EPD would be more involved with policing protests.
\n\nTear gas has a way of reengaging old friends and networks in the same way that the rain activates the spores that become the neon green moss for which the Pacific Northwest is known. It was inevitable that state violence would eventually bring people back into the streets. It was inevitable that the liberal city establishment would fail to calm the anger of the public, as they had no real leverage over the federal government. It was inevitable that concerted organizing, agitation, and preparation would pay off once social peace was no longer possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/1.jpg\")
\nEugene Punks United, a radical youth group known locally for organizing school walkouts, announced a demonstration at 2 pm on January 30, scheduled to coincide with the “general strike” taking place in the Twin Cities that day. Several other events were announced for this day, but the protest attracted a rowdy and prepared group hoping to “confront Nazi scum,” in the language of the call to action.
\n\nEnterprising participants in the crowd painted slogans on the federal building. Others broke windows. In response, outnumbered federal agents fired concussion grenades and tear gas into the crowd. This time, Eugene Police came to their aid. The authorities declared a riot and a pitched battle ensued. For nearly four hours, officers and demonstrators exchanged volleys of tear gas canisters, flash-bang grenades, bottles, fireworks, and other projectiles. The final salvo of tear gas canisters took place after midnight.
\n\nLike the looting and arson that followed George Floyd’s murder, the riot at the federal building represents a qualitative leap in Eugene’s recent history of struggle. It could mark a shift in the form that protests against ICE take. However, it did not receive the same widespread support that the January 27 clashes did. Public opinion is divided on whether things went “too far,” though the debate is less intense than the backlash after the looting on May 29, 2020. Some point to viral videos of federal agents breaking windows at the building to support conspiracy theories that they had broken their own windows. But in actuality, the windows had already been broken at that point—a fact that demonstrators should be proud of—and the officers were simply pushing away the wreckage in order to fire tear gas at demonstrators.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/5.jpg\")
\nThe state and local response to the events of January 30 was swift. Both of Oregon’s senators as well as Governor Tina Kotek held a press conference with the mayor of Eugene the next morning. They sought to establish a “good protester, bad protester” narrative, telling people “not to take the bait,” threatening consequences for those who engaged in property destruction or violence against the police. They implored protesters not to give the federal government a reason to target Eugene the way they have in Minneapolis, stating that Eugene could not handle a surge of thousands of ICE agents.
\n\nIt must be said that the federal government did not intervene in Minneapolis because protesters “gave them a reason”—Trump sent thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents because an extreme-right social media personality made a viral post alleging that fraud was taking place in the Minneapolis welfare system, not to mention because he has held a grudge against Minneapolis since the George Floyd uprising. If everyone everywhere fiercely resists federal agents, they will be spread too thin, with too little support, to be able to continue attacking other cities the way that they have attacked the Twin Cities. On the other hand, if people do as the aforementioned politicians urge and confine themselves to powerless symbolic protest, ICE will be able to assault one city after another, eventually reaching Eugene and countless others.
\n\nIn addition to the response from state officials, Donald Trump denounced the protesters as “highly paid Lunatics, Agitators, and Insurrectionists” [sic], threatening to deploy troops to quell the protests. Yet he has made himself so many enemies all around the country that we should not take these threats at face value.
\n\nSince that Saturday, protests have continued at the federal building, which remains boarded up. The protests are smaller than they were in late January, but there will be more opportunities soon enough. There have been both confirmed and rumored sightings of the FBI, who have asked businesses near the federal building for footage and have attempted to question at least two community members.
\n\nDespite their threats, we must stay focused on the goal. We have a chance to contribute to ending the American nightmare once and for all by stretching their forces thin, which will create openings elsewhere. For every ICE agent deployed to defend the federal building, that’s one less out on the streets terrorizing and abducting people. The more force they use, the more everyone will come to see them as an illegitimate occupying army. The more we resist them, the more the warnings of local politicians and the threats of federal officials will ring hollow.
\n\nWe hope that the growing backlash against the federal government that is unfolding around the country marks the beginning of a movement that can ultimately dismantle the techno-feudal police state that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others are trying to build. With their defeat, we can push for a deeper and more decisive victory against the state and private property.
\n\nWhatever happens, we cannot and will not allow their world to take shape. If our movement must be forged in the crucible of federal occupation, then so be it. Victory belongs to those who fight for a righteous cause. Here’s to many more nights of action in Eugene. May the portal open once again, may we pass through once and for all.
\n\nLove to our fighters!
\n\nRest in power, Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and so many more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/20/6.jpg\")
\nIn the following interview, Palestine solidarity activists from the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran in January 2026, comparing notes about resistance to various forms of authoritarianism.
\n\nFollowing the countrywide protests in Iran on January 8, 2025 and the bloody crackdown that followed, the Palestinian Solidarity Action Network (PSAN) conducted interviews and sustained conversations with two comrades from Roja, as well as with Iranian movement organizer Leila Hossein Zadeh. Under an unprecedented total communications blackout, the security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out systematic lethal violence against street protesters and ordinary civilians, inflicting large-scale deaths, arrests, and disappearances. Many who lived through this experienced it as a war directed against society as a whole, erasing any distinction between “wartime” and “peacetime.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/9.jpg\")
\nPSAN is an internationalist diasporic sinophone collective formed in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Since the outbreak of the 2026 Iranian uprising, Iran and Palestine have increasingly been framed as opposing issues within Western leftist discourse. The resulting divisions within pro-Palestine movements over Iran’s ongoing uprising and repression deeply trouble us.
\n\nAs activists shaped by the Chinese context, we place the experiences that Roja describe alongside our own historical and lived realities. In discussing internet shutdowns, street-level organizing, the normalization of state violence, and the ways that internationalism is hollowed out through the language of national security, we came to see that we were not confronting an unfamiliar situation, but a set of mechanisms of governance repeatedly tested, shared, and transplanted from one regime to another. Comrades from Roja also spoke about how the Islamic Republic of Iran has deployed Chinese state security technologies to suppress dissent. This resonates with PSAN’s earlier investigations, which have shown that Chinese state security technologies are not only deployed in “Xinjiang,” but have also been used in Palestine. The Iranian experience thus becomes part of a broader understanding of how contemporary authoritarian governance circulates across regions, part of a shared reservoir of experience and memory between us.
\n\nWe hope to share this experience with those who, under extreme conditions, still seek to understand, to record, and to continue acting. We believe—and we hope—that victory belongs to those who resist.
\n\nWe conducted this interview on January 23, before internet connection to Iran resumed.
\n\nRoja (روژا) is an independent, leftist, feminist collective based in Paris. Roja was born after the femicide of Jina (Mahsa) Amini and the beginning of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” uprising in September 2022. The collective is composed of political activists from a range of nationalities and political geographies within Iran, including Kurdish, Hazara, Persian, and more. Roja’s activities are not only connected to social movements in Iran and the Middle East, but also to local struggles in Paris in step with internationalist struggles, including in solidarity with Palestine. The name “Roja” is inspired by the resonance of several words in different languages: in Spanish, roja means “red”; in Kurdish, Roja means “light” and “day”; in Mazandarani, roja means the “morning star” or “Venus,” considered the brightest celestial body at night.
\n\nLeila Hossein Zadeh is a human rights defender and student activist in Iran’s contemporary social movements. In 2018, for her involvement in student activism, she was sentenced by the Tehran Revolutionary Court to five years’ imprisonment on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security,” and to an additional year for “propaganda against the state.” Although parts of the sentence were reduced on appeal, the five-year term remains pending, functioning as a long-term deterrent against her political activities. In November 2024, following her master’s thesis defense at the University of Tehran—where she researched ethnic minority issues and appeared without a headscarf—she was again charged with “propaganda against the state” and “appearing in public without sharia-compliant hijab,” and sentenced in absentia to one year of imprisonment and a heavy fine, without a hearing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/10.jpg\")
A photo of Leila Hossein Zadeh at a demonstration organized by Roja Collective in Paris on January 17, 2026, opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran and monarchists and expressing solidarity with the January 2026 revolutionary uprising in Iran.
\nIt has been more than 25 days since the nationwide protests began. Can you describe the situation on the ground, especially in terms of organization? How did people organize on January 8 without a single leadership or central command, and how did earlier cycles since 2017 shape this process?
\n\nRoja: This uprising is part of an ongoing cycle of mass protests that began in 2017, with the waves becoming more widespread, confrontational, and frequent. Major moments include the brutally repressed 2019 “Bloody November” protests over fuel price hikes, the 2021 “uprising of thirst” against water deprivation and ecological extraction, and the 2022 Jina Uprising, “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The 2022 uprising marked a peak because it united anti-colonial, feminist, and egalitarian struggles, sparked by the killing of Jina Amini, a young Kurdish working-class woman whose death resonated across social and political divisions.
\n\nLeila: When we talk about organization, there are two different levels. One is organization at the street level, and the other is organization at the level of political organizations. At the street level, people on the ground learn from previous uprisings, and each cycle has become progressively more confrontational. Neighborhood-based youth organizations played a very important role, especially during “Woman, Life, Freedom.” These were people who already knew each other, who had socialized together in the same neighborhoods. That social trust became crucial once a mass uprising started.
\n\nThe primary medium for street-level coordination is the internet. If an event occurs in a neighborhood, people can quickly organize online, allowing others to come to their aid. In the presence of repressive forces, protesters coordinate by sharing real-time information—for example, reporting which highways security forces are using—so that some can block the highways while others continue activities in the streets.
\n\nAt the level of political organizations, there is effectively no formal leftist presence due to decades of heavy repression. The main exception is Mujahedeen (MEK), though it remains marginal and lacks broad support for historical reasons. In this uprising, monarchist-aligned groups appear to be gaining influence. They maintain a strong anti-left discourse, positioning themselves against the 1979 revolution. They have substantial resources and financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Israel. According to media reports, Iran International received approximately US $250 million in start-up funding from Saudi Arabia during its founding phase.
\n\nMost of what I am describing applies mainly to central geographies, not the peripheries. Kurdistan and other marginalized regions have very different forms of organization not only because of decades of repression, but also deriving from decades of organizing. The tactics used on the streets—how to confront police, Basij [a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC], and IRGC forces—can only come from marginalized bodies, bodies that confront state violence on a daily basis, especially people working in the informal economy. Manual labor also matters in this context, because the capacity to engage in direct physical confrontation is part of the subjectivity produced by this class position.
\n\nTwo groups were especially important in street-level organization. The first was technical workers, especially mechanics. They have specific tools and skills that became extremely important for building barricades and blockades. For example, mechanics used the same instruments they normally use to fix cars to sabotage electricity towers on the streets, creating very strong barriers against repressive forces. The second group consisted mainly of young people, often between 18 and 25, who were very familiar with digital technologies. They knew how to smash surveillance cameras on the streets—the cameras that function as the eyes of the state. Many of these cameras were imported from China.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/4.jpg\")
\nRoja: In terms of broader organization, three forms were dominant during this cycle: street mobilization, university-based organization, and bazaar or merchant strikes. On the day that the internet blackout started, shopkeepers in more than 55 cities went on strike. Even conservative segments of the petite bourgeoisie joined. Kurdish parties called for a general strike, and all te shops were closed in Kurdistan. The strike extended even to Western Azerbaijan, where both Kurdish and Turkish-speaking populations participated.
\n\nOver the past ten years, union-based organizations—teachers, workers, nurses, truck drivers—have repeatedly protested and gone on strike. One persistent problem has been how to synchronize the temporality of union struggles with the sudden eruption of street uprisings. The only group that consistently kept pace with street mobilizations were university students. Students never let a mobilization opportunity on the streets pass them by.
\n\nCompared with previous movements, why have Pahlavi monarchists appeared to gain disproportionate influence in this uprising, despite lacking broad support or grassroots organization on the ground?
\n\nLeila: As a result of the heavy repression of leftists since the beginning of the Islamic Republic, there is no strong leftist revolutionary organization inside Iran. Monarchists seem to have the upper hand in this uprising, but not because they represent the majority of people or because they are more organized on the ground.
\n\nThey have money and media. They have their media and all of the main media outlets are outside the country. They have strong connections with foreign countries, and of course they are able to organize in exile.
\n\n“Iran International” is present in almost every house through satellite television, even more professional than BBC Persian. With this media power, they are able to shape what people see and hear. There are documented cases where slogans are edited, where the sound of chants is changed, and where one person shouting a monarchist slogan is shown as if the whole crowd is chanting it. If you look carefully at some of these videos, people are actually chanting something else. There was a video of Kurdish people dancing in Punak square in Tehran and there was only one person chanting pro monarchist slogans, but the media manipulation was such that it suggested the whole population is supporting Pahlavi in Tehran.
\n\nRoja: In central cities, especially Tehran, monarchist slogans are heard and seen more often. But in peripheral and marginalized regions—Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Khuzestan—there is much more hesitation and in many cases rejection.
\n\nIn some places, people did not come to the streets precisely because they felt alienated by monarchist narratives. They felt that their struggles were not represented and that everything was being rewritten through one dominant media voice.
\n\nThere is also a very dangerous political logic in this rhetoric. Monarchists say that there is no other opposition in Europe. Anyone who criticizes monarchy is accused of supporting the Islamic Republic. If you talk about ethnic minority rights, you are labeled a separatist. If you talk about leftist politics, you are equated with the regime. This logic is very familiar. It resembles the way political plurality was eliminated after 1979.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/8.jpg\")
\nDuring the blackout of the internet in Iran, which began on the night of January 8, do you still hear anything from friends and families? How did the regime’s shift from selective internet shutdowns to total communication blackout fundamentally change both the experience of repression and the possibility of collective action?
\n\nRoja: Just before this meeting (January 23), my family called me. For the first time since everything happened, my siblings and cousins were all on the phone together. It was very intense. They described how the internet shutdown completely cut people off—families, friends, even neighbors couldn’t reach each other, and many didn’t know if their loved ones were safe.
\n\nAfter protests, people deleted everything on their phones out of fear. Police randomly stopped people in the streets and checked their phones, even if they had never protested. Fear was everywhere.
\n\nFor short moments, Instagram briefly worked, then went down again. People felt this was deliberate—creating the impression that the internet was back while real communication remained impossible. ATMs and digital payments also stopped working. Anything dependent on the internet shuts down. As my cousin put it, it felt like living in prison—cut off from normal life.
\n\nLeila: During previous cycles of uprising—for example, in 2019—the international internet was shut down, while the national internet, often referred to as the “intranet,” remained operational. People were able to use the national network to coordinate, they could inhabit whatever digital space was still available. They would use state-sponsored or IRGC-affiliated Telegram channels and communicate in coded language to share information about conditions in different cities. Someone might write, “In Shiraz, the weather is still rainy,” while another would respond, “Isfahan is sunny now.” Everyone knew this was not about the weather. It was a way of talking about repression, about violence, about how intense things were in different cities, without saying it openly.
\n\nBut this time, the whole network was shut down. After January 8, the government didn’t just cut the international internet. They cut the national internet as well. Every means of communication was shut down at the same time. This had never happened like this before.
\n\nRoja: Even Starlink didn’t function during the blackout. Starlink equipment is extremely expensive, given the national currency depreciation, and it is illegal to have it. Only very few people have access to it. But even those people could not access the internet this time. There are reports that the Islamic Republic used some kind of noise or interference to block satellite signals, a new technology often associated with China and Russia. This is the first time the Islamic Republic has used this kind of technology on the population as a whole, to isolate people completely.
\n\nIran and China have a 25-year cooperation agreement. Iran has continued selling much of its oil to China, bypassing US sanctions, often at significant discounts—sometimes reported at around 20% below global market prices, though the exact figures vary and are difficult to verify. Some observers believe Iran has long sought to develop a China-style national internet and acquire related filtering and control technologies, but until now it has not been able to implement such a system fully. Many people saw the current shutdown as a test—or as a demonstration of more advanced restrictions than before.
\n\nWhite SIM cards are part of this system. These are SIM cards with no filtering and no censorship. In Iran, most websites and platforms are blocked, and people need VPNs. White SIM cards can bypass all of that. For a long time, only people close to the core of the regime had received them. After the twelve-day war with Israel, a limited number of journalists also received them, even including some who were critical to the regime.
\n\nBut during this uprising, even the white SIM cards didn’t work. Nothing worked. At one point, even government websites were down. This is why many people say this moment is radically different from anything they experienced before.
\n\nMany people, including ex-political prisoners, described the feeling during the blackout as like being in solitary confinement. Not as a metaphor, but as a lived condition. What happened in Iranian prisons in the early years of the Islamic Republic, especially the massacres of leftists in the 1980s, seemed to come out of the prisons and spread across society. The logic of the prison expanded and surrounded everyday life.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/5.jpg\")
\nCan you share more about the massacre of civilians on January 8? How did people respond to that inside Iran?
\n\nRoja: There is ongoing debate over how many people have been killed since the internet blackout, particularly during the two nights of Thursday and Friday, January 8 and 9, when people started to flood the streets, taking control of many cities across the country. Some say five thousand; some say ten thousand; others say twenty thousand, even thirty thousand. At the same time, official figures have announced roughly 2000 deaths, many of which they claim were members of their own security forces, effectively replacing the victim with the aggressor. More than 25,000 people have been arrested on the streets, many of whom face the risk of execution.
\n\nFor people inside Iran, the exact number doesn’t really change anything. Whatever the figure, the Islamic Republic of Iran—particularly the IRGC and its paramilitary branch, the Basij—has carried out a qualitatively distinct form of violence, shocking and horrific even by the standards of Iran’s long, bloody history of state repression. The only proper name for this scale and systematic targeting of protesters is massacre.
\n\nAccording to eyewitness testimony from protesters, accounts from medical staff in hospitals and clinics, and records from medical facilities, live ammunition and shotguns were used systematically—not randomly—with shots aimed directly at vital organs: people’s eyes, heads, hearts, and torsos. One of the most visible and devastating forms of injury has been the loss of eyesight suffered by large numbers of people—something that was also used on a massive scale during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022.
\n\nThis level of repression is also a form of punishment that marks collective bodies. It is oriented toward the future as well, so that the next time you begin conquering cities through mass uprising, you will remember that you were massacred—so you never forget what happened to you. The punishment is therefore inscribed on the body and marks collective memory.
\n\nOne of the crucial differences between the current uprising and previous ones is that, for the first time, the Islamic Republic of Iran is using the lexicon of “terrorism” to describe protesters. In the past, the term “rioter” (اغتشاشگر) was used to draw a distinction between “legitimate” protesters and those portrayed as seeking to destabilize the government—the latter of whom were often accused by security and intelligence services, as well as officials (including the Supreme Leader), of being linked to the US or Israel. Today, “terrorist” has become the official keyword for anyone protesting in the streets. People on the streets are no longer treated as citizens—or even as “criminals” to be policed. Instead, they are cast as outside agitators and terrorists, against whom the state claims the right to wage war.
\n\nWhile Western imperialists instrumentalize the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression to justify their own regime-change agenda, supporters of the so-called “axis of resistance” often seek to deny or downplay this repression and the mass killing it entails. This denial—common among campists, who support any force opposed to Western imperialism regardless of its own internal repression, class relations, and geopolitical interventions—is not a neutral error. It is an anti-imperialism of fools, inside Iran and abroad: so fixated on the goal of opposing imperialism that it refuses to recognize the state violence enacted under the guise of anti-imperialism. In that sense, they are not merely mistaken but complicit.
\n\nCould you say more about how the Islamic Republic understands the current uprising as a war?
\n\nRoja: Many who participated in the current revolutionary uprising describe their experience on the streets—what is happening now—as a war. Many non-Iranian commentators, based on a quantitative argument, argue that during the Twelve-Day War, one thousand were killed, but that in just two days inside Iran tens of thousands of people were killed. People even compare this to the eight-year Iran–Iraq War. Now, they say, in two days, the number is even higher.
\n\nArguments about the “quantitative scale” of war have historically served as tools of imperialist warfare. During World War II, the United States relied on precisely this logic when it bombed Hiroshima: if the war continued, one million people would die; if the atomic bomb were dropped now, fewer people would be killed. It was this reasoning that led to the use of nuclear weapons. The same type of argument has repeatedly been used to justify imperialist wars.
\n\nSo we need to be careful with the lexicon of “war.” Western imperialism often mobilizes the language of war to frame the Islamic Republic’s bloody repression in ways that serve imperial interests. That framing helps justify and normalize Western military intervention as a “response”—cast as support for the Iranian people, or even as a humanitarian necessity to “save” them. On the other hand, when the Islamic Republic calls protesters “terrorists” and “Mossad agents,” treating them as enemies, it effectively launches a war against its own subject populations. This has exposed Iranian society to outside imperial intervention through the unprecedented violence it has deployed against repeated cycles of uprising. In this sense, the Islamic Republic and imperialist powers reinforce each other. They are not equal forces, we are not equating them, but they operate in a mutual dynamic. One uses the threat of the other to justify repression. The other uses repression to justify intervention. Caught in between, real internationalist solidarities are weakened.
\n\nBetween Western imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran, there is a very narrow path. The whole difficulty is navigating between the two narratives without falling in line with either campism or imperialism. Roja has been trying its best to navigate this path through internationalism from below that prioritizes liberation struggles.
\n\nToday, many Iranians—deeply opposed to imperialist war—nevertheless say that a war is already underway: a war waged by the Islamic Republic against society itself. In this context of continuous internal violence, exhaustion, and blocked horizons of change, the logic of “lesser destruction” reappears in a tragic inversion. War from the outside comes to be imagined not as disaster, but as rescue. This is how a society pushed to the edge begins, desperately, to wait for a war imposed upon it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/3.jpg\")
\nIn many Western anti-imperialist narratives, Iranians are framed as having only two options: a “sovereign” Iran or an Iran occupied by external powers. What’s your response to the claim that “sovereignty is a precondition for liberation”?
\n\nRoja: Before turning to the question of “sovereignty”—which I understand to mean the state’s territorial integrity and “national security”—let me first say a few words about how the Islamic Republic presents itself internationally as an anti-imperialist force and a supporter of Palestinian liberation.
\n\nSince the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran has appropriated anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify both internal repression and regional interventions. It often deploys the language of “anti-imperialism” as a legitimating mask for domestic coercion. Compulsory veiling, for example, was violently imposed on women’s bodies in the aftermath of the Revolution and repeatedly framed as the embodied ideal of the Islamic woman—defined in opposition to “Western” values. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the 12-Day War, many people were executed on charges of spying for Israel. Today, protesters are routinely smeared as Mossad agents—a charge that functions less as a factual claim than as a political technology for criminalizing dissent and legitimizing violence.
\n\nAgainst the arguments advanced by campists, nationalists, and some decolonial accounts, Iran’s internal repression cannot be politically severed from its self-proclaimed opposition to imperialism. In the Islamic Republic’s political logic, “anti-imperialism” is not merely a foreign-policy stance; it is also a domestic governing strategy that records demands for freedom and equality as threats to “national security.” In this sense, geopolitics and internal repression are not parallel tracks but mutually reinforcing projects.
\n\nGeopolitically, the Islamic Republic has played an active role in shaping the Middle East through what it calls the “Axis of Resistance.” The case of Syria is illuminating: Iran—together with Hezbollah and Russia—helped sustain the dictatorship of Assad, whose methods of repression only became fully visible after its collapse. The Islamic Republic has long told society, “We fight in Syria so that we don’t have to fight inside Iran,” a claim that has no meaning after the 12-Day War. The logic of “national security first” implies that Syrian lives and Syrian blood did not matter because they were not Iranian.
\n\nAs these two interlinked processes—domestic repression and regional intervention—have repeatedly been legitimatized in the name of anti-imperialism, many inside Iran have become alienated from anti-imperialist politics and struggles. This is the case despite the fact that anti-imperialism was a crucial dimension of the 1979 Revolution.
\n\nNow let us return to the question of “sovereignty” in the state sense of the term. The discourse of “national security” has become increasingly dominant since the Syrian war and October 7 [2023], and especially after the 12-Day War. Certain campist and nationalist positions prioritize the form of the nation over its substantive content. If we understand the nation substantively, it implies social rights, democratic representation, collective autonomous self-determination, and the coexistence of different peoples. This is fundamentally different from understanding the nation as mere form—territorial integrity, centralized sovereignty, and national security.
\n\nBoth the Islamic Republic and its campist supporters have mobilized around this formulation—“national security” and “territorial integrity”—granting it absolute primacy and relegating all other struggles to the margins. But this primacy is false, because it evades the basic question: security for whom, and why is only one form of security prioritized? What about economic security? As we recently wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nWhile the state speaks relentlessly in the name of “national security,” it has itself become a central producer of insecurity: intensified insecurity of life through an unprecedented surge in executions, the systematic mistreatment of prisoners, and intensified economic insecurity through the brutal reduction of people’s livelihoods.
\n
We are repeatedly told: “This is not the time to protest; this is not the time to rebel—otherwise, we will become Syria; otherwise, we will face the same fate as Libya.” The real question is how to confront these contradictions. On the one hand, war and the imperialist fragmentation of society are real dangers. On the other hand, they must also struggle against the Islamic Republic. You cannot simply deny the right of people who have been stripped of any meaningful sense of life—whose lives barely differ from death—to speak and to act, by telling them, “Now is not the time, because national security comes first.”
\n\nHow is the idea of sovereignty contested inside Iran, especially in the Persian-dominated center by comparison with the non-Persian peripheries?
\n\nRoja: Everything depends on who we are talking about—for whom sovereignty serves as protection, and for whom it manifests as violence. Multiple nations live within the Islamic Republic, and the lived experience of “sovereignty” across these populations is profoundly uneven.
\n\nTake Baluchistan, for example. People there live under conditions of “internal colonialism.” They have been stripped of even formal citizenship. In Baluchistan, there are thousands of people who are not recognized within the state’s official system at all; some do not even have birth certificates and are deprived of the most basic conditions of life. For Baluch people, the relationship with the Islamic Republic is an extractive one, accompanied by an extremely securitized presence. When the state itself is experienced as colonial, violent, and occupying, telling people that sovereignty is more important than their lives makes no sense. This is why the claim that “sovereignty is a precondition for liberation” can only be understood—if at all—within the complex dynamics of center–periphery relations and the question of ethnic-minority self-determination.
\n\nThe “primacy” of “territorial integrity” comes out of a very strong nationalist tradition in Iran. Since the construction of the modern nation-state, sovereignty has been treated as the supreme, untouchable principle. Even nationalist leftists have often placed sovereignty above everything else. This was already a major point of division after the 1979 revolution, and it remains so today.
\n\nEven during the 2022 Jina uprising, much of the backlash centered on it: those at the forefront were repeatedly labeled separatists, accused of wanting to bring civil war into the country. Today, this same framing is used to justify a false binary—you must choose between the Islamic Republic or civil war—with civil war presented as a threat to sovereignty. This discourse shuts down any possibility for change from below.
\n\nMore importantly, this argument does not hold up empirically. Throughout the entire post-revolutionary period—from the 1980s until today—there has been no political force in Iran genuinely seeking to break the country apart. Even Kurdish political forces, in their official statements and positions, have never demanded separation from Iran. This claim is a narrative produced by the regime and by nationalist forces, not reflective of reality.
\n\nIn this sense, the sovereignty discourse also ends up reinforcing the Islamic Republic, because it mirrors the regime’s own logic. Over the past decade—especially since 2011—the regime has repeatedly told society: “You may have nothing, but you have security. You have not become Syria because of us, because we guarantee national sovereignty and national security.” This argument has been consistently used to delegitimize every uprising. Since 2017, whenever people have taken to the streets, this argument has returned: “We don’t want to become another Syria.” But the question is: why must that be the outcome? Why couldn’t there be a democratic revolution? This is not a purely imaginary fantasy; it is tied to real struggles and to democratic political imagination.
\n\nThis also helps explain why in this uprising, the calls for figures like [Reza] Pahlavi are heard more often in central regions. Ethnic minorities make up roughly 35-40% of the population. This is crucial. So when people say “Iranians think this way,” we must ask: which Iranians? Many people in peripheral regions do not share this “sovereignty-first” perspective. The claim that “the Iranian people think this way” simply does not hold.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/2.jpg\")
\nThe Palestinian struggle and the Iranian struggle are often pitted against each other—both in Western anti-imperialist narratives (such as the “Axis of Resistance” vs. “Zio-America” framing) and in liberal narratives (for example, slogans like “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran”). Inside Iran, how has the state’s monopolization and instrumentalization of Palestine shaped popular perceptions and solidarities? What has caused the two struggles to become disconnected—or even appear contradictory—and what does grassroots Iranian solidarity with Palestinian liberation look like beyond state propaganda, military alliances, and the “Axis of Resistance” framework?
\n\nLeila: When it comes to Palestine, the situation is very complicated. At a general level, among large parts of the population in Iran, sympathy for Palestine is low right now. This is not because people suddenly became pro-Israel, but because of how tensions have been mediated and instrumentalized by the state.
\n\nMany people feel that the Islamic Republic depletes the public budget and invests it into military apparatuses operating across the region instead of investing in social welfare. People are struggling with severe economic problems. Prices are going up. Subsidies are being removed. Hospitals are being privatized. The health care system is collapsing. In this situation, people attribute the state’s corruption to the Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinian Resistance. It is a very widespread misconception.
\n\nThis perception also depends very much on who we are talking to. If we move away from the central, urban, middle class, and look toward working class and marginalized regions, the picture changes. Age matters. Geography matters.
\n\nThere was a moment during the uprising when someone from a peripheral area called me and said that the catastrophe they were experiencing could only be described in one way. They said the city looks like Gaza. So Gaza became the reference. For that person, Gaza was not an abstract geopolitical symbol. It was a concrete way to describe what state violence looks like.
\n\nRoja: In Arab regions such as Khuzestan, there is strong sympathy with Palestine—and not only sympathy, but a strong connection. Palestine has been a source of inspiration for their own struggles, and their activists have been linked to Palestinian struggles. Because of this, they have been crushed repeatedly. People have been arrested simply for holding Palestinian flags or expressing solidarity. The state does not tolerate anyone else holding the Palestinian cause; it wants to monopolize it.
\n\nThis is one of the main contradictions. Even leftists inside Iran who are committed to Palestinian liberation find it almost impossible to organize any independent action in solidarity with Palestine. If they try to act publicly, they are either immediately repressed or their actions are absorbed and re-framed by the state narrative. Palestine becomes state property.
\n\nThe Islamic Republic’s relationship to Palestine—even if one accepts that it materially sustains certain forms of resistance—is fundamentally grounded in its own geopolitical and national interests, rather than in a commitment to Palestinian liberation as such. Officials themselves repeatedly invoke the notion that we fight outside our borders so that we do not fight inside. “If we don’t fight in Syria, we will have to fight inside Iran.” Palestine is treated within the same framework.
\n\nThere is a deep contradiction here. A state that massacres its own people cannot be a force of liberation for others. A state that kills people in the streets, blinds them, imprisons them, executes them, cannot claim to be fighting for justice elsewhere.
\n\nHow are these debates around Palestine and anti-imperialism experienced differently in Kurdistan and other marginalized regions?
\n\nRoja: For Kurdish people, the question of Palestine has always carried a lot of tension. It does not come from theory. It comes from political memory and lived experience. It comes from genocides.
\n\nThere are historical moments such as genocide that shape Kurdish political memory deeply. The first one is the “Anfal campaign.” It was carried out by Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war in Iraqi Kurdistan. Around one hundred and eighty thousand Kurdish people were killed—merely because they were Kurdish. The allegation to justify the genocide was that they collaborated with Iran.
\n\nWhat matters is not only the genocide itself, but also the reaction of some parts of the Arab world at the time. The majority of Arab states supported Saddam Hussein. And the Palestinian leadership supported Saddam during the Anfal campaign. Arafat supported him openly. Even Edward Said denied the Anfal campaign in his writing in the early 1980s. For Kurdish people, this created a very deep wound. It was not just betrayal. It was erasure.
\n\nThen there is Afrin in Syria. In 2018, Afrin, which is part of Rojava, was occupied by the Turkish army. The occupation involved systematic violence against civilians, including women and children. It involved displacement and destruction.
\n\nDuring this occupation, representatives of Hamas went to Afrin while the Turkish army was occupying the city. They celebrated together with the Turkish army and they said this very clearly. They said this is an example for the Middle East. They said this is something that should be replicated. For Kurdish people, that moment was devastating.
\n\nAs a result, a deep rupture has long existed between Kurdish political struggles and both Arab and Persian nationalism, as well as parts of the self-described anti-imperialist left, which have often failed to recognize the Kurdish struggle.
\n\nAt the same time, it is important to say that historically, Kurdish movements were among the strongest supporters of Palestinian liberation. The first generation of Kurdish revolutionary organizations, especially in the 1980s, declared armed struggle side by side with Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary movements. There was an organic political and military relationship.
\n\nBut today, in the consciousness of Kurdish people, questions have arisen. Why are Kurdish genocides not recognized, while other genocides are recognized? Why does nobody care when Kurdish people are killed? Why are Kurdish lives always treated as secondary?
\n\nThis is not only about the past. It is happening again now. In demonstrations in Europe, Kurdish people have seen photos of Saddam Hussein carried in pro-Palestine protests. Friends who recently returned from Syria say that Saddam’s image is appearing again there, being displayed and celebrated. For Kurdish people, this is unbearable. The person who carried out genocide against us is being brought back in the name of resistance.
\n\nIf we accept the argument that, in conditions of existential threat, a people may seek support wherever it is materially available—regardless of the nature of the supporting state—then the question must be posed consistently. Many defenders of Palestinian resistance justify tactical alignments with regional powers on the grounds of survival under siege, not because those powers are emancipatory or democratic. If that logic is considered legitimate in one case, why is it rejected so categorically when applied to the Kurds, who have likewise faced annihilation, statelessness, and repeated abandonment?
\n\nThe issue, then, is not the purity of allies, but the selective application of moral and political standards, standards that shift depending on geopolitical alignment rather than on the concrete conditions of survival faced by oppressed peoples.
\n\nI realized this clearly when a Syrian friend of mine, a member of the Druze minority that recently experienced massacres at the hands of Al-Jolani, the head of the new Syrian factional government, told me something. She said, “I have always been anti-Israel my whole life.” She was crying, showing me the Palestinian keffiyeh around her neck, and said, “I always wear the Palestinian keffiyeh wherever I go. But I have to admit, if it weren’t for Israeli support during Al-Jolani’s recent attacks on the Druze in Syria, my people would have been completely massacred. How can I allow myself to say that my people are allowed to be massacred, but should not take help from Israel?” I think she is right. Just as we, as Iranians, have no right to tell Palestinians that it’s okay to be massacred but not take help from Iran or any other repressive state. What we can say, however, is that the compulsion to accept aid in a survival situation does not mean we are endorsing the policies of Israel, Iran, or the US. It doesn’t mean we ignore the crimes these countries commit against other people. This is the logic I am talking about, and it should not be a double standard.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/6.jpg\")
\nNow that many activists are in exile, what can actually be done from outside Iran, and what limits and responsibilities shape diasporic organizing today?
\n\nRoja: As the Iranian far right is becoming a real threat to democracy, other progressive and leftist groups in the diaspora are ready to work together, which was not the case before. This common enemy (Pahlavi as well as IR) is contributing to the formation of united fronts and blocs of all sorts.
\n\nWe also work to maintain long-term connections with different collectives and organizations from Palestine to East Asia, particularly the new generation in China, Taiwan, and Bangladesh. We are building links between Baluchistan, Kurdish, and Iranian groups.
\n\nFor the first time, we organized a large, explicitly anti-monarchist demonstration against the Islamic Republic in Paris. This showed that a progressive, leftist, anti-war opposition also exists in Europe. Afterward, activists from other cities reached out, encouraging us to build broader, less dogmatic alliances capable of organizing opposition both to monarchy and to the Islamic Republic.
\n\nIn the diaspora, we are in a privileged position to fight on multiple fronts at the same time. One front is against Western imperialism. Another front is against the Islamic Republic. Another front is against the campist supporters of the Islamic Republic who deny or delegitimize the uprising.
\n\nMore importantly, we try to insist that the oppressed people and classes in the Middle East have shared destinies—that struggles in Iran, in Kurdistan, in Palestine, in Lebanon are connected, and we need to learn from each other and develop an internationalist politics based on common ground and articulations of social struggles.
\n\nInternationalism is precisely about this: I care about Palestine because it is directly and immediately connected to our lives and also shapes the destiny of social struggles. Your struggle is mine, mine is yours, despite all the differences and contradictions. It is around these questions that we in Roja are organizing today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/18/7.jpg\")
\nOn July 4, roughly a dozen people participated in a demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center, a facility imprisoning immigrants facing deportation proceedings. When the police responded, gunfire erupted, with one officer reportedly being injured. Today, nineteen people—some of whom apparently neither participated in the demonstration nor set foot anywhere near the Prairieland Detention Center—are accused of “providing material support for terrorism” as well as rioting, carrying an explosive, firearms, attempted murder of a federal employee, and other charges. Eighteen of them remain in jail.
\n\nProsecutors have sought to fabricate a criminal enterprise involving not only the participants in the demonstration but whoever else they could find to target, charging arrestees’ partners and even a member of a support committee. Considering that spreading outright falsehoods is standard policy for the Trump administration and its supporters, it is likely that at least some of the allegations that federal authorities and right-wing media have circulated about the Prairieland defendants have no factual basis.
\n\nThis case is intended to set a precedent criminalizing protest and intimidating people out of organizing in solidarity with immigrants and defendants. On February 17, jury selection will begin for a trial involving nine of the defendants.
\n\nHere, we will explore the what the stakes of this case are for people around the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/4.jpg\")
A banner at a support action.
\nDuring the fierce protests in response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, police arrested thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands responded by donating to bail funds. By summer’s end, the Minneapolis Freedom Fund had taken in nearly $40 million. Other solidarity groups pulled in millions more.
\n\nAt the same time, overnight vigils sprang up outside jails, where supporters offered arrestees a hug or a cigarette or a ride home. The protests spread across the country while the state’s strategy of repression collapsed into clumsy improvisation. Clerks misfiled reports, delays piled upon delays, courts dropped cases by the thousands. The state retreated.
\n\nOver the past decade, grassroots movements have demonstrated that it is possible to disrupt entrenched power structures from police departments and immigration enforcement to university administrations. Institutions that have no cause to fear for their control do not need to charge activists with terrorism, conspiracy, or racketeering. Just as the United States government is resorting to illegal wars, airstrikes, and kidnappings to preserve its global dominance, law enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to outrageous or criminal means to suppress domestic protest movements. While this is frightening, it also indicates these movements’ effectiveness. The government’s desperation is a consequence of popular resistance. The struggles of millions of people have the potential to bring about real change.
\n\nWhen we look back on the last few decades, we can see this story everywhere: communities pushing back against the attacks of the state.
\n\nBut there is another pattern, too.
\n\nWhat happens when people don’t push back against repression? To see the answer, we need look no further than a current court case against nineteen people in Northern Texas. They face a combination of federal and state charges for their alleged connection to a July 4, 2025 demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. In the silence surrounding this case, federal authorities are trying to get away with more and more, aiming to take advantage of this passivity to set dangerous new precedents.
\n\nThis case represents a strategic escalation in a decades-running campaign to expand state repression, criminalize dissent, and lay the groundwork for an all-out assault on grassroots movements.
\n\nTo support the non-cooperating Prairieland Defendants, start here. To support the 2020 George Floyd rebels still locked up in prison, start here.
\n\nOn January 20, the first day of his second term, Donald Trump signed several executive orders aimed at terrorizing immigrants. These orders handed the Department of Defense responsibility for US border strategy while restricting legal pathways to lawful residency. The government designated several foreign narcotics traffickers as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and sharply reduced the number of permitted migrants.
\n\nIn the year since, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have stalked US cities in balaclavas, kidnapping people at random. They have joined local authorities and agents in raiding workplaces, churches, schools, clinics, farms, and hospitals. They have staged public acts of intimidation and violence, smashing car windows, snatching children from their parents, stopping school buses. While immigration authorities have long conducted themselves this way at the borders, the new strategy focuses on publicly terrorizing immigrants throughout the country, inducing a number of people to “self-deport”—an official euphemism for fleeing the country in fear. Authorities have also set out to criminalize anyone who supports these embattled communities.
\n\nOn July 4, 2025, police in Alvarado, Texas arrested nine people near the Prairieland Detention Center. According to a criminal complaint filed on July 7, Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Clark Wiethorn claimed that a dozen protesters assembled outside the facility, shooting fireworks and vandalizing vehicles. Wiethorn claimed that when police arrived, “1-2” shooters fired dozens of rounds at them, hitting one officer in the neck. He later revised this claim to allege that only one shooter fired a much smaller number of shots, with a total of 11 casings being found in the area. They also later clarified that the “injury” to the officer was not life-threatening. The officer left the hospital within a few hours. The court has yet to make the medical records of this alleged visit public.
\n\nSubsequently, police raided nine homes connected to the arrestees and launched a manhunt for one of the accused. By July 10, they had arrested Benjamin Song on allegations of firing an AR-15 at law enforcement. More raids followed. They targeted at least 20 homes in connection to the protest.
\n\nOn September 22, 2025 Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.” Technically, there is no such designation under US law. Following this executive order, federal agents knocked on doors, raided homes, and launched dragnet-style investigations targeting people across the country. The National Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), issued on September 25, orders law enforcement to “disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.”
\n\nThe government has repeatedly used the Prairieland case to justify this broader crackdown. Authorities argued that the events surrounding the demonstration in Alvarado represented an existential threat to the United States. They aim to use the Prairieland case to further criminalize protest movements across the country.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/8.jpg\")
The interior of the Prairieland Detention Center.
\nTo understand how the Prairieland case became possible, we must look at the years preceding it to see how repression evolved after the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nThe government tried and failed to stop the 2020 revolt with outright force. Afterwards, it sought to attack the demographics that participated in the rebellion one at a time. In the six years following that uprising, federal, state, and municipal authorities have sought to crush racialized teenagers and youth, anarchists, bail funds, anti-war protesters, immigrants, “anti-fascists,” and gender nonconformists via a variety of means. To see the clampdown in Texas in context, we must review this pattern.
\n\nThe state tests its tools on marginalized groups, then expands them wherever it can.
\n\nA youth car subculture focused around street takeovers and racing spread nationwide in the years leading up to 2020. Participants in this subculture, largely young Black and Latino men, regularly clashed with police who interfered with their collaborative and unmonetized events.
\n\nDuring the 2020 George Floyd riots, this subculture repeatedly played a critical role in protest infrastructure. Participants blocked roads, coordinated large-scale caravans, and enabled rapid movement across metropolitan areas, spreading unrest far beyond city centers. As the protests waned, millions rallied to defend “protesters,” but few came to the defense of “drag racers,” even where these groups overlapped.
\n\nFailing to defend this scene has had serious consequences.
\n\nOver the last five years, police departments across the country have built dedicated “street racing” units. The repression of the street takeover scene has dragged thousands of young people—many of whom played roles in the 2020 protests—into the carceral system without provoking public backlash. Using this approach, the state successfully piloted a model of mass surveillance and criminalization under the cover of traffic safety and public order. By 2025, Automated License Plate Readers were tracking immigrants and abortion seekers. What began as a crackdown on street racers became infrastructure for monitoring everyone.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/3.jpg\")
Graffiti allegedly left from the demonstration at the Prairieland facility on July 4, 2025.
\nEvery large protest movement in the US since 2020 has faced police brutality and politicized prosecution. New forms of harassment, intimidation, and prosecution suggest that the government intends to suppress all meaningful forms of dissent.
\n\nBetween 2021 and 2024, authorities sought to suppress a popular direct action movement resisting the imposition of a police militarization facility on Atlanta, Georgia. As courageous protesters fought against the construction of Cop City, police raided homes, suppressed a local referendum, doxed the signatories on the government website, charged dozens of accused protesters with “domestic terrorism,” and charged bail fund organizers alongside 58 other arrestees with racketeering. They killed one protester, Manuel Esteban “Tortuguita” Paez Teran.
\n\nFor years, federal officials have sought to create a basis for using these kinds of charges against protest movements. Due to the movement’s robust support and solidarity efforts and the incompetence of local authorities, in Atlanta, this strategy has not gone well for the state. Despite bringing felony charges against over 100 people and RICO charges against 61, the government failed to compel even a single person into collaborating with the police against other defendants.
\n\nHowever, all of this violence and intimidation stymied resistance to the project. This was the authorities’ primary goal: to use police violence, judicial harassment, and punitive charging to suppress a powerful social movement.
\n\nIn spring 2024, protests broke out across the United States against the US-backed invasion of Gaza in which the Israeli military systematically carried out the genocide of Palestinians. Students and community members established a protest camp at Columbia University. Crowds assembled and attempted to establish similar protest camps at campuses around the country. In response, police repeatedly attacked students involved in the Gaza solidarity encampments, using tear gas, pepper balls, flash-bang grenades, tasers, and other forms of violence.
\n\nLater that fall, the US and Canadian governments designated the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network a “terrorist organization” for its alleged connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The US government accused Samidoun’s fiscal sponsor, the Alliance for Global Justice, of operating a “sham charity.” This echoed some of the language used to describe the Network for Stronger Communities, the non-profit sponsor of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a target of the Cop City RICO case.
\n\nWhen their primary goal is to terrorize the public, the authorities test the boundaries of their power by attacking the most visible targets.
\n\nIn summer 2025, Los Angeles exploded in revolt against the violence perpetrated by Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. During the months leading up to this, Mexican, Salvadoran, and other community groups had developed their capacities to coordinate and mobilize people through walkouts, marches, information sessions, and limited strikes, such as the February “Day Without Immigrants.” Agricultural workers from Latin America engaged in a kind of rolling strike, leaving industrial agriculture with skeleton work crews as many stayed home or limited their time in the fields for fear of detention or arrest. This drove up the cost of groceries, sapping Trump’s approval ratings.
\n\nOn June 13, as riots and confrontations spread across the country, federal authorities arrested Alejandro Theodoro Orellana for allegedly passing out face masks to protesters. Prosecutors charged him with “Conspiracy to Commit Civil Disorders,” though a court later dropped his charges.
\n\nAs the nationwide protests waned, the Federal government deployed National Guard, Homeland Security, and US Marines to Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Memphis, and New Orleans. By July 2025, these experiments in repression had set the stage for the Prairieland case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/1.jpg\")
The Prairieland Detention Center.
\nThe Prairieland case is the latest attempt to stabilize a system that has been unsettled by powerful grassroots movements. It is an effort to normalize treating protest infrastructure as terrorism in order to regain control by terrorizing defendants by means of punitive charging and isolating them by means of pre-trial detention and media scare campaigns in hopes of setting new legal precedents for repression.
\n\nThe authorities are always attempting to push the envelope. When they fail to criminalize one social movement, they try again elsewhere. Even when they do not set the legal precedents that they desire, they benefit from the ways that their efforts disrupt social movements and frighten potential protesters.
\n\nFor years, the efforts of the US government to suppress unrest have repeatedly brought anarchists into their crosshairs. The tactics and strategies that anarchists employ tend to be effective, contagious, and easy to reproduce. Consequently, they pose a serious challenge to those who aim to consolidate power over our society.
\n\nIn the course of their repressive operations, federal authorities have entrapped activists, raided homes, and spread conspiracy theories. They have lied to judges, media outlets, and the general public. They have inflicted indiscriminate violence against protesters and advocates of various social justice issues. Whenever possible, they have sought to establish legal precedents that would give them greater leverage in the future. In 2017, for example, Washington, DC prosecutors pursued a legal case that would make simply wearing black during a protest an act of conspiracy. It failed. During the 2020 protests, prosecutors argued that simply being on the streets was itself indication of criminal intent. For the most part, this failed too. Georgia prosecutors have tried to argue that attending protests against Cop City, donating to bail funds, and fundraisers in general are all acts of rackeetering. This case seems unlikely to succeed, but it marks a considerable escalation.
\n\nBut the government doesn’t always lose.
\n\nIn January 2025, Brian DiPippa began a 60-month sentence for allegedly throwing a smoke bomb at a protest against transphobic speakers on a university campus in Pittsburgh. Casey Goonan, an anarchist from the Bay Area, just began a 20-year sentence for burning a UC Berkeley police cruiser in retaliation for police attacks of the Gaza solidarity encampments.
\n\nIf all of these cases are part of a unitary pattern, if they can be considered within a single general framework, then only an ambitious, collective response can offer an effective answer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/6.jpg\")
Footage of fireworks allegedly set off at the Prairieland Detention Center during the demonstration of July 4, 2025.
\n\n\n\n“All around the world, states and their police forces choose from the same assortment of tactics to achieve the same ends. The specific choices they make vary according to their context, but the toolbox and the fundamental objectives are the same.”
\n\n \n
Maintaining hierarchies and inequality has always required repression. In capitalist societies, where inequality is stark, “crime” and criminalized means of survival have become a major part of everyday life. These criminalized forms of subsistence are, in turn, used by the government to justify broad attacks on struggling communities. Social movements that push back against this pattern of injustice are singled out for repression.
\n\nLooking at repression elsewhere around the world in the years leading up to the Prairieland case, we can see how similar patterns have unfolded globally.
\n\nIn Russia, in the 2017 Network case, the Russian secret police kidnapped activists, planted weapons in their cars, and tortured them with electricity in order to force them to sign false confessions admitting participation in a fabricated terrorist network. These police tactics have since become standard procedure in Russia. In France, the crackdown on the Soulevements de la Terre (“Earth Uprisings”) movement in 2023 shows how states escalate to smear entire movements as “terrorist” after violent repression fails to dissolve them. Similarly, the government of the United Kingdom arrested nearly 2700 people for holding signs declaring support for Palestine Action, a direct action network resisting British support for the Israeli Defense Forces. The fact that a judge later ruled this ban unlawful only underscores the extent to which contemporary forms of repression strain against the limits of the existing legal system.
\n\nSo the tactics deployed against Prairieland Defendants reflect a worldwide trend of state repression targeting social movements, often by means that stretch or violate existing laws. The Russian example shows what horrors lie ahead if we proceed further down this road.
\n\nEveryone who has a stake in social change should follow the Prairieland case closely. The prosecutors intend to use this case to criminalize protesting outside of jails, dressing in black clothing during protests, employing fireworks during protests, removing people who have been arrested from group chats, transporting anarchist pamphlets, and refusing to snitch on codefendants. If they are successful, the case could set precedents that will impact protesters for years to come.
\n\nAs of now, seven Prairieland defendants have been terrorized into signing plea deals with the prosecutors. To varying degrees, these pleas implicate others in crimes. The accused have faced months of solitary confinement, abrupt relocations, punitively high bail set to an average of $5 million, denial of medication, restricted access to lawyers, and intimidation. Several defendants report facing repeated strip searches on a daily basis. As in the Russian torture cases, the practice of coercing defendants into signing cooperating plea deals is aimed at undermining social movements and the very possibility of solidarity itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/5.jpg\")
A banner at a support event.
\nAll around the country, federal authorities and state authorities loyal to Donald Trump are testing out strategies to suppress dissent while Democratic state authorities look for ways to collaborate in maintaining this “order” without provoking their voters. In Texas, police, federal agents, and judges are experimenting with methods that they hope to use to crush all who seek social change. Just as dozens of people were indicted on baseless charges in the repression of the Stop Cop City movement, defendants in the Prairieland case are being punitively charged, held without bail, isolated from lawyers and the public, and terrorized into signing guilty pleas.
\n\nThe murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti show us what awaits at the end of this road. In these extrajudicial public executions, there is no role for the legislative or judicial branches of government at all: the executive branch chooses the target, pulls the trigger, and afterwards declares the victims to have been guilty of terrorism. The urgency and steadfastness with which demonstrators around the United States responded to these murders should set an example for how we respond to the Prairieland case, as well.
\n\nAs the trial approaches, we should bring the case to the center of public attention as a fundamental concern of ongoing anti-ICE resistance. To turn the tide of repression, we will have to support all of the non-cooperating defendants.
\n\nTrump intends to use all of the forces at his disposal to retain power at all costs—police, judges, courts, federal agencies, and media. If his control is threatened, he will accuse everyone he can of terrorism, as this is a means of giving his government unrestrained power. By defeating ICE in the streets and rallying behind all who take action to resist the rise of authoritarianism, we can redirect outrage against the who are actually terrorizing communities across the country and around the world: politicians, the wealthy, and the armed mercenaries they depend on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/9.jpg\")
\nJuly 4: Nine people are arrested, including Nathan Baumann, Megan Morris, Joy Gibson, Zachary Evetts, Seth Sikes, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, Savanna Batten, and Maricela Rueda.
\n\nJuly 5: Raid on Megan Morris’ house; Autumn Hill is arrested.
\n\nThroughout July: The FBI conducts raids on homes of activists, their families, friends, and others.
\n\nJuly 6: Des (Daniel Estrada Sanchez) is arrested transporting zines from his home in Garland to Denton, Texas. Officers raid Des’s house and the apartment in Denton, Texas. No arrests are made in the Denton household.
\n\nJuly 8: Raid on Thomas’s house. Authorities question Thomas and he cooperates. According to the criminal complaint dated July 14: “Thomas claimed that on July 5th, the day after the shooting, he did not leave the Churchill Way residence until 8:00pm, when he left to meet three individuals at the Days Inn in Cleburne, TX. Thomas later admitted that they met to discuss the shooting and getting Song out of the area of Prairieland Detention Center, which Thomas did, picking up Song and transporting him to Churchill Way residence.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/7.jpg\")
Zines seized in the repression of the Prairieland defendants.
\nJuly 10: John Phillip Thomas arrested, held on $5 million bond for a smuggling of persons charge. He provides extensive information to law enforcement immediately, leading to several more arrests.
\n\nJuly 13: Lynette Sharp arrested and held on a $2.5 million bond, charged with hindering the prosecution of terrorism.
\n\nJuly 15: Dario Sanchez arrested. Benjamin Song arrested.
\n\nJuly 16: Defendants’ friends and family report raids of their homes where agents deployed flash-bang grenades, caused extensive damage, and detained spouses, family members, and housemates without cause. In one instance, federal agents tackled the child of a defendant and put a bag over their head before arresting them and transporting them to jail. “I was terrified, I had no idea what was going on,” the arrestee later said. During this interrogation, agents offered this person monetary bribes in exchange for information, which of course they refused. Police also attempted to extort them by offering to “get rid of a warrant” if they cooperated with the law enforcement investigation.
\n\nJuly 18: By this date, 15 people have been arrested in relation to the noise demo on July 4, each facing some combination of state and federal charges.
\n\nAugust 7: Susan Kent is arrested and charged with “engaging in organized criminal activity” and “hindering prosecution of terrorism.”
\n\nAugust 20: Dario is bonded out, per agreement with the District Attorney.
\n\nAugust 28: Dario is arrested again. The District Attorney decided to add more charges and make the bond higher to force him to self-surrender and go through another hearing. Dario is indicted on hindering prosecution of terrorism and tampering with physical evidence.
\n\nSeptember 2: Dario released.
\n\nSeptember 22: Dario arrested again for “violation of parole.” Authorities claimed that Dario made Google searches about destructive devices. Later, attorneys revealed that Dario’s probation officer had made the searches.
\n\nSeptember 23: Rebecca Morgan and Lynette Sharp are listed as being held in federal custody.
\n\nSeptember 24: Dario is released once again.
\n\nSeptember: The authorities raid the home of Ines and Liz again, confiscating printers and book-making materials.
\n\nSeptember 22 and 23: Federal arraignment of 14 defendants.
\n\nOctober 1: The state of Texas indicts 14 defendants on state charges, adding an additional charge of “engaging in organized criminal activity” for all 14. Two defendants have no state indictments as of October 11. In total, 15 defendants have been indicted on state charges; at least 13 people will be fighting concurrent federal and state cases and hence will require legal representation on both fronts.
\n\nOctober 15: First federal indictments. Autumn Hill and Zachary Evetts are indicted by a federal grand jury on three counts of attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States, three counts of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence and one count of providing material support to terrorists.
\n\nOctober 21: Jannette Goering arrested.
\n\nOctober 28: Seth Sikes of Kennedale, 22, indicted on one count of providing material support to terrorists
\n\nNovember 6: Joy Gibson, Lynette Sharp, Nathan Baumann, Seth Sikes, John Thomas sign federal plea deals on one count “Providing material support to terrorists” before indictments.
\n\nNovember 13: Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, Ines Soto, Liz Soto, Savanna Batten, Maricela Rueda, and Daniel Sanchez Estrada are federally indicted together on the same case. All defendants except for Sanchez Estrada are indicted on charges including riot, material support of terrorism, use of explosive, attempted murder, and discharge of a deadly weapon. Sanchez Estrada is indicted for “corruptly concealing a document” and “conspiracy to conceal a document.”
\n\nNovember 24: Susan Kent taken into federal custody. Rebecca Morgan and Susan Kent plead guilty in Fort Worth federal court to one count of “providing material support to terrorists,” a felony. They face up to 15 years in prison and will be sentenced in March. Kent has pleaded not guilty to state charges of “engaging in organized criminal activity” and “hindering the prosecution of terrorism,” both first-degree felonies. Her trial is set for March.
\n\nNovember 25: Des is released from ICE holding facility.
\n\nDecember 4: Des turns himself into federal custody.
\n\nJanuary 5: Lucy Fowlkes is arrested in a joint FBI and Weatherford police detention. She is charged with two counts of “hindering a terrorism investigation” for not proffering a statement to Johnson County sheriffs.
\n\nFebruary 9: All defendants are moved to the Tarrant County Jail, where they are placed in solitary confinement. Authorities confiscate all of their belongings, including trial notes, ahead of trial.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/13/2.jpg\")
The real prairieland.
\nWe present a interview with Htet Khine Soe, an activist who organized in Burma1 for more than 20 years before relocating to Mae Sot in Thailand at the end of 2021. The interview was carried out by Ban Ge, a Chinese anarchist who has come back and forth to Mae Sot and worked closely with Burmese activists after the coup.
\n\nThis February, the military coup in Burma entered its fifth year. In Yangon, life appears to have returned to a fragile normality. Worn down by a revolution that seemed endlessly prolonged with no clear horizon of victory, many who once left their jobs to join the Civil Disobedience Movement have gradually returned to the system they once abandoned.
\n\nMeanwhile, in rural areas and border regions controlled by the armed forces of the resistance, the “Spring Revolution” has increasingly hardened into a stalemated civil war. The military junta’s drone strikes and aerial bombardments have become routine, and civilians continue to pay the price.
\n\nUnder these conditions, the military has moved forward with what it calls a long-delayed general election—widely described by observers as a sham election. With opposition parties dissolved or suppressed, there is little doubt that the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) will secure victory.
\n\nShortly after the 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)2 and nonviolent protests met with brutal military crackdowns. Some activists fled to the jungles, where they trained with ethnic armed organizations that had long fought against the military, forming People’s Defense Forces (PDF) and launching armed resistance. Others embarked on exile, scattering across the world. Mae Sot, the Thai border town opposite Burma, became one of the first destinations for many exiles and wounded resistance fighters.
\n\nIn February 2023, during events marking the second anniversary of the coup, I met Htet Khine Soe (Ko Htet), a Burmese anarchist activist, and decided to follow him to Mae Sot. We took an eight-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, crossing the mountain ranges of Thailand’s Tak Province before reaching the border. Along the way, I told him about anarchist self-organized spaces and resistance networks in China. He, in turn, recounted stories from the revolution—flashmob strikes, urban guerrilla actions, assassinations, escapes, and exile.
\n\nDuring the first year after the coup, Ko Htet helped organize the General Strike Committee and flash mob strikes, and eventually became drawn into urban guerrilla operations. After a comrade he worked closely with was arrested, his name appeared on the wanted list and was circulated on a state-run media platform, forcing him to flee Yangon.
\n\nIn December, he escaped to Lay Kay Kaw, a town in Karen State, then known among young exiles as a “liberated area.” With PDF training camps located in nearby jungles, the town became a hub through which weapons and ammunition circulated, eventually making their way back into cities like Yangon and Mandalay to supply urban guerrilla groups.
\n\nBut this also made Lay Kay Kaw a military target. On December 15, five days after Ko Htet arrived, the military launched airstrikes on what had been called a “peace town.” He fled across the river into Thailand alongside waves of other displaced young exiles.
\n\nHis wife, Su Yi, an activist too, later arrived in Mae Sot with their two children to join him. The family obtained “stateless cards” and finally settled here. Their home gradually became a gathering place for the revolutionary exile community. After October 7, 2023, their children—an elementary-school-aged son and daughter—would tell visiting guests who brought Coca-Cola, “Don’t drink Coca-Cola—for Palestine.”
\n\nIn 2025, Ko Htet and Su Yi opened a T-shirt shop in Mae Sot called All Colours Are Beautiful—an anarchist wordplay hinting at the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB). Upstairs from the shop is their screen-printing workshop, where they produce many of the shirts sold there.\nOne of the most popular designs reads in English, No One Is Illegal. In a town where much of the population lives in various shades of legal uncertainty, wearing that shirt in public is strikingly provocative. Recently, Ko Htet sent me a photo of an immigration detention registration card showing a Burmese detainee standing before a height chart—the standard mugshot background—still wearing that same No One Is Illegal shirt.
\n\nOn the fifth anniversary of the coup, I invited Ko Htet to reflect on the revolution from an anarchist perspective: the tensions between their movement and the mainstream revolutionary forces represented by Aung San Suu Kyi, and how leftist networks of Burma—formed before the coup—have continued to organize and survive through exile.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/4.jpg\")
Htet Khine Soe in a flash mob strike in Yangon, March 2021.
\nAfter the 2021 coup, how did anarchists in Burma mobilize within the anti-junta movement? And what were your main disagreements with mainstream supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi?
\n\nOn the eve of the coup, rumors were already circulating, but almost nobody truly believed it would happen. The 2008 Constitution3 had already granted the military enormous institutional power, including an automatic 25% of seats in parliament. Under such arrangements, it seemed unnecessary for the military to seize power outright. Yet, on February 1, 2021, the coup took place.
\n\nOn the morning of the coup, I discussed with comrades who used to work with the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU)—one of the country’s main leftist student organizations—and with members of our anarchist antifa group how to mobilize people to take to the streets. However, senior figures of the National League for Democracy (NLD) who had not yet been arrested, along with supporters of [Burmese politician] Aung San Suu Kyi, called on the public not to act immediately and instead to wait seventy-two hours. They were spreading the belief that international aid—and even an R2P intervention4—would soon arrive, encouraging people to stay home rather than take to the streets in protest.
\n\nBut that same day, the internet was cut off. Suddenly neither the military nor the NLD could effectively spread their propaganda. The movement I was involved in struggled to bring people onto the streets during the first three days. Communication between us was difficult, and organizing under those conditions was extremely challenging.
\n\nThe female workers of the Garment factory in Yangon’s well-known industrial district of Hlaingthaya were among the first to take to the streets in protest, while ABFSU, ignoring the NLD leadership’s calls for restraint, began organizing on their own. Meanwhile, ordinary people started spontaneously banging pots and pans from their balconies every evening in protest.5
\n\nFebruary 6 was the first, biggest day. Garment workers in Hlaingthaya again took to the streets while the military quickly blocked the roads. But on that same day, a nationwide wave of demonstrations began. Even people I knew who were normally indifferent to politics joined the mass protests.
\n\nAt that moment, nearly everyone united under the same slogan: opposing the coup and demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. I even responded to NLD calls by buying red clothing and wearing it to demonstrations.
\n\nOn February 12, I became involved in organizing the General Strike Committee (GSC), which was formed for the fight against dictatorship from the people’s movement, made out of party members from a total of 25 groups, including ABFSU, labor organizations, and political parties. The GSC’s core demands were resisting military dictatorship, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners, and abolishing the 2008 Constitution altogether. At that time, any political mobilization that did not include the demand to release Suu Kyi would struggle to gain public support. Still, we always emphasized the release of all political prisoners, not only her.
\n\nOur main disagreement with the NLD concerned the 2008 Constitution. NLD leaders and their supporters hoped to use the 2008 Constitution as a framework to restrain the military and preserve the outcome of the election. We, on the other hand, believed that this era had ended and that the constitution itself must be abolished. People needed to unite not just to defend an election result, but to dismantle the military’s structural role in Burma’s political system.
\n\nAt that time, protests took place almost daily. Public enthusiasm for resisting military rule was overwhelming. Whether or not people fully agreed with our political positions, once a crowd gathered, more people kept joining. During demonstrations, we organized speeches and morale-boosting segments explaining why removing the 2008 constitution was necessary.
\n\nOn March 3, during a protest organized by the General Strike Committee, more than three hundred people were arrested. After that, some groups began making crude explosive devices and noise bombs to push back against police and military repression in the streets. At the same time, the NLD and its supporters began accusing us of resorting to violence. They argued that once protests became violent, the revolution’s image in the international community would suffer.
\n\nOn social media, NLD supporters also labeled the General Strike Committee as communist or leftists. Because of decades of state propaganda portraying communism as a national threat, such accusations easily created suspicion and hostility toward us among the public.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/1.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day”: leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/6.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, “Anti-Fascist Day.” Leftist groups burning the 2008 Constitution on the street in Yangon. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nAfter the military’s bloody crackdown on March 27, large-scale peaceful protests in the cities became almost impossible, and many people went to the jungles to begin armed resistance. But some chose to stay and continue the struggle in urban areas. Could you describe what that period was like?
\n\nMarch 27 was Burma’s Armed Forces Day, known locally as Tatmadaw Day. That day, large anti-coup protests once again broke out in major cities such as Yangon and Mandalay, and we took part as well. The military responded with brutal force, killing hundreds of protesters across the country.
\n\nIt is important to understand the historical meaning of that date. March 27 was once known as Anti-Fascist Resistance Day (ဖက်ဆစ်တော်လှန်ရေးနေ့)and was only renamed Tatmadaw Day in 1955. Originally, it commemorated the birth of the very army that later staged the coup: on March 27, 1945, General Aung San led Burmese forces in an uprising against Japanese fascist occupation. After Burma gained independence in 1948, Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League became the ruling political force.
\n\nSo on that same commemorative day in 2021, people took to the streets to protest against the coup carried out by that army, effectively reclaiming and redefining the meaning of the day through resistance. The massacre that followed demonstrated once again that the force once celebrated as anti-fascist had itself become fascist. After the crackdown, many of us deliberately began referring to March 27 once again as Anti-Fascist Day.
\n\nAnother day we have tried to reclaim is Martyrs’ Day on July 19, which commemorates the assassination of General Aung San. In official narratives, only ethnic Bamar figures are recognized as martyrs. Leaders from minority ethnic groups who died in conflicts with the central state are rarely, if ever, granted that status.
\n\nAfter the March 27 crackdown, it became increasingly difficult to organize peaceful demonstrations in cities. Many of my comrades left for the jungle to receive military training with ethnic armed organizations. Some went to Kachin State along the China-Burma border and Rakhine State bordering Bangladesh to train with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Arakan Army (AA), while others went to the Karen State border region to join the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).
\n\nLater, some who returned from those areas told us that when new arrivals reached the camps, they were often greeted with a simple question as a test: “Are you joining the revolution to liberate the people, or just to free Aung San Suu Kyi?”
\n\nAs for me, I chose to remain in Yangon. From that time on, together with other comrades, we began organizing flash mob strikes—brief, rapidly assembled demonstrations that dispersed before security forces could respond. Many young people enthusiastically joined these actions, allowing resistance in the city to continue, even under increasingly dangerous conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/7.jpg\")
March 27, 2021, a flash mob protest in Kyi Myin Daing, Yangon. The banner says, “We will throw the fascists’ bones into the Bar Ka Yar ravine.” In Kyi Myin Daing, there is a large ravine called Bar Ka Yar. The flag in the photo is ABFSU flag. (Photo: Mar Naw)
\nHow did strategies change for those who stayed in Yangon compared with the earlier phase of resistance?
\n\nFlash mob strikes continued in Yangon until the end of 2021. During this period, our demands were no longer limited to opposing military rule or calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. Instead, we began using protests to communicate broader political messages and bring forward issues that mattered to us.
\n\nAs mentioned before, we worked to reinterpret historical commemorations such as Anti-Fascist Day and Martyrs’ Day. We also pushed discussions about gender issues within the revolution, the impact of mining projects and land confiscation, ethnic relations, and the need to confront long-standing Bamar chauvinism. On anniversaries related to the Rohingya genocide, we organized actions in Muslim neighborhoods that connected solidarity with the Rohingya to broader global struggles, including solidarity movements for Palestine.
\n\nPeople carried banners into the streets expressing remorse for the role that members of the ethnic majority had played, directly or indirectly, in the persecution of the Rohingya. Looking back now, it is clear that while many people sincerely expressed regret, others treated such gestures as tactical tools for anti-coup mobilization; deep down, many still held Bamar nationalist views.
\n\nIn mid-April, the National Unity Government (NUG) was formed in exile, and several leaders from grassroots movements were incorporated into its structure. But many of their strategies and decisions were difficult for us to understand. While young people were still risking their lives by staging flash protests in the streets, the NUG began calling for “silent strikes,” asking people to stay home and shut down economic activity instead of protesting publicly.
\n\nAt the same time, internet shutdowns continued, making communication increasingly difficult. In response, we launched the Molotov Newsletter project in April. Our editorial collective were all leftists and the paper was published weekly.
\n\nWe printed and distributed physical copies in Yangon. The first issue, released in April, received an unexpectedly strong response: we distributed about 5000 printed copies there. Later that same month, the authorities declared it an illegal publication. Ironically, in the atmosphere of that time, this only made it more popular.
\n\nSince it was difficult to reach other regions physically, we uploaded the newspaper’s PDF online so people in different areas could download and distribute it themselves. Each issue received around 30,000 to 50,000 downloads on average.
\n\nSome of those who went to the jungles for training returned to the cities after only a month or two, and armed resistance began to appear in urban areas. Could you talk about that period?
\n\nAround May, some of those who had gone to the jungle for military training began to return to the major cities. They brought weapons with them and began carrying out urban guerrilla operations. Weapons started circulating in Yangon, and from then on, many young people joined flash mob protests during the day and took part in guerrilla actions at night.
\n\nIn August, the military raided an apartment on 44th Street in Yangon that served as a base for a group of young activists. Shortly before the raid, those young activists had planted a bomb beneath an anti-junta banner; when police came to remove the banner, the device exploded.\nLater, we learned how the location had been exposed. A taxi driver who regularly worked with the group had been arrested by the military. He himself had actively supported anti-junta activities after the coup and was someone we trusted. Under brutal interrogation, he was forced to reveal the location of the safe house on 44th Street.
\n\nOn the day of the raid, five people leaped from the rooftop in a desperate attempt to escape arrest. Two were killed instantly when they hit the ground, while three others were critically injured and taken to hospital. Inside the apartment, three more were captured alive. The survivors were later charged with the illegal manufacture and possession of explosives and sent to prison, where two of them died behind bars.
\n\nOnly one person managed to escape that day. He hid for twelve hours beneath a small rooftop “shelter”, barely daring to move as soldiers searched the building below. Under cover of darkness, he finally slipped away and later crossed the border illegally into Mae Sot.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/5.jpg\")
In the beginning of 2024, Ko Htet organized the funeral for the boy who fled 44th Street raid. The funeral turned into a protest. (Photo: El Kylo Mhu)
\nIn the winter of 2023, he fell ill with what should have been a treatable disease, but without proper identification documents, he was unable to receive adequate medical care in Thailand. He eventually died in Mae Sot. I helped organize his funeral, and what began as a farewell soon turned into a protest.
\n\nAfter the 44th Street raid in Yangon, more young people, driven by outrage, joined assassination operations in the city. They named their group the “44th Street Urban Guerrilla Group,” and revenge became a major motivation behind their actions.
\n\nPersonally, I always felt conflicted about these operations. I never actually aimed a gun at anyone. But because I worried about those comrades—most of them Gen Z kids—I often helped in other ways, keeping watch or driving them to and from operations. Step by step, I found myself involved anyway. For me, killing someone, or even seeing someone die in front of me, is extremely difficult to bear. It is a line I have never been able to cross emotionally.
\n\nDuring one of the operations, I saw a military affiliated woman shot. She collapsed right in front of me. For the next two years, she kept appearing in my nightmares.
\n\nOne day in 2023, I received a call from a stranger’s profile on Facebook Messenger. When I answered, it turned out to be one of the comrades from 44th Street who had been arrested. He had briefly gained access to a phone while being taken to court and used the chance to call me. He told me that the woman we believed had been killed was actually alive and was now testifying against him in court. I don’t think he expected my reaction. Hearing that she had survived, I felt an enormous sense of relief.
\n\nDuring that first year after the coup, how would you describe the relationship between leftist movements and the broader anti-coup revolution?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftist organizing was highly structured. The revolution enabled our networks to expand rapidly. Many young people who had previously been apolitical or deliberately kept away from politics became radicalized, while those who already shared similar values were finally able to find one another.
\n\nBoth the streets and the public sphere became spaces where different political forces competed for hegemony within the movement. At that time, one of the slogans raised by the General Strike Committee was “Uproot the Fascist Military,” and it quickly spread and became widely popular. Another slogan people embraced was, “We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains,” from the Communist Manifesto. I even printed these slogans on T-shirts, and they were warmly received by protesters.
\n\nLeftist language began to enter the revolutionary space in a visible way. More and more people used the vocabulary of leftist struggle and anti-fascism in street protests. Through Molotov Newsletter, we tried to provide historical context, explaining what fascism and anti-fascist movements actually meant, so that these slogans would not remain merely emotional expressions but become part of a deeper political consciousness.
\n\nAnti-fascist protest songs were also created from the leftist community to remind people that, historically, many forces that once claimed to fight fascism eventually became oppressive themselves. That was not a path we wanted to follow. For example, when Aung San Suu Kyi stood alongside the military at the International Court of Justice, defending Burma against accusations of genocide, many of us saw that moment as her becoming an accomplice of fascism.6
\n\nDuring your formative years, how were people able to access leftist or anarchist ideas in Burma?
\n\nLeftist forces in Burma have long existed under heavy repression. When I was a teenager, books about contemporary student movements were extremely difficult to find. There were only a handful of books covering Burma’s history after independence. By contrast, there were plenty of works about the monarchy and the British colonial period. In official education, anti-colonial nationalism dominated the historical narrative, while discussions of resistance movements and social struggles after independence were often erased altogether.
\n\nMost writings on post-independence resistance or alternative political thought were published abroad following different waves of exiles, and bringing such books back into the country was difficult and sometimes dangerous.
\n\nBefore 2007, internet access was still very limited in Burma. To hear perspectives that differed from official propaganda, we relied largely on foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC or Radio Free Asia. At the time, some propaganda and literary materials from the Burmese Communist Party circulated, along with a publication called Revolution (အရေးတော်ပုံ), which we could occasionally access online in fragments. We could also find some materials related to the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU). But it is important to remember that, in those days, listening to so-called “enemy radio stations” or reading banned publications could lead to serious punishment, including imprisonment.
\n\nThe ABFSU has been the most important leftist student network in Burma. It was founded in 1936, when Burma was still under British colonial rule, and later played crucial roles both in the struggle for independence and in repeated anti-military movements.
\n\nAfter the military coup in 1962, student protests were brutally crushed, and the regime blew up the historic student union building at Rangoon University. Yet student resistance did not disappear. New waves of student protests erupted in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Then, during the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in 1988—the so-called 8888 Movement—the ABFSU flags returned to the streets and again became a symbol of resistance against military rule. Afterward, the military authorities frequently labeled the organization as a communist front or subversive force. When I was in university, I helped establish an ABFSU branch on my own campus.
\n\nAt the same time, the military’s propaganda machine consistently portrayed the Burmese Communist Party as one of the main sources of national instability and division. Ironically, after General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and established a decades-long military dictatorship, the only legal political party allowed by the regime—the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP)—claimed to follow socialism, promoting what it called the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” which in practice meant economic isolation, centralized control, and authoritarian rule.
\n\nYears of economic decline and social stagnation under this system led many people to associate poverty and repression directly with socialism. As a result, terms like “communism,” “socialism,” and even “leftist” became deeply stigmatized in public discourse. For many people, these words evoked fear or distrust. Because of this historical experience, mobilizing people around leftist ideas has always been extremely difficult in Burma.
\n\nWhen and how did you begin organizing actions in an anarchist way?
\n\nAround late 2013 and early 2014, we began forming anarchist reading groups and building networks for action. It was a very particular political moment. Formal military rule had ended in 2012, but Aung San Suu Kyi had not yet taken office—those years were widely described as a transition period. The military managed what it called a democratic transition; some political prisoners were released, and activities previously banned—such as public gatherings and publishing—became partially legal again. Civil society organizations began to emerge, and for a moment, it felt as if the country was moving toward normalcy.
\n\nAt the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled around the country promoting a strategy of nonviolence and electoral change. She encouraged people to transform Burma through voting, but she did not support protests on the ground. Meanwhile, we became involved in organizing protests around land confiscation affecting farmers, workers’ labor rights, and later the student movement against the Thein Sein government’s National Education Law.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/2.jpg\")
An action carried out by Anonymous Burma in Yangon, 2014.
\nIn 2014, we created a group called Anonymous Burma and began carrying out actions under that name. Even in that period, organizing open street protests was still difficult and risky. So we wore masks, burned parliamentary posters in city centers, and set off fireworks to draw attention. Some people began calling us Burma’s version of “antifa,” and individuals with similar political views contacted us wanting to join.
\n\nZin Lynn, once a legendary leftist activist, now a political prisoner, was also part of our group Anonymous Burma. He had been a leading figure within ABFSU and was also a musician who wrote many revolutionary songs, including the anthem of ABFSU. He introduced generations of young protesters to classic revolutionary songs—writing Burmese lyrics for Bella Ciao, Do You Hear the People Sing, and The Internationale, so they could be sung in the streets, not just remembered from afar. After the violent crackdowns of March 2021, he went to the jungle for military training, later returned to Yangon to participate in urban guerrilla actions, and was arrested in September that year.
\n\nHe remains in prison today. You can see many leftist activists in exile paying tribute to him in their publications and during live performances.
\n\nIt was also during this period in Yangon that we began working with Food Not Bombs Burma. Kyaw Kyaw, the lead singer of the punk band Rebel Riot, had started organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, and many of their political songs deeply influenced us. From then on, Food Not Bombs, Anonymous Burma, and ABFSU often worked together in protests and political/social organizing.
\n\nIn 2015, Burma held its first election of the transition era, and many ordinary people felt hopeful about the country’s future. But our resistance activities continued. That year, we organized what became known as the “Long March,” calling on students to march from Mandalay to Yangon in protest against the newly introduced National Education Law, which centralizes control over universities and increases state—and indirectly military—control over education. Thousands walked 600 km starting from Mandalay, and the government brutally cracked down in Letpadan, a city north of Yangon.
\n\nWith elections approaching, supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were hostile toward our movement. They believed our protests would harm the election and disrupt the democratic transition. In their view, we were causing trouble at a critical political moment.
\n\nIt seems that, faced with the common enemy of military rule, the relationship between the Burma leftists and Aung San Suu Kyi was often ambiguous—sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive.
\n\nIn fact, I have never voted for the National League for Democracy. In 2015, I did not vote. I also did not vote in the 2020 election. At the time, parts of the left started a “No Vote” movement. The only time I ever voted in Burma was during the 2008 constitutional referendum, and I voted against the constitution.
\n\nIn reality, before Aung San Suu Kyi came to power, much of Burma’s left had supported her. Since the 1990 election, ABFSU had strongly backed the NLD. When I was a teenager, I also took part in youth campaigns demanding her release from house arrest.
\n\nHowever, after her release in 2010, we soon realized that we could not agree with many of her policies and political agendas. For instance, while we demanded the complete abolition of the 2008 Constitution, she chose to accept its framework and participate in elections within it. Meanwhile, many large-scale mining projects continued under her administration, including the highly controversial Letpadaung copper mine, where we participated in protests against environmental damage and forced land seizures. Many of these projects had originally been signed during military rule with foreign companies, including Chinese firms. Instead of stopping them, her government responded harshly to local resistance.
\n\nThe same was true for projects such as the Chinese-backed Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, where protests were also suppressed. Her administration promoted economic development and foreign investment, but the result was often land confiscation and the displacement of local communities.
\n\nThe final break came with the Rohingya genocide in 2017. When she traveled to the International Court of Justice, some of us still hoped she might expose the military’s crimes. Instead, she publicly defended the military. Soon afterward, NLD supporters put up posters across the country showing Aung San Suu Kyi standing side by side with military leaders, with the slogan: “We stand with Aung San Suu Kyi.”
\n\nFor many of us on the left, that was the moment of definitive rupture.
\n\nOn October 7, 2023, mainstream “revolutionary circles,” including figures connected to the NUG and many representatives of the Bamar majority, openly expressed pro-Israel positions. Toward the end of 2025, when ABFSU issued a statement condemning what it described as US imperialism following the American intervention in Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro, it triggered intense backlash in Burma, with many people accusing ABFSU of being communist. In your view, when did the left begin to lose its mobilizing power?
\n\nIn the first year after the coup, leftists and anarchists finally found a battlefield where we could play a real role. At that time, we still had strong mobilizing power and were able to bring many left-wing issues into public discussion. Even into 2022, many activities continued, though increasingly underground. But as the initial revolutionary energy began to fade, leftist movements themselves also started to weaken.
\n\nBy 2023 and 2024, the Spring Revolution had entered a period of decline. The military kept advancing and consolidating control, while forces on the revolutionary side became increasingly fragmented and disorganized. Some revolutionary leaders openly made homophobic remarks, and reports of systematic sexual and gender-based violence emerged in certain so-called “liberated areas.” Yet under the banner of revolution, such issues were often deliberately downplayed or concealed, because many feared that internal criticism would weaken resistance against the junta.
\n\nMany comrades I once struggled alongside are now armed. Five years have passed. They are no longer the same people. The gun has become their form of power.
\n\nThose youth joined armed resistance out of anger and hatred toward military rule. But as the war dragged on, problems within the National Unity Government itself became more visible, and many fighters began to feel disillusioned. They had taken up arms to resist oppression, only to find that structures of power and hierarchy also existed within the revolutionary camp, the NUG leadership did not seem fundamentally different from the junta they opposed.
\n\nAs a result, more and more fighters chose to leave the jungles. Because of documentation and mobility restrictions, many could not travel far, and a significant number eventually ended up in border towns like Mae Sot.
\n\nDuring the early phase of the revolution, in Molotov Newsletter, we repeatedly stressed that armed resistance must be guided by political values, or else the struggle could degenerate into fragmented warlordism. But in reality, most People’s Defense Force units today are not politically oriented; their only unifying political position is opposition to the military junta. Similarly, any ethnic armed group that fights the military is automatically seen as a legitimate political force, often without further scrutiny.
\n\nYet many of these armed groups remain organized primarily along ethnic lines, and their political communities are built around ethnic identity. This risks reproducing new forms of ethno-nationalism rather than overcoming them. Even groups widely regarded today as among the most progressive, such as the BPLA (Bamar People’s Liberation Army), still operate within this framework to some extent. The difference is that they are more familiar with progressive discourses, and they attempt to regulate their conduct through such values, which is why they are still seen as one of the few armed groups that seriously engage with political questions.
\n\nNow it is the fifth year after the coup, the military has begun organizing what many observers call a sham election. How do you understand this moment?
\n\nMany people who left their jobs as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) have eventually been forced to return to the very systems they once resisted, simply in order to survive. Others have sought asylum in third countries [after to Thailand]. The boycott movements that began in 2021 have become increasingly difficult to sustain. The military understands this reality very well, and it is precisely under these conditions that it has moved forward with what many see as another staged election.
\n\nSome political forces that stood on the margins of the NLD camp during the early days of the uprising, such as the People’s Party, are now participating in this widely criticized electoral process. At the same time, candidates in the election increasingly speak of “ceasefire” and “peace”—language that would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago, when revolutionary momentum was still there.
\n\nI think that one important reason we have reached this point is that the National Unity Government (NUG) imposed its leadership on what initially was a spontaneous uprising led by young people, especially Gen Z protesters. Soon after the protests began, the NUG emerged, and most of its ministers came from the generation shaped by the 1988 uprising and the 1996 student movement. At the same time, some movement leaders who had strong influence among young people were incorporated into the structure, often as tokens, so that the leadership would not appear completely disconnected from the younger generation.
\n\nFor example, the NUG emphasizes what it calls representative politics—ensuring that women make up around half of leadership positions, or that different ethnic groups are included. But this does not necessarily mean that those women representatives oppose patriarchy, nor that ethnic representatives genuinely fight for the collective right of their communities. Often, such representation serves more as a display of diversity.
\n\nPeople still hate the military junta, but they are also tired of the Spring Revolution itself. Many who once devoted themselves fully to resistance are slowly returning to ordinary life, worn down by reality. I feel this personally. In the first year after the coup, I could devote myself entirely to the revolution. Now, like many others, I also struggle to survive.
\n\nFrom my perspective, the “Spring Revolution” has already failed. This is very difficult to say openly, and after so much sacrifice, many people cannot accept it. But I do not think we can continue living under the illusion that victory is just around the corner. If one day we want to win again, the only path forward may be to return to political education, to organizing young people, and to reclaiming the terrain of ideology and values.
\n\nAt the same time, I must add that my experience and my assessment of the revolution do not represent all leftist resistance fighters in Burma. The comrades who went into the jungles for military training and continue to fight in ethnic armed territories or in regions like Sagaing in central Burma experience the revolution very differently.
\n\nMore recently, in November 2025, the Spring Revolution Alliance formed. Many armed groups joined this alliance and moved away from the leadership of the National Unity Government. They pledged to guide themselves through shared progressive principles. For many people, this alliance still represents a remaining hope for unity within the resistance.
\n\nOn one hand, it feels as though revolutionary momentum is fading. On the other, here in Thailand, it seems that within the Burmese exile community, the “revolution” has become an NGO-driven industry. How do you see this?
\n\nIn fact, this trend did not begin after the Spring Revolution. Its roots go back to the earlier period of democratic transition.
\n\nAfter Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2015, Burma did experience a period of relative opening. For many people, it was the first time they felt Burma was reconnecting with the wider world. It was also during those years that a large number of Western NGOs entered Burma, bringing substantial funding into civil society.
\n\nMany former grassroots activists began establishing their own NGOs and became part of this new institutional ecosystem. Agendas were often shaped by donors, and activists increasingly worked according to funding priorities. Activism gradually became a profession.
\n\nBetween 2015 and 2020, you could clearly see that many projects and programs within civil society were shaped by externally driven agendas, sometimes poorly aligned with the actual needs of communities on the ground. During this process, it was painful to watch how some activists who had once been full of energy and conviction were gradually absorbed—and sometimes corrupted—by the NGO system.
\n\nNow, five years after the coup, we see the emergence of yet another generation of so-called NGO activists. Some use the revolution and people’s suffering to build personal careers—obtaining scholarships abroad, entering international NGO networks, and becoming spokespersons for Burma’s democratic struggle. Yet in reality, many of them are increasingly distant from what is happening on the ground.
\n\nFor my part, I have always followed a different logic. I maintain my own small business so that I can sustain myself independently while participating in social movements. Whether during the transition period or now, my comrades and I have continued to organize according to anarchist principles, relying on crowdfunding and mutual aid rather than writing budgets, applying for grants, or submitting project reports to keep our work going.
\n\nCould you describe how you are involved in social organizing now, in exile?
\n\nAt this stage, most of what I do focuses on organizing within the exile community. I arrived in Mae Sot at the end of 2021. From then on, I stopped my work with the General Strike Committee and shifted toward local community organizing.
\n\nMae Sot hosts a large transient population. Many are young people; many others are families who fled with their children. Quite a number of them once participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement and, after leaving their jobs, were blacklisted by the military authorities. Unable to leave Burma legally, they ended up stuck in this border town in a kind of temporary existence. Mae Sot is also a place of rest and supply for many PDF fighters. Some are still active in jungle-based resistance and only come here occasionally to rest. Others have left the battlefield because of injuries or disillusionment and are trying to survive here for now.
\n\nSome of these people may eventually resettle in third countries, but I believe many will one day return to Burma. For now, almost everyone here lives in a state of suspension—without stable work and without a real home. Yet many revolutionaries do not see these displaced people as part of the revolution anymore. Gradually, I realized that this is exactly where we need to work: organizing those who are stranded in these border spaces.
\n\nSo I started what we call the “Mae Sot Home,” using it as a platform to organize everyday activities—football matches, film screenings, reading groups—to bring together people from very different backgrounds: migrant workers, exiled resistance fighters, Bamar, Karen, and members of Muslim communities. Through these gatherings, we talk about anti-fascism, gender issues, and ethnic relations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/10/3.jpg\")
An iftar during Ramandan in Maesot, 2024. Food Not Bombs Mae Sot providing food to the Muslim community.
\nAt the same time, together with other comrades, we established Food Not Bombs Mae Sot. We cook meals for displaced Burmese refugees, but not in a charitable, top-down way. Instead, we want to convey ideas of mutual aid and solidarity. Some people involved in armed resistance mock or even attack us, saying that now is the time for weapons, and that Food Not Bombs sounds like anti-war activism. But in reality, we were already organizing Food Not Bombs activities in Yangon in the early 2010s, long before the coup. We are fighting the military today so that one day we can live peacefully again—not so that society remains permanently militarized.
\n\nWithin the work of Mae Sot Home, football has become one of our most important organizing tools, partly for safety reasons. Many people here lack legal status, and public gatherings often exist in a gray zone. We once tried to organize a concert and were reported to the authorities, which forced us to change venues at the last minute. Football matches, however, are easier to hold, since the sport is widely accepted and popular locally. More importantly, football has almost no barriers to entry, and Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot already have a strong football culture. It becomes an easy way to bring together young exiles and migrant workers. We also organize women’s teams and youth matches, and during these events, we discuss issues such as domestic violence, gender equality, and anti-fascism.
\n\nSome people who had migrated here before the coup originally felt distant from the revolutionary movement; but through playing football together, they gradually began to engage in conversations and understand the struggles others are facing. At the same time, some young people who arrived after the coup, especially those from big cities, sometimes become absorbed in their identity as “revolutionary exiles” and look down on those who came earlier—often migrant workers or Muslim cross-border traders—seeing them as not progressive enough. But in reality, racism and Bamar chauvinism also exist within the revolutionary movement itself. Rather than constantly drawing lines between friends and enemies, I think it is more important to leave room for people to change.
\n\nBurma’s education system has produced generations shaped by nationalist prejudice. Now, through the ruptures caused by the coup, revolution, and exile, we may finally have a chance to win some of them back.
\n\nMany Burmese anarchists use the English term “Burma” instead of “Myanmar” because of the latter’s association with the ruling military regime since its official adoption in 1989. Other Burmese leftists prefer “Myanmar” despite this association, because “Burma” (also preferred by the liberal National League for Democracy) is linked more closely to the Bamar majority, as well as to British colonialism. The terms are identical in Burmese; the different English spellings represent the literary and colloquial pronunciations. Both terms derive from the Bamar term for their own ethnic group. ↩
\nLaunched after the February 2021 coup, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) of Burma is a nonviolent resistance movement, in which civil servants and workers went on strike and refused to cooperate with the junta, becoming a central force in the Spring Revolution despite severe repression. ↩
\nThe 2008 Constitution, drafted under military rule and approved in a controversial referendum shortly after Cyclone Nargis, is widely seen by opposition forces as a tool to preserve military control. It reserves 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military, effectively granting it veto power over constitutional amendments. ↩
\nThe Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a United Nations-endorsed international norm adopted in 2005, designed to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It posits that sovereignty implies responsibility, and if a state fails to protect its population, the international community must intervene via diplomatic or, as a last resort, military means. ↩
\nThe practice of banging pots and pans from balconies at dusk comes from a traditional Burmese folk belief that making loud noises at twilight drives away evil spirits. ↩
\nIn December 2019, then State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi appeared before the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend Burma against charges that the military had committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims. ↩
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