How the NAACP signed up to abolish ICE

In the summer of 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage at the NAACP’s 47th annual convention in San Francisco. Speaking at the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement, King cautioned that “the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.” Over the next decade, Black Americans’ struggle for racial justice would lead to major victories from the workplace to the ballot box. But today, as King warned, the “old order” clings on, and the civil rights gains fought for in the ’60s are under siege. 

Since last January, the Trump administration has dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and shuttered civil rights offices across the federal government; rejected the legal framework used to protect marginalized groups’ access to jobs, housing, and education. Last month, Donald Trump even told the New York Times that he thought civil rights amounted to “reverse discrimination” against white people.

A year into Trump’s second term, and with months to go until the midterm elections, I spoke with NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson about Trump’s multifront attack on civil rights protections, federal agents’ violent invasion of Minneapolis, resistance to data centers in Black communities across the South, and the role of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in this political moment.

Days before we spoke, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in South Minneapolis, just blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. Johnson, who has presided over the NAACP since 2017, called ICE’s intimidation and harassment of citizens and non-citizens alike, due process violations, and use of racial profiling (greenlighted by the Supreme Court) “something that we have not seen at this level in this country for many, many decades, if ever.”

The NAACP of the 1950s and ’60s—after leading the charge against segregation in the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education—paired its winning legal strategy with support for nonviolent direct action. The year after Brown overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the NAACP provided legal aid to Black Alabamians boycotting segregated buses in Montgomery, and years later, to students protesting discrimination at lunch counters across the South. It even played a pivotal role in planning the 1963 March on Washington. But in the next decade, during the more militant Black Power movement, and into the Reagan years, the organization struggled with the departure of its longtime executive director Roy Wilkins, declining youth membership, and financial challenges.

At the start of the 21st century, the NAACP focused on less confrontational strategies until the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s—and Trump’s election—threw the organization into a new period of uncertainty. Promising a “systemwide refresh,” it dismissed its 18th president in May of 2017. Six months later, Johnson—the interim president and then-head of its Mississippi conference—was elected to the role.

In Trump’s first term, the NAACP took on high-profile court cases like its successful defense of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and since the start of his second, it’s taken a more offensive posture, disinviting the sitting president from last year’s annual conference for the first time in its history, and stepping up its support for more direct, localized action in Black communities resisting aggressive ICE raids and rapidly expanding data centers.

At the end of January, the NAACP launched a campaign calling on senators to block federal funding for ICE, impeach and prosecute Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and, ultimately, abolish the agency completely.

More and more Americans are calling on the government to do the same. More than six in ten respondents in a New York Times/Siena poll— after the fatal shooting of Good on January 7, but a week before federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24—believed that “the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have gone too far.” (Other polls show weakening support, even among Trump’s base, for the president’s immigration agenda, which may make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to hold on to its narrow majority in Congress.)

The same poll found that voters’ primary concern is the economy, where Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted. Data centers cropping up across the country have sent electricity bills surging, contributing to voters’ anger about the cost of living. As the AI industry booms, voters across party lines are pushing back on data center construction in their communities. 

Johnson told me that the NAACP has been “on the frontlines” of the data center resistance, starting with its work in Southwest Memphis, where Elon Musk’s xAI quickly built a data center in 2024, beginning construction last year on a second one on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, with talks of a third in the works. Last July, the organization threatened a lawsuit against xAI over the company’s use of polluting methane gas turbines to power those facilities, which it contends violate the Clean Air Act. Last September, the organization released resources for activists and organizers demanding increased transparency and accountability from the tech giants building this infrastructure. 

After Trump’s second victory, Johnson said it was clear to the group he heads that the administration “would pursue a course of mass distraction” to achieve its goals. Trump first deployed these “distraction tactics”—“othering communities and seeking to erode protections” at home and creating conflict abroad—to push through his tax and spending megabill, Johnson said.

Now, as immigration agents swarm blue cities and tensions escalate with countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, “we believe all of these things in sum total are means by which the administration is trying to avoid the accountability around the Epstein files and releasing them, and to mask the current economic predicament”—including prices that, despite Trump’s promises, continue to rise.

In preparation for the midterms, the NAACP has been “actively engaged in the mid-cycle redistricting process, which is unprecedented,” he told me. In addition to filing lawsuits in states like Texas, the NAACP is “working with policymakers in certain targeted states” to protect Black voters’ access to the ballot box. Last fall, the NAACP also launched a mass mobilization in support of California’s redistricting ballot initiative, Prop 50, as I reported for Mother Jones in November. 

Nearly 70 years after King’s speech, as the NAACP reaches its 117th anniversary—coinciding with a century of Black history commemorations and the nation’s semiquincenntinal—Johnson told me he believes “we are in a setback,” but also “at an inflection point.” 

What’s at stake, he said, is “whether or not we will have a true representative democracy, or something less than that.”