Tim Stevenson (bereal@vermontel.net), a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions, is the author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press) and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press). He is at work on a book about mutual care associations.
ATHENS-Thanks to the efforts of the president's special advisor for cruelty, Stephen Miller, and the principal architect of the far-right Project 2025 document, Russell Vought, that serves as the textbook for the Trump road to authoritarianism, we, the American people, have been blitzkrieged from day one of this administration by an onslaught of anti-democratic, unconstitutional, and illegal (not to mention personally harmful to untold thousands of individuals) actions.
This rapid-fire, shock-and-awe strategy has often had us back on our heels as to which outrage we should respond to and what was the most effective approach to take.
Though we have done our best with the several mass demonstrations we have held, it is the belief of a growing number of us that we need to sharpen our focus on what is arguably the worst of the worst: the ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) gestapo.
Beyond simply protesting their egregious actions, it is time to say, in no uncertain terms: Stop.
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We need to demonstrate that it is totally unacceptable for this government to treat human beings in the way this one has inflicted on our immigrant neighbors, whose only sin for the vast majority was that they entered our country illegally.
Like our ancestors, they came here in search of a better life and relief from the oppressive conditions of the countries they respectively fled from. Additionally, they have largely conducted themselves commendably, as good citizens.
Most who have been arrested have no criminal records, some are legal U.S. residents or even U.S. citizens, and almost none of them have been granted their Constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus, which ensures that no one - citizen and noncitizen alike - can be held by the government without the right to challenge their detention before a judge.
In addition to being denied due process, numerous detainees have not been allowed to speak with a lawyer or even to have contact with their families.
After being ambushed in Home Depot parking lots seeking work, apprehended in the immigration courts where they were fulfilling their legal obligations, or kidnapped from their homes and schools, with their children being torn away from them, they have been incarcerated in horrific conditions.
They have endured worm-infested food, they have been forced to share one toilet for 40 detainees with sewage backing up into their cells, and they have been deported to countries other than their own, often ones run by dictatorial regimes.
The preceding account does not begin to capture the pain and suffering, the fear and terror, our immigrant neighbors have experienced for months now. It is not just what this administration is doing; more specifically, it's how they've gone about it, with the unmistakable sense of sadism informing their policy.
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As a consequence, a number of us have been considering how we can move beyond protesting alone and how we can begin adopting more direct actions that obstruct and hinder ICE at the local and state levels, where their unconscionable actions occur.
This would include a legal campaign intended to convince the Vermont Legislature to pass measures mandating that both ICE agents and their agencies:
• Be forbidden from wearing masks in Vermont.
• Identify whom they represent when accosting someone, wear a badge indicating such, and inform anyone being arrested of what they are being charged with.
• Hold any migrant arrested in Vermont in a Vermont facility, not send them out of state.
• Provide detainees with their habeas corpus rights, accord them a lawyer, and provide access to their family.
This campaign would consist of a variety of activities, especially meeting with state government representatives to seek their support and promotion of legislation around our demands.
In addition to writing media letters/op-eds and organizing public meetings and community conversations, we would also seek the endorsement and support of local and regional chapters of Indivisible and other progressive groups.
Most importantly, however, the campaign would include acts of nonviolent civil disobedience around our four demands, not only wherever and whenever ICE agents appear, but also at the state Legislature and other politically sensitive venues.
If successful, this effort also has the potential to spread to our sister states, especially here in the Northeast, to become a larger regional movement. But most importantly, it is a demonstration of action that is appropriate to the crime that is being committed every day by the Trump administration.
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Finally, this action would also publicize the potential that ICE represents toward building Trump's national police. This has been foreshadowed by his recent executive order directing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to guarantee that each state's National Guard create a "standing quick reaction force" that "could be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, where public safety and order has been lost" (my emphasis).
Given Trump's disdain for the law and Constitution, the pliability of these words could easily lend themselves to suppress and arrest even peaceful demonstrators practicing their First Amendment rights.
His EO also calls for the creation of "an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience" (my emphasis) to be deputized "to join Federal law enforcement entities" to pursue the goals of his executive order "declaring a crime emergency" in the nation's capital.
Reminiscent of his "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by" statement during the first debate of the 2020 presidential campaign, it requires little imagination to see that this points to the creation of a Trump Brownshirts, a paramilitary outfit made up of the same far-right militia participants whom he exonerated for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
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This plan is a work in progress. As such, we would most welcome your comments, suggestions, and ideas.
In so doing, however, we would request that you ask yourselves: If not now, when?
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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