In the following account, the author recounts scenes from the movement against deportations in Paris in the late 1990s. As Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their lackeys scapegoat the undocumented and kidnap immigrants who oppose genocide even when they hold green cards, it is a good time to study how people have resisted the violence of the state in other times and places. This is adapted from the forthcoming memoir Another War Is Possible, narrating experiences from the global movement against fascism and capitalism at the turn of the century. If you’re interested in reading the rest of the book, you can back it on Kickstarter now. Gare de Lyon: Paris, May 5, 1998 It’s early evening and Sophie and I are sitting in the long-distance-train waiting area of Paris’s Gare de Lyon, one of Europe’s busiest train stations. All around us are travelers scurrying to and fro. Stressed-out tourist families, a camera still flung around Dad’s neck, rushing their kids through the station mix with tired-looking businessmen waiting to get back home. “You did a great job with your outfit,” she says to me as she looks me over from head to toe. I met Sophie at an action (or demonstration, or concert, or something of the sort) about a year ago, and we have been inseparable at political events since. She is my age, a student at Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School),1 and if I didn’t know very well the context in which she’s making this comment, I might think she’s flirting with me. “You’re looking pretty good yourself,” I respond in kind. She has managed to transform herself into the spitting image of your perfectly forgettable average French teenage girl. Basically, she looks like a younger Sporty Spice in her Adidas tracksuit and sneakers. I, on the other hand, have gone with a significantly preppier look: khaki pants, polo shirt, nondescript jacket, and moccasins. She looks at me again, pauses, and slightly withdraws her compliment: “It’s not the most functional wardrobe, though. The khakis stand out and the moccasins probably aren’t great for running.” I shrug. “I did what I could. I was mainly concerned with getting this far.” While we are sitting among the tourists and businessmen, doing our best to look like a somewhat mismatched young teenage couple waiting for a train back to their city, we are in fact not travelers, and the correct term for our attire is not outfit but disguise. We are not here to take a train, but to stop one. A train that transports imprisoned human beings against their will every single night. The 21:03 to Marseille, otherwise known to us as the deportation train. Our objective is to stop the Paris-to-Marseille overnight train, which the French National Railway Company, better known for its French initials SNCF, permits the French government to use to transport North African immigrants, usually of Algerian or Moroccan origin, by rail to Marseille. Once in the port city, they are expelled from French territory by boat. The attempt to block this train is an idea born of the Collectif Anti-Expulsions (Anti-Deportation Collective), and it was decided that if we were to have any chance of success, we should disguise ourselves as best as possible and infiltrate the station in small groups, since trying to march in there as a demonstration probably wouldn’t get us very far. The Anti-Deportation Collective The CAE, officially formed only a few weeks earlier in early April 1998, was an autonomous collective born in the heat of the movement of the sans-papiers of the mid-’90s, a French term meaning “without papers” that refers to the movement against the deportation of undocumented immigrants and in favor of their “legalization.” The collective’s broadly accepted guiding principles2 were as simple as they were clearly steeped in anarchist modes of organization, thought, and action: Practical opposition to deportations. We are not “allies” to the sans-papiers, we struggle with them out of motivations and convictions that are our own. These motivations vary among individuals, but are in all cases rooted in anti-capitalism. The collective is autonomous and collaborates with sans-papiers collectives that are autonomous not merely in theory, but in practice. Decisions are made by way of general assembly. The plight of the sans-papiers had exploded into the public consciousness following a series of highly publicized church occupations in 1996 by undocumented immigrants themselves. This culminated on August 23, 1996 in a raid in which nearly two thousand police officers stormed the Saint-Bernard church, resulting in the detention of 210 undocumented immigrants. After that, solidarity demonstrations with the sans-papiers in Paris regularly numbered in the tens of thousands, with the participants—and their demands and methods of action—representing the broad spectrum of the French center left and radical left. This included the Communist Party and the CGT union, but likewise the sizable anarchist blocs of the CNT, Anarchist Federation, Alternative Libertaire, SCALP, and everything in between. Importantly, the sans-papiers themselves were organized into several collectives and structures; they were active and leading participants in their own struggles. As with all communities, they were not a monolith. Within the sans-papiers organizations, one could find a similarly broad spectrum of ideas and strategies in regards to demands, objectives, and methods of action. While the sans-papiers organizations, regardless of their politics, were limited in their methodology by the logical constraints of their situation—the fact that an arrest or identity control could quickly lead to a possible deportation with devastating, even deadly, potential consequences—the reformist organizations were unsurprisingly bound by the constraints of their respect for legality and their acceptance of the basic premises of states and borders and the idea that a human being should in some way or another be bound by the possession of a particular piece of paper, or lack thereof, based on their place of birth. Or, even more absurdly, as is the case in France, their bloodline. We anarchists, on the other hand, had no such constraints. Our solidarity with what were clearly some of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society—workers, people of color, many of them women, escaping from what were some of the most horrendous conflicts in the world at that time—was immediate and instinctive. But through our position of unconditional solidarity with the sans-papiers and the assertion that in the world we are fighting for, no human will ever be illegal and freedom of movement will be for people and not just for commodities, we articulated a position of necessary rupture with the concepts of states and borders. If our demands could not be granted by the state and our objective could not be realized within the framework of its existence, then it naturally followed that we would not look to the state to grant those things. Consequently, we were embarking on a concrete struggle to prevent deportations and make it possible for people to live where they chose and how they chose. The same stance toward the state applied in this struggle as in our abstract analysis: the state was our enemy, and we were determined to wage war against it within the appropriate context of the time and situation we found ourselves in, in hopes of preventing it from carrying out its objectives. The greater our success, hand in hand with those sans-papiers who were open to our solidarity and methods, the greater our collective power would grow as a movement and the greater the degree of agency, autonomy, and freedom we would be able to realize. We were not making demands, but seeking to force concessions and create realities. Concretely, that meant that deportations are for stopping. To do so, we would attack the state’s machinery of deportation, its infrastructure, and the enterprises that collaborated with it and benefited economically from assisting with the hunting, caging, and expelling of human beings. We did so out of solidarity, out of conviction, but also with the explicit understanding that despite our privileges and different realities, our struggle was the same as theirs. In fighting alongside the sans-papiers, as accomplices rather than allies, we were also fighting for ourselves: “Their situation makes us all more precarious in labor relations, the repression and control developed against them will affect us eventually as well, the hardening of borders is also a barrier to our freedom of movement, because we are also foreigners to this world and we will be pushed further and further into clandestinity (by choice but also by necessity if we are to live our desires) by the constant evolution of the law and the states.”3 The 21:03 to Marseille So there we are, sitting under the elegant industrial-era steel and glass roof so typical of venerable European train stations—a fittingly dramatic setting for the impending confrontation. We are waiting anxiously for the moment when an unknown number of cops will appear, escorting what I expect will be a handcuffed individual through the hall, at which point we are to spring into action and form a human chain to prevent them from loading him onto the train. Failing that, we are to do everything we can to prevent the train from departing. We are not pacifists, and while there is a general consensus that our side will avoid unnecessary escalations, there is an equally clear agreement that the priority is not optics, but accomplishing a concrete and tangible objective. Nonetheless, I’m anxious about our chances of success. “Do you see any familiar-looking faces?” I ask worriedly. I’m scanning the hall as best I can and I don’t like what I see. “No, I can’t even see Alan or Mary. I wonder if they made it in.” Mary is another Lycée Autogéré student and Sophie’s best friend, while Alan is slightly older and the token cliché-looking punk—complete with mohawk and faux leather jacket—in our little youth affinity group. Not one of us is old enough to be a legal adult, yet the four of us already have a fair amount of experience getting into trouble with the state. We met at a Comité d’Action Lycéen (CAL, or “High School Action Committee”) meeting, a place that can only be described as a breeding ground for high-school-age anarchists. We’re young, fanatical, and unencumbered by wage slavery enough to enjoy ample free time, which we use to be regulars at every demonstration, action, occupation, political squat, concert, debate, and confrontation within the greater Paris area. When we’re not doing that, we’re spending our nights together drinking, getting stoned, and listening to Ska-P’s “El vals del obrero” in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Or at least the others are—myself, I’ve discovered Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of the Revolutionist and concluded that my mind and body are weapons for revolutionary struggle, so I should keep them free of drugs and alcohol. This makes me lots of fun at parties. Still, no matter how combative we may be, no matter how sharp I keep my proverbial weapons, if there are only twenty of us when the cops show up, this is probably not going to go well. “Fucking unions,” Sophie mutters under her breath. “What are they good for if they can’t even bring out fifty people for something like this?” Her complaint is directed at SUD, short for Solidaire, Unitaire, Démocratique (“In Solidarity, United, Democratic”), a small leftist union born in the aftermath of the 1995 general strike, whose railway branch had promised to mobilize for this action. I shrug. “Who knows, it’s not like we know what they look like. Maybe it’ll work out.” I’m trying to be positive, because this is the route we have chosen; if we’re at the ball, we might as well dance. It doesn’t seem like there are many alternatives available, anyway. A couple of weeks earlier, we were able to occupy the tracks, successfully delaying the train for a few hours. The cops eventually cleared the tracks via a liberal use of batons and CS gas, and when we returned a few days later, we found an army of police guarding the tracks. “Look, look, right there!” Sophie points to one of the entrances to the hall, her voice trembling with a mix of excitement and anger. I’m just spotting what she is pointing at, a young man probably in his twenties being led by an escort of seven or eight cops, when immediately my concerns about our numbers today are erased. From every corner of the hall comes a loud burst of disapproving whistling, followed immediately by what seems like the entire crowded hall erupting in thunderous chants of “Non, non, non… aux expulsions!” amplified and rendered even more urgent by the echoes generated by the closed space in which we find ourselves. The first few people rise from their seats, sprint over to where the line of CRS riot police are guarding access to the platform and the train, and link arms. A few more join them. Then dozens more. Friends and comrades appear from everywhere among the crowd. The chants declaring that no human being is illegal ring loud and constant as we too join the human chain. There are hundreds of us! There are so many of us that we form two lines across the opening to the platform—one facing the cops who were already stationed there to prevent us from attempting to get access to the tracks, and another facing back toward the hall, preventing the cops who are escorting a captive from reaching the train. Sophie and I find ourselves in the first of those two lines. The next few minutes pass in an adrenaline-fueled blur. The sight of the person we are trying to protect from deportation right in front of us illustrates poignantly what is at stake, and the disconcerted looks of his police escort only embolden us. Clearly, they aren’t sure whether to push through or abort. The police are familiar with resistance to deportations. We regularly show up at airports, informing passengers as well as airline workers about what is happening on their flights and what their employers are making them unwilling accomplices to, urging passengers to refuse to fly on flights that are simultaneously prisoner transports. We have had varying degrees of success. We’ve tried to disrupt and prevent deportations too, as we did a few weeks earlier at this same spot. But we’ve never done this. At least, never by the hundreds, never with the palpable feeling that we might actually succeed. I think the cops sense that, too. The next scene is of an extreme and almost intimate violence. Clearly, the order has been given to clear access to the train. CS gas and batons fly all around us. We are not armed. We have no flagpoles, no helmets, not even the cloth of a banner to protect ourselves with. Masks cover our faces while linked arms keep us together, but this leaves us practically defenseless against the baton blows. With neither word nor warning, the riot cop directly to my right pulls out a metal retractable baton from the inside pocket of his jacket, and in one swift motion he extends it and brings it down with a thud against the head of a comrade next to me. I hear the crack and immediately see blood gushing from the wound at the top of his forehead. His arms go limp, and the best I can do is kind of release my arm, which I have linked around his, and push him backward as he slumps, so that he falls toward the line of comrades facing the station and not at the feet of these unhinged cops. Before I can assess the wisdom of this course of action, I am already instinctively launching a kick at the stomach of the cop who has injured my neighbor. This cop has been sneering at us since we stood up, waiting for his moment to injure a “gauchiste de merde,” the French for “piece-of-shit leftist,” which is exactly what nationalists and fascists like to call us in Argentina, as well. Sophie yells for me to get back, but her voice barely registers on my radar. Comrades break the line to carry away the injured friend just as I broke ranks with my kick. Still others, blinded or unable to breathe due to the CS gas, also break ranks and retreat. The young Algerian is forced onto the train. The following week’s edition of Le Monde Libertaire, the weekly newspaper of the francophone Anarchist Federation, later reported4 that the train “departed with a delay of thirty minutes. […] The train would stop several kilometers farther, in Melun, waiting for another train transporting approximately half of its original passengers.” The missing passengers had been unable to board due to the clashes between demonstrators and police. “The train was again stopped at the Lyon-Perrache station around 2:30 am by activists there, but not before having made an unscheduled stop at L’Estaque station to disembark the prisoners and place them in the detention center at Arenc, as the cops were concerned about the possible actions of further demonstrators in Marseille.” There are still two clearly defined fronts inside the waiting area. We are standing on one side, now about twenty meters or so away from the trains. A small group of people start to leave—about twenty people, all wearing high-visibility vests. They are the SUD railway trade unionists, who had shown up to the action after all, but decided that with the departure of the train, their participation was over. The rest of us still number solidly in the hundreds. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. It’s poor attendance even at a third-division football match, barely enough people to fill a subway car. Even a strictly anarchist demonstration in Paris could number into the thousands. But in my eyes at that moment, these people are the whole world. Who cares about numbers, optics, or the opinion of sheep? I feel at home among these two hundred who have put their bodies behind the conviction that no human being is illegal, who have shown with their actions that the state and its agents are to be confronted head-on. Rather two hundred ultra-leftists, adventurists, extremists, or whatever else they may call us than two thousand who will stand idly by because party or union discipline says now is not the moment and this is not the way—or twenty thousand who will march down the street with us proclaiming that no human being is illegal, only to placidly continue with their day while others are dragged, often drugged and bound, to prisoner transports. I’m grateful for the participation of the sympathizer, the unionist, the party member, the reformist. I understand we need them to exert political pressure. But I feel now that my place is with the militants and the fighters, no matter the numbers. In front of us is a wall of riot cops, now too far to reach us with their gas and truncheons. The idea of police as the armed guards that enforce the dictatorship of capital through the state-sanctioned monopoly of violence gave way to a much more urgent feeling—a burning hatred of those who hurt my friends in order to perpetrate injustice. Whoever wears that uniform is the immediate means of our oppression and therefore my enemy. Somebody has come back from another track with a backpack full of stones. As the chants against deportation continue to roar, a few dozen of us attack the cops. There’s sadness and frustration still, because we failed, but there is also joy. There is a feeling of collective refusal and liberation. Too Much and Never Enough As we finally make our retreat from the station, smashing security cameras, advertisement panels, and automated ticket counters along the way, I am already thinking about the young Algerian whose deportation we were trying to stop. Tonight wasn’t about making an abstract political statement against deportations. It wasn’t a militant yet still symbolic action against the machinery of expulsion and the barbarism that categorizes human beings based on where they happen to have been born. The objective was to stop the kidnapping of a specific human being. And while there is still some distant hope that comrades farther down the line, in Lyon or in Marseille, might still succeed, we, at least, have failed, and my mind is already focused on how I, or we collectively, can do more. Despite my concerns that we didn’t do enough, the very next day, I am confronted with the press and the good citizens of Paris howling that we did too much. I pick up a newspaper on the way to school and find articles pontificating about the extremists at the train station, outraged at the disorder, condemning the supposed outbreak of violence. Too much disorder, too much violence—words coming from exasperated good citizens of Paris as they walk past me at the very same train station and see the smashed ticket-vending machines. The constant hand-wringing about “the extreme left, emboldened, becoming increasingly aggressive, violent, and dangerous” has only intensified since the election of the socialist and communist center-left government coalition. What was damaged? As I make my way through the station, I take note of the “damage.” The only damage to the station is to the machines that hinder our freedom of movement and convert the need to get from one place to another into an economic consideration. To the advertising panels that pollute public space and turn any place where the human eye might rest its gaze into propaganda for the constant consumption of goods we don’t need. And finally, to the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras, ensuring that anyone who rejects this system of consumption and control can be more efficiently surveilled and criminalized. What precious order did we disrupt? If the order they are referring to is this superficial peace and tranquility that has nothing to do with justice, then the problem is not that we were violent or disorderly but that we effectively disrupted the orderly procedures of oppression. The order of those who prefer the continuation of oppression as long as they can turn a blind eye to it—or worse, celebrate it in the name of nationalism or racism—to the turbulence of the struggle to end it. Violence? We threw some stones, probably injured nobody. The injured were on our side, those who faced the armed forces of the state with not much more than our bodies and the occasional flying object. What is a few smashed ticketing machines and advertisements compared to the violence we witnessed? The violence that takes place constantly, unceasingly, in every immigrant neighborhood swept by kidnappers working for the state—during every ticket control in the subway that triggers a domino effect that ends in deportation—on flights leaving constantly with prisoners, often drugged and handcuffed, transported as human cargo against their will. In regards to the life of this man, I don’t intend to shock or traumatize with speculations about what his fate might be, what his circumstances were, whether he was torn from a family, a partner, a project, his dreams. It doesn’t matter. I assert his freedom to live as he chooses and where he chooses because my anarchism demands this as a minimum condition of human dignity and a rejection of the system of states and borders that I seek to destroy. This violence, this war on individuals in the name of states and nations, is the only relevant violence here, the violence that is carried out in the defense of oppression. It is a machine of violence built to protect and perpetuate the system of exploitation and human suffering that pits human against human in a needless struggle for survival. A machine that has colonized the minds of people to such an extent that they can only recognize violence at the point of impact—the fist striking a face, the rock striking the policeman’s shield—and only when it interrupts the order that ordinarily inflicts it. This renders invisible the ceaseless unspeakable violence that flows from the system of nations, capital, and class society: death due to lack of access to health care, famine and hunger created by artificial scarcity, workplace accidents and deaths caused by the drive to skimp on safety measures in order to maximize profits, endless religious and nationalist wars. Immigrants drown in the seas around Fortress Europe or die of dehydration in the heat of the Arizona desert in desperate attempts to escape poverty and improve their lives. This systemic violence, the violence of oppression, barely even registers to most as such. I make my way through the city, still lost in my thoughts as I exit the subway into the largely immigrant neighborhood where the CNT offices are. Two cops are parked outside the subway, nonchalantly checking people’s identification at random. “Papers, please.” The normality of everyday violence. Faced with this reality, who cares about legality? Who cares about popular opinion? When there were few of us and we occupied the tracks, our action was completely peaceful. Yet the mercenaries of the state came and beat us without hesitation in order to achieve its objectives. Although they were able to accomplish this in a relatively “orderly” manner, due to our small numbers and tactical avoidance of violence, was that not the victory of an immeasurably greater violence? Would a greater violence on our end, for the purposes of liberation, not be justified? In what thought process does it follow that nonviolence represents the moral high ground, when adherence to nonviolence makes the perpetuation of human suffering and oppression possible? There is a moment that I will never forget from the day we were beaten off the tracks a few weeks prior to the story I have recounted. I can barely see him through the glass, his complexion and the reflection of the station lights against the train’s windows making it difficult to distinguish his features and facial expressions. Two cops are moving him through the train, one holding each arm behind him, his hands cuffed together in front. Suddenly, as they pass an open window we can clearly see as he turns to us. He lifts his hands and displays a victory sign with each, as he mouths “thank you” to us. There is sadness, dignity, and gratitude in his face. I don’t know anything about him, who he is, where he is from, what brought him here, what he is being sent back to. But I know that violence—life-changing and potentially fatal violence—is not taking place in the delaying of the train. Violence is what is being done to him inside it. It’s not that we are too violent, but exactly the opposite. If we don’t employ the full arsenal of our capacity for collective revolutionary action, to be a force against the system of control that oppresses all of us, are we not as complicit as those who see it but choose to turn away? What we are doing is not too much. It’s not nearly enough. Further Reading The Border Is Everywhere—We Can Attack It Anywhere Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE No Wall They Can Build Solidarity in an Age of War and Displacement The Students Walk Out in Los Angeles The Syrian Cantina in Montreuil: Organizing in Exile Willem Van Spronsen’s Action against the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma Paris’s Lycée Autogéré (Self-Managed High School) is an experimental public school founded in 1982 that “places students in a condition of autonomy, encouraging them to resolve challenges themselves, in a collective manner if they so choose.” Academically, the school rejects grades, while structurally, its day-to-day operations are decided on collectively by teachers, students, and staff in a directly democratic fashion, principally through working groups and assemblies. Unsurprisingly, the school has steadily provided new and young blood into the anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement, and just as unsurprisingly, it was a target of a fascist attack in 2018. The high school’s website (in French) can be found here. ↩ “Lutter auprès des sans-papiers: Histoire du CAE Paris,” Courant Alternatif, February 1, 2006, http://oclibertaire.free.fr/spip.php?article115; translation by the author. ↩ “Un bilan critique du Collectif Anti-Expulsions d’Ile-de-France,” Cette Semaine, no. 85 (August–September 2002), https://cettesemaine.info/cs85/cs85cae.html; translation by the author. ↩ Jacques, “Étrangers expulsés, étrangers assasssinés!,” Le Monde Libertaire, no. 1123 (May 14–20, 1998), available at https://ml.ficedl.info/spip.php?article3761; translation by the author. ↩

A work of speculative fiction. In November 1919, United States President Woodrow Wilson launched mass raids against the entire anarchist movement in the United States. Police simultaneously arrested thousands of anarchists in many different parts of the country, shutting down their newspapers, organizations, and meeting halls. If similar raids were to take place today, they would occur in a technological landscape involving mass surveillance and targeted electronic attacks. Those who survive would also have to adopt different tools. Escape When the police battering ram hits his door at 4:11 am, Jake is in his boxers on the floor, playing an emulated sidescroller. The adrenaline hits and within seconds he has jammed his bedroom window open, sliding down into the backyard and off in a run, his socks instantly soaked in the grass. He hears shouting but doesn’t look back to check if there are pigs looking out his window or chasing him from the side of the house, he jumps the back fence more awkwardly than he imagined, getting a splinter deep in his left hand, but he ignores it and dashes over the roof of the neighbor’s shed, trying to remember every detail of the surrounding blocks. In what feels like an instant, he’s two blocks away, hiding behind some bushes as a squad car drives by. His breath sounds to him like the loudest thing in the world and his mind spins as he imagines a neighbor coming out behind him. He’s in nothing but boxers and muddy socks and his hand is dripping blood. Nothing happens. The squad car crawls down another block. Time to move. Vera is almost home from work, listening to music in her earphones, when she comes around a bend and sees the corner of a SWAT van outside her punk house. She pivots immediately down another street, casually continuing her walk while pulling out her phone, she knows she should immediately turn it off but first she texts a group chat “House being raided” and then turns it off. Maybe that warning will help someone. Many phone batteries remain active even when the device is off, she knows; right now, some lazy junior officer could be noticing the GPS or her network connection triangulating her as she moves away. Should she throw it? Should she abruptly stomp on her phone out here on the street? There’s a drainage vent coming up, she could toss it in and keep walking. Vera hesitates. Her phone is “encrypted,” but against everyone’s advice she uses a short password. If they dig it out of the drain… she doesn’t know how to pry out the SD card, stomping on the whole device might draw attention and not even destroy the main memory… time is of the essence, so she makes a hard choice quickly and just tosses the whole thing in the drain. She’s just a normal person on a walk. As she keeps walking away, Vera hears a car rolling up behind her slowly, it takes every ounce of willpower to keep walking normally, not to look back in terror. Maybe she should? Maybe she should just run for it? The car parks behind her and there are sounds of a mom unloading young kids. She’s not being followed. Where to now? Julie and Maggie sit at their dining room table, struggling not to reflect panic at each other. Only one news outlet is even reporting the nationwide raids and there’s almost nothing there. Messages saying “Leave and then delete this group chat” keep popping up for both of them. Little spatters of reports on raids and then silence; a friend who is always too frantic is spamming everyone asking for updates, then suddenly she’s silent. There’s an hour of nothing. They trade terse updates with a friend who lives far away. Someone local suddenly appears online, but only to post a meme in a dead channel and then disappear. The same music plays on the same radio stations. The wind blows through the trees. A cousin asks for advice with a preschool situation, totally oblivious. The local news does a puff piece about a local business. The neighbors get a pizza delivery. “They’re probably not going to come for us. We haven’t done anything.” Their confused dog is whining with shared nerves. Maggie keeps eyeing the go-bag by the door they packed together months ago. That afternoon, Julie had made a show of being a good sport, humoring her need to prep; now all Maggie can think about is everything they’re missing. Julie’s passport has just expired. Can they get across the border? If only they had done a dry run. They take the dog out on a walk, leaving all devices home, whispering potential plans to one another, trying not to draw attention as a jogger passes them by. When they get home, there’s a private message on Instagram from a friend saying they’re putting together a legal defense committee, first meeting will be public, at a public park, they’re inviting some local liberal journalists as shields. Someone at the local alt-weekly says she’s writing a story. There’s a lawyer coming from a big-name liberal thing. The internet keeps being really slow. Signal doesn’t deliver messages and then suddenly delivers three all at once. Loading a lot of websites just returns errors. They’re so sleep-deprived with stress that when they finally crash together on the couch, they sleep right through the defense committee meeting. A friend knocks loudly on their door and they nearly die of heart attacks, assuming it’s the cops. His report back is terse: almost no journalists showed. Most of the folks who went have been grabbed. One was driven down off her bike on her way home. An old liberal lawyer went to the county jail with a court order and the cops just laughed and arrested her. He’s going underground and suggests they do too. But Julie and Maggie have a life, they have jobs—at least for now, as they’ve both called out sick—and they have a house. They’re normal now, even law-abiding. Burn a few posters, donate a few books to the neighborhood little libraries, delete a few accounts, maybe they can pass as upstanding citizens. “If we leave our shit here and stop paying, we’ll lose everything we’ve built since poverty, plus have to pay some ridiculous fine.” If they do get raided, maybe it’ll be just a few days in lock up, in and out, just a performance of a crackdown. The libs will get mad about the lawyers, surely. Neither of them has been able to cook since the raids first started, so they drive out together to grab pickup. Waiting for a light, Maggie stares at something on the side of the street and then leaps out the truck passenger’s side door without a word. Julie is frightened at first, then furious, but when she pulls the truck over and heads back to Maggie, she sees her partner kneeling next to a homeless man lying at an odd angle. “We don’t have our phones, we can’t call a paramedic,” she reminds Maggie. But then recognition dawns on her. It’s one of their friends. Under the mess of blisters and swollen bruises, his eyes are open, staring at nothing. He lived in one of the first punk houses that was raided, he never went to anything besides some hardcore shows, he was just a baker. They don’t pick up their meal. They head home. Dog. Go-bag. Some last-minute additional ideas. Camping gear. Encrypted backup drives. Medicine. Dry food. Clothes. Blankets. Phones and leftover devices smashed. House key hidden somewhere in the yard for a friend. Maggie looks at her cheap Casio watch. “That’s time; we need to go.” Resources Jake has been tagging and dumpster-diving for years, so he knows his neighborhood pretty well. Just as he’s noticed what gets cleaned and what does not, he’s noticed what gets moved and what does not. What gets paid attention to and what does not. There’s a moss-covered rock in a local park that never gets moved. No one even goes near it. There’s a roof of an abandoned building littered with garbage. Long ago, Jake took two plastic bottles and sealed inside each a ziplock bag with a small amount of cash and two USBs each. Then he buried one bottle in the dirt underneath the rock and taped another bottle underneath a non-functioning vent on the roof of an abandoned building. In each bottle, one USB contains an encrypted KeepassX database with the distinct login information of every online account he has, as well as a VeraCrypt encrypted folder with various files he wanted to make sure he never lost (scans of his IDs, photos of friends) including a GPG key pair. He has encrypted both with a passphrase of five randomly chosen dictionary words committed to memory. “Veritable Sasquatch Humdinger Locality Peeps.” He has practiced this every night for weeks, building all kinds of associations and mnemonics. Unencrypted on the drives are executable files to install KeepassX, Veracrypt, and GPG on any new computer. On the other USB is a full install of the Tails operating system. Jake knows he looks a mess in his boxers and muddy socks, but he gets to the park and digs up the bottle without a squad car seeing him or some vigilante neighbor raising a fuss. The twenty and two tens inside will have to be enough. Luckily, there’s a small houseless encampment nearby and an old lady is willing to part with a sweater for ten. A free box happens to have a (too large) pair of sneakers. He desperately tries to make his boxers look like shorts and walks to a thrift store, quickly emerging with a backpack, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a pair of pants. A visit to a corner-store bathroom with a razor and hair dye, and his appearance is at least a little different. He buys a cheap first aid kit for the splinter in his hand. With his cash broken into change, he can catch a bus across town. When Jake gets near the first house of comrades, not only are the cops there, but his friends are still in their underwear and hogtied on the lawn. A cop is violently molesting a friend of his under the pretense of a search while the others laugh. Jake keeps moving. At the second house, there are no squad cars, but the front door is visibly missing. Jake notices someone sitting in an unmarked car across the street. He keeps walking. The third house he tries belongs to a largely apolitical friend. It’s a struggle to try to get him not to proclaim surprise loudly on the front porch and not to talk near devices. “I just need to borrow a couple hundred, man, then I’ll be out of your hair. I never saw you, you never saw me. Please.” Jake leaves with a hundred, a filled water bottle, a better hoodie, a better pair of shoes with dry socks, and a dusty old laptop. It’s not enough bus fare to get to the border. He needs a sleeping bag, but REI has been implementing stronger anti-theft policies and the longer he fucks around town, the more likely he is to get stopped. He’s terrified of facial recognition/tracking software on the buses, and his thrift store baseball cap isn’t going to protect him forever. He scopes out the city bus terminal from some distance, but it looks like this one checks ID and there’s a cop wandering around. Instead, he catches a city bus out to a distant suburb on the edge of rural two-lane roads, trying to hitch. Hopefully, the cops out here aren’t actively looking for him and won’t harass a hitchhiker. A state patrol car passes him without incident. He has no success for hours and it starts to grow dark, so it’s back to the city. Worried about cash, in the middle of the night, he climbs the roof of his second stash, but it’s missing. Probably the tape eroded months ago and it fell off. Hope the person who found it could use the cash. If they opened one of the USBs, it would just prove cryptic, no way to even learn what was encrypted. It’s a cold night, sleeping rough without a sleeping bag, and in the morning, Jake takes refuge in the back of a café, where he still has enough cash for a warm drink. He takes out the dusty old laptop from his friend and the Tails USB, booting it and accessing the internet over Tor. The connection to the Tor network has trouble, so he chooses “Configure Connection” and selects different bridges until he finds one that works. A few anarchist counterinfo sites are reporting the raids, but a surprising number of sites are down entirely. Local news says almost nothing besides statist blather. Social media is trash with speculation from those least informed. Foreign noblogs and indymedia sites have the most relevant reporting. Signal is down, something about centralized architecture, comments speculate about international law, but it doesn’t matter right now. Riseup allegedly melted their servers with thermite during a raid and were all arrested. Protonmail has apparently been collaborating, injecting spyware onto user’s devices, and some people are surprised by this? Wire is “temporarily unavailable.” A few people leave links urging people to use various apps or tools Jake’s never heard of. Other people debate the technical merits, but he has a hard time understanding. One new app is blowing up pretty quickly, lots of people attest to it being good, but this seems mostly based on them finding it easy to use. One person says they are still trying to use a smartphone but then goes quiet. One account that was quiet for a while starts speaking differently. In the comments section on a formerly obscure site, someone says, “This is Big C, I’m free, a group of us are forming up at a secure location, contact me through a secure channel.” Jake knows this is Cookie, a local organizer. After a little struggle, Jake manages to get the most popular new “encrypted communication” apps temporarily installed on his Tails instance. He joins one of the public channels that some comments encouraged using. It’s basically like Telegram or Discord: a flood of posting and arguing. Folks who’ve survived the raids using these new accounts try to imply who they are without saying it openly. It’s an amateur hour shitshow of oblique flailing: “Remember that one time when we did that one thing, I was the one who wore green.” Turns out one of the worst assholes in the scene is still free and he’s using the opportunity to crow. Even when the crude “only you would know X” games imply an account is a given comrade, Jake knows that such details could simply be copy-pasted from a compromised device via some man-in-the-middle attack where the cops sit between two parties relaying their messages back and forth as if they’re the other person. This is not enough to trust an internet post enough to meet up. Vera walks immediately to the house of her old friend Cat. She scopes the front from down the street, notices Cat’s Subaru is missing, and makes her way in through the backyard. Vera has held on to a spare key for years, but their friendship is almost entirely offline. They don’t even bring devices when they hang out. As far as the outside world knows, Cat is just another park ranger doing ecological restoration. Ten years ago, they burned down a condo together. Vera cries and trembles the second she closes the back door behind her, falling into a fetal position. Cat’s house is pristine, beautiful, safe. Vera rocks back and forth, trying to remember breathing exercises. Has her heart always been this loud? Is she dying? After an eternity, she gets up and starts doing stretches and exercises. She pictures herself punching through the faces of the cops back at her house. She knows she needs to work out the adrenaline. She needs to—oh god she needs to drink water. Cat’s house is like a warm security blanket. Everything is just right. Vera lies on the floor of the living room for hours, not moving. Listening way too attentively to the sounds of cars going by. Is Cat even in town? Should she make something from her food in the pantry? The slow crunching sound of Cat’s Subaru coming to rest in the driveway is an immense relief. Cat is surprised about the raids, but she grasps the severity, hugs Vera, and tries to throws lentils and veggies in an Instapot while listening and asking questions. While dinner cooks, Cat brings out an old laptop she rarely uses and they check the major news sites together, careful not to enter search terms or anything that might flag. In some sense, it’s a relief to learn the raids were beyond just Vera’s house. They’re not targeted at Vera specifically. But no one seems to have been released yet, so it’s clearly not safe to leave. Cat makes up a futon for Vera in the basement. “Of course you can stay the night. You can stay as long as you need.” Vera takes off her earrings and places them carefully beside her work bag. In each earring is a tiny sliver of a USB stick. Each of them is just like Jake’s: encrypted KeepassX database, encrypted file system, GPG keys, installation executables for Veracrypt and KeepassX. In the morning, Vera will investigate what can be done with Cat’s laptop. Julie and Maggie make three stops before heading out of town, first at Julie’s bank, where she successfully empties most of her account into five thousand in cash. But at Maggie’s bank, the teller disappears for a long while and doesn’t come back. “You know what, never mind, I’ll go to a different bank,” Maggie says to another teller, using her best imitation Karen voice. They drive off, heads on a swivel for cop cars. Finally, they slip a note into a friend’s mailbox explaining where to find their house key and some instructions for their lease. They collect every credit or debit card they have and tape them together under a seat, never to be used again. They take off quickly. Back roads to avoid license plate readers, then long country roads. It’s hard to navigate without their phones. Each of them picks a personality type and fashion style that signals no political or subcultural allegiance. They make up a backstory about how they’re friends and try to bicker in convenience stores to avoid looking queer. They pick up a bumper sticker they’d otherwise be livid at and slap it on. At a campsite two hundred miles away, they go through all their remaining belongings. They have a tarp, a tent, two sleeping bags, a gallon jug of water, a Sawyer microfiltration water purifier, a five-gallon bucket of rice and beans, a camp stove, a couple pads, trashy books for boredom. They end up buying basic comforts like folding chairs with their cash reserves. “It’s just a camping trip, until it isn’t.” They go on a hike with their dog and talk about communities they can flee to. A land defense occupation that became permanent. A log cabin squat built deep off any path on federal land. A friend’s organic farm with some partially abandoned yurts. They discuss the pros and cons of various cults they know. In the end they drive to the furthest option, the organic farm. The drive is long. On a thin winding back road, they stack up behind a long line of cars. Local vigilantes are performing an inspection to check for “ANTIFA.” A middle-aged white lady with an AR waves them through cheerily. “Stay safe out there!” The next town has a small “rally for democracy” along the central drag, besides an Arby’s. A couple dozen liberals in folding chairs hold cardboard placards making puns about the suspension of a cable news channel. At a gas station, Julie overhears two men confidently talking about the investment opportunities in real estate being opened up as all the “cockroaches” are removed. One night, they sleep in their car in a Walmart parking lot on the advice of a friendly night auditor at a cheap motel. “New regulations, I can’t take a cash deposit. And there’s this thing I gotta enter your IDs into that wires them nationally.” When they finally arrive at the farm and are allowed past the gate, there are already fifteen other people there: extended family of the owning couple, a couple of WWOOFer hippies, and two coteries of obvious radicals who are cagey and cold to anyone they don’t know. Everyone is antsy. Different groups cook different food. Panicked envy flickers in some eyes. Two weeks in and Julie keeps to herself. Maggie spends her time trying to suck up to the owners and befriends an autistic nerd with one of the other radical groups. An old balding white dude in a black hoodie keeps snapping at their dog. A trip into town for bulk food goes badly after the nerd insists on wearing a mask and a confrontation breaks out with a local. A backed-up toilet in the farm house makes the owners dour for a couple days. One night, the situation boils over and folks start openly talking about the raids. There’s fury over who has a device and who can be trusted to have a device. Who is putting everyone else in danger. Who has a right to be here. Who has a right to anything. After someone brings up “Land back,” someone else screams, “Who do you think you’re fooling?! Who are your people exactly?! You’re not Indigenous, you’re as white as me!” and an awkward physical fight breaks out. The next morning, there are immigration police visible in the distance at the neighboring farm. One of the hippies finds three young girls hiding down by the river and rushes them into one of the plastic yurts everyone else is hiding in. Dogs bark in the distance. Julie joins the couple that owns the farm in meeting the immigration agents. Her dog barks at theirs and they put them away. The immigration agents are some of the newly deputized conspiracy heads that have barely any training, and Julie is able to find common cultural ground with them, ranting about how genetically modified organisms are poisoning the land, leaning hard into the persona she’s studiously built on the road. The wannabe genocidaires laugh at her jokes and leave, waving back to her. The girls’ white uncle was allowed to remain, a nasty gash across his forehead. The rest of the family is being taken to one of the deportation camps where people die of dehydration. He’s profoundly grateful for the rescue of his nieces. Over the next month, the adjacent farms begin to merge. A dugout hiding spot becomes a tunnel network. Maybe it’ll suffice to hide folks if cops return. Some new folks arrive, fleeing other things. Tensions break down, relationships begin to form across the groups. One of the quieter members starts opening up, giving lectures on syntropic agriculture, and an array of projects rapidly consume all the spare land across the farms. As people get busy developing personal domains and projects to be invested in, the overall vibe improves dramatically. Food gets pooled. People become more open about what devices they held onto, but it doesn’t matter as much, because all of the old internet is gone. A few specific corporate sites remain accessible, whitelisted by telecoms for the sake of commerce, but almost everything else is gone. You can get Amazon deliveries and send Gmail, but it’s impossible to reach Wikipedia, much less Athens Indymedia or any Noblogs. The farm establishes a consensus on how devices are to be used. The owners maintain all their devices in the farm house, air-gapped from everyone else. News stories and everything else are downloaded to a USB by one person for an hour every day, then passed around the three laptops everyone else shares. There’s one burner cell phone for the whole farm, bought with cash at one of the last Walmarts where that is possible. It’s kept turned off and wrapped in plastic bags under a rock five miles away along the side of a road. It’s for emergencies and strictly overseen usage. No one will put its SIM card in or turn it on near the farm or its stash location. Having swapped out plates and tags, Julie and Maggie occasionally drive into the local town. They sit behind a café in their truck while it’s closed at night and tap into the still-active Wi-Fi with their laptop running Tails. Signal is long gone. Tor is totally inaccessible, even using the latest smuggled bridges. On the plain internet, they have managed to register two Gmail accounts using the farm’s collective burner phone. How can they find other comrades? How can they talk with them? Communications Jake doesn’t have to trust the new app everyone’s using while Signal’s down. Long ago, everyone in his affinity group created GPG key pairs, then verified each other’s keys and signed them. They also created private backup email accounts on other platforms only to be used in emergencies. Jake’s Riseup email account may be down, but his GPG keys were in the encrypted folder on his cached USB along with a list of the backup email accounts of his comrades. He goes through each one, encrypting a message to that person’s public key and sending it to their backup email. After a couple hours at the café, one of them sends a message back to him. Ethan is still free! Jake asks if he knows anything about Big C’s supposed posts. Ethan says he’ll check with someone in Big C’s crew he’s also in contact with, Ash. Ash emails back with a public key for Big C. She signs his key with her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public key for Ash that he’s signed. Then he signs Big C’s key and sends it to Jake. Jake messages Big C on the new app everyone is using. Instead of sending anything in cleartext, he encrypts a message to the key he has for Big C. He adds his own public key. On that same app, in the general channel they’re all using, someone’s screaming that another account is a honeypot. People stop posting. If they move to a different channel or a different app, they never send Jake anything about it. But that doesn’t matter, because Big C responds, his message likewise encrypted using GPG and then pasted within this new app. Jake decrypts and checks that it was signed by the same key for Big C that his friend Ethan certified. There’s a time and location. Back room of a donut shop a couple punks work at, 11 pm. Jake spends most of the day at the café, trying not to attract attention. Then he scarfs down some fast food and gets a bus across town to the donut shop. He gets off a couple stops early and circles around it on back streets, looking for any car or person that could be staking things out. He decides to wait a little longer in an alley. But the alley isn’t empty. Ethan’s there, smoking a cigarette and also scoping things out. They hug. “You’re the first person I’ve seen in like two days, man.” Ethan’s heard a rumor about some kind of legal defense committee being set up, but he can’t stand one of the people he thinks is in it. Jake quietly regales him with the saga of his nearly-nude escape. They look at the donut shop down the street. “If it’s a trap, maybe only one of us should go.” “I’ll go. If it’s chill, I’ll come back out and get you?” “Maybe they raid us only once we’re all inside.” “Do you wanna wait out here all night?” “Fuck, man. I dunno.” Jake goes in. A punk he doesn’t know ushers him in through the employee side door. It’s just three. Big C, usually known as Cookie, the unknown punk, and Ash. Ash is chowing down on donuts nervously. Cookie gets up and extends out a hand and then turns it into an awkward hug. They don’t really know each other like that, but Jake accepts, surprisingly eager for physical touch. “Are we waiting for anybody else? Who’d you share this with?” “I don’t fucking know, I told Ash and Sydney and Sydney said she told her band, but like I don’t trust them to—” “Hey! Mitch is cool.” “Yeah, sure, Mitch is cool, I’m just saying I don’t trust them to not tell someone random, you know.” “Jesus,” says the punk Jake doesn’t know, looking out the cracked open employee door. “What?!” “It’s Zoe. She’s down the street but she’s coming this way.” Some shared glances. No one wants to let Zoe in. “Well, let her in.” Half an hour later, the tiny donut store backroom is swampy with seven nervous anarchists, Ethan included. “What are we fucking doing?” “Besides running and hiding?” “I say we make distractions, make them feel like they got the wrong folks. They’re not the threat.” “So what? They’ve already grabbed everyone. It’s not like they’re gonna let them go to get us instead. They’ll just keep them detained and then use all their resources on the few of us. Naw, last thing we need to do right now is remind them they didn’t get all of us.” “To what fucking end. Solidarity means attack.” “Look, if you can think of some way to bust people out, I’m all for it, but like, right now we can’t even keep ourselves safe. We bust people out, we have no way to house them. They’re raiding random totally apolitical squats, they just cleared the last houseless encampment near the airport.” “Look, you can run and hide if you want, honestly, I mean that, I don’t judge, but I know if I was captured right now, the number one thing I’d want to see in the world would be cop cars on fire in the county jail parking lot.” The meeting ends a couple hours later. They have sorted into two groups and a lone individual. One group will focus on risky active strikes. The other group will try to build an underground capable of keeping people safe. Ash is going to run a clearinghouse email account to take submissions and push out notifications. Only people within the signed network of GPG keys. If they shut down her email, she’ll just pivot to a different one, using the same keys and sending to the same recipients. “They can’t shut down email wholesale, too much of capitalism runs on it.” She’ll try to maintain a public counterinfo site for certain announcements marked to be public, but no promises. Two of the punks present are going to be showed how to use GPG. Jake and Ethan head out into the night. Ethan’s got a van they can sleep in. Cat said Vera could stay as long as she needed, but they’ve never actually lived together before, and as the weeks go by, little frictions keep coming up. Vera forgot that she sided with the bandmate of Cat’s old boyfriend that one time, but Cat hasn’t. Cat doesn’t approve of the lengthy showers Vera takes. Vera had no idea Cat was such a morning person. Normally, these would be nothing, but the isolation and background stress is taking a toll. Vera feels like it’s hard to keep her head together. Hard to be her. Without the reference points of her normal life, she feels unmoored and frazzled. Always a step behind. Saying things she should have thought through more. Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account and Vera has nothing to do all day but pace around Cat’s basement and read Cat’s books. Cat doesn’t use the internet much and Vera is trying not to suddenly flood Cat’s router with a ton of activity. Every morning, around the time Cat said she sometimes checks her work email, Vera takes the new laptop Cat bought for her and connects to the internet. Insofar as the raids are getting attention, it seems to be mostly because some prominent journalist got detained too. It joins the background shrieking about journalists’ rights being under attack, but the news outlets mostly want to use that narrative to bolster their subscriptions. With social media effectively gone, there’s little coverage of the mass detentions of anarchists, save some conservatives chortling that it was about time, and “See, the old establishment was deliberately choosing not to fight terrorism the whole time.” She’s careful to build a profile of internet activity that doesn’t match her prior use. She chooses different websites for news, even to check weather reports. She doesn’t want to deviate too far from Cat’s previous activity. If Cat used Bing for searching about mushroom harvests, so will she. If Cat didn’t use an ad-blocker, she won’t add one. The goal is to slowly build up Cat’s internet usage so she can use it more frequently while stuck at home. She holds herself back from checking radical websites. In the last three weeks, Vera has almost never left Cat’s house. One afternoon, there was an unusual car parked all day within view of the front door. Even Cat was convinced it was sketchy. Cat’s home cooking is very cumin-and-vegetables oriented, but she picks up the Thai food Vera loves a couple times with cash, not card. Vera is hesitant about booting Tails off the USB she had on hand and connecting on the home network because she’s worried that will draw attention. Instead, she gets Cat to go to a nearby café during the day and write down the Wi-Fi password. Then, in the middle of the night, she goes out with Cat’s crusty old laptop, sits behind the café’s dumpster, boots Tails, and connects to the open internet. A lot of anarchist websites are gone, and the foreign ones are thin on substantive report-backs. Meaningful news or how-to guides are overshadowed by essays that triumphantly advocate one or another grotesque alliance and declare the time of principles to be over. This provokes, in turn, angry evocative screeds that fetishize death. To survive is a betrayal of our fallen, says one, it’s our duty to die beautifully together. Someone else is aggressively promoting a Patreon. In her backup email account, there’s an encrypted message to her, signed by her old comrade Matthew. He survived the raids that got every other anarchist in their town and has taken formal sanctuary in the basement of a Quaker house. The cops seem to know he’s there, though, or at least suspect it. They keep a squad car parked out front at all hours and have followed the two old Quakers who come and go. He’s heard from a friend who escaped the raids in another city and has been riding the rails. Matthew has a normie friend, a former movement lawyer who has fallen off the radar doing corporate work for a decade, but who he is certain would put his other friend up. It’s just that he’s got no way to contact him. He has another friend who made it down across the southern border, but is penniless, needs a money transfer to get an apartment and look for a job. It could be cryptocurrency, even a mailed check… is it possible to get an anonymous money transfer? When Cat gets home, Vera is ready with questions. In the middle of the night, Julie and Maggie have to leave the farm. They drive out with six of their friends lying flat in the back of their truck, supplies and blankets packed on top of them. Every time they swerve around a bend on a back road and see headlights, they flinch, waiting to see if it is the cops or the local militia who promised to kill all of them. The sudden collapse of two major cities from back-to-back environmental disasters has killed thousands, but it has also resulted in the establishment of an immense internal refugee camp in the south. The rumor is that the authorities can’t demand ID there because so many people have lost theirs. There are enough white people in the vast camp, with enough friends and family outside, that it looks unlikely they will be purged, like so many immigrants had been, if they just keep their stories straight and avoid speaking with an accent. They should be safer there than at the farm where they have lived for the last year. The roads are too chaotic, the internal border checkpoints too overwhelmed. The eight of them make it south intact. They buy Taco Bell and donuts along the way. When they get to the camp, the armed guards shake them down, pilfering whatever they think might be of value. From the shoddy posters everywhere, they quickly discover there are out “leftists” in the sprawling camp—the kind that want to be an armed gang and won’t countenance any “organizing” that isn’t under their umbrella. Every few weeks, one of them ends up dead, and it’s rarely from the guards or conservatives. The better relief organizations are all fatigued and thin on resources. They keep getting squeezed out by Christian groups and political organizations looking to gain contracts or legitimacy. It’s unclear to what extent this is the ruler’s acolytes cannibalizing a Federal project in an orgy of corruption and to what extent the powers that be are deliberately inflicting pressure on the refugees. Buses with corporate branding on the sides promise quick work contracts to those in the camps. People come back bone-weary, but they do come back through the security cordons and fencing that surrounds the camp. The ruler brags that this program is finally providing jobs for real citizens. It’s said that Amazon is restructuring its national supply chain to center around the concentrated cheap labor that the refugee camp provides. Julie and Maggie keep their heads down, forming a tight circle with their friends from the farm. When administrators try to split them up into separate tracts of tin sheds, they find a way to meet up again. When the guards took their jewelry and cash, they left them their bulk filtration system, chemical water purifying tabs, and beaten laptop. These turn out to worth more than gems within the camp. Being able to purify gallons of water every day makes their crew self-sufficient. What remains of the internet in the rest of the nation isn’t much to speak of, but there’s almost nothing in the camp besides a single app that takes over your phone, charges you dearly, and pronounces news headlines from a single source. Julie and Maggie ignore phones entirely, sticking to Maggie’s Casio watch and their laptop. They disable the Wi-Fi on it and pretend it is just for showing pirated shows. Electrical power is available in the camp for a hefty charge, but folks rig up DIY tin-can and magnet turbines in the river that can recharge batteries if you wait long enough. Once you’re in the camp, you can’t leave, but smugglers promise to get letters or even packages to and from the outside world. Rumor has it that many of them steal whatever you entrust to them and turn anything incriminating over to the cops for rewards. Julie and Maggie have signed GPG keys with everyone they lived with at the farm, and those who didn’t flee with them to the camps are now vital relays to a wider network. The uncle of the three girls they saved has left the adjoining farm to join up with family further east. His white father’s name and address is above suspicion, so far. They operate a rudimentary onion network, mailing USBs out with the smugglers. First they encrypt a message to the final recipient, then they encrypt that encrypted message plus a note about how to relay it to them to a friend, like the uncle. This encrypted file they hide as a malformed gif file among other memes and similar junk of the sort that is passed around the internal refugee camp. If the smugglers or anyone else inspect the USB on its way to the uncle, they just see some memes and a broken gif. It’s crude, and not every message makes it, but enough do. Soon enough, Julie and Maggie are writing reports on the camps that are getting to anarchist journalists and infosites in other countries. One of the companies that oversees the camp’s most hated enforcement drones gets its supply lines attacked in the Mediterranean. The CTO is assassinated at a gala. When news reaches the camp, even conservative grannies who are always on about racist conspiracy theories are suddenly praising “those anarchists.” A communiqué from distant comrades makes its way back through a laborious series of USB exchange. Solidarity, it reads, means attack. Attack It’s actually pretty hard to live in the forest. Jake and Ethan knew it would be when they drove their van far off an abandoned logging road and began burying it with dirt and branches to avoid detection by overhead drones. But they couldn’t live in the city anymore. Not after the attack on city hall. Every night, they laugh about the video of the supposedly “progressive” mayor—the one who had approved the executions of so many of their friends in black sites or ditches screaming as he emerged from the burning ruins. “Every night we are still alive to cherish this is a gift,” they tell each other. It makes freezing on a punctured air mattress and throwing centipedes out of their bedding a little more tolerable. Before they had escaped the city in their increasingly suspect van, stencils had started appearing of the dying mayor’s face on the news reel. Printed underneath was NO PITY. Food is a problem, though. They rapidly pick the surrounding valleys clean of dandelions, miners’ lettuce, chickweed, and blackberries. After they almost get caught raiding a dumpster for something with calories in it, they realize they need a better system. Once a month, they make their way through the forest to the outer suburbs of the city. Cookie leaves two plastic bags of food and stove gas canisters for them to pick up in a forested nook just outside an army graveyard. Peanut butter, chocolate, granola, olive oil, instant rice, chili. Sometimes, there’s also a book or a boardgame. There’s never any T for Ethan, though; it’s impossible to get hormones for anyone these days. Back at the buried van, they carefully ration their laptop use, laboriously rebuilding battery charge from a damaged solar panel. They only hook up to the Baofeng radio at specific times. With email effectively banned, Ash is now running communication bursts in the region via radio. About once a week, she bikes out to random locations around the edge of the city and fires off a blast of noise over ham radio before taking off. A few drones now circle the city taking pictures, triangulating her signal each time she sends it. She’s in a race against time with them. This noise is encrypted, of course, and decrypted via private keys now shared by a wider set of anarchist survivors. Each communication burst includes the time of the next burst, though not the place. Jake and Ethan connect their radio to a program on their laptop each time, waiting to read and decrypt. Most nights, it’s just news from the wider world, ferried in via underground networks. Warnings of systematic sweeps planned for certain neighborhoods or local highways being closed by militias. But one night, it’s something new. The ruler of the new regime is coming for a photo op. They’re going to drag out one of the comrades kept alive from the original raids and execute her as the mastermind of the attack on City Hall. There will be a ton of security. But maybe not enough for six different shooters. It’s dangerous to keep connecting to the Wi-Fi in the middle of the night at the same café, so Vera rotates cafés, making sure that Cat doesn’t get the Wi-Fi password on the same days and doesn’t bring a phone or device when she does go. With Tor blocked, Vera knows that every time she uses the internet at a café to check sketchy websites it’s a signal to the authorities there’s a radical still running around her town. She tries not to check sketchy websites the same nights at the same cafés where she checks the backup email account she’s been using to message with Matthew. She writes most of her emails ahead of time to minimize time on the ground. No more than three minutes connected, then back into the night. The cops could catch her if they really put resources into it, but she’s banking on their laziness. Then one day her emails are blocked. All email seems to be blocked. There’s new ID legislation that’s gone into place? This is the last night Vera goes out to a café. But by that point, she’s already helped build a relay network across town. Every Monday, Matthew hands a USB to one of his Quaker hosts, who slips it down the side of a bench while sipping coffee in a park. Cat checks the side of the same bench a couple hours later and brings it home to Vera, who decrypts it. Relay points and drop spots now exist across town because Matthew’s efforts to rope in the former movement lawyer have succeeded. Now there are two anarchists hiding out on the lam from other cities in his house. One lives in the attic. The other has changed her hair color, removed some piercings, added a full face of makeup, and is working a job under the table. A month ago, they helped relay the complete archives of a major anarchist collection that had supposedly been purged from a university. It went south with an anarchist backpacking a long mountain trail. Hard drives with copies of the collection are now squirreled away in various places. Another anarchist that their new network loosely knows has set up a hidden camp on an island in the river, taking a little hidden canoe back and forth into a national park in the wee hours once a week and getting supplies. Cat and the lawyer are finding ways to slip an extra hundred a month to him. Conservatives have been screaming about demolishing the Little Libraries on people’s lawns because liberals stuck a few banned books in them. They have no idea that Vera’s network uses them as flags to notify couriers about drops. A pulp sci-fi book with spine turned inward placed on top in a certain Little Library means to surreptitiously pick up a USB from a Burger King bag in a trash can down the street. They’re getting a whole system going. Vera doesn’t need to know the network beyond her immediate circles. With her preexisting GPG public keys for certain distant comrades, she can just send encrypted messages with a distant city as a public destination and wait for couriers and swaps to copy and circulate it until her recipient can decrypt it. Messages get lost, but some get through. Through the network, distant strangers trade tips and tricks they have learned keeping their own local networks up. With so much of the internet down, normies have started engaging in wider swap networks for saved files. “It’s almost like the libs are making their own little really really free markets.” It doesn’t matter that Cat doesn’t have a Netflix account, because now Vera has access to every show once torrented by local nerds. She keeps the new laptop that accepts such USBs air-gapped from everything else. Even if it’s not the shows she’d prefer, Vera can watch TV again. Having something to do—knowing they can make a difference helping other anarchists—has Cat and Vera in a much better mood. Their city is a locus point in an emerging national underground railroad. That friend of Matthew’s south of the border that Cat sent cash to? He has a job now, and his apartment is packed with anarchists who have survived the dangerous trek across the border. They still have the internet down there! As Vera’s little sneaker net develops, folks begin to loop in around the edges—certain liberals from the pirate networks who have proven they can be trusted, at least with some things, at least to help relay GPG messages. One of the liberals in the network finds a way to tap into the credit card reader communications network and sneak packages of information back and forth with a programmer friend in another country. When the Quaker house is raided and Matthew is summarily shot inside, it hardly breaks anyone’s stride. And soon enough the network of safehouses and dead drop couriers is so well established that a subsection of it can risk moving not just people and money but guns. Julie holds the wound closed while Maggie applies the glue, a contraband gift slipped into the camp via their smuggler friends. The fallen striker is cursing up a storm, but at least he’s not fainting. Where’s that blasted Red Cross worker? The crowd around them isn’t howling or chanting, they’re just jumping up and down in waves, a tactic somehow revived from decades ago in Apartheid South Africa. It makes the earth seem to shiver and shift—an avalanche of people, a force of nature. The usually sandy ground of the camp is already muddy with the rains of the flash flood. All the jumping makes it squelch in a way that adds up to something like the roar of the ocean. This is it. More bullets are going to fly. But the guards don’t have enough and the camp knows it. The gangs have disappeared. The leftists who talked endlessly about a mass strike are nowhere to be seen. The rune-tattooed fascists who work hand in hand with the guards are magically gone, too. A scrawny white boy who usually proudly hawks black market items is beating his chest wildly as he jumps alongside the grizzled Latina dyke who drives the aid workers around. Maggie’s Casio watch is beeping with some irrelevant reminder. Their mud-soaked dog is jumping excitedly too, deciding the vast crowd is playing a game with her. Maybe the three of them will survive this, too. If that video of the ruler’s photo-op that was smuggled in is to be believed, anything is possible. Further Reading Tech Guides for Anarchists Tails: Encrypting Text and Files using GnuPG and Kleopatra A Guide to Peer-to-Peer, Encryption, and Tor: New Communication Infrastructure for Anarchists An Anarchist’s Guide To GPG Surveillance Countermeasures Afghanistan’s Underground “Sneakernet” El Paquete Semanal: The Week’s Internet in Havana The publishers endorse Signal as the most secure widely-used option for encrypted messaging.

The banner at the Civic Media Center welcoming participants to the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering. From February 28 to March 2, hundreds of abolitionists and anarchists from across the country converged in Gainesville for the first Florida Abolitionist Gathering (FAG). Across a passionate weekend of workshops, films, food, debate, ritual, and protest, the contours of a robust regional resistance movement came into focus. The intergenerational, heavily queer and trans, and strongly multi-issue and anarchist group of abolitionists that converged in Florida articulated an expansive vision of liberation anchored in the urgent need to dismantle the prison-industrial complex in all its manifestations. The gathering showed that even as liberals wring their hands about the death of democracy, scrappy groups of organizers continue to fight back—and sometimes win—deep within the belly of the beast. An Uphill Battle Even within the darkening landscape of hyper-policing, anti-immigrant crackdowns, racist backlash, and transphobia spreading across the US, Florida poses a particularly chilling context. Despite his conflicts with Donald Trump, popular conservative governor Ron DeSantis has led a vicious campaign against activists in the state for years, prefiguring the national MAGA obsession with pushing back against all things “woke.” The notorious 2021 HB1 law passed in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter uprisings dramatically expanded the definition of a “riot” and the charges that can be levied against protesters, made toppling statues a felony, and limited the liability of anyone who injures or kills protesters, among other appalling provisions. The power of developers continues to surge, resulting in rollbacks of environmental protections and further reductions in affordable housing, while punitive policies criminalizing homelessness have led to sweeps of parks. As poverty and harsh laws sweep more and more people into jails and prisons, the conditions inside have worsened. New policies have ended physical mail delivery in most facilities and nearly succeeded in eliminating in-person visits, while DeSantis has called in the National Guard to staff prisons. Suffice it to say: in Florida, abolitionists face a hostile climate. Yet the state also features a robust array of resistance movements, including a strong anarchist presence, which have long pushed back against environmental destruction, gentrification, xenophobia, and mass incarceration. The Earth First! Journal was based in Lake Worth, Florida for some years, and active EF! chapters along with groups such as Fight Toxic Prisons have fought campaigns against ecocidal developers and prison profiteers. Protesters have targeted the headquarters of the GEO Group, a major private prison company; the Lake Worth-based Prison Legal News collects and circulates a wide range of information on prisoner rights. In 2020, outside organizers concerned about the horrifying conditions facing prisoners during the COVID pandemic launched the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People in South Florida, documenting abuses and offering support to hundreds through legal referrals, advocacy, and protest. A mass demonstration in Tallahassee memorialized people who died in Florida prisons in the pandemic, featuring the testimony of a person whose father died from COVID-19 in prison and the laying of body bags in front of the state capitol building. Gainesville in particular has been the site of powerful abolitionist activism in recent years. Campaigns by Florida Prisoner Solidarity successfully forced the termination of prison labor contracts with the city and county in 2018, effectively closing the Gainesville Work Camp facility; in 2023, in response to activist pressure, the Alachua County Jail became the first in the South to offer free unlimited phone calls to prisoners. Last year, local organizers agreed that something needed to happen to mobilize against rising fascism in the state and nationally. They proposed a gathering that would bring together abolitionists and anarchists to network and share strategies. While many solidarity groups and campaigns operate in Florida, the geography of the state is so spread out that organizers from different regions may rarely have the chance to connect and collaborate. This gathering offered a chance to bring these far-flung radicals together while keeping the spotlight on prison solidarity organizing, which can often be ignored in broader progressive activist spaces. Tabling materials at the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering. The Gathering The Civic Media Center (CMC) served as the home base for the 2025 Florida Abolitionist Gathering. One of the longest-lasting radical community spaces still operating in the US, the CMC emerged from the global justice and Indymedia movements of a previous anarchist generation. Since its founding in 1993, the space has offered an alternative library, reading room, and infoshop, hosted events in support of grassroots activism, and featured do-it-yourself music and cultural events. In addition to the CMC, organizers partnered with other local art spaces and the public library to ensure that they could accommodate a wide range of workshops and activities. It’s a good thing they did, because over two hundred participants thronged the gathering over the course of the weekend, filling most event spaces to capacity and spilling out into countless discussions in the CMC’s outside courtyard, in a nearby park, and elsewhere across the city. The gathering’s provocative acronym reflected the centrality of queer/trans organizers, participants, and topics. As we’ve observed on an international level, newer generations drawn to anarchist activity are disproportionately gender/sexual outlaws as well as political radicals; that pattern was very much in evidence in Gainesville. Tablers such as the Pansy Collective and Queers for Climate Justice offered queer/trans merch and perspectives. Sessions took place over the weekend on producing hormones for do-it-yourself HRT and herbal transition options, a prison book luncheon hosted by the Tranzmission Prison Project on strategizing to get queer content into prisons, a participatory poetry workshop on “writing the queer/trans body,” and a presentation on “Radical Queer Histories of Faggotry, Abolition, and Anarchy.” The Alyssa Rodriguez Center for Gender Justice, an organization dedicated to strengthening movements for gender justice across prison walls, fighting gender-based violence, and eliminating barriers to political participation for incarcerated survivors and other grassroots advocates, presented on the experiences of trans people in Florida DOC facilities and spoke about coalition organizing around reproductive justice and bodily autonomy within and beyond prisons. At a time of intensifying gender fascism, as the right increasingly demonizes trans people, restricts access to abortion, and excuses male sexual violence, it was encouraging to see abolitionist organizers foregrounding struggles for gender self-determination in the movement to end prisons. This intersectional logic informed a wide range of activities at the gathering. Presenters emphasized connections between varied struggles in workshops on Palestinian political prisoners, immigrant solidarity and anti-deportation efforts, and the environmental impact of jails and prisons. The final event on the program involved the screening of Can’t Stop Change, a new documentary film connecting stories from “LGBTQ2S+ artists, organizers, and educators across Florida (and the new Florida diaspora) into an intersectional climate justice narrative.” The weekend showed that today’s abolitionists see prisoner support and prison abolition movements as inseparably linked to a wide range of liberation struggles and can confidently articulate the links between them as they build solidarity. The specific context of Florida and the Southeast informed many presentations. The workshops included a teach-in on the oppression of Haiti and Haitian migrants, and its role within US empire; perspectives on Appalachian anti-capitalist and abolitionist organizing from the mine wars to mountaintop removal; the bail fund and hurricane relief mutual aid efforts in Asheville, North Carolina; and campaigns against new prison construction across the region by Fight Toxic Prisons. One especially interesting presentation by Root Legal, a South Florida nonprofit public interest law firm and community organizing project oriented towards addressing root causes of harm, shared their efforts to forge an abolitionist strategy working with “crime victims” to reject pressure from prosecutors to pursue criminal punishment. An innovative cultural project launched by the South Florida Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP) has produced “Bending the Bars”, a full album of original hip-hop written and recorded entirely by musicians inside the jails and prisons of Broward County, Florida. Despite a complete ban on in-person visits and severe restrictions on costly phone calls, outside supporters collaborated with a wide range of incarcerated rappers to produce a powerful musical effort that defies the state’s efforts to isolate and silence prisoners. This was one of many examples on offer of how ferocious, creative, and effective abolitionist organizing can thrive in unexpected places. While local and regional efforts remained in the spotlight, on Saturday evening, attendees took inspiration from struggles in other territories. Many participants were relieved at the recent release of Leonard Peltier after nearly fifty years incarcerated on charges stemming from his participation in the American Indian Movement’s struggle for Indigenous self-determination. A longtime Florida supporter of political prisoners offered an emotional presentation on the significance of his case to prison movements; some older organizers recalled being radicalized by Peltier’s case decades ago, and despairing of ever seeing him freed in their lifetimes. After viewing a short video of Leonard addressing a crowd of supporters near his home in so-called North Dakota, the assembled abolitionists recorded a wildly enthusiastic cheer and message of support and solidarity, which was sent to Peltier through his supporters. Afterwards, a large group viewed the recent CrimethInc. documentary Fell in Love With Fire, an anarchist account of the revolutionary uprising that swept through Chile from October 2019 to March 2020. Amid a weekend of sharing strategies for fighting back against an array of miserable conditions, it was electrifying to hear the stories of the Chilean revolt as a reminder that revolutionary possibilities exist in the here and now, that courageous mass defiance can dramatically alter the social consensus in a short period of time, and that the future is unwritten. Participants at the gathering showed a passionate interest not only in supporting prisoners and dismantling existing carceral facilities but also in critically rethinking the alternative ways our communities respond to harm. An evocative image appearing on stickers and t-shirts insisted, “Abolish All Carceral Logics,” illustrating the grip that our prison society can exert on our minds and hearts as well as our bodies. One of the weekend’s most widely discussed workshops was titled “Against Me Too: Against Survivor Politics,” which waded into the waters of controversy around efforts to respond to harm within radical communities via community accountability processes. The conversation proved so generative that when the session ended, participants agreed to convene a second time on Sunday to continue the dialogues that had begun. At a time when liberals commonly repurpose the MAGA chant “Lock Them/Him Up!” at spaces ranging from the Democratic National Convention to a rally to defend trans history at Stonewall, it is critical that those of us fighting for total freedom reject the creep of carceral logic into our own approaches to social transformation. Anarchists have long critically reflected on our small-scale efforts to redress harm outside of criminal legal processes. The many discussions that unspooled within and beyond these workshops confirmed that a new generation of anarchists and abolitionists continue to debate how to dismantle patriarchy and keep each other safe outside of the ineffective and punitive approaches put forward by the state. On the last afternoon of the gathering, a well-attended caucus of non-white attendees met and shared experiences of navigating the gathering and broader organizing spaces. In the collective debrief session following, caucus participants shared a range of feedback about their experiences, critiquing the predominant whiteness of the gathering and asserting the importance of more autonomous spaces for non-white organizers to connect. While participants diverged in their perspectives of the weekend, many agreed that both the caucus space and the public debrief circle at the close of the gatherings schedule were key features that other gatherings should reproduce. In both autonomous organizing and critical participation in majority white efforts, Black, brown, and Indigenous attendees made clear that their perspectives are integral to effective movements for abolition and liberation. Other suggestions offered toward future gatherings included increased intergenerational spaces, sessions rooting us into the place we gather in and its local context, and expanding the variety of modalities for learning, sharing, and action. Friday evening’s grief ritual offered one of the weekend’s most moving moments. The assembled participants shared a painfully long list of names of fellow organizers and loved ones who had died in recent years, adding them to a board that would eventually be composted, symbolizing their return to the earth to continue nourishing and fertilizing a new generation of resistance. One participant sung a song to honor Tortuguita, an anarchist murdered by police while defending the Weelaunee Forest in the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta. At the ritual and in several workshops across the weekend, participants honored the memory of Karen Smith, a prolific outside organizer who has been mourned by her comrades on both sides of the walls since her tragic death in a car accident in 2020. As a recently incarcerated organizer recalled, “She gave her heart, her mind, and her life to this movement.” Despite the intense grief and demoralization so many radicals feel amid personal losses and political defeats, the ritual showed the capacity of our radical movements to rebuild our resilience by honoring our departed comrades and sharing deeply with each other. The altar created by FAG 2025 participants during the grief ritual commemorating our departed comrades. The Power of Inside/Outside Organizing: Julius’s Story In one of the weekend’s most powerful sessions, two Florida outside abolitionists joined Julius, one of the lead incarcerated organizers of the 2016 national prison strike in Florida, to discuss inside/outside resistance to the Florida Department of Corrections to a packed room of 75 attendees at the public library. After spending over seventeen years in Florida prisons since being sentenced as a teenager, Julius had just been released the previous month. In a particularly moving moment, a south Florida anarchist organizer arrived and approached Julius at the table; as it turned out, the two had been corresponding and organizing together for years, but had never before been able to meet in person. Their emotional embrace with tears in their eyes showed concretely the powerful bonds that can be forged through solidarity across prison walls. Julius shared his perspectives on how becoming involved in inside/outside solidarity organizing since 2016 transformed his life. He traced his political development over his years inside, acknowledging the shame he felt about his past actions of stealing from other poor people from his own community and misogynistic behavior. While accepting responsibility for harm he caused, he explained that his sentence involved “no recognition of what I’ve been through, or the context that shaped me.” Receiving mail from outside organizers helped him reinterpret his experiences through a political lens, and as momentum built toward the national prison strike, he decided to go all in. He used his own scarce commissary funds to photocopy and circulate materials about the strike, and built relationships with prisoners who were widely respected whose influence could help ensure wider participation. His efforts paid off: at his facility, 90% of the prisoners participated in hunger strikes or sit-down work strikes. Florida prisons kicked off the strike nationally, launching in a dozen facilities two days before the scheduled date and startling Florida Deportment of Corrections officials. Like other vocal strikers, Julius was targeted by the prison administration with made-up infractions and arbitrary transfers to other facilities in an attempt to hamper his organizing. Yet their strategy backfired. Although the authorities bounced him around to five different facilities in retaliation, Julius gleefully recounted, “I could reach five times as many people with the message as I could have if they’d just left me there.” But outside pressure proved instrumental to offsetting the consequences prison officials can inflict on inside organizers with near impunity. “That’s why your voices are so important,” Julius explained, “because they can’t tell you to shut the fuck up, pepper spray you, and throw you in a cell.” Julius reiterated a lesson that incarcerated organizers have long emphasized: receiving mail, phone calls, visits, and commissary donations from outside supporters demonstrates to both prison officials and fellow prisoners that an inside organizer has support and cannot be subjected to abuse or isolation without consequences. Achieving a critical mass of both participation inside and support outside provides the only way to win victories and protect organizers, he explained: “They might catch us individually, but they can’t beat all of us.” Prison was a harrowing experience, and adjusting to life on the outside for the first time in nearly two decades hasn’t been easy, Julius acknowledged. Small things could trigger his PTSD, from the jangle of keys (signifying the approach of guards) to the squeak of shoes on a basketball court (the soundscape of a fight or stabbing). But the organizing that changed his life inside has also transformed his notion of what could be possible in his life outside. The positive thing he’s taken from his seventeen years in Florida’s hellish prisons is the network he formed with other abolitionists—“It’s you comrades who are the inspiration.” Alongside Julius’s powerful in-person testimony, panelists shared audio recordings of messages from two additional inside organizers who are still currently incarcerated. Their testimony—interrupted by the mechanical voice intoning “you have one minute remaining” that is so familiar to organizers—reminded attendees of the absence of the countless thousands of comrades who remain held captive behind the walls. In a poignant moment, Julius explained that across nearly two decades behind the walls, his biggest fear was “dying alone in prison without my voice ever being heard.” The panel showed how organizers can amplify those voices, strengthening movements for solidarity and abolition and overcoming the state’s efforts to bury people alive. Materials for participants at the gathering to write to prisoners. From Discussion to Action: Protest and Mutual Aid At the panel discussion, Julius had explained the powerful impact that noise demonstrations outside prisons and jails can have: “That gets their attention, I promise you!” So it was appropriate that the weekend concluded with a demonstration outside the Gainesville Work Camp, a prison focused on extracting prisoner labor that has recently reopened after activists successfully shut it down several years before. About twenty-five participants from the gathering held a spirited rally, making noise and chanting to let officials know that the exploitation of local prisoners did not go unnoticed. A particularly feisty child of perhaps ten years old who had attended much of the gathering provided a highlight, getting on the bullhorn and chanting, “Oink oink, piggy piggy / We’re gonna make your lives shitty!” As the demonstration concluded with a chant of “We love you, we see you / We won’t be free without you,” a group of incarcerated workers could be seen waving. One organizer described it as the best part of the gathering: “After a weekend of talking about solidarity, then being in it.” The demonstration at the Work Farm prison in Gainesville. In addition to the demonstration, the weekend’s cultural events raised a significant sum of money for a variety of solidarity projects. A show one evening benefited Florida Prisoner Solidarity’s support efforts, while proceeds from a rave helped the Gainesville Books to Prisoners program and mutual aid efforts in Gaza and Sudan. In particular, money raised throughout the FAG weekend successfully funded a water well in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, which is now supplying 300-400 families, enabling them to resist Israeli colonial forces seeking to displace them. The relationships of solidarity that were strengthened this weekend transcended apartheid walls and national borders as well as prison walls. The Florida Abolitionist Gathering showed the outlines of a fierce and broad movement against prisons and the world that creates them, anchored in an anarchist vision of total liberation. In the difficult times ahead, we can find strength in remembering that prisoners in the most horrific conditions have sustained their determination through the power of solidarity—and that every one of us can play a role in fighting back as we build towards a world free of prisons and all forms of exploitation and oppression. To learn more or get involved: Florida Abolitionist Gathering – also check out their Instagram (T-shirts from the gathering are still available, in case you missed it!) Want to host the next Abolitionist Gathering in your area? Whether you’re from Georgia (GAG), South Carolina (SCAG), Louisiana (LAG), or somewhere else in the region that makes for an even worse acronym, you can reach out to the organizers through the links above. Organizations: Civic Media Center (CMC) Florida Prisoner Solidarity Fight Toxic Prisons South Florida Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP) “Bending the Bars” – hip hop album by incarcerated musicians from Florida Root Legal The Alyssa Rodriguez Center for Gender Justice Florida Institutional Legal Services Project](https://www.floridalegal.org/) Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) Oakland Abolition and Solidarity Films: Fell in Love With Fire Can’t Stop Change

On March 8, Department of Homeland Security agents kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian organizer and graduate student at Columbia University who had permanent residency in the United States. Donald Trump’s State Department arbitrarily revoked his residency. They are holding Khalil in Louisiana, over a thousand miles from his home. This is part of Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and other schools around the country. Above all, however, it is a test, and how we respond will determine what happens to the rest of us later—as Martin Niemöller described in his well-known poem. Here, we will explore the stakes of this moment and share experience from anarchists whose comrade was similarly kidnapped for participating in the Occupy ICE movement in San Antonio, Texas in 2018. The Antisemitic Plan to Smear Palestine Solidarity as Antisemitic The Trump regime has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and their efforts are already underway. The kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is something different. Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States who is being targeted for political reasons. Trump is seeking to set an additional precedent in order to open a new front in his campaign to purge the United States of dissidents. This is the culmination of two years of planning. In April 2023, the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a playbook to overhaul the federal government of the United States in order to consolidate autocratic power in the hands of Donald Trump. Although Trump temporarily distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, it proved to be a solid predictor of his game plan once in office. In October 2024, the Heritage Foundation followed up Project 2025 with Project Esther, a playbook for repressing those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians. In the text of their report, the Heritage Foundation depicts all concern for Palestinians as participation in “a global Hamas Support Network” and explicitly accuses Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jewish people of being “antisemitic” for refusing to support Zionism. At the same time, the report relies heavily on anti-Semitic tropes such as fearmongering about George Soros. This exemplifies the way that the far right has sought to appropriate concerns about antisemitism to promote racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. A slide from a Heritage Foundation presentation about Project Esther. Note that “Soros” and Jewish Voice for Peace are at the tops of the columns titled “Masterminds” and “Organizers.” The chief source of Trump’s appeal is that he has been able to channel the considerable anger of the downwardly mobile away from those who hold power and towards scapegoats, creating a pressure valve for a wide range of resentments. But in order to scapegoat people without consequences, it is necessary to undermine their social ties, to prevent others from identifying with them, to carve up society into isolated and mutually hostile factions. Reducing all empathy for Palestinians to support for Hamas is a discursive maneuver intended to frame all who speak out against genocide as legitimate targets for Trump’s government. In addition to demonizing Palestinians, Project Esther lays the groundwork to attack Jewish people as “antisemites” if they don’t get on board with Christian Nationalist priorities. This strategy weaponizes an existing rift that cuts through the Democratic Party—the question of whether Palestinians deserve to be treated as human beings—in order to create the conditions for a fascist takeover of the United States as well as further colonial violence abroad. The ones who stand to gain the most from this strategy are not Zionist Jews, but authoritarian gentiles. In view of the significance of Project 2025, we should not underestimate how central Project Esther is to the Trump administration’s strategy. This will help us to understand the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil. The core of Trump policy is performative violence. That is why they have kidnapped an activist who has never been charged with a crime, whose wife—an American citizen—is eight months pregnant, who has a legal right to reside in the United States according to all established precedents. That is why they intentionally targeted a negotiator, the same way that the Israeli government routinely murders negotiators in Palestine. The point is to be shocking, to terrorize, to show that they can do things in public that the Biden administration had to do secretively. Everyone who has excused or minimized the genocide of Palestinians—for example, by spending at least as much time talking about the 1139 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 as they do addressing the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people slaughtered since then—must understand that today, supporting Israel means supporting Trump’s brand of fascism. The escalating violence of the Israeli colonial project helped create the conditions for Trump’s return; now that he is back in office, excusing Israeli colonialism can only facilitate Trump’s own consolidation of power. As we argued on the night of the 2024 election, The Biden administration has already done much of the work to desensitize the general public to the program that an emboldened second Trump administration will attempt to carry out—above all, by supporting the Israeli military in carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. In so doing, Biden and Harris have accustomed millions of people to the idea that human life has no inherent value—that it is acceptable to slaughter, imprison, and torment people based on their status in a targeted demographic. You either embrace the struggle for the liberation of Palestine or you become an accomplice in the rise of fascism. This was always true, but today there is no possible excuse not to recognize it. Even if your sole concern is fighting antisemitism and you do not care what happens to people of any other ethnicity, you pave the way for antisemites to gain power by standing aside as Palestinians are kidnapped. Like Palestinians, Jewish people are on the hit list of potential scapegoats, and what befalls one scapegoat will eventually befall another. If there are no serious consequences for the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, then soon enough, the Trump administration will push the envelope, moving on to kidnap other activists who obstruct the far-right agenda. Likewise, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a template for bloodshed that will be used again and again as long as there are no significant consequences. If politicians like Trump retain their sway by inflicting violence, they will have to continuously expand the range of people they target and the intensity of that violence, just as the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945. What Will It Take? For now, a judge has ordered a temporary delay in the expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil from the United States. But this should reassure no one. If we count on judges to restrain Trump, we will have no recourse when Trump’s administration simply ignores the laws, and no plan when he manages to replace them with loyal flunkies—or has his flunkies replace the laws themselves. On March 10, demonstrators gathered in New York City for a protest that took the streets, resulting at one point in tussles with police. On March 11 and 12, further protests will ensue in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. But the point of these protests must not be to petition the authorities. Donald Trump is not a well-meaning public servant looking to represent his constituents. He is a power-hungry sadist who benefits from our displays of grief and impotent rage. Politics in the United States today is a question of relations of raw force. When we take the streets, we are not addressing Trump or his ghoulish underlings; we are addressing each other. We are setting out to demonstrate that resistance is possible, that there are tactics that can exert concrete leverage against our oppressors, that there are enough people invested in solidarity that it can become a social force capable of compelling Trump and his lackeys to stand down. At the March 10 demonstration in New York, participants handed out fliers to this effect: Fascist politicians need the police. But we know masses of people can get the better of the police, their cars, equipment, cameras. All we have to do is to start acting like our friends, neighbors, and our own lives are at stake. All other options have been exhausted. We have to pull down the new fascism before it consolidates control. If we settle for waving signs and chanting, our fate is sealed. If we remember the summer of 2020, we stand a fighting chance. Mahmoud Khalil. Learning from Experience Mahmoud Khalil is not the first person in recent history to be targeted by ICE for political activism. To get more perspective, we reached out to anarchists in San Antonio whose comrade was kidnapped during the Occupy ICE movement in 2018. This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. In 2018, ICE targeted a filmmaker and student for their participation in the Occupy ICE camp in San Antonio. They were targeted as a consequence of their activism; the authorities used their political beliefs and tweets as evidence against them. Both our movement and the campaign to free our friend were held back by our decision to defer to the lawyers. The lawyers wanted to run a PR campaign based on respectability politics and innocence narratives, erasing our radical politics from the conversation. As time went on, the lawyers related with hostility and suspicion towards some participants in the movement. Deferring to the lawyers and separating the legal support from the movement itself was detrimental to both. We gave up many tools that we could have used to fight; this contributed to fragmenting our movement. There was no rally, no day of action, no unrest, no political scandal. Not even a phone zap! In 2018, we were aware of the example of the Northwest Detention Center resistance, at which ICE detained the activist Maru Villaplanado. Maru Villaplanado was ultimately released and granted legal status due to a campaign of pressure and mobilization. Unfortunately, this knowledge did not lead us to take the kind of action that could have made a difference for our friend. Many of us were young and inexperienced. We did not know better than to trust the lawyers. We didn’t know how to draw on the experience of other movements before us or around the country. Since then, we have learned that lawyers should have a very limited influence on our movements. They should focus on their work in the courts. We must prioritize organizing a strong political response, as that is the only real source of power and pressure that we can draw upon outside the legal system. There is no silver bullet or magic combination of tactics that would be guaranteed to stop Mahmoud’s deportation. However, if we limit ourselves to depending upon a legal system that has no regard for the humanity of its captives while the state targets an activist on explicitly political grounds, we will fail while simultaneously sabotaging ourselves. We wonder how differently things might have gone if we had called for national days of action. We wonder if there was some chance that we could have stopped them from deporting our friend. We don’t know the answer because we didn’t try. To have any chance of saving Mahmoud Khalil or any of the millions of immigrants in the crosshairs of the white supremacist state, we will need movements that are resilient, that grow in numbers and combativeness. Palestinian, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and working-class organization and action must create a political crisis that interrupts the deportation machine. If we lead with an organized political response, we will have a better chance of stopping the deportation of Mahmoud and our other comrades and of interrupting the entire system it relies on. I hope that everyone who is confronting this tragedy today can learn something from our experience and put those lessons into practice. This is not the first time this has happened. If our enemies have their way, it won’t be the last. It is up to us to organize in defense of our friends, families, and neighbors. -Some Cicadas from Abolish ICE, San Antonio, Texas We Are Made for Each Other Let us conclude by expressing gratitude for the courage of Mahmoud Khalil and others who have risked their own freedom in order to express solidarity with other people. In doing so, they show us what is best in humanity—and that gives us a reason to fight for ourselves and each other. Khalil has already distinguished himself in the fight to create a world without ethnic cleansing or genocide. It remains for us to do the same in return. For everyone who has met Mahmoud, they can attest to his incredible character, humbleness, selflessness, and his love for helping others. He is always willing to stand up for the oppressed. He is funny, kind, and sometimes a little messy. He constantly puts his needs last when it comes to helping others. I always tell him that sometimes he needs to put himself first. He always responds with, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.” -Mahmoud Khalil’s wife (identified thus, rather than by name, in the original source) There is a fundraiser for Mahmoud Khalil here. The Palestine solidarity movement on Columbia campus in spring 2024.