Don't Mourn, Organize
September 4, 2025 - Ramp up our resistance
Boston, get ready for military invasion!
There are several clues that the Trump administration may be planning to send the National Guard and/or greater ICE crews to our area soon (unless a court decision stops him) - and to Boston specifically, due to Mayor Michelle Wu’s defiance. How would we protect our immigrant neighbors and our city?
Dozens of groups are making rapid response plans, but privately over Signal and other encrypted channels. To get the warnings and the action alerts (in a more timely, day-of way than we can provide), make sure to sign up for action alert emails or texts from some of the central coordination groups, like Indivisible Mass Coalition, 50501 or UU Mass Action, as well as any union you’re a member of.
We encourage you to prepare by reading 50501’s guide to “Responding to Federal Occupying Forces,” in particular section 10, “Calls to Action: If Your Community Is Occupied.
And be prepared to change your plans, if feasible (take vacation days, line up backup childcare or eldercare, cancel meetings, whatever it will take to free some time) when those trusted grassroots groups sound the call. Free DC had successes (such as getting their own metropolitan police chief back in charge) because so many tens of thousands of people took to the streets and non-cooperated with the hostile takeover of their city.
Another way to pressure ICE
Besides the powerful weekly demonstrations at the ICE detention center and office in Burlington, there are now demonstrations at Cafe Escadrille, organized by Heatwave.Now. The Cafe is owned by Robert Murray who also owns the office building that houses the ICE facility. The Burlington City Council wants to inspect the detainees’ conditions, but ICE says no, and Murray is not pushing ICE to let them in. Learn the background here; and sign up to hear of future demonstrations here or on Facebook.
They have a campaign of writing to Mr. Murray to ask him to let city officials in. To participate, you can email them at action@heatwave.now, or just compose your own postcard or letter and mail it to Robert Murray, Cafe Escadrille, 26 Cambridge St, Burlington, MA 01803.
The resistance gets more creative!
The Swing Blue Creative Resistance Team and others made a big splash at the exhilarating Labor Day March in Boston, with South Park characters, puppets and custom fortune cookies.
(Why South Park characters? Recent seasons of South Park have depicted characters as symbols of resistance to President Trump by portraying him in bed with Satan and showing ordinary people pushed to their breaking points by an authoritarian, petty, and ridiculous government.)
To get ideas for how to inject more art and humor into your resistance, and to get invited to flash mobs, join the Swing Blue Creative Resistance listserv by emailing creative-resistance-team@swingbluealliance.org.
How we decide which actions to include here
Pro-Democracy Organizations we are monitoring
(This list keeps getting longer and longer!)
Indivisible national and Massachusetts
We also review these 14 national compilers of action alerts.
What I wouldn’t give to have that lengthening list of pro-democracy organizations consolidated into one or two nationwide groups. We are far too fragmented and should not be celebrating that.