Last Thursday, Crain’s Grand Rapids Business posted an article entitled, Long Road bets on canned cocktails with production facility expansion.
The article discusses the production expansion plan, along with details about the company’s desire to produce more ready to drink cocktail beverages. The primary source for the Crain’s article was co-owner and former GR City Commissioner Jon O’Conner.
Having O’Connor be the spokesperson makes sense, since the other co-owner in Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand.
The production expansion plans were also part of the January 27th Grand Rapids City Commission meeting, which means that Mayor LaGrand had to remove himself from the discussion, since him being a co-owner would be a conflict of interest.
Unfortunately, the Crain’s Grand Rapids Business article doesn’t mention that Mayor LaGrand is a co-owner of Long Road Distillers or that it was an agenda item at the Grand Rapids City Commission. Not only was the Long Road Distillers expansion on the City Commission’s agenda, there will be a public hearing on Tuesday, February 10th at 2pm to hear public input on the company’s expansion plans and whether or not the city should be providing the company with a tax abatement.
Additionally, the Crain’s Grand Rapids Business article never mentions that there has been an organized boycott of Long Road Distillers locations and products since last October, when members of Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE began the campaign with a protest in front of their Leonard St. location.
Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE initiated the boycott to pressure Mayor LaGrand to adopt 6 sanctuary policies that would guarantee that the City of Grand Rapids and the GRPD would not collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in their efforts to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
It is instructive that the Crain’s Grand Rapids Business article fails to inform its readers that their is an upcoming public hearing on the expansion plans of Long Road Distillers along with the fact that there is an active boycott of the company as a tactic to pressure Mayor LaGrand to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE began 4 months ago.
This is a clear case where Crain’s Grand Rapids Business only seems interested in promoting business interests at the expense of community demands and community safety.
In November there will be more elections and with that comes the same dynamics we have seen repeatedly in terms of where we should place our focus and energy.
The mid-terms are upon us and many people and organizations are placing a great deal of hope in those elections. Not only are groups wanting to center the upcoming elections they want us to participate with the usual mantra of anybody but the Republicans. Ironically, this blind devotion to voting for the lesser of evils is exactly how we got here in the first place.
Ask yourself if the Democratic Party has demonstrated any real and substantive resistance to the Trump Administration over the past twelve months? I don’t mean speeches or statements, rather how have Democrats voted and more importantly, how much are they following the lead of those doing the actual organized resistance across the county? The Democratic Party in the past 12 months has not engaged in real resistance, and more often than not they have tried to either undermine organized resistance through proxy groups and they have gone out of their way to defend systems of power and oppression, like ICE.
Undermining organized resistance
The Democratic Party has undermined movement work in recent decades, often using the language of on the ground movements, but always with the goal of not doing what movements are demanding. Remember of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was challenging the Capitalist Class and calling for radical economic change that would not only benefit families, but address the climate crisis. Remember, the Occupy movement happened during the Obama Administration, which bailout out banks and forced autoworkers into taking concessions during contract negotiations.
Then there was the Movement for Black Lives, which was a direct response to brutal killings of Black people by cops. Again, the Obama Administration did little to address this matter, often chastising those in the streets and practicing respectability politics. This same national movement erupted in 2020 with the largest protests in US history after the police murder of George Floyd, with calls to defund and abolish the police. Again, Democrats tried to change the narrative and make it so cops had more diversity training, using body cams or they needed even more funding, like what happened under the Biden Administration.
In the past twelve months under the Trump Administration we have seen economic attacks against working class people, continued support for the Israel genocide and direct US military intervention in places like Venezuela. Again, the Democratic Party has responded by simply offering more oversight or mild reforms to capitalism and they continue to vote to provide nearly roughly $1 trillion to fund US militarism.
A large percentage of the public is calling for ICE to be abolished and yet the Democratic Party wants to make it about ICE agents wearing masks, calling for body cams additional oversight. What the Democratic Party is not calling for is the abolition of ICE.
Undermining organized resistance through proxy groups
The other main strategy of the Democrats is to use proxy groups to undermine the incredible organized resistance happening across the country. Some of those proxy groups are MoveOn (which was created during the Bush Admin.), 50501 or Indivisible.
In a recent weekly Email, the GR Indivisible group wrote the following:
Protests, rallies, calling our elected representatives, letter and postcard writing, supporting affected communities and mutual aid efforts, helping with food insecurity, and showing up for our neighbors are all incredibly important actions that we should continue to do. But if we do not turn Congress around in the 2026 midterm elections by getting progressive candidates elected, our society will continue to break down, increasing hardship for people not just in the U.S. but also around the globe.
Ok, so this is an instructive statement from Indivisible. What I take from this statement is that before the Trump Administration most people in the US were doing pretty good. This kind of thinking is so problematic, because 1) it fails to acknowledge how millions of people in the US have been suffering for a very long time regardless of who sits in the White House, and 2) it demonstrates that Democrats and Democratic Party front groups like Indivisible are in denial of the tremendous suffering and injustice that happens under Democratic administrations.
Here is a question, why wasn’t Indivisible organizing during the Biden Administration. Why weren’t they making similar statements during the Biden Administration? Here is a very short list of what happened during the Biden Administration that were also rather heinous:
- There were more deportations in the last four years than there were during the first Trump Administration.
- The Biden Administration approved more fossil fuel extractions on US soil than the Trump Administration did.
- The wealth gap has expanded during the Biden Administration, especially amongst the Billionaire Class.
- The Biden Administration increased US military funding every year for the past 4 years.
- The Biden Administration increased funding for policing, even in the era of Black Lives Matter.
- The Biden Administration was completely and utterly complicit in the war crimes and genocidal policies of Israel, refusing to end weapons sales to Israel, being complicit in allowing Israel to block humanitarian aid to Gaza and always voting against most of the rest of the world when the United Nations condemned what Israel was doing.
- The Biden Administration was not only silent, but did not actively oppose the repression of the US campus Pro-Palestine movement.
- Rent increases went up during the Biden Administration, which did very little to address the current US housing crisis.
- The Biden Administration did not raise the federal minimum wage, they did not eliminate Citizens United, the did not release the Epstein files, and they didn’t codify Roe v Wade.
Last Saturday, the Kent Dems held an anti-ICE rally in Grand Rapids, but the Kent County Dems do not support the sanctuary policies that Movimiento Cosecha has been demanding over the past 12 months and none of the local Democratic politicians support Cosecha’s demands either. More importantly, they did not center affected communities during their anti-ICE rally or even bother to have Cosecha speak.
Instead, the Kent Dems invited the Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow to speak. McMorrow has NO history of demanding that ICE be abolished and her stance on ICE and immigration includes the following:
- Support legislation to require all ICE officers to wear uniforms and clear identification to prevent fear and distrust with plain-clothes officers conducting raids in communities
- Focus our immigration enforcement dollars on keeping violent criminals off of our streets, not bullying legal immigrants who came here for a better life
- Secure the border with more agents, better technology like sensors and scanners, and modernized ports of entry to stop trafficking and bring order to entry
This is the same weak reformist proposals that will do nothing to effectively stop ICE from arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants.
Now, I’m not telling people to not vote or how to vote, but what I am saying is that never in the history of the US has the federal government ever done anything good on their own. To the degree that there has been any fundamental changes at the federal level it has always been because of organized resistance and organized movements throughout history.
The radical historian Howard Zinn once said:
But before and after those two minutes it takes to vote, our time, our energy, as concerned citizens, should be spent in educating, agitating and organizing in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.
Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House and in Congress into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate, that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
On Friday, the US Senate voted 71 – 29 for a spending package to keep the government open, which included funding for the Department of Homeland Security and by extension ICE.
According to an article on Truthout:
The deal represents a major concession from Democrats — by allowing spending for most of the government to be approved, they give up a large bargaining chip to ensure their demands, however milquetoast, are taken seriously.
Michigan Senator Gary Peters voted for the seriously compromised bill and released a statement which included these comments:
“While we continue to negotiate DHS reforms like requiring body cameras and clear identification of federal law enforcement, I’m glad that we were able to pass funding for the remaining government agencies with bipartisan support.”
Senator Slotkin voted no on the bill that included funding for ICE, which was fairly meaningless, since 22 of her fellow Senate Democrats voted for ICE funding. In addition, Senator Slotkin wrote on her Facebook page:
“My sincere hope is the White House and my Republican colleagues in Congress hear the chorus from the American people, and use the next two weeks to put the appropriate limits on ICE. The model should be our state and local police officers, who adhere to a set of standards every day while protecting our communities.”
First, Slotkin left out Democrats in this statement, since the overwhelming message from the American people has been to Abolish ICE, not make it a kinder, gentler systems of state carceral violence. Second, for Slotkin to suggest that ICE should model themselves after state and local police means she not only is not interested in abolishing ICE, the Michigan Senator is denying two major factors about state and local police – that they use massive amounts of public tax dollars, which do not actually keep the public safe, plus cops across the country killed 1,314 people in the US in 2025, which has been the average number since 2020.
The votes from Senators Slotkin and Peters are representative of the majority of Democratic Party members in Congress, which is to keep voting to fund ICE, but with some mild reforms like no masks and body cams. The fact of the matter is that even without masks and wearing body cams, ICE will still be arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.
This is why I believe that the Democrats are equally complicit in the state carceral violence that ICE inflicts on affected communities, since they only want to make some mild reforms around the edges, while funding the separation of immigrant families and perpetuating trauma and pain on affected communities.
GRIID Class on US Foreign Policy since WWII – Week #3
In week #1 I provided some foundational documents and a framework for how to look at no what country the US is engaged in. I also used the framework document to assess the history of Iraq, particularly the US relationship with that country.
For week #2 we focused on US government efforts, primarily through the CIA to undermine the elections in Italy 1947-48, and to orchestrate coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.
For week #3 we continued to used William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII. The three countries we focused on were the Congo, Indonesia, and Chile during the 1960s.
The Congo
The Congo had been colonized by Belgium for decades, primarily under the rule of King Leopold who was responsible for an estimated 10-15 million Congolese that were killed.
Eventually the Congo wanted to get out from under the boot of Belgium and began working for independence in 1960. The US always pays attention to countries that are seeking to be independent of colonialism and when they discovered that one of the leaders of the independence movement, Patrice Lumumba, was not only a charismatic speaker, but a sharp organizer.
According to Blum’s book (chapter 26) the CIA got involved and began looking for Congolese leaders who would be more sympathetic to long-term US interests, specifically mining interests. There is no consensus who who actually killed Lumumba, but it is clear that the CIA played a significant role in his death.
Once Lumumba was dealt with the US and Belgium collaborated to control economic and political dynamics in the Congo until they found the perfect leader who would be submissive to US longer interests, Mobutu. Mobutu had been recruited by the CIA as early as the 1950s, and in 1965 Mobutu seize power in the Congo with the assistance of the CIA. Mobutu was a dictator and plundered the national wealth for his own benefit. He was eventually forced out in 1990, thus ending 25 years of rule.
Today, the Congo still is one of the poorest countries in the world and continues to have its natural resources plundered by multinational corporations, which is well documented in the book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara.
Indonesia 1965
In October of 1965, there was a coup (involving the CIA) with the goal of ousting President Sukarno. According to Blum’s book the coup/purge resulted in 50,000 deaths:
Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of “communist” operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
In many ways this was a purge of anyone who was identified as a communist. Blum goes on to write:
The desire of the US government to be rid of Sukarno—a leader of the nonaligned and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, and a protector of the PKI—did not diminish with the failure of the Agency-backed military uprising in 1958. Amongst the various reports of the early 1960s indicating a continuing interest in this end, a CIA memorandum of June 1962 is strikingly to the point. The author of the memo, whose name is deleted, was reporting on the impressions he had received from conversations with “Western diplomats” concerning a recent meeting between President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan. The two leaders agreed, said the memo, to attempt to isolate Sukarno in Asia and Africa. Further, “They agreed to liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities. (It is not clear to me [the CIA officer] whether murder or overthrow is intended by the word liquidate.)”
This purging of communists put General Suharto in power, who was a longtime ally of the US. In 1975 Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal relinquished control. It was the beginning of a massacre that continues into the 1990s. By 1989, Amnesty International estimated that Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000.29 The level of atrocity has often been on a par with that carried out against the PKI in Indonesia itself.
Suharto was able to do this after meeting with US President Gerald R. Ford and Henry Kissinger, who gave Suharto the green light to invade East Timor and cause one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. See the declassified US documents collected by the National Security Archives. Also see the documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which documents the role the US played in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.
Chile 1964 – 1973
The US will not tolerate socialism in any country, especially in the Americas. This is why the US State Department, the CIA and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations worked tirelessly to overthrow the democratically elected government in Chile, with President Allende.
According to Blum’s book:
The CIA is an ongoing organization. Its covert activities are ongoing, each day, in each country. Between the 1964 and 1970 presidential elections many of the programs designed to foster an anti-leftist mentality indifferent sections of the population continued; much of the propaganda and electioneering mechanisms remained in place to support candidates of the 1965 and 1969 congressional elections; in the latter election, financial support was given to a splinter socialist party in order to attract votes away from Allende’s Socialist Party; this reportedly deprived the party of a minimum of seven congressional seats.
The CIA also began supporting some labor unions, which were connected to US labor unions and also collaborated with US efforts to squash socialism. See Jeff Schuhrke’s book, Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade.
US multinational corporations also got involved, since the Allende government wanted to use Chilean resources for Chile. Companies like ITT and Kennecott Copper, which provided logistical support to US agencies seeking to overthrown the Chilean government.
Again, Blum writes:
In September the military prevailed. “It is clear,” said the Senate investigating committee, “the CIA received intelligence reports on the coup planning of the group which carried out the successful September 11 coup throughout the months of July, August, and September 1.973.”
The American role on that fateful day was one of substance and shadow. The coup began in the Pacific coast port of Valparaiso with the dispatch of Chilean naval troops to Santiago, while US Navy ships were present offshore, ostensibly to participate in joint maneuvers with the Chilean Navy. The American ships stayed outside of Chilean waters, but remained on the alert. A US WB-575 plane—an airborne communications control system—piloted by US Air Force officers, cruised in the Chilean sky. At the same time, 32 American observation and fighter planes were landing at the US air base in Mendoza, Argentina, not far from the Chilean border.
The CIA coup led to the rise of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile with an iron fist, eliminated public dissent and adopted economic policies that were favorable to Chilean elites and foreign investors. Pinochet invited US economists to Chile to restructure the economy.
Milton Freidman was the prominent US economist and intellectual architect behind the neoliberal restructuring of Chile following the 1973 CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende. Friedman advised the “Chicago Boys”—Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago—who implemented radical free-market reforms, including privatization, deregulation, and austerity under dictator Augusto Pinochet.
For more details on the CIA coup, see the National Security Archives documents here and part of the documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.
Last week the House voted for the 2026 US military budget HR 7148, approving the proposed $840 billion for military spending requested from the Trump Administration.
The vote passed in the House 341 – 88, with 2 members not voting. There were 149 Democrats voting for Trump’s military budget, including Rep. Hillary Scholten. In fact, according to the vote breakdown every Michigan House member voted with Trump, except Rep. Tlaib.
Rep. Scholten never mentions on her Facebook page that she voted with the Trump Administration for the $840 billion in military spending, yet she likes to complain about the Trump Administration regularly. On January 24th, Scholten made the comment that “Congress is not working the way it should,” yet she voted in favor of militarism and US Imperialism with the majority of House members.
Rep. Schoten’s vote on the US military budget is consist, in that she has voted for the massive US military budget every year since she joined Congress in 2023. In addition, the majority of House Democrats voting with the Trump Administration’s proposal for $840 billion demonstrates once again that they are not an opposition party.
Considering that the Trump Administration has continued to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is seeking to use social unrest in Iran to justify a US intervention, the US military’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Maduro, the threat to invade and occupy Greenland, and so many other overt forms of US imperialism, one would think that politicians would not want to rubber stamp $840 billion more for US militarism.
Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Il) voted no on the 2026 US military budget stating:
“As long as we are funding imperialism and authoritarianism while working people can’t afford the high cost of living. I will stand opposed.”
This is the right stance to take, since $2.01 billion in taxes leaves the 3rd Congressional district every year to fund US militarism. Imagine if that money was spent on meeting the needs of people in Rep. Scholten’s District. Unfortunately, voting for the $840 billion military budget demonstrates that Rep. Scholten is more committed to US imperialism than she is to making sure that people in her district have their basic needs met.
Misinformation and the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding from the City and the County
I have seen over the past few weeks comments from people who are not involved in the struggle for immigrant justice, particularly white people who feel compelled to share their own thoughts about the 6 sanctuary polices that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding from the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County.
Some of it is the same old argument that being a sanctuary city or county will bring the wrath of the Trump Administration. First, this effort is not, and I repeat, NOT calling for the City or County to declare themselves a sanctuary. These two groups are calling on the City and the County to adopt 6 specific policies that would prevent those two governing bodies and the cops that work for them to not collaborate with ICE in any way. Think of these 6 sanctuary policies as public safety policies or harm reduction policies. Second, ICE has three offices in Grand Rapids and is adding a fourth office with more ICE agents. ICE has been terrorizing undocumented immigrants since 2003 in this community and Cosecha & GR Rapid Response to ICE has seen a significant increase in ICE activity since last June. Therefore, the wrath of the current administration is already being felt by members of the affected community.
Just days after 5 people were arrested at the Kent County Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that the Kent County Jail is holding immigrants for ICE and to demand that they end this practice, these same people and another 20 people attended the January 8th Kent County Commission meeting to push the 6 sanctuary policies. I wrote about that meeting, where the primary response was that the county doesn’t enforcement immigration policies. Again, people are not asking them to enforce immigration policies, they are demanding that Kent County adopt policies which will signify that all county employee will not share information or cooperate in any way with ICE. As I stated before these are public safety and harm reduction demands.
During Tuesday night’s Grand Rapids City Commission meeting, Mayor LaGrand made some comments which were rather instructive and infuriating (Listen to the Mayor’s comments at 13:00 into the video).
First, Mayor LaGrand made comments critical of the Trump Administration, suggesting that the harm done to undocumented immigrants are because of the current administration. While it is true that the Trump Administration has escalated anti-immigrant rhetoric and funding for ICE, ICE has been brutalizing immigrant communities since they were founded in 2003.
Second, LaGrand responding to the 6 sanctuary policy demands suggested some of those demands are already being done, specifically by the GRPD. LaGrand read some of the GRPD practices related to immigration status (all of which you can read here)
“No member of the GRPD shall coerce, threaten with deportation, or engage in verbal abuse of any person based on that person(s)… actual or perceived immigration status or citizenship”
“No member of the GRPD shall inquire into a person’s immigration status when the person is seeking police services…”
“No member of the GRPD will stop, question, investigate, arrest, search, or detain an individual based solely on actual or suspected immigration status… including an immigration detainer, administrative immigration warrant, prior deportation order, or other civil immigration document”
However, none of what LaGrand said is the same as the 6 demands from Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE. Again, see the imagine above. Mayor LaGrand went on to talk about human rights and liberty and how he will shout some of the GRPD immigration-related policies from the rooftops. Look politicians can use whatever rhetoric they want, but this means little while immigrants in this city and this county are living in constant fear, while immigrant families are being separated in this community, while immigrant children are being traumatized by seeing a parent taken away, and while immigrant families find themselves in a position of economic hardship, because the primary income earners have been taken by ICE.
Equally important is the fact that members of Cosecha and GR Rapid Response have witnessed the GRPD and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department cooperate and collaborate with ICE, along with documented evidence. You can engage in as much rhetoric as you want and have police policies that the city decided on, but the reality is that the City and the County are collaborating with ICE on a regular basis.
Towards the end of the City Commission meeting (1:40:00 into the video), Mayor LaGrand said that none of us can outsource democracy, meaning we all have an obligation to practice democracy. This is insulting to lots of people in the city who are dedicated and committed practitioners of democratic principals. As someone who has been involved in GR Rapid Response to ICE since 2017, I have seen hundreds of people do the work to try to prevent ICE from taking immigrants, people accompanying immigrants to appointments when they don’t feel safe in public, doing patrols in neighborhoods where ICE has been sighted, providing transportation, food, diapers and funds so that immigrant families can survive after a loved one has been arrested, set to a detention center and often deported. People do this work are not relying on the government or any other institution to do it, because they are doing it and not just talking about it.
Lastly, the evolution of how Mayor LaGrand has responded to these demands to adopt 6 sanctuary policies is instructive. In January of 2025, when the community generated over 3,000 letters to the City, LaGrand said that he wasn’t hearing from the immigrant community. This is absurd, since Cosecha’s members are part of the immigrant community.
In March of 2025, during another GR City Commission meeting, the Mayor said he didn’t want to give immigrants a false sense of hope.
In May, during the annual May Day march that Cosecha organizes, the GRPD threatened people with arrest before they marched and the arrested two people who were doing crowd safety.
In June, the GRPD showed up to harass and threaten members of GR Rapid Response to ICE that showed up when ICE arrested 8 people going to their appointments at the ISAP office at 545 Michigan.
In late July, people spoke for 2 hours during the City Commission meeting and then engaged in street theater and other forms of disruption, where Mayor LaGrand threatened to have people arrested if they didn’t leave. In September, Mayor LaGrand said some awful stuff about Cosecha and the sanctuary policy demands, which was followed up by a forum hosted by Cosecha where all City and Kent County Commissioners were invited to hear directly from immigrants affected by ICE violence. Because the low commissioner turnout, Cosecha then began a campaign to boycott the businesses owned by Mayor LaGrand beginning in October. This action was followed up by a second action that was at another Long Road Distillers location in November.
In December, Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE attended an event hosted by Mayor LaGrand, which resulted in him giving a verbal commitment to talking with city commissioners about adopting sanctuary policies. Now Mayor LaGrand is saying that the city is fulfilling some of the demands from Cosecha. So, what’s next? Will the Mayor start claiming that he and the GRPD are actually keeping immigrants safe from ICE? Stay tuned.
Of course, if you want to become involved in the campaigns to get the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies, contact Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE.
Editor’s Note: GRIID conducted a recent interview with Pastor Shannon Jammal-Hollemans, who spent several days in Minneapolis as part of the invite from organizers in that city to have people come there to be part of the resistance against ICE.
GRIID – What motivated you to go to Minneapolis and be part of the resistance to ICE terrorism?
I went because I am concerned for my neighbors, and my country. A group of organizers called MARCH Minnesota–which stands for Multifaith, Antiracist, Change & Healing–put out a call for clergy and faith leaders to come and stand in witness and solidarity with them in Minneapolis. They had the idea on a Thursday, put the call out the next day, and by Monday more than 650 leaders had registered to go. They had another 700 who wanted to be part of the action but who the organizers could not accommodate them.
I considered the call seriously, and I went to church that Sunday morning still on the Fence about it. But when my congregation heard I was thinking about going, they threw their full support behind me. By the end of the service they had collected more than $700 to send me to Minneapolis and they said a blessing over me to send me off.
Faith leaders have a responsibility to say what is true, especially when lies are being used to justify violence. As many of us know, it is painful to stand by and watch from a distance while this is happening, so I was so grateful to the organizers for inviting faith leaders to join them in faithful witness.
GRIID – What were some of the things happening on the ground that inspired you during the time you were in Minneapolis?
Over the course of our first day together we heard poetry, sang songs, and listened to story after story after story from those working on the ground to protect and serve those who are being impacted by violence right now. We participated in trainings to equip us for the work of faithful witness we would be doing in Minneapolis AND the trained, sustained resistance to authoritarianism we are doing in our own communities.
Minneapolis is a city that is all too familiar with violence. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 changed life there. But something we heard over and over again as we heard from those living in Minneapolis right now is “This feels different.” When the chief of police threatens to fire any officer who does not intervene when ICE is harming people, I know this is different.
I cannot get the stories that I heard in Minneapolis out of my head–the story of a mother and her two children chased by ICE officers to her home, escaping by mere seconds; or the story of a four year-old U.S. citizen, whose mother is a U.S. citizen, who has not left her home since November for fear of being kidnapped by our government because her father is not a citizen; or the story of the mother of a 3 month-old infant whose mother was kidnapped, leaving her child behind. This is horrific.
But the stories of resistance are also staying with me. Women are coming together to donate breast milk to that 3 month-old baby whose mother was kidnapped by ICE. People are mobilizing to help in any way they can–those with disabilities and confined to their homes are watching from their windows and managing communications; trained witnesses are following ICE and recording their activities for accountability; and trained citizens are organizing to are put themselves in harm’s way to protect those who are being kidnapped by our federal government.
Minneapolis showed me that effective resistance isn’t spontaneous—it’s learned, practiced, and disciplined. People don’t just show up brave. They show up prepared.
On Thursday evening, I had dinner at an immigrant-owned restaurant in Minneapolis. When talking with the server, I noticed the whistle she was wearing around her neck. Local resisters wear whistles around their necks to alert people to the presence of ICE. I shared with her why we were in town, and she got choked up. “Thank you….thank you for being here. Thank you for standing witness.”
What I saw clearly while in Minneapolis was that the actions being taken by ICE agents are not about immigration. They are about authoritarianism. They are targeting black and brown communities indiscriminately. Indigenous people with protected status are being kidnapped and held because they are standing witness and offering protection. All of us have the power to respond to this threat to our country in one way or another. Sometimes we need to lend one another the courage to do it.
GRIID – What actions did you take part in and can you describe what that (or those) actions looked like?
Our group of faith leaders and clergy divided up among several locations on Friday to take action. Some went to deliver groceries to families trapped in their homes. Others staged a sit-in at U.S. Bank where they successfully demanded to talk with the CEO to share their concerns. Another group had a “sing-in” at a local Target store to protest the ways Target has been cooperating with ICE agents in the city. And a large contingent went to the Minneapolis airport to pray in protest of the three flights a day that are leaving the city with people being kidnapped by ICE agents. One of my colleagues was among the 100 who were arrested.
I went to a local church in Minneapolis where a group of us rabbis, pastors and priests walked around the neighborhood and sang both as a way to deter the presence of ICE and let the people locked in their homes know that we were with them. As we walked, home alarms went off, and the lights on exterior cameras turned on. We know they saw us and heard us, and we lamented the fear that they live in right now.
When we were back in the church, listening to the stories of those taking immense risks to protect their neighbors, the church went on lockdown because of ICE activity several blocks away. Someone was taken, and people were harmed in the process. The church operates a free medical clinic in its basement since people are not safe going to the hospital. We sat there as the injured were treated downstairs, and the rabbis led us in saying a blessing over the people taking these risks and the people receiving treatment downstairs.
While we were in the church, a group of our clergy colleagues were traveling by bus from the site of George Floyd’s murder to the site of Renee Good’s murder. They did not notice the vehicle of ICE agents that was following them. A group of local organizers began to follow the vehicle of ICE agents, and after a while, the ICE agents abruptly stopped their vehicle, got out, and smashed the drivers side window of the vehicle carrying the organizers who were following them. This is terrorism.
Friday afternoon we were among the 50,000 people who marched through the streets of Minneapolis demanding accountability, transparency, and an end to the use of force that has already cost so many lives in Minneapolis and around the country. It was minus twelve degrees Fahrenheit but the positive energy of those of us who gathered and marched was incredible. We were a diverse group, and our coming together did not erase our diversity, but showed the power we have when diverse groups of people unite for the common good. I consider that sacred and holy work.
GRIID – What was your reaction when you heard that ICE had shot and killed Alex Pretti?
I was driving home on Saturday morning when the other clergy in my car saw on our Signal chat that Alex Pretti had been shot and killed. Because we were connected to the groups on the ground there, we heard within minutes of it happening, before local media had even caught wind of the news. And we were stunned–not surprised–but stunned, and angry. We sat in silence for a bit until I finally said the words that were running through each of our minds,“Should I turn around?”
We considered it together. We stopped for lunch with the other car of clergy we had traveled with, and we concluded that we were where we needed to be in that moment.
The organizers asked anyone who was still in the city to stay if they were able to, to serve as movement chaplains to those impacted by the murder. More than a dozen responded that they were able to stay and offer support.
GRIID – What did you learn about the power of organized resistance while in Minneapolis and what can you encourage people to do/replicate here in West Michigan?
My time in Minneapolis taught me that resisting authoritarianism requires trained, sustained resistance—grounded in truth-telling and faithful witness. Faithful witness means naming what must change, not just what we oppose. The movement in Minneapolis is absolutely breathtaking, and it is working. It is also adaptable and completely replicable in our communities.
ICE agents must be held legally accountable for their crimes. Federal funding for ICE must be cut. ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional rights violations of Americans and our neighbors. National companies must commit to becoming 4th Amendment businesses, ceasing economic relations with ICE, and refusing ICE entry or use of their property for staging grounds.
Editor’s Note: I would encourage people in Kent County to get involved in the work of Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE.
Why are white people so pissed off about ICE now? On why we need to come to terms with US history and learn from BIPOC communities
There is an overwhelming amount of chatter on social media over the ICE infiltration of Minneapolis and the recent ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Of course all of this is understandable, but at the same time much of it can be problematic. Why is it that it took white people getting killed by ICE for people to wake up? Undocumented immigrants have been killed by ICE agents or in ICE detention facilities by the hundreds since ICE was created in 2003?
White people and the politicians they have voted for – both Democrats and Republicans – have been approving billions in funding for ICE since 2003, while undocumented immigrants were being arrested, detained and deported, along with hundreds being killed. You can read about these immigrant deaths by reading reports from Detention Watch Network and the ACLU.
What I want to address today is the response from so many people who say what ICE is doing is not very American, when in fact it is exactly what America has done since this country was founded. I saw this fabulous post from someone on social media in recent days, which is included here above.
The person who posted this is BIPOC and also included the following commentary about the above post.
“This isn’t a conversation about semantics or word choices. This is a conversation about history, about accountability, about ownership. This is who the US is. This is who the US has always been.”
I was so moved by the post and wanted to expand our understanding of US history, by looking more deeply at the examples included in the statement above.
ICE is not the gestapo – If you read Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Whitman, you will find out that the Nazi regime learned directly from what the power structure in the US was doing to BIPOC communities in the US. In Hitler’s American Model, the author says that a great deal of the policies that the Nazi Party adopted that not only vilified Jewish people, but also demonized Roma, the queer community, immigrants and non-Aryan people, were based in large part on what they learned from policies in the US. Whitman states:
The 1920 Party Program called for sharp limits on citizenship, which was to be restricted to persons of “German blood,” along with a scheme of disabilities for resident foreigners, who were to be threatened with expulsion.
When the US adopted the the Naturalization Act of 1790, it opened naturalization to “any alien, being a free white person.” The Nazi Party learned from this as well as US immigration laws that were adopted in 1921 (Emergency Quota Act – which limited the amount of immigrants into the US) and 1924 (The Immigration Act of 1924), which prevented immigration from Asia and put limitations on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Nazi Party were paying attention to both of those US immigration policies and and wove them into their own citizenship law that emerged in 1935.
Whitman’s book relies heavily on Nazi Party internal documents, which included comments from Nazi strategists who said they thought that, “the US was too extreme in some of their laws.”
ICE is the descendant of slave patrols – Slave patrols were a legalized mechanism developed in the south to police Black people who were enslaved whenever they fled slave plantations. Throughout South Carolina, town after town asked the state legislature to transfer control of the slave patrols from the county courts or state militia to the local government. Camden won that power in 1818. Columbia followed in 1823. Georgetown requested it in 1810, but was not allowed it until 1829. Ten years later, the legislature granted all incorporated South Carolina towns the power to regulate patrol duty. According to Kristian Williams book, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, modern day policing grew out of the slave patrols system.
ICE is the descendant of the indigenous child abductors for boarding schools – The US was founded on Settler Colonialism, where Indigenous people were killed and dispossessed from their land. In addition, Indigenous children became the target of abductions in order to place them into what are euphemistically referred to as boarding schools. US Captain Richard Henry Pratt delivered a speech in 1892, where he famously said, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The ideas expressed in Pratt’s speech are central to the development of the Carlisle Indian School (founded 1879) and other boarding schools across the country, which aimed to “civilize” and “Americanize” the Indian. See the book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror, by Laura Briggs, along with Kill the Indian, Save the Man, by Ward Churchill.
ICE is the descendant of the Jim Crow South law enforcement – The policing of Black people during the time of Jim Crow led to the early stages of mass incarceration, along with the hideous reality of lynchings that took place throughout the country. See Adolph Reed Jr.’s book, The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, along with the incredible book by Ida B. 
Wells on lynching, The Red Record.
ICE is the descendent of night riders – Night riders is a term used to describe groups of white US citizens who didn’t want to allow Black people to achieve any form of justice and equality. Most people are familiar with the KKK, but there were also groups known as the Red Shirts and the White League, which was paramilitary organization that acted as a military arm of the Democratic Party. Of course, these were early iterations of night rider groups, which still exist through the country. See James Ridgeway’s book, Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump, and Leonard Zeskind’s book, Blood and Politics: The History of The White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Of course there are a great deal more examples, but to re-emphasize the final points of the graphic above, we all need to learn from and listen to BIPOC voices and lived experiences.
Before the U.S looks to anyone else’s history to equate what ICE is like, the U.S. needs to remember its own history. And remember that many modern day atrocities were inspired by how this country treated its marginalized.
Resistance as an act of solidarity, resistance as an act of deep love in Kent County
Editor’s note – On Sunday morning I was asked to give the homily at All Souls Community Church. The theme I was asked to speak on was resistance.
Good morning everyone. Thanks for braving the cold. I was invited by Pastor Greta Jo to come and talk with you all this morning about resistance work, specifically resistance to oppression. I want to start off by reading some wisdom from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
These words from Dr. King were spoken in 1967, in his Beyond Vietnam speech, but they could very easily have been spoken today, especially since the US continues to spend $1 trillion on militarism, which is more than the next 10 largest military budgets around the world combined, along with daily state carceral violence at the hands of law enforcement agencies against Black communities, Latinx communities , poor communities and increasingly against undocumented immigrants.
The theme of my reflection today is centered around the idea of resistance, specifically resistance to systems of oppression. Again, Dr. King can provide us with some insight. In that same 1967 speech I referenced earlier, Dr. King said:
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
The system of oppression that Dr. King is referring to is the economic system of Capitalism, s system which primarily benefits the Capitalist Class, the millionaires and billionaires.
There is certainly no shortage of systems of oppression that we need to resist, like militarism, white supremacy, colonialism, transphobia, patriarchy and state carceral violence. These systems are structural and institutional, which means it will take a great deal to not only resist them, but to dismantle them.
Now in order to resist systems of oppression we need to determine what our goals are, meaning what do we want, and what kind of world do we want to live in. We then need to develop strategies and implement tactics in order to achieve those goals. As someone who has been organizing for nearly 5 decades in Grand Rapids, too often what people do when they are angered is they protest. They hold signs, they march, they have rallies and then they go home. The problem is that protesting more often than not is performative, it is symbolic and it rarely leads to change. Why, because protesting is not resistance. In fact, protesting more often than not is reacting to some atrocity, and when we react we tend not to think strategically.
Right now, what thousands of people are doing in Minneapolis, is resistance, which involves a general strike, shutting down commerce, blockading the ICE office, and people in the streets disrupting business as usual, so that ICE cannot kidnapped more undocumented immigrants. I’m not saying that protesting ICE is bad, but what if we redirected our energy in a strategic way, in a way that would directly benefit the very people that ICE is targeting – undocumented immigrants.
I am part of the core team with GR Rapid Response to ICE. We work directly with the immigrant-led group Movimiento Cosecha and do what they ask of us. As the Zapatista movement says, “We lead by following.” Right now, here is how GR Rapid Response is resisting ICE in Kent County.
- First we build relationships with undocumented immigrants, then listen to what they want, so that they could keep themselves and their families safe.
- Second, we respond to calls on our hotline for direct intervention when ICE attempts to kidnap undocumented immigrants in Kent County.
- Third, we accompany immigrants who have appointments at the ISAP office at 545 Michigan, the ICE office at 517 Ottawa and during court appointments, in order to reduce the chance of being taken by ICE during those appointments.
- Fourth, we are doing patrols in neighborhoods where immigrants live/work and where immigrants have told us that they have seen ICE operating. We do this on a daily basis in 6 different neighborhoods as a way to prevent ICE attempts to kidnap members of the affected community.
- We work with faith communities, community centers, non-profits and other entities that would declare themselves as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants and then provide safe houses for them to stay in when they no longer feel safe where they live.
- We work directly with Cosecha on organized campaigns to get local government bodies to adopt sanctuary policies that would make it harder for ICE to arrest and detain immigrants by not collaborating with ICE. We are currently doing this with Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids. The Kent County Sheriff’s office is conducting ICE holds at the Kent County Jail. Five of us were arrested for occupying the Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that they are collaborating with ICE by conducting holds for ICE. At the City level there is a boycott of Mayor LaGrand’s businesses, since he refuses to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha has been demanding.
- We provide mutual aid to families that were directly impacted by ICE violence with transportation, material aid, financial aid and legal support for those being detained. Author and organizer Dean Spade says, “Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.” This is what distinguishes Mutual aid from charity.
For people to be part of this work they have to attend a training, so we are better prepared to show up in solidarity for affected communities and to make sure that we don’t practice white saviorism. We as volunteers do not arrive as protectors of the vulnerable, but as co-conspirators. The language of “defending immigrants” often reproduces the very hierarchies we aim to dismantle, casting some as saviors and others as saved. This reproduces the “false generosity” of liberalism, one that preserves systems of domination under the guise of aid. Instead, we align ourselves with an ethic of solidarity, not saviorism.
Resistance then should be seen as an act of solidarity and deep love.
So what can you do right now to resist ICE in Kent County?
- You can share and donate to the Mutual Aid requests on the GR Rapid Response to ICE Facebook page.
- You can sign up for a training.
- You can get your faith community to host a training and work to declare themselves a sanctuary.
- You can attend the Melt ICE concert at Fountain Street Church on February 15, with live music and ticket sales going to families affected by ICE violence.
- Attend or host a workshop we do on the history of US immigration policy, so we can better understand the historical context for what ICE is doing.
- Lastly, you can join Movimiento Cosecha’s campaigns to pressure Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that will make sure that the GRPD and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t collaborate with ICE.
I am well aware of the fact that what ICE has been doing recently seems so outrageous, but the fact of the matter is that ICE has been arresting, detaining and deporting over 10 million immigrants since they were founded in 2003 and most of the people killed by ICE have been immigrants, either shot or died while in detention facilities. The biggest difference now is that the have a much larger budget to engage in brutally repressive actions primarily against affected communities. I also know that two non-immigrants have been killed in recent weeks in Minneapolis, but I want to emphasize again that there have been hundreds of undocumented immigrants that have been killed by ICE agents, either using lethal force or while they have been in detention centers. Where was the outrage when immigrants were killed?
I get that you might be afraid to get involved and to take risks, but no social movement in the history of this country has ever changed anything without taking risks. So let us be bold in our words and our actions, even if it means we take risks to our own well being. As the late Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero reminds us, “We must not love our lives so much that we avoid taking the risks in life that history calls for.” History is calling for it NOW!
GRIID Class on US Foreign Policy since WWII – Week #2
In week #1, I provided some foundational documents and a framework for how to look at no what country the US is engaged in. I also used the framework document to assess the history of Iraq, particularly the US relationship with that country.
For week #2 we began using William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII, using a PDF version of he book. I had participants read chapters 2, 9 and 10, with how the US interfered with the elections in Italy in 1947-48, the CIA coup in Iran in 1953, and the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954.
1947-48 Italian Elections
The US embraced a virulent anti-Communist stance after WWII, which played a major role in US foreign policy until the collapse of the Soviet Union decades later. In fact, towards the end of WWII, US troops played a vital role in undermining anti-fascist efforts in Italy. Noam Chomsky notes in his book, Deterring Democracy, US and and British military forces actively removed the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that had defeated the fascists in Europe. Chomsky states that these antifascist forces were often replaced by fascists collaborators they had defeated, “to weaken unions and other popular organizations, and to block the threat of radical democracy and social reform.” The fascist collaborators were more inclined to embrace capitalism and the social order that came with it, which means that the US and British military ended up being complicit with fascism by putting fascist collaborators in charge of cities in France, Italy and Germany.
With Italy there were several political parties like the Popular Democratic Front (PDF) that included those who embraced both socialist and communist beliefs. The US feared that Italy would have a socialist/communist government after the elections, so they invested a great deal of money, propaganda and other tactics to prevent the PDF from winning. Here is a short sample of some of the tactics that the US government used:
These tactics and many more resulted in the PDF losing the election and the Christian Democrats won, the party that the US was backing.
Iran 1953
The Iranian people and the Iranian government as early as 1951 wanted to nationalize the oil that was being pumped from the earth on Iranian land. Such an action was a major no no, since the oil interests (both British and US) were not in favor of allowing Iranians to benefit from domestic oil production.
The British initiated an economic blockade on Iran once they announced that Iranian oil was for Iranians. However, the Iranian government under the leadership of the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh was able to weather the economic blockade and continued to use oil production to benefit Iranian society. US strategists working with the CIA began developing a plan to oust the Mosaddegh government and put in his place the Shah, who would dismantle the law that said Iranian oil for Iranians.
In the summer of 1953, the CIA initiated a coup and then installed The Shah of Iran who became an important ally of the US in the Middle East until 1979. During the Shah’s reign he suppressed dissent, was very anti-Islam and created his own secret police known as SAVAK. According to Blum:
“The notorious Iranian secret police, SAVAK, created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel, spread its tentacles all over the world to punish Iranian dissidents. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”
The brutality of the Shah of Iran is what eventually led to the Iranian revolution in 1979, which was led by Islamic clerics who had nothing but contempt for the US, primarily because of the decades long US support of the Shah.
For more insights into the history of US/Iranian relations check out the US government declassified documents put together by the National Security Archives. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/iran-us-relations
Guatemala 1954
The third example we looked at for week #2 was the Central American country of Guatemala. Guatemala was historically one of the “banana republics” of Central America. The United Fruit Company had tremendous control in Guatemala that it was nicknamed El Pulpos – The Octopus, because they had their tentacles in everything.
However, with the elections of 1944 Guatemala was becoming more democratic, with the victory of Arevalo, ushering in what Guatemalans call Los dies anos de la Primavera – The ten years of Spring. A former military man, Jacobo Arbenz was elected in 1951 and sought to continue the reforms that began in 1944. Land reform was a major issue and the Guatemalan government appropriated land that the United Fruit Company was not using and paid them the same value the company had listed for tax purposes.
However, the United Fruit Company was not going to let the Guatemalan government to use land for the betterment of its own people. There were numerous people in the Eisenhower Administration that had a long history with the United Fruit Company, so they devised a plan to use the CIA to overthrow the government and did so in the summer of 1954. The CIA installed a Colonel named Castillio Armas that was willing to be a puppet for the US government and US interests.
After the 1954 CIA coup, the Guatemalan military ran the country with one dictator after another until there was eventually peace accords signed in 1995. However, to this day the 60% majority Mayan population still suffers from poverty and racism, with US interests still being a driving factor, especially after Guatemala signed on to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005.
For more on the CIA coup in Guatemala and the consequences of that coup check out the declassified US government documents from the National Security Archives. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/guatemala-project
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 