Oppression and resistance: the DHS Diaries
PWS weekly on ICE, Border Patrol, and the brave communities , organizations, and individuals resisting their fascist policies
Minneapolis doubles down on Resistance
After the murders of two Minnesota residents, and the shootings of two more people in Minneapolis by personnel, the White House responded to rising national outrage by dispatching border czar Tom Homan to the state.
Shortly after his arrival, US President Donald Trump and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, called for “de-escalation” of civil resistance to DHS efforts in the city. But neither DHS, nor Minneapolis residents seem to have received the memo.
“There are ‘ICE parties’ now regularly on my block,” one Minneapolis resident told PWS, explaining that the name is ironic. Residents have set up demonstrations in intersections, or roundabouts that hand out flyers, and often food or hot beverages to residents, but restrict access to DHS officers.
“It’s something that is happening across the entire city,” said the resident, who asked that their name be withheld for security reasons. “And they’re happening organically,” he said, “just neighbors watching out for each other. It’s really beautiful.”
At many roadblocks, residents search publicly sourced databases of license plate numbers known to be used by DHS officials in real time on passing cars.
Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, more than 34,000 residents have signed up to be ICE/DHS observers: activists who follow DHS deployments across the city and film them.
Chat groups used by informal neighborhood monitoring that serve as early warning systems for ICE/DHS operations have also exploded, forcing the formation of hundreds of new, hyper-local, chatrooms using apps like Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp.
And from an institutional perspective, although the removal of ‘Commander at Large’ Gregory Bovino, and some of his Border Patrol personnel, migration enforcement operations are very much still underway.
Spain bucks a trend and formalizes half a million undocumented migrants
As many of the governments in the world retreat behind militarized borders, and propaganda that demonizes immigrants, the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), has approved plans to formalize more than half a million undocumented migrants.
PSOE, working with Spanish leftist party Podemos (We can), wants provide ID cards, healthcare, the right to work, and other state benefits, to all foreign citizens within the country informally.
The leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra, said she believed the regularization could benefit between 500,000 and 800,000 people. Funcas, an independent think-tank dedicated to economic and social research in Spain, estimates the figure might be closer to 600,000.
ProPublica names DHS officers who killed Alex Pretti
In a review of public records, the media company identified the two shooters as Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierrez, 35. Both officers are veterans of Border Patrol, and form part of the organization’s “Special Response Unit: — an elite unit that behaves much like a SWAT team.
It would seem that a lack of training is not the issue. They did precisely what they were trained to do.
The ICE Chilling Photo of the Week
The round-up
DHS is using facial recognition software to identify migrants and protesters alike. Some officers in the field have been filmed taking photos of observers for what they describe in comments as a “terrorism database.”
ICE will be playing a vague roll in Italy during the Olympics. This is…weird. And Italians aren’t happy about it, calling them “blackshirts” in public comments — a reference to Mussolini’s fascist enforcers.
US Border patrol shot a migrants in near Nogales last week, and two more died during a high speed with CBP officers. This is where Greg Bovino has been reassigned, presumably because he can kill people there with relative impunity.
ICE says that a man “shattered his own skull by running into a wall" in Minnesota. Hospital staff say that claim is extremely unlikely to have happened.
You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.
And if you can’t do any of that, please do help us by sharing the piece! We don’t have billionaire PR teams either.
Hasta pronto, piratas!
