ICE OUT FOR GOOD
For almost a year, Donald Trump has been using ICE as an occupying army to intimidate and repress those who would stand against him.
These violent enforcers are already being used to suppress protest, and several citizens have been shot and killed.
To win climate action, we need to live in a democracy, and that means preventing Donald Trump from establishing his own personal gestapo.
Join us and millions of others in getting ICE out of our cities.
What can you do?
Donald Trump thinks that deploying ICE to cities is a show of strength. It’s not. It reveals his weaknesses.
Occupying armies are fragile things. Thousands of ICE agents require thousands of meals every day, thousands of rental cars, and thousands of beds to sleep in every night.
Everyday people have power there. We work the hotels, the car rental agencies, and the restaurants. Without our cooperation, ICE cannot function.
If enough of us say no, this occupation will crumble and fail, and it will reveal just how weak fascism is.
Right now, we’re targeting hotels
We’ve got two tactics: Wide Awakes (in person), and mass bookings (online)
WHAT ARE WIDE AWAKES?
Wide Awakes are pretty much what they sound like. You and your friends show up outside a Hilton and make so much noise that ICE agents can’t get a good night’s sleep, sending a strong message to the hotel that your community doesn’t want them housing an occupying army.
We’re learning from history here
Before the Civil War, the Wide Awakes were a mass youth movement for the abolition of slavery. In the years leading up to the Civil War, they turned the lives of politicians who supported slavery into waking nightmares, while also serving as escorts and protection for abolitionist politicians, who often faced violence at the hands of those who supported slavery.
One might say they were “woke” to the problems of their time, eyes open to the evils of slavery the urgency of immediate action. At Sunrise Movement, we have often taken inspiration from the Wide Awakes.
They were best known for the actions that gave them their namesake, showing up outside of pro-slavery politicians’ houses and banging pots, pans, and whistles all night.
Check out a few Wide Awake actions we’ve hosted over the past few months
Tell Hilton to stop housing ICE
With your help, we’ve been booking out Hilton hotels (refundable), then cancelling the bookings last minute and telling them exactly why. Hotels need to know that the cities they operate out of don’t want them housing ICE so they can terrorize our neighbors, and you can send them a strong message.
The Two hands of Fossil fuel fascism: Why climate movements must oppose ICE
For eight years, we’ve been organizing under a simple principle: climate action is inevitable, but how it happens is not. There are only two clear paths forward.
The first path is beautiful. We mobilize as a society and win the largest democratic project in modern US history: a full-scale transition off of fossil fuels, rebuilding our economy around a politics that treats human joy, not profit, as the core motive. Instead of spending trillions of dollars on guns and fighter jets and walls, we invest that money in jobs building the resources that make our society better and more resilient. We build cheap, abundant clean energy, we shore up our communities against natural disasters, and we make those communities wonderful places to live.
The second path is grim. As the climate crisis gets worse and worse, those with resources (clean water, the least affected land, etc) will build walls around them. They will hire private security to protect that hoard. They will leave the rest of us to struggle and die.
Unfortunately, it’s the path we’ve been on for decades. This ICE surge is simply the next step.
For decades, the fossil fuel lobby has spent billions of dollars to influence US policy.
- With one arm, we wage international war against any country that gets in between them and their greed for oil, overthrowing democratically elected governments in South and Central America, Africa, and the Middle East, all for the crime of not bowing to their presumed right to profit. In the process, we oppress their people and their economies, turning the global South into as much of a sweatshop for American supremacy as they can. These destabilized economies are then hard hit by the rising global temperatures those fossil fuel companies caused, sending millions of refugees North, looking for a better life.
- With the other arm, we push those displaced people back into the global sweatshop, whether by locking them in private prisons where they are forced into what is effectively slave labor, or sending them immigrant detention centers where they endure miserable conditions – sometimes for years – before deportation back to their own country, or even another country if that’s more convenient for the engine of deportation.
It’s a self sustaining cycle: extraction drives instability, and enforcement manages the consequences.
Once you see this, ICE invading cities around the United States isn’t a separate issue from the climate crisis. It’s simply the enforcement arm of the fossil fuel lobby’s climate plan.
While we fight for a jobs program building clean energy, the job program they’ve fought for is the gestapo terrorizing our neighbors.
But all of this militarization serves another function.
The fossil fuel lobby has to handle domestic resistance: a majority of Americans want their government to do more to address the climate crisis.
The fossil fuel lobby has to handle economic forces: new clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. Their business model is swiftly dying, and will soon be a fossil of its own.
They can only maintain power if they suppress democracy. We can only win climate action democratically if democratic protest remains possible. They hope to build a world where protest is shut down violently and without question.
Climate organizers know this in our bones. We’ve learned from Standing Rock. From Line 3. From Cop City. From Steven Donziger. The fossil fuel lobby is willing to jail us all for the crime of wanting a better future if it stands in the way of their profits.
Today, it’s deportation raids. Tomorrow it’s protest raids. Today it’s “illegal immigrants”. Tomorrow, it’s “eco-terrorists”. Today, it’s detention for crossing a border. Tomorrow it’s detention for showing up to a protest.
We are opposing ICE’s occupation of our cities because it is self-defense for democracy, and against the same enemies who are driving us headlong into the climate crisis.
