The architecture of resistance: America’s year of mobilizing against ICE

A post appeared in Mercie’s feed. “Protect my community. Patrolling is love.” 

Her family had lived in Los Angeles for five generations. She didn’t know what it meant by “patrolling”—immigration raids had been a vague idea until rumors of masked federal agents disrupted her son’s fifth-grade graduation.

She sent a message.

The reply told her to meet at 5 a.m. in an empty parking lot attached to a derelict shopping center. Within minutes, she was in a stranger’s car, scanning for ICE. Within months, she had a second family.

When the Department of Homeland Security, early in President Donald Trump’s second term, began occupying American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, it sparked resistance so rapid and so well organized that the White House and its allies insisted they were facing paid agents. Millions of people swiftly found roles from 3D-printing whistles to logging ICE vehicles’ license plates to feeding and sheltering displaced families—many remaining active in the face of continuing raids, killings, and mass detentions, and adapting as ICE became more powerful, mobile and difficult to track.

What looked spontaneous was the product of years of organizing.

In the wake of Los Angeles’ 1965 Watts uprisings, neighborhood residents calling themselves the Community Alert Patrol began gathering reams of data on Los Angeles police, tracking badge numbers, patrol cars, locations, and witnesses. The idea was adopted by the Black Panther Party, and later the San Diego–based Uníon del Barrio, which in the early 1990s began training locals to monitor the Border Patrol.

Those decades of quiet work are part of the reason, by the time of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in December, that nearly every coffee shop, bookstore, or restaurant in Minneapolis featured whistles and know-your-rights guides at checkout counters and side tables, many translated into Spanish, Somali, and Hmong. They help explain how businesses became clandestine meeting spaces, how churches organized their parishioners, and how commutes to work became patrols.

Now, as the White House again ramps up ICE activity, those networks of teachers, parents, clergy, shopowners, and retirees are still in place, subjecting the agency to constant scrutiny and protest and limiting where and how it can deploy.

We spoke to dozens of people in communities facing down ICE—in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the San Francisco Bay Area—to ask what motivated them to resist and how they became part of an ongoing movement of unprecedented size and scope, tracing the architecture of resistance: the invisible mesh that drew neighbors into encrypted chats and pre-dawn meetings in abandoned lots. It’s the story of how ordinary people inherited that playbook, adapted it to a new machinery of enforcement, and, at times, rebuilt their lives around it.

Mercie as told to Daniella Jiménez

A fifth-generation resident of San Pedro, Los Angeles, Mercie had spent years watching the neighborhood and the routines of family life. When ICE began showing up, she answered a Facebook post with a simple invitation.

I was at home one day, and a Facebook post came up: “Protect my community. Patrolling is love.”

And I said, “Yeah, I can do that. I don’t know what patrolling is, but I can do anything, so I can go check it out”—not knowing if this could potentially be an ICE trap. This person messaged me back and said, “Hey, meet me at five o’clock in the morning in this empty parking lot in town.”

It felt really, really weird and very scary.

There were maybe seven people. They let me know what I was going to do, paired up, and they were like, “Get in the car.”

Within 10 minutes, after a very quick rundown, you’re in a car with a stranger, driving around the community, taking pictures, not really quite sure that you’re doing the right thing.

None of us really knew at the time what we were supposed to be doing, but we went out there and we tried it anyway. Now I would trust all of those people with my life.

I’ve lived in San Pedro my whole life. I’m fifth generation. As a kid, it was not something I ever thought I’d have to see. Those things don’t happen here. We have night markets. We walk to school. Immigration doesn’t come here—that’s just something that my aunts and my uncles and grandparents talk about seeing as kids.

But having it right in front of your face every single day, and seeing families and places that I go to with my kids, with my dad, with my aunts, being attacked by these individuals, it made it so brutal to the point that—how can you possibly ignore this? How can you keep your head down anymore?

I love our weirdos on the patrol. It’s part of the reason why I keep coming back. Every time I came back, I was like, Okay, are we getting a new person today?

My life has been absolutely 360 through this, from moving, to divorcing, to restructuring how I parent my kids. I remember feeling such love in this group all the time that made me feel braver as a person and made me feel like I could be a person that I feel like I’ve lost for a very long time.

I’ve told them all that my life is infinitely better now than it ever was. I know there are people I could call any hour of the day, and have had to call, because you really can’t do it without community. I didn’t really know what that was until I met all of these people.

I know my future is going to be much brighter. I know I can do anything, and what I can’t do, there’s somebody I can call. If they can’t do it, they have somebody they can call.

Iris Delgado as told to Daniella Jiménez and Ellie Prickett-Morgan

Iris didn’t set out to build a rapid response network; she started a run club. But a Home Depot across from their regular meet-up point became the center of an ICE operation. We walked with Iris at the same spot.

It was a little before 8 a.m. One of our runners sent some pictures to the run club chat: “I think ICE just came and took some of the jornaleros.”

I got there 10 minutes later. 

That was the first major hit. We didn’t have any kind of rapid response. So I made a story describing what I saw and what happened. We had a video. We had witnesses.

All of a sudden, the Huntington Park Run Club became dispatchers. Somebody would send me something, I would put it on the WhatsApp chat, and someone else would respond.

Then we would also get into the habit of asking around: “Hey, did you see anything out here?” And someone would say, “Oh, you know what? I did.”

Because we had such a large network of runners, running on their own all the time, we would always get people who, if they saw something on their routes, would send something in the chat. It was an acknowledgment that this happened in a place that we run. This happened in a place that we live. 

Then one of the members of our community was struck by a vehicle. She died, and she was someone very dear to us. It hit all of us very hard.

All of a sudden, we became a pedestrian and cyclist safety group. Then all of the stuff started happening around ICE. It just so happened that we were already outside in the mornings, running, and we already had a pretty established group. 

We learned a lot about know-your-rights information, about how to make sure the community members that were affected, the neighbors, the people, were taken care of and connected to legal resources. From the Huntington Park Run Club grew the Southeast LA Rapid Response Network.

I felt like, Oh man, what are we getting ourselves into? But with ICE activity, it was a direct threat to the safety of our community and still is.

One of the things that really stood out for us was seeing community members being chased by ICE and running. Sometimes they get away. Sometimes they don’t.

We were running for joy, running for leisure, running for peace, while others were running to escape, literally escape their deportation, or their forced removal, or their separation from their kids. It made us think about how political running is.

At the beginning, I felt very overwhelmed. I was like, how did I become this person that people are relying on for information, for resources, for support? I’m [still] not very active in terms of showing my face. I’m not like, “This is me. I’m the one.” It’s all of us. We’re all the ones.

Lindsey Joyce as told to Ellie-Prickett Morgan

Reverend Lindsey Joyce is a pastor at Grace Church of Logan Square in Chicago.

I think it’s hard for people who haven’t experienced this to understand, which is why I feel an affinity for folks in LA and Minneapolis and Portland and DC. It’s hard to impress on people how much this was not immigration enforcement in any way, shape, or form. There was a moment where I’m standing with my whistle next to a dad in a Bluey shirt, outside of my kids’ school, and I’m like, “What the fuck is happening? What are we doing here?”

The former mayor [of Chicago] lives two blocks from our church. When everything was happening with the George Floyd uprisings, the police shut down her street. The corner where we are became a place of constant protest.

We started working on protest response. We had a lot of first aid stuff on hand, we got folks trained in de-escalation. People could come in and get warm or cool down. We made the choice that if we’re going to be a safe place for protesters, we can’t be a place for police. 

This was our outreach for almost two years. When all of the community defense work started, we’d already built that infrastructure. I don’t know that this last fall changed us as much as it solidified who we are.

“It wasn’t like any of us were ever like, ‘Hey, we want to go get beat up.’”

If you look on our bulletin board, we still have flyers up for the bike patrol. We have a flyer that says “fuck ICE.” My administrator, who I love really deeply, crossed out the “fuck” with a permanent marker ’cause she’s like, “This is a church.” But she kept the “chinga la migra,” which is really funny, ’cause she speaks Spanish. 

One thing we did realize was that the media really loved stories about clergy getting beat up. It wasn’t like any of us were ever like, “Hey, we want to go get beat up.” We just knew if we showed up at Broadview, there was a chance it would happen, because it kept happening.

My husband and I love horror movies, and we always laugh at the person who’s like, “I heard a noise, I’m going to go check it out.” But when I was there and they started shooting rubber bullets, I had a parishioner up front. So I ran up, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m that person.” I didn’t realize that’s how my body would react, but you learn a lot about yourself in that space.

My congregant had been in the front lines moving forwards, linking arms with folks. As I ran up there in my N95, the tear gas, it just takes you out. You can’t breathe. You feel like you’re choking. Once I checked that he was okay, I felt pinpricks in my leg and realized I had been [hit with debris from] pepper bullets.

We moved back to where they weren’t attacking us. This young man in particular was someone I had baptized a couple years before. There was this very interesting moment for us where he had knelt and I had put the water on his head. He could tell I was struggling, and pulled me aside. He had me tip my head up and was pouring water on my head and my face, and we both had this moment of, “Oh, wow, these things are connected.”

Julian Jackson as told to Ellie Prickett-Morgan

In the first Trump administration, Julian Jackson joined Protect RP, a rapid response group in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood that now trains people across state lines.

I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in a Christian commune—part of the Jesus freak movement in the 1970s. I grew up as an urban Mennonite. The caricature of Mennonites all learning carpentry was at least true for me. I worked my way through college as a theater carpenter. I met my wife in a play.

Reaching back to that theatrical experience, I formed a group of people to portray these ICE agents and teach people not only situational awareness, proper distancing, but so they experience what it is to be confronted by angry, aggressive, large, often men—so people can ask themselves, “How am I going to react to this?”

Have you ever seen the movie Pulp Fiction? There’s this moment where Ving Rhames’ character is just sitting there at a red light, he’s been looking for Bruce Willis the whole movie, and Bruce Willis just walks across.

We knew that ICE were in the area, but we were having trouble finding them. I had come across a friend by the hardware store. He was like, “Have you seen anything?”

“One by one, other people peeled off. I was going to chase them no matter what.”

The words were coming out of my mouth—“I haven’t seen them yet”—and I look back over, and there are two ICE vehicles right there. You can see the guys in military garb inside.

So I hopped on my bike and started chasing them. 

Biking while blowing a whistle is difficult, but I was attempting it. Almost immediately, there were people on scooters, there was another person on a bike, there were cars that joined in this chase.

They were trying to lose us by circling through the Loyola [University Chicago] campus. These guys were driving like crazy. They took off up Sheridan Road, one of the very few straight shots we have in Rogers Park. One by one, other people peeled off. I was going to chase them no matter what.

That was probably the first time I had my picture taken. An agent reached out the window and tried to take my picture. I had a whistle in my mouth, a helmet on my head, and I’m sure I was five shades redder than I usually am.

I had chased them for [what] must have been a couple of miles. Eventually, I couldn’t go any further. I hopped off my bike and I threw up, because I’d just gone to complete exhaustion.

We train for all of these things, we try to protect our neighbors, and we still have neighbors who get abducted. While we believe that it makes it harder for them to just grab people off the street, we also feel every one of those failures really deeply.

There was a Sunday morning—we had started patrols, but we really had not been truly tested. I got a call that ICE had abducted somebody right here on Clark Street. I raced over.

We were a couple of minutes too late. But we saw the neighborhood start to activate in the ways that we had been training for. People started turning out on the street corners with orange whistles. 

Almost immediately, there was another abduction right along the train tracks, a little bit further down. I was one of the first on the scene, but there were four or five other people there with me. We saw it from start to finish.

We went through our training of documentation, trying to get the number of the person who was being abducted, challenging the legality of this particular arrest—because they were just grabbing this guy for walking down the street.

My hands were shaking. I double-tapped the button, so I took a picture rather than filming. Fortunately, somebody else had the film.

To see one of our neighbors get grabbed and thrown in the back of a truck by masked people was, frankly, a little bit traumatic. We try to get people used to the idea that you’re going to see things; you’re going to see people who are aggressive and violent in ways that you are just not used to.

I know that Black and brown communities have been affected by this kind of enforcement in the past, but let’s be frank, very few white communities have seen that. It’s very difficult to prepare for that.

Adam as told to Renée Bartlett-Webber

Adam, an attorney, spent a year preparing for immigration agents’ arrival in the San Francisco Bay Area. When we spoke, he was chatting with neighbors and new friends as they threaded lanyards through 3D-printed whistles.

I can’t believe how much more efficient we are now. We ran out of materials.  We don’t have enough lanyards, so we don’t have whistles.   We’ve started figuring out that this is the right method. There’s more people here than there were at the last one.

I felt like I couldn’t wait. It was a cumulative effect. One little thing happens, and you’re like, “Oh, maybe it’s not so bad.” Then another one happens. You try to convince yourself that maybe it’s not what you think it is. And it really hit me hard that it wasn’t going to get better. 

 My daughter is trans.  Seeing a bully go after people that don’t have a lot of power makes you realize they’ll never stop until you stop them.  So it just really struck home that it was immigrants today, but it’s gonna be trans people next. We’re all on the list.

I set about trying to get much more involved.  I went to a lot of meetings. I wanted to find people who were action-oriented.

I’ve been a corporate attorney for 20-plus years. My work world is obviously very capitalistic.  But it has made it so that I feel very comfortable operating against ICE because I know the law and I know my place in it.

We know that ICE had been patrolling some of the local food banks. We’ve helped organize watches there and at schools. We’re thinking a lot about how to do food delivery  to people that don’t feel comfortable leaving the house.

One of the things that we’ve been doing too is going to the businesses in our community to tell them these are your rights, the rights of your customers, of your employees, and these are things you can do.  You should know that you have the right to have a private area where nobody, not even ICE is allowed in. They need a warrant.

I never thought that the government would be at war against its own people. And I never thought that Americans would be so willing to let their fundamental rights go. They rolled right over. 

Emily Phillips as told to Renée Bartlett-Webber

Emily Phillips started out by joining a weekly protest. Eventually, she moved from Wisconsin to Minneapolis—and now crosses the country to go up against ICE.

My roommate said, “Hey, there’s a raid going on right now.” We got in the car and went together. We got separated. I got pepper sprayed, point blank.  Some stranger drove me home after taking care of me and walked me up to my door. We were already sitting down to talk about how horrible things were, and then the first major raid of this series happened.  It was in mid-November. 

I had never been pepper sprayed or tear gassed before that. By December, it was a good day if we weren’t getting tear gassed.

The Whipple Building is the regional headquarters, so that’s where our Wisconsin people are processed as well. It’s a  one-and-a-half, two-hour drive each way. 

 At first, I started going to a protest that was like a prayer vigil— just people holding signs. Then we started Wednesday protests— turning up the heat a little bit, yelling at them with megaphones, playing speakers.

 And then we added a Friday protest.  It was maybe even a little spicier—swear a little more, play harder-hitting songs.

I was going to the Whipple once or twice a week, and then it became four or five times a week [when]  I moved here. 

 We definitely saw activity pick up. They were being really aggressive towards us. They would try to hit protesters in the street, actively swerving at us. They would brandish pepper spray out their windows at us. They started trying to intimidate me by name. Out of their PA system, they’d be like, “Emily, you’re so weird,” or “Hi, Emily.”

In Minneapolis, there’s a gap between the people we’re trying to protect and the people out doing the protecting.  Delaney is actually a completely different experience. You can see them in the windows. They’re locked in there. There’s a helplessness about it. But they can hear you. Seeing someone pump their fist in time with your chant is a feeling I can’t describe.  It makes you want to act bolder in other areas, because there’s nothing else you can do. So the temperature has been a lot higher as far as what protesters are willing to do, putting their bodies on the lines because that is your only option.

We would go home at the end of the night and just be like, “Well, time for a good cry,” because it’s hard to watch your friends get beat up every day. It’s hard to get beat up every day and keep going back out there. But the goal of this regime is to scare us out of resisting. And all of us know that at any point we could die for this—just like they did to Renée Good and Alex Pretti and Keith Porter. Our job is to show up and be brave anyway.

Maya Suzuki Daniels as told to Daniella Jiménez and Ellie-Prickett Morgan

Maya Suzuki Daniels co-organized a group called the Harbor Area Peace Patrol after her husband received a call saying ICE was en route to their two-year-old’s day care.

So the daycare call was Tuesday, the training was on Wednesday, and we were rolling by Friday morning. We had binders immediately. I’m a teacher. If you want to get shit done, you need binders.

The day before we started patrolling, before we knew what we were doing, my son and I drove around to try to spot ICE. There was a whiteboard in the backseat, and he was tallying the blocks we went down: “ICE, no ICE.”

We knew they were out on Terminal Island because we’d gotten a call. We started documenting them leaving. Over time, it got more formalized. One of [us] had an encyclopedic knowledge of the license plates they’ve used down here. People were sending our BOLOs to street vendors and rapid response networks. People were taking our data and putting it into different databases and platforms.

One of our patrollers took a photo of a car that later that day was at a Home Depot [where] there were people also doing self-defense work. Someone was able to see the car and clear the area before anybody was taken. 

When you know that you played a part in someone going home to their family that night, then it makes sense why you would drive an hour before dawn to do this.

But do you know that we won? We won. They don’t stage on Terminal Island.

That happened on Feburary 13.

February 19 is the Japanese American Day of Remembrance, and it honors everyone who was forcibly displaced from the Japanese fishing memorial. I’m Japanese American. The whole nine months, Terminal Island had been our second home, but the kids had never been able to go out there because it hadn’t been safe. So we wanted to do a ceremony out there and fold paper cranes. I got to bring my kids, and other people brought their kids.

So much of the work is thankless and tireless, but when you do win, there is a high that you just don’t get over. For them to get to experience our family’s history—my family went to [a Japanese American incarceration] camp—and my kids led the paper crane lesson, that was the best win. I know my son is going to remember this and carry this.

I always worry, as a teacher and a mom, that this work is taking me away from my family. But they’re always learning, and they love going to patrol events because they have a whole community of people. 

And [my husband] Elijah, I just have a lot more admiration for him, because he stayed steady the whole time. We’ve been together for 17 years. We had never really worked on a project like this together before. During the summer, one of us was patrolling every day, and we would just switch back and forth. He was my voice of caution, but 100 percent behind the things we were doing. We had a mutual understanding of each other’s gifts and strengths.

Maybe that’s the best thing I got out of this: he believed in me, he knew I could do it. So then I did.

Ron Gochez as told to Daniella Jiménez and Ellie Prickett-Morgan

Ron Gochez teaches high school history in a Los Angeles public high school. The lessons have not stayed inside the classroom.

On Monday, I was showing my kids Schindler’s List, the scenes where the Nazis are rounding up Jewish people and taking them to the ghettos.

I didn’t say anything. The kids were like, “Mister, it’s like what’s happening right now.”

I was explaining to them that they didn’t start killing the Jews on day one. They started criminalizing them. Then they started deporting them. Then they started putting them in camps.

We don’t have to spell it out for them. They see these connections.

There’s a saying we use in Spanish: El maestro luchando también está enseñando. The teacher in struggle is also teaching. I can teach them in the classroom, and that’s great, but they also see the work that we do in the street. That’s the lesson too.

In the last several months, I’ve gotten calls on social media from former students saying, “Hey, Mr. Gochez, ICE is here,” or, “How can I join the organization?” 

Yes, I want you to get good grades. Yes, I want you to go to UCLA, or Cal, or whatever. But that’s not going to be a solution. I started organizing my sophomore year at San Diego State. That close to the border, Border Patrol was a daily reality. The organization had already started doing community patrols years before, in 1992.

We got the idea from the Black Panthers, who did their community patrols in Oakland. We’re not reinventing the wheel here. We’re not armed [like they were]. But the concept of being in your community, organizing yourself, looking out for them before they look for you, that’s the point.

In those days, it was pretty much members only who were doing that work. We had people arrested. We had people beaten. We learned from those experiences, and years later, we’ve been able to use that to train people.

We didn’t start from scratch. We didn’t start with the second Trump administration. 

Even if [someone’s] only been a member for six months, they carry that legacy and that knowledge from decades of work. Even though they’re new, they’re going to be given the training that took us decades to learn.

When Trump won in November 2024, we knew it was coming. We contacted maybe six organizations that we have a long relationship with, that we trust. The first Community Self-Defense Coalition meeting and actions were in February of 2025. By the time we announced it publicly, I think we already had at least 40 organizations.

From February until June, we trained eight to ten thousand people. That’s a lot, because we’re all full-time workers. It’s all on our off time, weekends and after work.

We start the patrols at 5:30 in the morning because that’s when they’re staging. That’s when they have their little meetings in parking lots. Ideally, that’s when we find them, because that’s when we can disrupt their operation. We can start telling people, “Hey, they’re here. Lock your doors. Don’t come outside.” We would tell the neighbors, “If you’re undocumented, stay inside. If you are documented, come out. Join us to help us defend your neighbor.”

We had the National Guard, we had the Marines, which weren’t sent anywhere else, and the highest number of agents anywhere in the country. What would it be like if it wasn’t for the organized resistance we’ve been able to build?

This article was produced in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.