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This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Tomorrow’s midterm elections are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Prior studies have found strong associations between protest and U.S. election outcomes, including the 2010 and 2018 midterm elections. Protests can influence popular opinion on policy issues, boost turnout among eligible voters, and shape how candidates set policy priorities.

At the Crowd Counting Consortium, or CCC, we have tallied an extraordinary number of protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. The majority of protests in Trump’s second term so far have named democracy or the presidency itself as a primary claim — think the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests in 2025 and 2026. 

But among protests focused on more specific policy domains, one key theme stands out. The administration’s anti-immigration policies and expansive, violent crackdown on immigrants have generated active, grassroots support networks in neighborhoods across the country and fueled a wave of protests in support of immigrants’ rights. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul, protests took place in over 30 percent of counties containing 80 percent of the nation’s population. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history. A significant proportion of these protests occurred in counties that Trump won in 2024. 

Trends in immigration-related protests since January 20, 2017

Of course, the current wave of protest builds on a longer-term foundation of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Since the CCC started collecting data on protest in the United States in 2017, we’ve seen that protests against the federal government’s immigration policies have been a constant feature of the protest landscape across all three presidential administrations — Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Immigration protest events as a share of all left/liberal protests

Little more than a week after Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, numerous protests took place around the country in response to his Jan. 27 signing of Executive Order 13769, sometimes called the “Muslim Ban,” which restricted citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. On Jan. 28 and 29, mass protests occurred in and around airports, where immigrant rights groups and community members assembled to ensure the safe arrival of citizens of those countries who were in transit when the executive order went into effect. Protests against the executive order continued in February 2017 under the slogan “No Ban No Wall.” The Trump administration ultimately revised the executive order to a narrower version that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as lawful; multiple protests followed on June 26, 2018. 

But the biggest jumps in protest participation came on coordinated, nationwide days of action related to the administration’s immigration policies. The first, on June 30, 2018, was a national day of action declaring that “Families Belong Together.” These protests demanded an end to the administration’s “child separation policy” — the practice of separating migrant children from parents and caretakers upon arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border — which was in effect under the Obama administration but escalated under Trump. This protest campaign was highly effective: The pressure placed on the administration led the White House to end the policy through an executive order, though loopholes remained.

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On Jan. 19, 2019, the third annual Women’s March on Washington represented an additional increase in coordinated nationwide protests in which immigrants’ rights were a core issue. And July 12, 2019 saw the Lights for Liberty day of action, which attempted to pressure elected officials (particularly in the newly Democratic Congress) to close detention centers and adopt more humane immigration policies. Ultimately, congressional Democrats introduced legislation in 2021 to reunite immigrant children with their families. In sum, the first Trump administration saw an impressive range of protests on behalf of immigrants’ rights, some of which had powerful impacts. 

Overall, the Biden administration saw a decline in such protests, with about 60 percent fewer than during the first Trump administration (seven percent to 11 percent as a share of overall left/liberal protests, respectively). Notable days of action during the Biden administration included continued protests calling for closure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers, as well as protests against ongoing family detention and separation practices, and protests against asylum restrictions during a major surge in deportations in 2024. 

During the second Trump administration, such protests have seen a breathtaking rise. 

Figure 1 provides a comparative view of the number of immigration-related protests under the second Trump administration, compared to the first. The y-axis, showing the cumulative number of immigration-related protests since Trump’s two inaugurations, demonstrates the massive scale and steady climb of protests during his second term so far.

Figure 1: Counts of pro-immigrant protest events during Trump’s first and second terms

Figure 2 shows the frequency of such events on a monthly basis. There have been more protests in support of immigrants in seven of the months since January 2025 than in any of the 48 months of Trump’s first term. In 10 of the first 17 months of the current term, protests against Trump’s immigration policies made up over 20 percent of total protests. Few other protest claims have animated the public with such enduring salience over time.

Figure 2: Pro-immigrant protests in the U.S., January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Figure 2 also shows clear increases in the number of immigration-related protests during nationwide anti-Trump protests. Spikes in activity occurred on April 19, 2025 during the Hands Off protests; on October 18, 2025, when many No Kings protests adopted opposition to ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda as a central claim; and on March 28, 2026, when the third No Kings protests again made immigration a primary claim. Our tallies have also documented 170 repeater events (protests that are scheduled to take place daily, weekly or monthly) that specifically mention immigrant rights or opposition to ICE in their stated claims.

In Illinois and Minnesota, protests started local and went national

Trump’s immigration policies have produced particularly intense local mobilizations in areas that saw escalated ICE deployments, which then diffused to solidarity protests nationwide. For example, from early September to mid-November 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz targeting immigrants in Chicago. During that period, the CCC documented 3,491 protest events in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies, starting in Chicago and spreading across the country during the No Kings mobilization on Oct. 18, 2025, which named immigration as a central issue.

Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, also provoked powerful opposition locally and beyond, with over 4,400 protests taking place between Dec. 2, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026. Significant numbers of protests responded to specific, publicized government abuses, such as aggressive law enforcement actions against immigrants, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the detention of a 5-year-old child of a Colombian immigrant. Three waves of action stood out: the ICE Out For Good weekend of action on Jan. 10-11; the Day of Truth & Freedom on Jan. 23, which was concentrated in Minnesota; and the National Shutdown and ICE Out of Everywhere actions, which mainly spanned Jan. 30-31, with some events lasting into Feb. 1. 

Figure 3 shows the number of counties that saw pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, after Operation Midway began in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Overall, these two states saw higher-than-average numbers of counties featuring protests, including among counties far afield from the major cities in which ICE focused its deployments. 

Figure 3. Pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota during and after ICE operations in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul

Nationwide, the total volume of protest produced during early 2026 is extraordinary. 

January 2026 alone featured the fourth-most protest events recorded in all 10 years of CCC data, owing to the massive number of protests in Minnesota and around the country in opposition to Operation Metro Surge and its impacts, and to Trump’s immigration agenda in general. 

And the events in Minnesota seem to have been a flashpoint. Anti-ICE protests continued in February and March 2026, and anti-ICE claims were central to the nationwide No Kings mobilization on March 28. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history (see Table 2).

Table 2: Top 10 months by total protest events, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Protests opposing Trump’s immigration policies were reported in 933 counties during Operation Metro Surge, between Dec. 2, 2025 and Feb. 1, 2026 — about 30 percent of all counties in the U.S. These counties were densely populated: Together, they contain more than 80 percent of the U.S. population (see Figure 4). From March 2026 through May 2026, the CCC continued to record thousands of events protesting ICE, with hundreds of distinct civic organizations and hundreds of thousands of people participating. 

Figure 4: U.S. immigration protests following ICE deployments to Minneapolis

Nor are protests against ICE operations an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Instead, there has been a stark increase over time in the number of pro-immigrant protests in counties that Trump won in 2024 by at least a 5-point margin (see Figure 5). Among the pro-immigrant protests that occurred in March 2026, about 40 percent of them occurred in such counties. 

Figure 5: Pro-immigrant protests in counties Trump won by >5 Points in the 2024 Presidential Election, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Across the country, a broad range of constituencies using a variety of means have expressed opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. Demonstrations have just been one method. Those activating on behalf of and in support of immigrants include people forming human chains to protect immigrant workers; neighborhoods organizing support networks for affected immigrant families; students engaging in walkouts from schools and protests at college career fairs; people engaging in hunger strikes in support of international and undocumented students; knitters engaging in “craftivism”; people holding encampments outside of ICE facilities or noise demonstrations outside of hotels in which ICE agents were housed; consumers engaging in boycotts and sell-backs at Target and Home Depot; clergy engaging in civil disobedience; communities holding vigils for slain immigrants or those killed while advocating for them; community members building raised beds across thoroughfares to prevent ICE vehicles from accessing facilities, and more. Institutions and employers have raised their voices: Local businesses and business associations have called for the end of ICE operations in their towns, ranchers and farmers have decried treatment of their immigrant employees, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned mistreatment of immigrants as well.

Counter-protest was minimal

Trump’s immigration policies have supporters in the country, particularly among Republicans. But few people have rallied or marched in defense of them. Right-leaning protests made up fewer than two percent of all immigration-related protests during the first 14 months of the first Trump administration, and less than 0.7 percent of immigration-related protests during the same stretch of his second administration. 

The frequency of pro-immigrant protests during Trump’s second term has eclipsed that of anti-immigration protests by 145 to 1. The vast majority of anti-immigration protests have been counter-protests occurring at demonstrations in support of immigrants and their rights. 

However, right-leaning protests have been increasingly characterized by anti-immigrant claims over the past three presidencies. Whereas anti-immigrant protests constituted 1.68 percent of all right-learning protests during Trump’s first term, that proportion has increased sevenfold so far during his second, to 12.43 percent. 

Table 3: Anti-immigration protest events as a share of all right/conservative protests

A powerful and growing pro-immigrant constituency

Today’s mass protests in support of immigrants’ rights build on a durable pattern of pro-immigrant and anti-ICE protest in the U.S. To wit, the CCC has documented a prayer protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that has been held every Friday for the past 20 years. 

But the recent increase in pro-immigrant protests and their intensity is notable. The breadth and volume of pro-immigrant protests show that committed activists and organizations have succeeded in rallying huge numbers in favor of justice and dignity for immigrants, indicating a durable underlying infrastructure. In this essay, we focused on street protest as one indicator in the overall picture. But community mobilization on behalf of immigrants has meant far more than demonstrations. Mutual aid and neighborly support, observing and documenting ICE operations, litigation, support to immigrants in detention, and direct appeals to public officials have all been central to America’s response to Trump’s immigration policies. The growth of pro-immigrant protests reflects a (potentially growing) constituency willing to take risks to defend a multicultural vision of America, potentially widening its appeal. 

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In short, we see capable organizers and the mass public pushing hard for humane treatment of immigrants for the foreseeable future. Neither political party has figured out how to address immigration in a way that resolves the need for safe and secure borders and the need to treat everyone on U.S. soil with dignity, decency and due process. But the impacts of Trump’s policies on immigrants, their families and their broader communities provide a galvanizing issue for Americans who otherwise agree on little else. For example, some conservative faith communities and various progressive groups increasingly find themselves on the same side when it comes to immigration. 

Policymakers often resist turning to activists, civil society organizations and community groups for policy solutions. But the persistence of multi-sectoral immigration activism, as seen through protest alone, also reflects a powerful and growing constituency in favor of just and humane approaches to immigration. Protests reflect and shape the existing moral consensus but also can reorient constituencies in favor of a new consensus. We hope the members of the next Congress pay attention.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A North Carolina movement asks voters to reject corporate tax breaks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The affordability crisis is hitting people hard across the country, but it’s especially acute in North Carolina. For the sixth year in a row, North Carolina holds the distinction of being the worst state in the nation for workers based on its wage policies, worker protections, and rights to organize, according to Oxfam. Nearly half of renters in the state are struggling to afford their homes, while nearly a third of households are cost-burdened (spending over 30 percent of their income on housing).

North Carolina voters’ eyes may light up when they see two proposed constitutional amendments on their November ballots: one to cap the state personal and corporate income tax rates at 3.5 percent, down from a cap of seven percent, and another to limit how much local governments can levy in property taxes. On their face, they appear as if they might bring much-needed tax relief to North Carolina’s working class. 

The amendments are deceptively framed as being beneficial to working people and homeowners, reading as if they would lower individual taxes when there’s no indication that they will, according to Todd Warren, statewide campaign strategist at Down Home North Carolina, a member-led organization that endorsed a “no” vote. Instead, Warren said, the measures would be a giveaway to corporations and wealthy individuals by limiting how much they pay toward the public good — and a “scam” for voters.

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Since the passage of the two Republican-sponsored bills that placed the amendments on the ballot this past May, Down Home NC and over 20 other groups have come together as the NC Vote Against coalition to defeat them, as well as to oppose a third amendment that would enshrine voter identification requirements in the state constitution.

Each organization has its own expertise and its own tactics, but a common message: The amendments will not benefit working-class people, but rather corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Each group is playing its part in collecting a total of 100,000 pledges from North Carolinians who commit to voting against the amendments.

The fight to fund the future

Down Home NC joined together with another coalition member, the Carolina Federation, to launch the Fund the Future campaign, deploying nearly 200 paid canvassers.  

Jenn Frye, co–director of the Carolina Federation, spent part of this weekend canvassing at the poll at a Durham, North Carolina library, where she convinced an older couple to vote “no” on the amendments. After a member-led endorsement process that included political education on the amendments, a leadership summit and a vote at a statewide membership meeting, the Carolina Federation decided they wanted to deeply engage in the amendment fight. “We see more and more people in North Carolina who agree that corporations and the wealthiest individuals aren’t contributing what they owe when day in and day out, North Carolinians are working really hard,” Frye said. “We pay our taxes, and we contribute what we owe.”

Down Home NC and the Carolina Federation were founded in 2017 and 2018, respectively, in the wake of President Trump first taking office and Republicans winning control of both North Carolina’s state legislature and governorship in 2013 (for the first time since Reconstruction). The groups share a long-term goal of loosening corporate power’s grip on the state legislature and supplanting it with people power.

The Fund the Future campaign campaign is knocking doors, talking to voters at the polls, getting resolutions against the amendments passed by local governments and school boards, and placing signs in small businesses and in yards, among other tactics. So far, the Carolina Federation’s canvassers have knocked on over 600,000 doors across six counties, collecting over 33,000 pledges, while Down Home NC’s canvassers had knocked 500,000 doors across 20 counties and collected about 8,000 pledges.

“Whatever the outcome of this amendment fight, Federation’s members plan to launch a statewide campaign next year with other organizations like Down Home and Siembra to demand that the legislature pass fair tax policies that make corporations and the wealthiest individuals pay what they owe our communities in taxes,” Frye said. “That may be a multi-year fight. It is one our members feel is worth waging.”

North Carolinians deserve funding for real solutions, Frye said, such as property tax assistance programs, childcare tax credits, an increased minimum wage (it’s currently the federal minimum, $7.25 per hour), and protections against corporate landlords.

Todd Warren of Down Home NC said he has never seen such a robust response to a single issue in over 20 years of working and organizing in North Carolina.

Because Down Home NC’s chapters run organizing campaigns to make sure that local budgets go toward working people’s needs, members recognized immediately how the amendments would exacerbate the underfunding of local services. Like the Carolina Federation, its members endorsed a “no” vote in addition to endorsing political candidates who are supportive of its platforms.

Many voters don’t know about the amendments, Frye said, and if they do, they’re often not sure what to make of them or inclined to support them because they’re exhausted and stressed out due to the affordability crisis. But when they are engaged in conversation about how the amendments affect services they rely on, “then people are movable,” she said.

North Carolina residents march to the polls with signs opposing tax amendments on the ballot during early voting in Guilford County on Oct. 27, 2026. (Guilford For All)

Frye gave the example of her own mother, who recently suffered a series of strokes. Fortunately she was living in a North Carolina county with adequately funded Emergency Medical Services, or EMS. But residents of counties with underfunded EMS operations could face a life-or-death situation during medical emergencies.

“Right now, people feel like ‘taxes’ is a dirty word,” said Warren, a former public school teacher. “But if they connect it to something that they care about, like, ‘Oh, in Johnston County, we have explosive population growth. We need to build a new high school. These amendments would limit our ability to [do that].’ Then they’re like, ‘I’m gonna vote “no” on it.’ We can do that in a five-minute organizing conversation. It doesn’t take much for people to see through the scam.” 

North Carolina’s allegiance to corporations

North Carolina has lost out on almost $18 billion in annual tax revenue since Republicans began overhauling the tax system in 2013. Personal income tax reforms are so regressive that the state’s lowest earners pay more than 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the highest earners pay only six percent. For corporations, the income tax has dropped from seven percent to two percent, the lowest in the nation, and will be phased out completely by 2030. As tax revenue shrinks, so does local governments’ ability to fully fund vital public services.

“Our public services, the things that are supposed to strengthen our communities and support all families in all counties in North Carolina, are being stretched to the limit by the tax cuts,” Frye said. “These amendments want to take that and enshrine it into the [state] constitution.”

Exploitation has marked North Carolina’s economy since the days of chattel slavery. Post-slavery, Black families like my own (in Bertie County) sharecropped for a living well into the 20th century — jobs now carried out by migrant workers who experience poor labor conditions. The Duke family once had a monopoly on the state’s tobacco industry and founded both Duke Energy and Duke University, two institutions notorious for not paying their fair share.

Now the state and some local governments are subsidizing data centers, of which over 60 have been built and at least 30 more are planned or under construction. Under pressure, the state eliminated some tax breaks for data centers in July, but three remaining sales tax subsidies are projected to rob the state of $250 million in revenue annually. Meanwhile, between 2017 to 2024, the average electricity bill of a North Carolina household rose by nearly 30 percent. The state is subsidizing wealthy corporations as regular folks struggle to keep their lights on.

A history of underfunded public schools

On May Day this year, thousands gathered in the capital city, Raleigh, to rally for fully funded schools. Tax cuts have already contributed to the state being ranked last in the country in public school funding by GDP.

Isabell Moore, a coordinator at North Carolina Families for Public Schools (a project of Down Home NC) and a public school parent, said the amendments could be “catastrophic” for public education. North Carolina Families for Public Schools comprises countywide, districtwide and schoolwide teams of volunteer organizers who are calling for equitable, fully funded public schools. These teams are currently circulating a pledge to fund the future for children that includes voting against the amendments, along with measures like fair funding for special education; higher teacher pay; and safe, inclusive schools for all students, including those from immigrant families. 

North Carolina Families for Public Schools had already voted on its 2026 platform when the amendments dropped in May but decided to incorporate them because they stand directly in the way of their goal to win fully funded schools. Their organizers have been tapping into their personal networks to turn people out to vote against the amendments, holding house parties and school-based parties to educate people on the amendments, and more. 

“Everyday working people and public school parents are creative and tough and scrappy,” Moore said. “If we commit to not just voting ‘no’ but also organizing other people in our networks and in our school communities, that’s when we really start to build the power to defeat the amendments.”

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Even public schools in wealthy counties like Durham, home to Duke University (which has a $14.3 billion endowment) and Duke University Health System (which made nearly $766 million in profits last year), are chronically underfunded. The riches of these two tax-exempt nonprofit institutions haven’t trickled down. Among other demands, the Durham Rising coalition—made up of workers, students, and community members—is calling for Duke University to help fund public schools and educator salaries by making a voluntary payment to the local government called a PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes.

Since the summer, Christy Patterson, vice president of the Durham chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators, or NCAE, and a middle school teacher for students with disabilities, has been knocking on doors to tell folks the amendments are for billionaires, not everyday people. The NCAE, which functions as a professional organization because North Carolina bans public-sector collective bargaining, is part of the NC Vote Against coalition and was one of the main architects of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally in May.

“Our voters and our community are engaging us in conversation on the doors,” Patterson said. “We’ve had some conversations that really made us think. Constructive friction on the doors is always good because everybody’s not going to say the same thing or think the same. They’re just so ready to open the door and talk to us, so we are grateful for that.”

Organizing for the long run

In a September poll by Elon University, 67 percent of respondents were in favor of the income tax amendment, and 72 percent supported the property tax amendment. Organizers are working hard to turn that tide.

However, even if they don’t get their desired outcome, there is an entire movement that will continue holding North Carolina corporations and wealthy households accountable until they contribute their fair share to the public good. Organizations like the Carolina Federation, Down Home NC, and the NCAE have been engaging in this work for years and are in it for the long haul.

Warren hopes the Fund the Future campaign can help shift the narrative so that people understand that “taxes” aren’t inherently bad but rather a tool for improving quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities. 

“Through years of listening and campaigning, we know what working people across North Carolina want,” Warren said: well-funded, well-staffed public schools, healthcare access, transportation options and recreation programs for kids, infrastructure for effective disaster response. “When we talk to people about those things, even when they understand that it may involve an increase in taxes for them personally, they support funding those types of programs.”

This article A North Carolina movement asks voters to reject corporate tax breaks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Tens of thousands get ready to defend the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Garnet DeGrave and other organizers with Citizen Action Wisconsin watched in shock as news broke this June that FBI agents had raided the office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonprofit that hosts voter registration drives and does political organizing. The incident was largely understood to be an attempt to intimidate progressive organizers in the state and foster uncertainty in the state’s elections. DeGrave realized if a similar situation happened in Wisconsin — if a government agency interfered with community organizers or, in the worst case scenario, the election — they were woefully unprepared. 

“There weren’t enough people that were organized in the western half of the state to be able to handle that,” DeGrave, Citizen Action Wisconsin’s northeast organizer, said. 

This spurred the organization to try to fill the gap. At the end of September, Citizen Action Wisconsin — which does grassroots organizing around electoral and issue-based campaigns for social and racial justice — partnered with local organizations to pivot to election protection  ahead of a crucial midterm. 

It’s one of many community organizations and advocacy groups across the United States that have built out their election protection and defense work this year in an effort to combat misinformation and protect election integrity — a basic tenet of democracy that has come under attack from a president who is an election denier. Alongside national groups like the ACLU, which has had 68,000 sign-ups for its Democracy Defenders Task Force program, these state and local organizations have undertaken an unprecedented coordinated effort to bolster voting rights amid efforts by the federal government to undermine election results. 

According to DeGrave, the work falls into two categories. “Election protection” is pre-election work to help people overcome any barriers to voting — a process that differs in every state. This can include challenging laws that might restrict voter access, running voter assistance hotlines or holding voter education campaigns.

“Election defense,” on the other hand, is work during voting and after polls close to ensure every vote is counted and to defend election results. This can include nonpartisan poll watcher programs and community-led trainings that prepare people to mobilize in the event of a contested count due to political interference. 

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For Citizen Action, the pivot was a natural one, as the group had done small-scale election protection work and occasional direct action, DeGrave said. Citizen Action partnered with GROWW, a grassroots group that organizes behind progressive candidates in western Wisconsin, to host training sessions on how to mobilize in the event of election interference. In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians is running a similar election defense program, taking inspiration from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In Maine, organizations like the League of Women Voters have worked to grow a statewide poll watching program — a tactic also being used by groups in Florida and California.

Though election protection and defense efforts have been an integral part of American politics for decades, part of the reason this year’s efforts have grown in size is because the stakes feel so high.

“This election is such an important moment for us to be prepared for, in order to vote out authoritarians,” DeGrave said.

A surge of volunteers

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the Trump administration has intensified tactics that advocates say are meant to intimidate or disenfranchise voters. 

On the pretext of combating voter fraud — which experts say is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. — the administration has demanded sensitive voter information to identify alleged noncitizen voters from every state. Its attempts have been consistently denied by judges, though that hasn’t stopped the administration from trying to remove 20,000 people from voter rolls in California or from creating a federal voter database that’s incorrectly flagged some voters as noncitizens. The administration also tried to make voting more difficult for Americans with new Postal Service restrictions on mail-in voting, which a district court put on hold until after the election. 

State Republicans have followed President Donald Trump’s lead. Since Trump entered office in January 2025, at least 19 states have passed laws that will make it harder to cast ballots in the midterms. 

Government officials have also repeatedly implied they will deploy armed federal agents to poll sites, an action illegal under national law since it could constitute voter intimidation. The administration has also indicated its intention to send around 1,000 Department of Justice federal monitors to all 50 states to observe voting procedures, which advocates say is another intimidation tactic. And privately, Trump opponents worry he could claim that foreign governments interfered in the election as a way to discredit results. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely. But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.”

Jen Lancaster, League of Women Voters of Maine

Mel Neal, legal counsel on voting rights issues for democracy defense organization the Campaign Legal Center, characterized the Trump administration’s actions as undermining trust in the election system. “They are attacks on democracy and are an attempt to sow distrust in our election system so that election results can’t be trusted,” she said. 

In response to these threats, organizers have built statewide coalitions of nonpartisan poll watchers: people who travel to poll sites during early voting and on Election Day to ensure that people are able to vote without difficulty. 

Such poll watching programs have been around for decades, explained Amy Keith, executive director of Florida’s chapter of Common Cause, a national voting rights group founded in opposition to the Vietnam War in 1970 whose initial campaign successfully reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.

Poll watching emerged first and foremost to document any and all issues that could discourage voters trying to cast their ballots: police presence, overlong lines, lack of disability access, language barriers, etc. Jen Lancaster, the deputy director of the League of Women Voters of Maine, said the league’s poll watching program emerged during COVID-19 to ensure all polling places followed public health standards, such as by implementing plexiglass or acrylic barriers. 

“We are always watching for anything that could intimidate or deter or make it harder for voters,” Keith said. The goal, she added, was “to make sure that polling places are calm and welcoming, so that everybody can have that experience to cast their ballot and to participate in the process.”

But this year, organizations have also begun advising volunteers about what to do if agents from federal agencies like the FBI or ICE show up. 

“It’s highly, highly unlikely,” Lancaster emphasized. “But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.” The presence of any officer, including ICE agents, near a polling location can discourage voters, which is why organizers look out for it. “It can be scary to walk by an armed officer in order to cast their ballot,” Keith said. Poll observers don’t typically engage in direct action themselves when these situations arise; instead, they alert their teams, who often have experienced advocates or lawyers on standby to provide advice or assistance.

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Maine’s nonpartisan poll watching program has grown to around 400 registered volunteers. “For Maine, this is a pretty big number,” Lancaster said. In Florida and California, poll watching programs co-run by Common Cause chapters reported over 1,000 recruits. They are part of a nationwide boom in poll watching volunteers, which state-level chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have worked quickly to accommodate. 

Eileen Ma, director of democracy and national initiatives at the Asian Law Caucus, which has co-led an election protection program in California since 2012 with Common Cause, said the program could only channel the surge of volunteers into trained roles because of years of  infrastructure development.

“We have the capacity to bring on and train 1,000 volunteers because we built up over time the materials and the expertise and the practical knowledge of how to do that,” Ma said. “The work over the last decade [has] been critical to our being able to respond in this moment.”

Combating misinformation and building trust

Advocacy organizations have also, for years, operated national and state-level voter hotlines where prospective voters can call to clarify any questions they have about voting and make plans to cast their ballots. All day, including on weekends, Keith and her team at Florida Common Cause field calls about early voting, ID laws and polling locations. 

Lately, the Florida Common Cause team and other organizations with voter hotlines have fielded questions related to new voter ID laws, which have gone into place in several states. These laws have caused confusion about what identification can be used to vote, organizers said. 

Keith sees clarity on voter laws as crucial to combatting voter misinformation, which she and other advocates characterize as an unfortunate side effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine election results. 

Misinformation has included false rumors about the number of noncitizen voters in elections, how ballots marked by poll workers could be disqualified, incorrect guidance about how to register to vote, and more. 

“We want people to have the correct information, not misinformation — whether it’s disinformation being spread by bots or [others] intentionally trying to confuse people, or it’s misinformation because they don’t understand the process,” Keith said.

By combatting these rumors through voter education and voter hotlines, which are increasingly available in more languages, Keith believes trust in the electoral system — the number one defense against attempts to overturn election results — could be restored. 

The League of Women Voters of Maine distributes a community newspaper at a No Kings rally on October 17, 2026. (League of Women Voters of Maine)

Groups around the country are using various channels to get correct information to voters. In Wisconsin, the legal advocacy group Law Forward has invested in its social media strategy, and used social media and op-eds as avenues to combat voter misinformation. 

Democracy Defense Foundation adviser Brian Jones said the organization, which was founded in 2024 in part to reverse the erosion of trust in the U.S. electoral system and operates in eight states, has heavily invested in partnering with community organizations like churches and local nonprofit groups to get information about elections out.

In Maine, where internet access in rural areas remains an issue, Lancaster said the League of Women Voters prints a newspaper with information about candidates across the state. This year, they distributed 50,000 copies in 16 counties. In rural counties, they left the newspapers in town hubs — community centers and libraries — for people to see. 

“There’s a transparent system here and play,” Jones said. “People need to understand that and ensure that faith and trust in their elections, and it’s not driven by just a partisan point of view.”

Ready to deploy

Unlike Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, organizations that have worked in voting rights spaces for years, like Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW, don’t have a volunteer base dedicated to this type of work. In the past month, Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW have trained about 70 volunteers across Wisconsin in voting rights and post-election mobilization, and then trained those volunteers to conduct outreach to get others involved in election defense. 

“If they talk to five people and those five people talk to five people, then we can actually end up at over 700 people that are motivated and organized and ready to be deployed in a rapid response situation if something does go wrong with the election,” DeGrave said.

Volunteers will be posted outside of key polling sites across Wisconsin when ballot counts begin, and will remain at the ready to host vigils and press conferences outside polling sites if any issues arise.

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In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, which primarily focused on distributing information about early voting and ballot drop-off locations to voters across the state, has worked on recruiting dozens of volunteers to mobilize in anticipation of election interference. 

Communications director Melinda Billingsley said the organization plans to have volunteers watch polls and, if needed, advocate for voters experiencing issues at the ballot box as part of a statewide nonpartisan poll watching program. 

In the event of a contested election, “we’re recruiting folks to be willing and able to go to any place they’re needed and to throw a party and create a joyful, safe atmosphere,” Billingsley said. This strategy is partially inspired by anti-ICE protests across the United States, which has involved organizers utilizing creative approaches to defend community members from federal agents.

Staying on watch

Though organizers have welcomed the increased interest in poll watching and voter education programs this year, many are wondering how to sustain that energy in future election cycles, where the stakes will arguably be just as high. 

“It’s even more important because in 2028, we have a presidential election year and in 2030, we have a census year,” Darius Kemp, California Common Cause’s executive director, said. Census counts help determine congressional districts, and voting rights organizations are advocating and educating against legislation that would skew a census count, such as a proposed rule to not count noncitizens.

But beyond ensuring fair and accurate elections safe from federal interference, organizers see the expansion of their work as critical to restoring Americans’ faith in the electoral system, which has dropped in the past decade. 

“It is not just a one-day struggle,” said Ma, from the Asian Law Caucus. “It’s not just a one kind of activity kind of struggle. It has to be a full-frontal assault or full-frontal defense, however you choose to look at it, in order to preserve people’s voting rights.”

This article Tens of thousands get ready to defend the vote was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Serbia voted and the Student List won. Late that evening, President Aleksandar Vučić — the man who has dominated the country’s politics since 2012, steadily hollowing out its courts, media and elections along the way — went on television and admitted that his Serbian Progressive Party and its allies had lost. The final count isn’t in yet, but the result is not in doubt. Candidates selected by the Students List protest movement have more than half the vote and a majority in the 250-seat parliament.

For more than 20 years, our team at the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies, or CANVAS, has worked with activists from dozens of countries on one question: How do ordinary people defeat a government that looks unbeatable? This time the answer came from our own streets, again. We want to explain what happened, because movements elsewhere will try to learn from it, and we’d like them to learn the right lessons.

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You can’t understand Sunday without understanding the 14 years before it, since Vučić first came to power.

Most people in Serbia learned to live with a low, constant fear. You assumed your phone wasn’t really yours. Amnesty International later confirmed what many suspected: Spyware was being installed on the phones of activists and journalists, sometimes while they sat in a police station. If you spoke up, a tabloid might put your face on the front page the next morning with a story about who was supposedly bankrolling you. People lost jobs and contracts for being on the wrong side. Plenty stopped saying what they thought, even at the kitchen table.

We see this pattern in almost every country we work in. That kind of power doesn’t have to arrest everyone. It only needs everyone to believe they could be next.

How it started

On Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station fell and killed 16 people. The station had just been renovated. Everyone understood immediately what that meant: The money meant to keep people safe had gone into someone’s pocket. Within days, “Corruption kills” was written on walls across the country.

Students shut down their colleges and refused to go back to class. Many observers abroad missed how important this was. A march lasts an afternoon. The blockade of the universities lasted for months and took a whole part of society out of normal life. In our field we call that noncooperation, and it is far more powerful than protest alone. Every regime depends on people showing up and doing what is expected of them. The students stopped.

For two years the students were arrested, followed, slandered and called foreign agents. Cars drove into crowds. People were beaten. The government gave them every excuse to respond with violence, and they didn’t.

A protest marshal at the front of a crowd during the largest march in Serbia’s history on March 15, 2025 in Belgrade. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

At the largest protest in Serbia’s history, in Belgrade on March 15, 2025 — with between 275,000 and 325,000 people, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings — student marshals in yellow vests kept the crowd calm and blue flares showed people the way out if things went wrong. None of that was improvised. The students organized themselves. The assembly of each fakultet (a specialized college within a university) chose its marshals. Before every big action they went over the same things again and again: how to spot provocateurs, how to calm a tense moment, how to move a crowd out safely. At CANVAS, we teach this in every training we run: Nonviolent discipline doesn’t happen by itself. It is planned, practiced and repeated until it’s second nature. The students did exactly that.

Here is why it mattered so much. Violence was the one thing the regime wanted from them. A single burning car would have given the government its “terrorists” and sent the cautious middle class back indoors. 

Because the students stayed nonviolent, everyone could join. Grandmothers did. Farmers did. People who had never been to a protest in their lives did.

What it cost

People sometimes talk about nonviolent action as if it were the soft option. Anyone who watched these students over the past two years knows better.

They walked across Serbia. They arrived with bloody socks and taped-up blisters, slept wherever someone offered a floor, and set off again in the morning. In village after village people stood by the road with bread, hot tea and blankets, and a lot of them were crying. Those marches reached places that no rally in Belgrade ever could, places the government thought it owned.

Wherever they stopped, they talked with people. In town squares, school yards and village halls, they explained why they were marching and listened to what local people were angry about. They also urged residents to set up their own citizens’ assemblies, and in many towns people did, often for the first time in their lives.

Their professors paid a price, too. When fakultets sided with their students, the government cut university salaries to a small fraction of what they had been. Some professors received nothing at all for months. The president went on television and said that instead of salaries, they would get potatoes. Schoolteachers who backed the protests were punished the same way. These are people with children, mortgages and parents to look after, and they stayed with their students anyway.

A list with no politicians on it

Then the students did something we had not seen done quite like this anywhere.

They didn’t hand their momentum over to the opposition parties, and they didn’t run for office themselves. They wrote their own rules for the slate of candidates that they would support. No students could be on the list. Nobody from the ruling coalition. No officials from the opposition parties. No extremists.

For more than a year, over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposed names, argued about them, interviewed people and vetoed the ones they didn’t trust. It was slow, messy and deeply democratic. We think that is exactly why it worked. Nobody could say it was cooked up in a back room.

What came out was a list of 250 people, one name for every seat in parliament, who were respected long before politics: professors, teachers, doctors, actors, artists and athletes. 

Serbia doesn’t have local districts. The whole country votes as one constituency for party lists, seats are shared out by each list’s share of the vote, and they are filled in the order the names appear. So the order matters, and the first name on the list was a cardiologist from Novi Sad. A former governor of the National Bank shared the list with one of the best basketball players this country has ever produced. Several opposition parties pulled their own lists and backed the students instead, which could not have been easy for them.

Tens of thousands gathered at Slavija Square in Belgrade on Oct. 22 ahead of the general election. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

The people on that list don’t agree about much. Some are on the left, some on the right, and some have never thought of themselves as political at all. State-owned media called that chaos.

We see it the other way around. Movements win by bringing huge numbers of people on board, and huge numbers of people never share one ideology. If the list had looked like one camp, it would have attracted one camp. Because it looked like Serbia, almost anyone could find someone on it they trusted.

What held it together was simple. Nobody wants another leader the whole country has to obey and adore. Nobody wants to live again in a place where a handful of people get rich off everyone else. The students put it on their posters in three words: “Serbia or Mafia.”

Healing from a cancer

The best way we can describe where Serbia is today is this: we’ve had the diagnosis, and treatment has just started.

For years the country lived with a cancer — with captured courts, captured media, public money flowing into private pockets, and fear as the normal background of life. It spread slowly into nearly every institution.

Sunday’s defeat of Vučić didn’t cure it. Sunday made treatment possible.

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Anyone who has sat next to someone they love during chemotherapy knows what comes next. It takes a long time. It hurts. Some weeks the treatment feels worse than the illness. There will be setbacks and bad results, and people saying things were better before. The old networks won’t leave quietly, and some reforms will fail the first time they are tried.

But this cancer can be beaten. And the whole body has to heal, including the neighbors, relatives and colleagues who voted for the other side on Sunday. They aren’t the disease. They’re part of the country that has to get well.

What we ask of each of us

No government can do this healing by itself. Here is what we think it will take, and from whom.

1. The new governing majority: Start with institutions, not with settling scores. Establish courts that are actually independent, a public broadcaster that tells the truth, and clean elections — all of which will outlast any government. And open a full, public investigation into the surveillance of citizens, so no one is tempted to do it again.

2. The movement: Don’t let the assemblies fade away. They built this list, and they are the best protection Serbia has against the next strongman, including one who might come from inside the movement itself.

3. Friends abroad: Support Serbian institutions and citizens rather than personalities. In practice, that means long-term funding for independent media, watchdog groups and local citizens’ assemblies; sending judges, auditors and prosecutors from your own countries who can work alongside Serbian colleagues rebuilding theirs; and support tied to concrete rule-of-law results rather than to warm words for whoever is in office. And please stay for the whole treatment, not only the first week.

4. Activists in other countries: Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.

Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient and carried by many hands. Now it has to show that a country can heal. We intend to be part of that work: training the next generation of organizers, writing down honestly what worked and what didn’t, and holding the new government to the same standard the students held the old one.

A version of this article first appeared on CANVAS’ newsletter.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher. 

“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”

“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”   

Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.

While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.

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Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”

Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago. 

Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.” 

Organizing solidarity, facing criminalization

This violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices. 

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Besides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen. 

Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging. 

Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military. 

The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.

Lessons learned and the way ahead 

Spain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta. 

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Solidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders. 

Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.” 

Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.” 

Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I recently showed up to a protest for the first time in months, looked around, and thought: “Who the hell are all these people?” 

Friends I could once rely on running into at protests when I was younger were missing. 

The fact that I hadn’t been to a protest in months was unusual. I’d had a hard season of exhaustion and cynicism, and I felt I was falling out of the loop. In the last few years, I turned 30 and moved back to my hometown, and the once-intense focus on social movements that I had in my 20s was now jostling for attention with work and family. 

The absence of my comrades at that protest seemed to signal that others, too, had burned or faded out of organizing.

It’s a trend that Chris Dixon describes in his new book, which is about sticking around for the long haul in the fight for a better world: “In radical activist scenes especially,” he writes, “people tend to age out by their 30s, if not before.” 

When the manuscript of Dixon’s book came my way, it spoke to my fear of burning or fading out of the movements that have given my life meaning and momentum. (I sit on the editorial collective of Between The Lines Books, and helped select the book for publication; it was released in September 2026.) 

After a few recent boom-and-bust cycles of uprisings — 2020’s Black liberation uprising, the Palestine solidarity protests that kicked off in 2023 — it’s a timely and thoughtful book about building movements with care and commitment.

Dixon (who unfortunately shares a name with a far more famous American crypto bro) is an anti-authoritarian activist and a scholar of social movements. “For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World” is the latest effort in his lifelong project to understand how social movements are built and sustained.

Dixon grew up in Alaska, and the book opens by describing his decades-long friendship with Ruth Sheridan, an anarchist who was in her 70s when she first came to talk to his eighth grade labor history class. That early curiosity — about how left-wing social movements are built and sustained and the unsung activists who make it happen — showed up in his 2014 book “Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements,” in which he shared lessons from almost a decade spent interviewing organizers across the U.S. and Canada. 

Now, Dixon has reached back into this same conversational archive to write “For the Long Haul.” 

We meet Bill Stivers, an elder communist Dixon befriended as a teen; Rachel Herzing, the co-founder of prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance; the political prisoner David Gilbert with whom he exchanged letters from jail, and many more. 

These lifelong leftists share their observations about what leads to burnout, the many-headed monster that has long stalked social movements. During this time of totalizing neoliberalism and weakened movement infrastructure, it’s grown especially powerful. These movement veterans counsel us to be patient, open-minded and to “practice being nobody special.” 

Dixon tells the story of Stivers who, at the age of 76, travelled from Anchorage, Alaska to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to attend the Zapatistas’ Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. It was just a couple years after the militant group’s armed uprising and a young Dixon, more swayed by a European left tradition at that time, looked on with skepticism. But Stivers ended up having the more clear-eyed assessment of this new approach to anti-capitalist struggle. Stivers had cultivated the long view, which helped him avoid cynicism and dogmatism, and encouraged him to keep learning and stay open to new developments.  

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What I found most helpful about the book was Dixon’s formulation of burnout: he sees it not just as a type of overwork or exhaustion, but as a feeling of defeat that becomes more common because of a lack of strategy. Dixon introduces this idea by sharing a conversation he had with Kim Marks, a direct-action environmentalist and Indigenous solidarity organizer in Oregon: “So much of burnout is about not being effective,” she said, “and so much ineffectiveness comes from not having a plan.” 

Dixon traces the ways that people often burn out of activist groups back to this underlying lack of strategy. When a group promises sweeping change but never decides how to take the first step; when a group gets mired in discussions about internal structure or politics and stops taking outward action; when a few veteran members shoulder a huge amount of work while new ones struggle to find meaningful ways to pitch in; when a group is hastily cobbled together to address a crisis then falls apart just as quickly after an unsuccessful campaign — all of these are instances in which a lack of strategy leaves people feeling defeated, ineffective and worn-out. 

A good plan can pull groups out of these exhausting spirals. This involves mapping the current political landscape, articulating our goals, making agreements about what to do and how to support each other in doing it, and then evaluating our success and learning from our mistakes.  

Dixon writes about the importance of imbuing this strategy-setting with care and intentionality, to “help people to talk frankly about workload, make reasonable estimates of what they can do, and look out for one another’s well-being.”

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You can find many of these same encouragements — for rest, care and intentionality — in the pages of any self-help book. But the goal of capitalist self-help literature is to create an individual who is independent, sane and productive enough to keep cranking the handle of profit-making machines. 

Dixon’s help is different: it’s not for the individual, but for the collective. At the end of the day, “sustained involvement in movements is fundamentally a collective activity, not an individual one,” he writes. No amount of advice given to or followed by the individual can stop the pattern of burnout and disengagement that’s become endemic in leftist spaces. 

As a result, Dixon focuses on collective care rather than self-care. This can look like preparing food for the picket line, planning for childcare and legal support at the direct action, or tending to hurt feelings after the meeting. He calls care work “a crucial — and too often overlooked — foundation for the long haul.”

For Dixon, care is not just a way to make organizing more pleasant for the people doing it, or a moral imperative if the left wants to keep claiming the high ground. Instead, he sees care as a strategic imperative. When we make our political commitments with care in mind, Dixon writes, it forces us to ask ourselves and each other if what we’re committing to is reasonable and tactical. And when it is, we become more likely to stick around for the long run, and also more likely to win.

Not one of Dixon’s ideas stands without a quote from an organizer, an example from a movement or a reference to a movement scholar’s work. One of the book’s main contributions is its vast bibliography — a full third of the pages are suggested reading and endnotes. 

Dixon’s form of activist research is highly attentive to insights that are gleaned from a person’s own experiences. Like this observation by anti-authoritarian activist Helen Hudson, who draws on decades of organizing with prisoners to form her analysis of how the state uses prison to weaken movements: “Prison isolates the prisoners from support,” she told Dixon, “but also deprives younger generations of radicals from the experience of revolutionaries who have much to teach us.”  

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Dixon encourages younger readers like me to find these people in our own lives — older activists like Stivers and Sheridan who show us that it is possible and lovely to live an ordinary life of unflagging commitment to the left. 

This is not an organizing manual (though Dixon does recommend a few of those in his suggested readings). Instead, what he gives us is a deep study of left-wing dynamics and some broad strokes toward sustainability. The people likely to get the most from this book are those of us who have already gone through many cycles of boom-and-bust social movement activity, and who are looking for fuel that burns longer and cleaner. 

And it’s by paying attention to Dixon’s rigorous practices of listening and sharing that readers will get the most out of this book — leaving not just with a handful of advice, but with an initiation into a practice. 

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration moved to rein in the Bovino-style spectacle with its made-for-TV arrests. In an attempt to avoid another public outcry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly settled into a new rhythm.

Arrests have still increased month after month, reaching a record high of roughly 51,000 people taken into ICE custody in August. This is part of a new surge — carried out in hospitals, courthouses and airports — with an intent to stay off the nightly news. As The New York Times reported, this phase is “captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.” 

This phase is also backed by a dragnet of data. At airports, ICE has been running name matches with TSA to detain people at check-in counters and gates. It has found a backdoor into the country’s license-plate cameras: Records show local and state police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s camera network in a single year. (Yet another reason Flock cameras should not exist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the tech infrastructure driving ICE’s new surge is headquartered in … Vermont. The town of Williston, outside Burlington, is home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which houses the agency’s national tip line, and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, its social-media surveillance hub. 

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As ICE tries a new approach, this new phase of resisting ICE requires moving to more offense — and the people of Vermont are offering us some clear lessons. 

Vermont resistance

Resistance started with the fight over flights. Early in Trump’s second term, activists documented ICE moving detainees onto commercial flights out of Burlington’s airport — more than 450 people as of mid-July 2025, by their count. They showed up in airports as witnesses and disruptors, sometimes aided by empowered flight attendants. They forced an ICE retreat: organizers say ICE hasn’t moved detainees through the airport in more than a year.

More recently they’ve gone after the hard infrastructure. Sit-ins at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, where the NCATC facility is located, have led to arrests for allegedly blocking the entrance to the ICE offices, including 11 people in February and 13 in July.

After those arrests came some unusual twists, which speak volumes about the courage it takes to refuse unjust orders and to continue protesting in the face of repression.

Complicity and noncooperation

Responses to authoritarianism are as old as a time — many of the same dynamics from Vermont show up in the ancient story of Pharaoh and Moses.

Undeniably the most powerful person in his land, Pharaoh was the ultimate authoritarian. His big trick was taking beautiful work and turning it evil. Take the work of midwives, whose job is to usher life into the world — he turned that work into ugliness by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy. 

But we all have a choice. And famously, several of the midwives refused. Their act of noncooperation with an unjust order is the reason Moses lived.

We are living through a moment when institution after institution is being turned toward evil. Some, like the Department of Justice, were already a mixed bag. But now it is being turned against the very logic of due process it claims to serve, as we’ve seen recently with the criminal indictment of whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. Other institutions, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being perverted, with great resistance from insiders who cling to the key values that these agencies were founded on.

Previous Coverage

The movement to defend the Minneapolis 15

In Vermont, the local prosecutor, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, faced her own choice. When asked to bring charges against the protesters who held the sit-ins, she repeatedly declined, citing limited resources. That makes sense: No one was harmed, and the protesters have a strong necessity defense — the argument that they were preventing an even greater harm. Every minute that ICE isn’t taking part in abducting people is good for the country.

Then came a bizarre turn of events. The state’s public safety commissioner directed state police to send the cases to Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark, bypassing normal procedure and upending the traditional role of the attorney general. Clark, a Democrat, decided to charge the protesters with trespassing.

In an op-ed, she said her hands were tied: “Justice must be blind or our system will fail.” Back to Pharaoh: This is a bit like a midwife in the next town over raising her hand to say, “I’d like to kill Moses, because that’s what the law dictates.”

Protesters recently unearthed relevant Vermont history — a model of state-level noncooperation. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which ordered cooperation with slave catchers, Vermont passed a state statute known as the Habeas Corpus Law. It effectively nullified the federal law, and went so far as to require state attorneys to defend anyone accused of being a slave, with full representation before a judge and a jury. The entire practice of nullification was deemed highly escalatory — so much so the federal government threatened military invasion — but due to the state’s resistance, throughout Vermont there was effectively no participation in the Fugitive Slave Act.

As in that case, the pressure from the federal government has continued. One week before a planned week of direct action, the federal government suddenly charged five people from the earlier protests with obstructing access to a federal facility (punishable by up to 30 days in prison or a $5,000 fine), likely hoping to deter further escalation.

We all have a choice: complicity with Pharoah or noncooperation. Despite the threats and new legal challenges, the protesters in Vermont chose the riskier, more liberatory path.

A funeral, a guerrilla garden and a sit-in

The week of direct action went on as planned, beginning with a funeral. On Oct. 5, more than 30 clergy led a procession of a hundred or so mourners who walked behind a hearse to the White Cap Business Park, singing “Amazing Grace.” They carried 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE — directly or from complications while detained — and placed them one by one in a handmade coffin of Vermont pine. The action echoed the Stolen Neighbors Quilt created in Minnesota, which remembers people who were deported. Here, names of those killed by ICE were read out. Then, in front of the doors of the spy center, the coffin was nailed shut. 

A crowd gathers in Williston, Vermont on Oct. 5, behind a coffin filled with paver stones representing lives lost to ICE. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Rev. Marybeth Redmond said at the vigil, “I have walked alongside Vermonters struggling to survive, and I have never seen our immigrant neighbors so hunted, so afraid and so alone.”

In the end, it was a symbolic act. Security scattered the stones, and the property manager and others were seen taking crowbars to the coffin. But it was only the beginning of the week.

The next action was a garden. Because what would you expect from Vermont? Rather than using just their bodies to get in the way, about 40 protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil. 

They affixed the boxes to the pavement with construction adhesive, painted and chalked them with flowers, insects and slogans, flew a rainbow kite, and by mid-morning, had gotten a full dance party going. The action blocked the road to 188 Harvest Lane, which houses ICE’s national tip line.

They were also highlighting the environmental violence of ICE’s data intensive operation. Gardener Isaac Petersen said, “ICE’s surveillance technology is extremely energy-intensive, much of it powered by AI and data centers. It harms our communities directly by targeting our neighbors.”

State and local police moved some barriers, but largely left the garden alone, which blocked the road for most of the day. ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day, and the rumor was that ICE was told to avoid coming into the office.

Protestors hang handwritten “tips” outside the ICE office housing the agency’s national tip line. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Each day escalated from the day before. By Thursday, protesters went right up to the front entrance of the Harvest Lane facility. Dozens had arrived before 8 a.m. to deliver handwritten note cards with “tips” encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. The protesters started by taping those messages to the windows and doors. Then they hauled out a rug, a couch, a coffee table and a fold-up mattress — a makeshift living room — and sat down, singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down. 

Much of this has been intergenerational. Vermont protesters have ranged from people in their early 20s to an 83-year-old from Bethel and 85-year-old from Sharon.

Some of those sitting at the entrance this week had taken part in earlier acts of civil disobedience, and several now face charges brought by Clark. 

Organizers say the ICE facility was effectively shut for much of that week, its parking lots empty. Police interference was minimal: At one point, officers came over only to remove the items protesters had used to block a surveillance camera, then returned to their cars. As the organizers said in their press release, “ICE employees went home rather than face Vermont’s week of bold, decisive action.”

What you can do 

The week of action was only one moment, and organizers hope others will organize their own — aimed at different pieces of ICE infrastructure. There are other flash points around the country this month, too, in Austin, Minneapolis and Arizona.

As for Shut Down ICE VT, the group behind the week of action, they plan to keep going. One simple way to support them: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. To disrupt its activity, the group is encouraging people to call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, this tactic has been so successful the lines are clogged — one person was on hold for 2 hours and 18 minutes until her phone died. (This tactic was used in the early DOGE days.) Instead of doing Pharaoh’s bidding: What are the beautiful things you could be doing with your life? It can be a bit of a daily ritual.

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Because here, in the end, is Pharaoh’s trick: He changed the meaning of what was legal. He didn’t simply say, “You must obey me.” He said that if you refused, you were the one breaking the law.

But we should remember whose side the law has so often taken. The law stood against enslaved people seeking freedom. It stood against women having control of their own bodies. It stood against trans people claiming full autonomy. The law, by itself, is no defense against injustice — and must not be turned into an instrument of oppression.

Sarah George declined to prosecute protesters for a reason. By stepping in to take up the case, Charity Clark has signaled a willingness to participate in the repression. The people shutting down ICE in Vermont are on the right side of history. Let’s find ways to join them.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This election is not like any other. You’ve heard that before, and so have I. But after decades of “this presidential election is the most important election in your lifetime,” I have finally conceded that this midterm election may be the most important election in my lifetime — because it will be the ultimate test of whether Trump and MAGA have succeeded in their authoritarian consolidation of power. 

And so it’s appropriate that many groups are trying new things ahead of this election — because the old playbook alone won’t get us there.

No Kings. On Oct. 17, No Kings is going to try something it hasn’t tried before. Instead of another mass march, the coalition is holding No Kings: Vote Early, a nonpartisan day of action in which communities will host block parties, BBQs and local protests to make a voting plan together and vote early where local rules allow. Organizers say it’s “not purely a protest,” but rather a nonpartisan action to encourage voter participation. The idea is to treat voting not as something we do alone, but as something we do together. I’m not old enough to remember it, but people used to go to the polls with their neighbors and make an event of it. This is bringing back that collective spirit.

(It’s easy to host. Go here for all the info you need by Thursday Oct. 15.)

Election Holiday. Another experiment is popping up for the Nov. 3 election — Election Day: Our Civic Holiday. This group (which I’m a part of) rests on a simple idea: treating Election Day as a day for showing love for democracy by doing our civic duty. Vote, help someone else vote, become a poll worker or observer, or find another way to participate in civic life. The idea is to translate that into a cultural vibe, like Valentine’s Day, but for a different form of love — love for democracy and our neighbors.

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These are two experiments among many in how we protect elections in new ways under new circumstances. (I’ll be writing more about possible post-election actions later.) Neither solves the problem on its own, but both actions build on the understanding that stealing an election gets much harder when there’s a large blowout. Hungary is the reminder. As I wrote in April, Orbán’s defeat was so decisive that he conceded before all the votes were counted, with turnout near 80 percent, the highest since their transition to democracy. As Micah Sifry put it, it was “too big to rig.”

New tactics aren’t easy — and it’s worth reminding ourselves of that.

The trap of the winning tactic

Until now, No Kings has been known for one thing: enormous marches, each bigger than the last. Organizers put the first at five million, the second at seven million, and the third, in March, at more than eight million. When a tactic works like that, the pressure to keep repeating it is immense.

I’ve seen this up close. After Greta Thunberg began her Friday walkouts, Fridays for Future grew and grew. I was working with 350.org — a global environmental organization — at the time and we provided a lot of the backend technical support to help it grow. That growth created tremendous pressure and helped drive movement at the United Nations and in many countries. (You can certainly argue it contributed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which — despite significant cuts — has some parts that are still very active.)

But every tactic eventually peaks. As Saul Alinsky put it, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Suddenly an organization named for leaving school on Fridays needs to improvise — and that’s hard.

Student protesters asked me to write the Climate Resistance Handbook to try to assist Fridays for Future (and others) to break out of their tactical doldrums.

Occupy Wall Street hit the same wall. In Philadelphia, where we had an encampment outside of City Hall, my ears still ring with painful, shouted debates over whether we could do anything other than occupy. The argument largely won out that occupying is the thing that held us together — and like most occupations around the country (but not all!), we never tactically transitioned.

That’s the pull: The familiar tactic feels like the glue. The drive to stay the course is strong. And it takes a strong decision-making process to break out.

Many of us know this tactical challenge: endless weekly vigils and letter-writing with no changes. Worried about this dynamic in my anti-casino organizing group, I once made us promise we would only use the same tactic once — resulting in new tactics like citizen’s search warrants, Philly’s Ballot Box or the public filibuster. 

So No Kings deserves congratulations for breaking the mold. Yes, many would love to see something more escalated that increases the level of risk-taking — but it’s worth just underlining how difficult it is to change course at all. So greeting this pivot with encouragement makes all pivots more possible.

The strategic logic

Why put so much energy into the election? 

I’ve regularly argued there is so much more than elections. And Trump’s attempt at consolidation is happening in places where elections alone won’t save us. Take the military, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to purge 20 percent of the military’s top leaders. He’s already blocked and purged many women and Black leaders. Many view his attempts as a long-term purge to keep control of the military. (The military is hardly defensive and has its own ways of pushing back — including the extensive leaking about the eight sailors in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group who attempted suicide.)

But the elections remain critical both as a narrative (exposing Trump’s unpopularity!) and also because Congress (for all its faults) remains a key pillar in allowing the theft of congressional money, putting in radical judges, co-signing his corruption and so much more.

Previous Coverage

What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us

Trump knows this, which is why it is such important contested territory for him. In September, Trump led the crowd at the Republican National Convention in a pledge to “cheat like hell” (Newsweek claimed he was joking — but I’d say the intent is hard to dismiss). The Callais decision echoes widely as the single largest loss of Black political power in recent memory. 

Trump hopes terror can keep us from voting. In March he signed an executive order restricting mail-in voting, and while courts have kept the restrictions from taking effect this year, the fear it stoked is already having an impact. Trump is adding more fuel by making up stories of noncitizen voting. Why? So he can actually steal the election. I lay out 18 ways the regime might take our votes away in this scenario guide.

If nothing else, remember that a 2028 election becomes far easier to steal with a willing Congress. You don’t need a strong imagination to picture a Trump-led Jan. 6 insurrection under current Republican leadership ending in a fully effective coup backed by Congress and the Supreme Court. That becomes much harder with a hostile Congress.

All of this brings us back to why the midterms matter and the context of why collectively voting early and supporting each other on Election Day matters.

Why turnout is protection

Mass participation can overwhelm a system and make the likely accomplices of would-be election thieves less willing to go along. Trump can try to control the narrative, but the mechanics of theft require a chain of accomplices: election deniers in the certification process, state actors, and behind them businesses and supporters who quietly approve. That’s why folks at May Day Strong launched the Business for Democracy Pledge. By signing on, businesses commit to oppose obstacles to voting and, if results aren’t honored, to close ranks in defense of the election. It pulls potential accomplices back before they cross the line.

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Then there are the efforts to recruit more voters, like the Oct. 17 Vote Early Day coming up soon — a chance to mix large-scale decentralized actions for an electoral good. Or the Election Day: Our Civic Holiday effort where we’re not asking for a federal policy change. We’re asking people to treat the day differently. Vote if you haven’t. Help someone else vote. Make it visible.

We’re trying to feed into the energy by reminding everyone to stay active on Election Day, Nov. 3, by:

• making sure you’ve voted, and that the people around you have too
• becoming a poll worker or nonpartisan observer
• joining Singing Resistance, Souls to the Polls, or Joy to the Polls, and meeting any interference with positivity
• connecting with rapid-deployment teams or people already at polling sites, not to confront ICE, but to redirect and escort voters so everyone eligible gets to vote.

You can share the word at election.holiday. Businesses can support the campaign by pledging to give their employees time off to do their civic duty through Time to Vote, the coalition founded by Patagonia. And if you’re still looking for roles to support the election, find them at We are Ground Control.

All of this is part of the pre-election plan: Get large numbers of people voting against an awful regime. There’s an abundant range of opportunities to help protect our election. I hope you find your role.

This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When the shrill of heavy earthmoving machinery crept towards Elias Mlambo’s riverside banana plantations in February, the sudden brownish color of the river alarmed him. 

The water was laced with used machinery oil, disfiguring the once crystal-clear, wild water of the Haroni River. The river not only sustains the Ndau tribal people of the Chimanimani district in southeast Zimbabwe but also acts as Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique. By December of last year, excavators operated by a Chinese mining syndicate were at work along a stretch of the riverbeds — tearing up centuries of riparian ecology in a hunt for alluvial gold deposits.

“They appeared without notice, without our permission, claiming to have a government license to dig for gold on our land, but never showing the actual permit,” said Mlambo, a banana farmer and local tribal elder in Rusitu, one of the largest villages in the district. 

He said he confronted a man who claimed to be the manager of the Chinese miners — but the man gave his name only as “Xai Samson” and flatly refused to give out the company’s name. He acted as though he did not understand English — a deliberate tactic some dubious Chinese mining syndicates adopt in Zimbabwe when confronted by aggrieved locals, Mlambo said. 

“He just waffled a few sentences in Chinese — gestured to the excavators and piles of fresh soil,” he explained. “We figured out that our river, fruit plantations and ancestral graves were collateral to the invaders.” 

Ignored at first

For the next three months, Mlambo made complaints to the Chimanimani municipal authorities, a lawmaker and Zimbabwe’s mines ministry — and was ignored. Just one ministry bureaucrat responded to Mlambo and other tribal elders by telephone, only to say that his hands were tied, citing how high-level state partnerships and national economic priorities trump tribal land rights. It’s a familiar cold response from Zimbabwe’s government that human rights leaders say has given dozens of Chinese prospectors carte blanche to excavate hills and river streams, and encroach onto tribal farming and grazing lands in pursuit of precious metals like platinum, lithium or gold.

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“There’s a cozy, transactional relationship between state decision-makers and Chinese minerals prospectors,” said Nsama Musonda, the executive director of Care for Nature Zambia, a regional ecology monitoring nonprofit. “This gifts Chinese businesspeople a carefree right to dig for precious minerals — without consent — on tribal people’s lands in Zimbabwe and nearby countries like Zambia.” 

Knowing the script that has played out elsewhere across Zimbabwe, Mlambo and fellow villagers refused to retreat. Instead, they looked across the international boundary to Mozambique — a stone’s throw across the Haroni River. On the other side, in Mozambique’s Sussundenga district, villager Manuel Pinto was watching his community’s primary fish stocks float belly-up to the surface.

Fish in the community ponds that line the Mozambique side of the Haroni riverbed were suffocating from the sludge coming from the spoiled headwaters on the Zimbabwe side, he said. But Pinto feared something worse: Mozambique’s community health nurses warned that children could develop chemical rashes if they encountered contaminated waters. 

“The river doesn’t need a passport to flow and nourish both countries, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” he said, speaking the same Ndau vernacular language that hundreds of thousands of tribal people on the Zimbabwe side of the river border speak, too. “We realized that if authorities in Zimbabwe would not enforce environmental law, the Ndau people on both sides of the border would act to protect their right to safe livelihoods.”

The border alliance 

Pinto says he knew routine complaints would be easily ignored by state decision-makers. So Mlambo and Pinto conjured up a community alliance rooted in their shared Ndau lineage. Tribal identity, older than colonial state borders, drove their determination to defend their environment against the encroachment of heavily polluting Chinese miners. 

In daylight, the Ndau communities on the Zimbabwe side confronted the Chinese miners: spraying graffiti on the worksite and the machinery, and singing, chanting and banging pots, drowning them in noise. Since the area is remote geographically, located far from city markets, they also successfully convinced local food shops to refuse to sell soap, beverages, bread, meat, tea, essential groceries and cellphone top-up cards to the Chinese miners and their local mining employers. Taxis and buses refused them service. These actions constantly reminded the miners and their workers that they were trespassing on tribal lands. 

“We made life uncomfortable for them,” Mlambo said. “Their workers were often hungry because we instructed local shops not to sell food or beer to the invaders, which they liked a lot. They would drive 50 kilometers just to replenish the food pantry with essentials like salt and cigarettes. Their workers began to quarrel with their bosses.”

Locals also shared their displeasure to social media networks followed by thousands of Zimbabweans. 

At the same time, the Ndau communities on the Mozambique side of the river filled out urgent cross-border environmental petitions with provincial authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province. They walked into the offices of the governor and lawmakers and demanded urgent meetings, asking them to directly press the Zimbabwean government to take action under specified timelines. If the decision-makers didn’t follow through, the Ndau activists threatened not to pay taxes because the sludge from Zimbabwe’s polluted river was beginning to spoil their corn and fruit farming plots. 

A Chinese mining excavator digs a hillside for gold in Chimanimani district, Zimbabwe. (Centre for Natural Resource Governance)

The Zimbabwe government is known for being “tone deaf” to citizens’ grassroots petitions against irregular mining, said Pedrito Martinho Campira, chief of the Sussunhega district. But he added that the deliberate aggressive petitioning of the regional government in Manica, which borders Chimanimani, has created a diplomatic headache for Zimbabwe’s stubborn authorities, whom locals suspect were shielding the Chinese syndicate.

“At night our people would cross the river, cover the Chinese mining site with paper petitions and spray graffiti, warning the Chinese miners that they are messing with the waters flowing into Mozambique,” Campira recalled of the intense cross-border pushback that overwhelmed the Chinese prospectors. 

“Illegal riverbed mining is an affront to our two shared lands and cultures,” he said. “We are one Ndau people separated by a colonial fence; we have blood family ties across the river.”

Faced with nightly protests, daily confrontation with locals on the Zimbabwe side of operations, cross-border diplomatic pressure and vocal warnings from Mozambique border guards, who were dismayed by the contaminated water flowing from the Zimbabwe side, the unidentified Chinese miners finally retreated in June. They abandoned heavy machinery and fled the mining site — leaving locals to rehabilitate spoiled riverbeds, banana plantations and damaged forest cover. 

“We won,” Mlambo said. The Chinese mining syndicates operating without consent across rural Zimbabwe are used to facing only local complaints and enjoying the shield of compromised government bureaucrats, he added. “This time they faced something unfamiliar — a cross-border, bi-national grassroots pushback, and they were clueless on how to respond.” 

Xiao Samson, the manager of the Chinese syndicate that attempted to excavate for gold in Haroni River, refused to give a full interview. He only said in a short phone call, in broken English, that, “we are no lawless people. We have a permit. We will [be] back in Haroni River to do our gold with law.” 

Mutoko pushback

The victory in Chimanimani is not an isolated event; it marks an uptick of grassroots defiance forming in rural Zimbabwe in areas where precious minerals are being discovered. In the granite-rich hills of Mutoko, 250 miles north of Chimanimani, a similar crisis boiled over in June. Mutoko has long been the center of friction over complaints that Chinese miner-exporters are blasting and digging up lucrative black granite and gold without consent — leaving in their wake damaged homes, polluted riverways, desecrated grazing and farming lands, and deformed hills. For example, Shanghai Haoying Mining Investments has been frequently cited by locals for continuing mining activities without obtaining community consultation or environmental approvals, and for threatening to evict locals. 

In June, the community finally drew a line in the sand with a different band of Chinese miners, who, like the miners in Chimanimani, refused to give out their identity. 

“My house has been shaken to the core — its roof and walls cracking from relentless blasting by nearby Chinese miners who are going for gold,” said Urai Godo, a mother of three whose home stands at the slopes of a contested hill. One day in early August, the building frustration finally boiled over when locals saw a crew at a Chinese gold prospecting site setting up wires and detonators. Locals feared that the hill was going to be destroyed by dynamite while kids were doing homework in houses nearby. Word filtered around the village in minutes and residents carrying pots and wooden sticks stormed the blasting site without warning, Godo said. A Chinese mining boss who called himself “Hei Chu” felt the pressure and gave orders for his workers to stop blasting preparations. 

“We encircled the miners — chanting, singing, blocking their work progress. The rattled miners dropped their detonators, unwound the blasting wires, hopped into their cars, abandoned the site and never returned,” Godo recalled. 

“Hei Chu” was not reachable for comment on why the miners had attempted to work on communal land in Mutoko because the number he gave the village head repeatedly went to voicemail and no longer seemed to be working. 

Compromised governance and impunity

Though still small, this growing pushback by rural residents against mining impunity is a damning example of how the state in Zimbabwe is now captive to foreign extractive corporations, said Ancelimo Magaya, an outspoken cleric based in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

“Rural Zimbabweans are seeing this shady encroachment onto tribal lands without consent,” he said. “Rather than simply relying on hiring expensive lawyers to litigate or lodge complaints with the same tone-deaf government agencies, they are taking the miners head-on through peaceful grassroots protests.”  

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The Environmental Management Agency of Zimbabwe doesn’t do much against these foreign mining syndicates, Magaya says. They often issue small, token fines. Some officials could themselves be compromised by the same mining syndicates. This has not escaped the attention of rural residents in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to mount active, peaceful grassroots resistance rather than wait for regulatory protection, which is often absent. 

The spokesperson for the Environmental Management Agency did not respond to emailed questions about why mining in Chimanimani began without first obtaining community consent, an environmental impact assessment certificate, and all the necessary paperwork. However, speaking on anonymity, a senior bureaucrat denied such characterization.

“We are in a tricky situation,” he said. “We would like to do our jobs properly defending communities against ecological destruction. But we can’t match the money, tools and vehicles that these mining syndicates have — and the political influence they carry.” 

Back in Chimanimani, Mlambo surveyed the banks of the Haroni River. The water is beginning to run cleaner, but the marks of devastation on the land remain. Some youths are replanting fruit and Indigenous trees to rehabilitate disturbed riverbanks. The scars on the land will take years to heal.

“We reasoned that the government in Zimbabwe won’t tackle these Chinese miners,” Mlambo said. “As Ndau people on both sides of the border, we resolve to be united and proactive in defending our ecosystems. It worked, and this is a model of how grassroots communities can defend their lands against corporate extractivism.” 

The Chinese in Zimbabwe had never met this kind of bi-national grassroots community resistance to unaccountable mining, he says proudly. “We shocked them – they froze and we learnt lessons to refine our resistance next time should they try to mine on our lands again.”  

This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article After October 7, I learned that movements need grief spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since the massacres on Oct. 7, now three years ago, the news has brought a steady stream of horror and broken promises. The ceasefire in Gaza has been broken thousands of times; the ceasefire with Iran only holds until the next strike. Many of us have responded by going numb or turning away. Over these three years, I’ve come to believe that collective mourning can help movements build sturdier organizing infrastructure, move through paralysis and numbness, and get back to the long-term work of creating systemic change.

I’ve spent nearly two decades living and working as a human rights defender, mostly in Palestine and Israel. For years, I responded to atrocities the way much of the dominant organizing culture did at the time: strategically. I prepared statements, launched campaigns and mobilized our base. I worked through several wars and the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even though my colleagues and I were often physically together, we rarely had the opportunity to collectively mourn. In fact, mourning was often seen as something only the privileged could afford. As organizers and solidarity activists, we were the ones who needed to push past the pain and keep mobilizing.

And then, after each war, large swaths of colleagues and organizers would burn out, and our movement would suffer a setback. Movement researchers Paul Gorski and Cher Chen, studying U.S. human rights and social justice activists, found that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of organizers eventually walk away from movement work and never return, burned out by a culture that treats overwork and self-sacrifice as necessary. That culture also leaves no room to mourn and process the secondary trauma that accumulates, hastening burnout. These kinds of cycles make it especially hard for movements seeking systemic change to sustain themselves.

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When Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 and I was waiting in anticipation of the retaliation against Gaza, I knew I couldn’t respond with the same kind of organizing strategy that we usually use: preparation of advocacy statements, social media campaigns and fundraising appeals. I knew that while some people should and would continue that work, there also needed to be spaces for organizers and our base to mourn. And so, on Oct. 8, I opened a space for collective mourning online, sharing it in the many community, political and religious groups I was a part of, for anyone who needed somewhere to process what they were witnessing and feeling. Dozens of people joined: primarily my Jewish community at first, and then people from many faiths and chapters of my life, from Palestine to Palo Alto. 

As the assault on Gaza and the genocide continued, the room stayed open. More colleagues, including community organizers, artists, chaplains and psychologists, joined me in facilitating, and we held space for hundreds of people from across our communities to mourn together. We formed a collective called the Social Change Sanctuary and developed a format that included facilitation and participation from attendees. Over time, we were invited to hold spaces for other communities in mourning. We’ve held spaces to grieve the ongoing genocide; climate catastrophes like the fires in Los Angeles; ICE raids, arrests and murders; and the war on Iran.

The Social Change Sanctuary hosts an Interdependence Day circle in 2025. (Alison Avigayil Ramer)

Participants repeatedly shared the difference it made in their lives to know they had a consistent space to mourn.

“In daily life, when something hurts, I turn away, I distract myself,” one participant told us. “But the collective mourning practice helped me move through the frozenness that constant news induced — helped me stop doomscrolling — and I’m able to return to my work.”

That participant went on to organize her community and raised $20,000 for refugees in Gaza. 

Another participant returned to their role as a chaplain, and extended her work to include “movement chaplaincy” holding one-on-one spaces for people doing solidarity work. 

Many participants also shared how witnessing the news with others enabled them to feel the emotions provoked by the headlines, leaving them feeling less isolated and more connected. That is co-regulation happening at the communal level, increasing people’s capacity. People who could barely stay in the room during the earliest, rawest sessions after Oct. 7 can now sit with the news longer, witness without shutting down and understand what is theirs to carry and what is not.

A historical movement of mourners

While many of the collective mourning groups that have come together in recent years are new, they’re built on generations of organizing that already knew how to fold community care and grief into the work itself.

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Preserving a people’s history through quilts

During the civil rights movement, Southern organizers mourned the murdered publicly and loudly, treating funerals as organizing events rather than sites of private grief to be managed quietly. Decades later, AIDS activists advocating for government support built the NAMES Project Quilt, which memorialized the dead one quilt square at a time. And ACT UP’s “political funerals,” where activists carried the actual ashes of the dead to the White House lawn, were a vigil and a protest at the same time.

For years, Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter has opened its meetings and protests with a mourning ritual in which members stand in a circle and speak aloud the names of people killed by police, while one person at the center pours out water for each name and the group answers “ashe” after every pour. 

Over the past three years, IfNotNow, a Jewish organization that mobilized thousands to oppose the genocide in Gaza, has built something they call ceasefire circles: small, ongoing groups organized around what researchers studying the practice term “solidaristic grief,” designed less as a single vigil than as a longer-term way of holding people inside the movement over time.

In February, as ICE violence escalated, a coalition that included the NDN Collective, the Brave Heart Society, the Indigenous Protector Movement, the American Indian Movement, Sunrise Movement and Project South circulated a public toolkit for grieving those killed by federal agents, built explicitly so that any group, anywhere, could hold its own public mourning.

How mourning helps us keep going 

In an environment dominated by negative news, many of us are starting to turn away, rather than experiencing a kind of secondary, media-induced trauma that can leave us anxious, depressed or numb.

Both avoidance and numbness are the nervous system’s way of protecting us — an involuntary, evolutionarily produced reaction. They are also what makes the news cycle so useful to the people who want to immobilize us and our movements. Steve Bannon named the strategy “flood the zone.” Scholars of authoritarianism describe this as a deliberate exploitation of the public’s limited attention, engineered to produce fatigue and an inadequate or absent response. The aim is to overwhelm and exhaust the opposition. 

We do not need to feel guilty for having this response, but we do need a way through it. So we ran an experiment: Could listening to the news become an opportunity for co-regulation instead of dysregulation?

Collage of grief practices from Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026. (Art: Alison Avigayil Ramer / Photo: Lorie Shaull)

We called the practice Good Mourning. We held the 30-minute practice once a week for 40 weeks with six to 10 people. For 15 minutes, we listened to the day’s news together, usually “Democracy Now!,” mixed with music. People wrote, drew, danced or sat still while they listened. Then, for the other half of the session, we turned to each other and shared what moved through us, without offering to fix or resolve anything.

Why listen to the news at all? It may seem like a counterintuitive ask of people who are already overwhelmed by news. But tuning out isn’t a neutral act for organizers. If we numb ourselves to avoid the pain, we also lose contact with the reality we’re trying to change. We lose sight of the people being harmed, the urgency and the stakes. Scrolling by yourself doesn’t help either; it keeps the nervous system braced without ever letting it process. 

But practices like Good Mourning offer a third option: Take in the news deliberately, in a bounded container, alongside others, with room for the body to respond. This helps us stay informed and connected to what’s happening without being flooded by it, and that connection is what fuels action.

“I started Good Mourning because I wanted to hold myself accountable to listening to the news, instead of giving in to the temptation to block it out completely,” Eva Orbuch, a community organizer and one of the founders of Good Mourning, told me recently. “It became so much more — a community, a creative practice, a way to take in the news mindfully, a place to recommit to what supports my own resilience and makes things a little better in the world.”

Talking about the news activates the same analytical mind that has been narrating the news to us all week. But moving the body or creating something, even just doodling, helps us use another part of the brain to process it. That’s the basic premise of expressive arts therapy: Grief and trauma often live below language, stored in the body as tension or bracing, and adding expressive arts to the practice of listening to the news helps us move through it.

Listening together also creates an opportunity to co-regulate communally. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory describes how nervous systems calibrate against each other: Being near someone else in a state of relative safety can shift your own breathing and stress response toward theirs. A structured, repeated practice gives that calibration somewhere to happen, week after week.

“The practice helps me to compost whatever I’m holding, and to move through all the grief,” one participant said.

Making your own Good Mourning practice

This year, several of my friends contacted me before Oct. 7. “What could we possibly do this year? I’m tired of organizing events,” an organizer who has held dozens of peace vigils in the past year told me. 

“Why don’t we create our own space for collective mourning?” I offered. We can look at some of the stories, news and art from the day together. Make something of our own? 

She agreed. 

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Perhaps this is also a practice that can accompany you. Creating your own space for collective mourning doesn’t require much. Ideally, form a small group and commit to 30 minutes. Read the news to each other, or play it aloud, mixed with music, or anything that isn’t just more thinking. Invite people to pair the listening with something for the body, like movement, drawing or dancing. Then turn to each other and share your grief, without trying to resolve it, fix it or offer advice. At the end, share one way you will nourish yourself and others in this hard time, and wish each other well.

This simple act of witnessing your community in grief has been powerful for so many. Perhaps it can be a way for you and your community to move through mourning and keep on mobilizing.

This article After October 7, I learned that movements need grief spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.