By Oliver Kaplan
From coast to coast, groups of people are springing up to protect members of their communities as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents threaten them with violent enforcement.
In Portland, Oregon, community volunteers have delivered food boxes to migrant families scared to leave their homes. In Portland, Maine, nearly a thousand people turned out for a virtual American Civil Liberties Union “Know Your Rights” training event. And in Minneapolis and St. Paul, volunteers have formed networks to give warning with whistles and phone apps when ICE is prowling the streets.
As someone who for two decades has studied nonviolent movements in war zones, I see many parallels between these movements abroad and those that have been organized recently across the U.S. The communities I have studied – from Colombia to the Philippines to Syria – teach lessons about surviving in the midst of danger that Americans have been discovering instinctively over the past year.
These experiences show that protection of their neighbors is possible. Violence can bring feelings of fear, isolation and powerlessness, but unity can overcome fear, and nonviolence and discipline are key for denying the powerful pretexts for further escalation and harm.
But at the same time, the deaths of Americans Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were part of a nonviolent movement and were killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis, make it clear that acting to protect neighbors requires courage, and prospects are not always certain.
Here are the core lessons I have learned from the people and the groups I have researched.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
1. Organizing is the first step
Community organizing is the act of building social ties, setting decision-making procedures, sharing information and coordinating activities.
In Colombia, I found that it was the more organized communities with vibrant local councils that were better able to protect themselves by avoiding or opposing violence when caught between heavily armed insurgents, paramilitaries and state forces. These organizations provide reassurance to the more hesitant and encourage more people to join in.
America has a strong civic culture and history of organizing, dating back to the Civil Rights Movement and long before, and Minnesota is known for its strong social cohesion. It’s no wonder so many Minnesotans, as well as Chicagoans, Angelenos and other Americans have organized to aid their neighbors and press for justice.
Make no mistake, the act of organizing itself is powerful. I found that insights from the combatants of armed conflicts shed light on this. A former insurgent I interviewed in Colombia quoted to me an adage of Aristotle and Shakespeare: “A single swallow doesn’t make a summer” – meaning there’s safety in numbers.
A mass of people on its own can shift the calculus and behavior of those with weapons and deter them. It’s why there are now many visuals of ICE agents leaving the scene when outnumbered by community members.
2. Adopting nonviolent strategies
Organizing also enables communities to adopt nonviolent methods for accountability and protection without ratcheting up conflict.
These strategies are less political or partisan, since there is usually consensus around promoting safety, which makes it difficult for political figures to oppose. While recent polling on presidential approval and immigration policy still shows a partisan split, ICE is widely unpopular, and a large majority opposes its aggressive tactics.
Americans have taken up many of these nonviolent strategies. They have established early warning networks just as communities did in the Democratic Republic of Congo to guard against attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group.
Whether with whistles or WhatsApp, such networks of protectors are sharing information with each other to identify threats and come to each other’s aid.
3. Setting up safe zones
Communities in places such as the Philippines have also set up safe zones or “peace zones” to publicize their desire to keep violence away from their residents. This is akin to the declaration of “sanctuary cities” in the U.S. for the issue of immigration.
Communities may also apply different kinds of pressure on armed aggressors. While protest is the most visible approach, dialogue is also possible. Pressure can take the form of persuasion as well as shaming to make trigger-happy agents think twice about what they’re doing and use restraint.
In the U.S., protectors have shown great creativity when it comes to exerting pressure. Grandmas and priests are visible symbols who have influence through their moral and spiritual status. The use of humor and farce – such as protesters dressed in frog suits – can help to de-escalate tensions.
It may not always seem like it, but reputations and concerns about accountability matter, even to bullies. That’s why ICE agents don’t want to be seen enacting violence. Hence the face masks, the snatching of protesters’ phones and the misleading statements by officials about violent encounters.
Elizabeth Flores/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images
4. Finding the facts
In the “fog of war,” the powerful may try to twist the facts and mislead and stigmatize communities and individuals to create pretexts for even greater uses of force.
In Colombia and Afghanistan, armed groups falsely accused individuals of being enemy collaborators. Communities addressed this by conducting their own investigations of those accused, after which community elders could vouch for them.
In the U.S., Americans are recording cellphone videos and collecting community evidence to counter official lies, such as accusations of domestic terrorism – and for future efforts to pursue accountability.
Standing up for others
Finally, what’s known as “accompaniment” is also important.
For example, international humanitarian staff and volunteers have gone to communities in places such as Colombia, Guatemala and South Sudan to let armed groups know that outsiders are watching them and acting as unarmed bodyguards for human rights defenders.
In the U.S., volunteers, citizens and religious leaders have used their less vulnerable social statuses to stand up for noncitizens who are under threat, even positioning themselves between immigration agents and those who may be at risk. People from around the country have also sent messages and traveled in solidarity to the cities and states where operations have been carried out.
Yet that can have consequences even for those who believe themselves less likely to be attacked. An ICE agent on Sept. 19, 2025, shot a clergyman in the head with a pepper ball while he was protesting at an ICE detention facility in Chicago.
Acting to protect oneself, other people and communities can involve risks. But civil society has power, too, and many communities in war zones in other countries have outlasted their oppressors. Americans are learning and doing what civilians in war zones worldwide have done for decades, while also writing their own story in the process.
Oliver Kaplan is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Bo Peep says
Stay on the curb. Display your signs and blow your whistle and you will be safe.
Skibum says
It would have been absolutely wonderful if the Jan. 6 maga insurrectionist mob had heeded such advice, staying outside, calmly waiving all of their “TRUMP” signs and flags, blowing whistles. But instead, they violently attackied U.S. Capitol police as the mob broke windows and assaulted officers who were overwhelmingly outnumbered while trying desperately to keep the rioters outside.
One of the maga insurrectionists, Ashli Babbit, would never have been shot and killed inside the Capitol building as she tried to force her way into the chambers where members of Congress were huddled and being protected by Capitol police and secret service agents. Hundreds of police officers would never have been seriously wounded that day. Millions of dollars in damage to the Capitol building would never have occurred had the maga mob peacefully protested while voicing their unfounded and false claims of election fraud that the idiot orange faced president was spouting to his faithful mush brains.
So I have to ask, Bo Peep, having the awesome 20-20 hindsight you apparently have in giving the warning you wrote above, what document, or news website, or social media posting or ANYTHING did you write the same, after the fact comment about all of the maga mob insurrectionists who violated every peaceful law possible when they violently attacked not only the U.S. Capitol building but actual, live police officers who were there simply to protect all of the members of Congress and VP Pence who had assembled to do their constitutionally required jobs and certify the presidential election?
Please enlighten us, because if YOU kept your mouth shut then when all the nation was aghast at the violence on that day, then all I can say to you now is SHUT THE HELL UP!
Ray W. says
Are you suggesting that stepping off a curb justifies a loss of safety? Has the bar really been set that low? Who set it that low? When it was set that low, was it an arbitrary and capricious decision? When the protestor wearing an inflatable penis while walking on grass far from a curb was tackled by two state troopers, should she have known that she was supposed to be on the curb and not on the grass?
Laurel says
That would have been a prophylactic response.
Sorry, I couldn’t let it go!
Actually, what Bo Peep is promoting is the authoritarians message for us to shut up and sit down, while our country is overtaken.
Sherry says
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/g-s1-108426/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-immigration-mistaken-deportations
Sherry says
A recently unveiled memo from the Department of Justice indicates Donald Trump’s administration plans to “maximally pursue” denaturalization of American citizens, marking a radical expansion of the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
According to the June 11 memo, the Justice Department’s civil division will “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.”
The agency intends to take action against citizens who it believes “pose a potential danger to national security,” or who officials claim have acquired their citizenship through “material misrepresentations.” The division also notes that it could pursue denaturalization in “any other cases” that officials believe are “sufficiently important to pursue.”
“These categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance,” according to the memo.
Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups warn that such sweeping guidelines — fueled by a politically motivated agenda — could end up targeting a broad spectrum of U.S. citizens.
The Justice Department is commanding prosecutors to ‘prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings’ as Trump seeks to ramp up immigrant removals from the United States
Republicans are calling on Trump to revoke Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him
Supreme Court gives Trump more power after ‘birthright citizenship’ ruling curbs nationwide injunctions
How Trump’s deportation push created 1 million MORE undocumented people
Is that legal?
Trump wouldn’t be the first president to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens, but it’s an exceedingly rare measure; the government pursued an average of 11 denaturalization cases between 1990 and 2017, when the first Trump administration began ramping up efforts to strip American citizenship, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Roughly 25 million people in the United States are naturalized citizens, or immigrants who completed the lengthy legal process to become a citizen.
Skibum says
Melania has been complicit in her horrible husband’s purge of immigrants, including naturalized citizens like herself. She has never spoken out, spoken up for other immigrants. She had the gall to actually wear a coat in public during the first administration with the words “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U” emblazoned on the back side for all to see.
As an accomplice to what her felon husband is doing to other immigrants, other naturalized U.S. citizens, she needs to voluntarily renounce her U.S. citizenship or be “denaturalized” and deported to Slovenia just like the other naturalized citizens of this nation who’s only “crime” is standing up for their families and friends and speaking out about the abuse and inexcusable discrimination by this corrupt, mob mentality president and his accomplices in his administration.
Laurel says
Melania is completely transactional. She’s safe.
Michael Cocchiola says
Resistance does incur risk, but I believe the nonviolent resistance movements that have gained a foothold in communities across the nation are proving fruitful. They will continue to grow in size and impact, as they must.
ICE Out, America.
Ray W. says
A number of FlaglerLive commenters describe undocumented immigrants crossing the border en masse an invasion.
Here is how our federal legislature describes the act.
Under 8 U. S. Code, section 1325, titled: Improper entry by alien, the minor misdemeanor offense occurs, among two other option not relevant to the issue, whenever an undocumented immigrant is “apprehended while entering (or attempting to enter)” the country.
Actually remaining in the country after improperly entering without apprehension is not a crime at all; it is a civil offense.
I accept that the human condition permits exaggeration, wild or irrational, minor or rational.
Something tells me that if we are indeed a nation of laws, our federal laws describe improper entry as a minor misdemeanor punishable by no more than six months in jail and/or a fine of between $50 and $250, a punishment inconsistent with a crime of “invading” a country.
As an aside, neither Florida nor the federal government has a crime of “invasion”, en manse or not.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Something tells me that invasion is a political issue, not a rule of law issue.
Sherry says
During the congressional hearing this morning with questions put to leaders of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services. . . I noticed some Republicans couldn’t even bring themselves to call “ANY” protest anything but a “RIOT”. Way to “respect” our citizens’ constitutional rights . . . Republicans!
It was appalling to see that NONE of the despicable leaders of those agencies (Todd Lyons, Rodney Scott and Joseph Edlow) would even agree that Renee Good and Aex Pretti were not “Domestic Terrorists”! They would not even agree that those two US citizens should not have been killed.
You should all find those hearings online and see for yourself just how horrific our government has become.