During the agents’ violent attack on a delivery worker Saturday morning in DC, bystanders repeatedly demanded the agents share their badge numbers. One of them—his face fully obscured by a black balaklava—eventually shot back, “Do I have to answer to you?”
“You guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” one bystander said to the agents at one point during the incident. An agent, ironically clad in a rainbow face mask, replied “Liberals already ruined it.”
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Last week on stage at the Netroots conference in New Orleans, I spoke with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-IL) about ICE: specifically that she believes it should be abolished. It’s a stance that’s considered far left, but after witnessing ICE and other federal agents in DC this week, abolishing ICE should be the baseline Democratic position.
“ICE is a terrorist organization,” Ramirez told me. “It needs to be defunded and needs to be abolished.”
And lose your jobs, your homes, and your freedom in the process as you get prosecuted for assaulting federal agents where the authorities have an incentive to make an example out of you to deter future incidents.
I’m not expecting the world to change from holding hands and singing hymns, but insulting people (who already started confronting them instead of just pretending not to see) for not sacrificing more than I’d have to seems rather narrow-minded to me.
You’re going to lose all those things anyway.
If this continues unopposed, yes, but asking individuals in specific situations to sacrifice their own lives without an organized community does not sound reasonable to me.
Considering the mass surveillance well underway, the window to organize effectively has already closed. Doing so puts you in as much danger unmasking an agent and in this scenario they will just slap the terrorism label on it and that’s the end of the conversation.
It’s preferable to mass organize but it’s too late now. Keep fighting. We are going to lose but we are going to make this as difficult and expensive as possible anyway. They don’t get to be comfortable.
We’re not gonna lose, these fucks always fall apart sooner or later. Authoritarianism always falls.
Then do it in a big enough group that they wont dare prosecute you and show how many people opposed them, or try to isolate you and show how weak they are.
Making large groups of people that all agree with you spontaneously appear at a location is typically not super easy.
True! But everyone hates ice.
Unfortunately, a large percentage of the voting population seems to support them, which is part of how we got here in the first place. The best argument for a free and open democracy is what happens with any of the alternatives, but people have a tendency to forget, and opportunists are great at using difficult times to garner support.
Go the fuck outside.
Everyone hates ice. The people who don’t are afraid of outside.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/politics/ice-unpopularity-trump-analysis