Another GRPS student walkout took place on Wednesday, where students demanded ICE out of Grand Rapids
On Wednesday, more than 100 students from Innovation Central High School in Grand Rapids participated in a walkout against ICE.
This was the third student walkout I have witnessed and provided support for in terms of crowd safety. On February 4th, students from the Museum High School did a walkout. On February 13th, students from Southwest Middle High School, also known as Academia Bilingüe, took part in a walkout as well.
Student walkouts have been taking place across the country, especially in school districts where large numbers of immigrant students attend school, like the Grand Rapids Public Schools.
As in the previous student walkouts, these were initiated and organized by students who want to not only make a statement about the terrorism that ICE is inflicting in their communities, but also to share their stories of how family members and neighbors are affected by ICE arrests, detention and deportation.
The Innovation Central High School students walked out of their school around 12:30pm and marched towards downtown. Along the way they were greeted by people honking their horns, cheering for them and taking video of their public act of defiance against what the federal government is doing to create fear and terror in affected communities.
The GRPS students marched down to the Rosa Parks statue on Monroe and stood on the sidewalk with signs, chanting and lots of energy. There was one student who brought a portable amplifier with him that was play musica Dominicano – Dominican music, music that was celebratory.
The students then marched over the Calder Plaza in order to be near the Federal building, along with the City and County buildings, since they are aware of how local governments are collaborating with ICE.
What was different about this group of students compared to the other student walkouts that I have reported on was that they did not make speeches. Instead of making speeches, these students made noise and danced, as you can see in the video here below.
For these students their resistance was also festive. They chose to dance, since it was rooted in cultural and historic opposition to oppression, much like the Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny.
The student celebration was beautiful and powerful and it reminded me of why we need to engage in this type of resistance and to celebrate our collective histories and public defiance of government repression. The students gave us all a gift today!
Don’t expect much from the performative letter and visit from Rep. Scholten and Stevens regarding the GEO Group-owned Northlake ICE Detention Facility
On Tuesday, WOODTV8 posted a story with the headline, Congresswomen Scholten, Stevens tour ICE facility following detainee death.
The channel story states:
U.S. Reps. Hillary Scholten, D-Grand Rapids, and Haley Stevens, D-Birmingham, toured the North Lake Processing Center in Lake County after asking several questions in the December death of Nenko Gantchev.
Most of the rest of the WOODTV8 story is based on what the GEO Group-owned Northlake facility people have said, along with what Representatives Scholten and Stevens said. None of that information is terribly revealing nor compelling in terms of shedding light on the conditions of the Northlake facility, plus much of the back and forth has to do with the case of the Bulgarian detainee who died there last year.
However, WOODTV8 does include a link to a letter that Scholten and Stevens sent to the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on December 23, 2025. Much of the letter is specific to death of Nenko Gantchev, but towards the end the letter states the following:
Additionally, given the ongoing reports regarding the treatment of detainees and conditions of accommodations at North Lake, we also request an investigation into the current conditions at the facility. The review should address, at a minimum, the following:
- How is ICE fulfilling the required medical screening, care, and supervision of any medical needs of detainees at North Lake, especially in light of the rapid population increase at the facility since reopening? Please provide a description of the current and future expected staffing of medical professionals to fulfill such required medical care.
- Please provide a copy of all policies and procedures for medical screening and response currently in place.
- Please provide the number of detainees currently being housed at North Lake who have lodged a complaint or request pertaining to medical care.
- How is ICE meeting requirements related to mandatory basic need care, including safe accommodations, at North Lake, especially in light of the rapid population increase at the facility since reopening? Please provide a description of the current and future expected staffing of required professionals to fulfill such functions.
- Has ICE investigated any complaints regarding the conditions at North Lake? If so, how many? Please provide a detailed description of the complaints received, the steps taken to investigate them, and any corrective actions implemented as a result.
These 5 questions that Representatives Scholten and Stevens included in the letter to Kristi Noem are useful in terms of getting answers, but they fall way short on what it is that the two members of Congress from Michigan will actually do to challenge the Trump Administration and the GEO Group to make sure that detainees are treated humanely.
If people truly want to be involved to demand real transparency and justice for detainees at the Northlake facility then they might want to get involved with the group No Detention Centers in Michigan, which has been working with detainees at that location for years. Michigan members of Congress who visited once to assess the realities of what is happening at the GEO Group-owned facility is completely inadequate and arguably performative. Justice for detainees will not be achieved through partisan politics, but from grassroots organizing and strategic movement work from an immigrant justice framework.
Equally important is the issue of how Rep. Scholten has voted on immigration matters since being a member of Congress. We know that in the last year Scholten voted for the Laken Riley Act at the beginning of 2025, legislation that further criminalized immigrants. In late January of 2025, Rep. Scholten voted for H.R. 30, which also criminalizes immigrants as I noted then. Then again in February of 2025, Rep., Scholten voted for HR 35, which also further criminalizes immigrants.
Rep. Scholten can talk about the issue of oversight, which has rarely happened when it comes to federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE. (See Silky Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.) Scholten can lay the blame at the feet of Republicans regarding ICE behavior and she can say she will do everything in her power to hold ICE accountable. However, we know this is standard political speak that translates into something like this – I can’t do anything because Democrats are not in power. The reality is that since ICE was created in 2003, the Obama and Biden administrations, the years when Democrats also had a majority in Congress, did nothing to provide transparency, accountability or oversight of ICE.
Representatives Scholten and Stevens have consistently voted to fund ICE and they are both up for re-election this year, which raises the question of whether they will actually do anything substantively about ICE or are they just engaging in performative politics during an election year where a large percentage of voters are actually demanding that ICE be abolished. I believe it is the later, which is why I don’t believe that members of Congress will fight to end ICE.
I believe that the only way to Abolish ICE is if enough people are mobilized to force politicians to stop funding ICE and to make it so that companies that have contracts with ICE will not be able to profit off of human suffering.
William Glenn: Civil Rights Advocate in Grand Rapids, Communist Party member and Internationalist
William Glenn grew up in Grand Rapids. As an African American, Glenn was keenly aware of the racist and segregationist practices within Grand Rapids and most of its institutions.
William Glenn got involved in the Civil Rights struggle early on, as he was named in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against the segregationist practices of the Keith Theater in Grand Rapids.
However, Glenn, like other more radical Grand Rapidians, was not always supportive of the efforts of the NAACP. In the 1940s, the NAACP leadership changed in Grand Rapids, and Glenn was one of several members that opposed what was called the Brough Community Association, a project that Glenn saw as a “Jim Crow project,” as is documented by Black historian Randal Jelks.
In this photo William Glenn is the person in the middle with a hat. Photo by Barb Lester
William Glenn was also a member of the Communist Party, something that made other NAACP members want to distance themselves from him. Because of his political affiliation, Glenn lost a job and in 1954 he was subpoenaed to testify in front of the US House Un-American Activities Committee.
However, efforts to silence and censure Glenn did not work. For most of his adult life, the activist continued to speak out on critical issues like racism and challenge US foreign policy. William Glenn is on the cover of my book, A People’s History of Grand Rapids, where he was part of a weekly Central American Solidarity protest that took place in downtown Grand Rapids in the 1980s.
William Glenn was also part of several labor unions, and he sat on the housing committee of the Community Relations Commission. Glenn wrote a three-page document addressed to Mayor Sonneveldt. The document was titled “Urban Renewal Housing.” Glen wrote the following about the housing crisis:
“It is a condition with which we can no longer play around. It is a condition that fifty years ago would have required dealing with a couple of square blocks – today several square miles must be dealt with. How large an area will it cover tomorrow? It is a condition that if not checked, can engulf the entire city.”
Glenn is correct in his assessment of the crisis and that it has been an issue for some time. We know that particularly in the city’s 3rd ward, specifically within the African American community, that the housing crisis was substantial. In a 1940 Urban League report, it states:
“In many instances the two-family houses are converted single family structures. Only one-fifth of the structures are in good conditions, one-third of them need either major repairs or are unfit for use. Nineteen families of the 205 (renters) do not have toilet facilities within their own unit; a greater number of families (84) do not have private baths. Over half of them live in cold water flats where they must furnish heat from small stoves, there being no central heating plant.”
That same 1940 Urban League report also states in the concluding remarks, “conditions in the Negro community are no better, if not worse, than at the time of the 1928 report.”
In 1947, the Urban League conducted another report on the State of the Black community in Grand Rapids. The 1947 report reflected very similar dynamics in terms of housing ownership and housing conditions, as the 1940 report. The reports cites the disparities between white and black residents when looking at housing, particularly at the cost of rent. A great deal of the housing disparities were due to structural racism, often in the practice of Red-Lining that plagued the black community for decades.
Another factor that contributed to the housing crisis in Grand Rapids, particularly for black people, was the construction of the highways through the city (196 & 131). In an interview I did with Fr. Dennis Morrow on this topic, he talked about 1,000 homes being destroyed and the devastation it had on families:
We don’t normally call it devastation, because something was built. It was pushed through by the government and certainly you could say that some people have benefitted from it. However, if the devastation from the riots of the 60’s had been nearly as great as the devastation wrought by the freeway construction they would have called the riots an all out war. The amount of dwellings that were destroyed during the riots were infinitesimal compared to those destroyed during the freeway construction.
The highway construction was part of the larger urban renewal efforts amongst city planners, often with the plan of wiping out or further marginalizing black neighborhoods.
Glenn goes on to say that it is the city’s responsibility to address the housing crisis by investing massive amounts of money and appointing someone who would coordinate this effort. Glenn concludes that this communal effort cannot be done in piecemeal fashion and that the longer we wait, the worse it will get. “The longer the task of saving the inner-city is delayed, the more difficult – if not impossible – it becomes to accomplish. It is a task which can never be accomplished in piecemeal fashion as some are attempting to do.”
At one point, Glenn refers to the “power structure of the city,” showing his critical understanding that the power structure was not limited to elected officials but included many institutions and a small group of wealthy families, all of which shifted dollars and influence away from neighborhoods in order to invest in the downtown area.
For more information on William Glenn, see the book by Randal Jelks, African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids. Also see the complete three-page letter that Glenn wrote in 1970 about the housing crisis in Grand Rapids. https://grpeopleshistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1970-document-on-the-grand-rapids-housing-crisis.pdf
Doug DeVos and revisionist history of Grand Rapids since 1976: How the Capitalist Class always tries to control the narrative
“History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.” Howard Zinn
We should all be deeply skeptical when billionaires like Doug DeVos want to control the narrative around the history of Grand Rapids. In a December 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, DeVos wrote a piece entitled, The Grand Rapids Revival and an American Comeback.
Doug DeVos also re-printed the Wall Street Journal op-ed in his recently created pro-Capitalist online journal called Believe!. Believe is a homage to his father Rich DeVos’ book by the same title. I am not going to reprint the entire op-ed piece, but provide a summary, along with a counter narrative about the history that DeVos wants us all to accept.
DeVos begins by making the claim that in 1976 Grand Rapids “had struggled with crime and poverty over the previous decade,” and the Secret Service didn’t want to bring President Ford downtown for a parade because their were too many boarded up buildings downtown.
Like most people with economic or political power, DeVos provides no verification of the claim that Grand Rapids had struggled with crime and poverty over the previous decade. The previous decade would cover from 1965 – 1975, a period in the city’s history where the wealth gap had been growing and where Black residents were disproportionately the ones living in poverty.
In my book, A People’s History of Grand Rapids, and Todd Robinson’s book, A City Within a City, both acknowledge that institutionalized racism permeated most of the institutions throughout the City. The 1967 riot was in part because of police brutality directed at Black youth, but it was predominantly a response to decades of exploitation and systemic racism.
White flight and disinvestment in Black neighborhoods contributed to the deterioration of the city, especially when it came to housing. However, the City of Grand Rapids continued to increase the amount of money they were spending on policing and the financial drain on communities because the federal government had spent billions on the Vietnam War, which Ford had voted for while in Congress and when he was in the White House.
Paul I Phillips noted that median income for black families in 1974 was $7,802 and for white families, $13,830, nearly double. Phillips refers to the policy of the 1970’s as policies of “benign neglect,” with the depression of 1974-75, “effectively undermining the economic gains made by Blacks in the 1960’s.” To survive, “an increasing number of Black families are doubling up and pooling meager resources.”
DeVos goes on to say that his father and other business leaders made a commitment to revive downtown Grand Rapids, a commitment that continues through today primarily through the efforts of Grand Action 2.0, which the DeVos family has been leading since the 1990s when it was founded. Here DeVos writes, “A half-century later, Grand Rapids is a city transformed, regularly ranked among the best places in the U.S. to live, work and raise a family.” Again, no verification of these claims.
Three years ago I deconstructed one of the claims about Grand Rapids, especially to notion of Grad Rapids being an affordable city. The article was entitled, Grand Rapids is the 2nd most beautiful and affordable city: Affordable for whom?
DeVos goes on to write:
When I look back on Grand Rapids transformation, I’m most inspired by how people rallied around a shared vision of the city. My hometown, like America, has never been a place where everyone agrees. But it’s harder to stoke division when you’re working together to tutor struggling students or fund inner-city entrepreneurs.
Of course, DeVos is talking about himself here and the other people who make up the Grand Rapids Power Structure. When DeVos uses phrases like funding inner-city entrepreneurs, he is referring to groups like State Garden, which promotes a false solution that everyone needs to create their own wealth and start their own business. This is simply a lie we are all taught about Capitalism, which disproportionately benefits the super rich and widens the wealth gap.
In 2024, I wrote a piece based on the ALICE report – ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In that report it stated that 41% of Michigan households live paycheck to paycheck. I go on to write:
As the MLive headline said, 41% of Michigan households live paycheck to paycheck, but that number goes up to 47% for Grand Rapids households. This means that nearly half of the households in Grand Rapids are living paycheck to paycheck! You wouldn’t know this, since the local news doesn’t really talk about it much, nor do the politicians, hell even faith leaders to make economic justice a priority when they preach.
Doug DeVos can try to control the narrative around recent history, but we all know that he and his family are the primary beneficiaries of the Grand Action 2.0 projects. Just within the past few years, the DeVos family has been the primary driving force behind the Amphitheater, the Soccer Stadium and even convinced City officials to provide $565 million is subsidies for their Three Towers project, which will provide housing to people who are well off. Below is a list of GRIID articles on the Three Towers project.
It is a given that people like Doug DeVos want to control the narrative about local history. If people were provided a counter narrative about Grand Rapids history, it would put their wealth and their social status at risk. It is imperative that we tell a different story and gather as many stories as possible, especially from communities that are either omitted from history or are a mere footnote in the dominant narrative.
No Justice, No Peace is not just a slogan, but a strategic and tactical approach to resisting systems of oppression like ICE
A common chant that can be heard at protests and rallies is, No Justice, No Peace. This phrase generally conveys the idea that if people don’t get the justice they deserve the the system of oppression that is being confronted will not be allowed to continue without disruption, without resistance.
The students from Southwest Middle High School used this same chant during their walkout last Friday. As I stated in a an article, the students shared stories about the harm and violence committed by ICE, with some of them talking about family separation that they have witnessed themselves. This is the injustice that they are experiencing, thus our response should be to not let ICE, their collaborators or the politicians that defend them have another moment of peace.
Resisting ICE in Kent County
ICE has been in Kent County since 2003. They currently have 3 offices and will soon have a fourth office. ICE has been arresting, detaining and deporting members of the affected community since 2003. The difference today is that they now have more funding, since Congress voted to give them billions more in funding.
Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have been resisting ICE since 2017 in the following ways.
They have a hotline for people being targeted by ICE, with tips on what to do if ICE comes to their home, their workplace, their children’s school or anywhere else in the community. People can call that number to give GR Rapid Response to ICE information about where ICE is, then deploy people who have been trained to directly intervene with the goal of preventing ICE from taking people.
Since June 4th, when ICE agents arrested and detained at least 8 immigrants who were going to their appointments at the ISAP office, GR Rapid Response to ICE has offered to accompany people who have those kind of appointments to make sure that they get to those meetings safety without being taken by ICE. People can call the hotline number to request people to accompany them.
GR Rapid Response to ICE has also been doing patrols in neighborhoods where ICE has been spotted, with teams of people in vehicles monitoring ICE activity and calling the hotline if ICE is getting ready to arrested someone. This is one way that people can potentially preempt ICE from taking people.
GR Rapid Response to ICE does regular monitoring of the 517 Ottawa NW ICE office, which is their deployment office. That office has a holding cell and when ICE arrests immigrants from our community they process them in at the 517 Ottawa office. Once people have been processed in they are then taken to the ICE Detention facility in Baldwin, Michigan. GR Rapid Response to ICE monitors this office to determine how many ICE agents are out in the community at any given time, based on the number of vehicles there are at the office, along with documenting the types of vehicles, etc.
In addition, GR Rapid Response to ICE does safety work when members of the affected community or agencies that provide social services to affected communities want people there to provide security during a celebration or community benefit event. This is why GR Rapid Response to ICE people were providing safety during the student walkout last Friday, to make sure ICE did that threaten the students who were demanding that ICE be abolished!
Then there is all of the Mutual Aid work that GR Rapid Response to ICE offers. They have connected families with legal support, provide transportation to people who do not feel safe going to the grocery store and anywhere else in the community, provide material support like food or diapers, financial support for families who have little or no income coming in because the primary income earner is in detention, and they offer sanctuary for families who no longer feel safe where they live.
GR Rapid Response to ICE also offers an educational workshop on the history of US Immigration policy, which provides important historical context for what ICE is doing right now. This history demonstrates that the US has engaged in mass deportation previously and has discriminated primarily against non-European immigrants attempting to come to the US. People can schedule that workshop by sending an Email to info@grrapidresponsetoice.org.
Then there is the campaigns that Movimiento Cosecha has to get the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt 6 specific sanctuary policies that are public safety policies, but also make it clear that the City and the County will not cooperate of collaborate with ICE. Currently, it is well documented that the City and the County are cooperating and collaborating with ICE.
These campaigns not only include demands, but are designed to pressure politicians and to disrupt business as usual, like the civil disobedience that people did on January 5th in order to pressure the county to not engage in holds at the Kent County Jail for ICE.
All of these things listed here are designed to disrupt business as usual and to resist ICE repression. It is a manifestation of the chant No Justice, No Peace. It is a strategic and tactical approach to fulfilling the idea that if people don’t have justice, then we will not allow entities like ICE or the institutions and politicians that defend them to have any peace. Join the resistance!
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been terrorizing immigrants since they were founded 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.
White Liberals are now outraged after ICE shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but more often than not they continue to put their faith in the state when it comes to how to deal with ICE.
For example, in a recent weekly message from Indivisible Greater Grand Rapid, they included the following:
Share the State of Michigan ICE Activity Reporting Form with everyone you know. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel launched an “Immigration Action Reporting Form” encouraging residents to report ICE and Border Patrol activity and warning that some federal immigration actions are putting Michiganders at risk. Other ways to report ICE: ICEActivity Tracker and Stop ICE Alerts and GR Rapid Response Hotline: 616.238.0081 (call, don’t text)
The first link takes you to way for you to report immigration-related matters, but never even mentions ICE. The link does tell people that for “emergencies or crimes in your area to local law enforcement.” The Michigan Attorney General does not support the abolition of ICE. More importantly, the Michigan Attorney General puts their faith in law enforcement, which includes ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, along with state and local cops. We can never rely on the carceral state and violence workers – ICE and cops – to ever bring about an semblance of justice. If you believe that ICE is about justice then you are naively misinformed.
The other two links in the IGGR weekly newsletter are both insecure portals that if used could put you at risk of being tracked by the government, plus amongst Rapid Response to ICE groups across the country, many believe that both of them were created by ICE.
The only information that IGGR includes in their weekly newsletter that does not rely on the state to fight ICE is GR Rapid Response to ICE. However, they only include that groups hotline, without telling people what they do or that people should sign up to take one of their trainings. The GR Rapid Response to ICE trainings provide people with concrete ways to resist ICE in Kent County and they never rely on the carceral state while organizing to resist ICE.
GRIID Class on US Foreign Policy since WWII – Week #5
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. In week#4 we discussed how the US undermined Angola, Libya and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 80s. Today, we are looking at Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991, Afghanistan 1979 – 1992, and Haiti 1986 – 1994.
Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991
This section of Blum’s book is essentially what was happening right at the time that the Soviet Union was collapsing, thus at the end of the Cold War. Regarding Bulgaria, the US intervention involved the CIA at a lower level, since the US was interested in preventing Socialists from winning the upcoming election.
The US turned to the, as Blum notes:
The National Endowment for Democracy, Washington’s specially created stand-in for the CIA, with funding in this case primarily from the Agency for International Development, was pouring some $2 million into Bulgaria to influence the outcome of the election, a process the NED calls promoting democracy.
The student movements were amongst the recipients of National Endowment for Democracy grants, to the tune of $100,000 “to provide infrastructure support to the Federation of Independent Student Associations of Bulgaria to improve its outreach capacity in preparation for the national elections”. The students received “faxes, video and copying equipment, loudspeakers, printing equipment and low-cost printing techniques”, as well as the help of various Polish advisers, American legal advisers, and other experts – the best that NED money could buy.
But for Washington policy makers, the important thing, the ideological bottom line, was that the Bulgarian Socialist Party could not, and would not, be given the chance to prove that a democratic, socialist-oriented mixed economy could succeed in Eastern Europe while the capitalist model was failing all around it.
Nor, apparently, would it be allowed in nearby Albania. On 31 March 1991, a Communist government won overwhelming endorsement in elections there. This was followed immediately by two months of widespread unrest, including street demonstrations and a general strike lasting three weeks, which finally led to the collapse of the new regime by June. The National Endowment for Democracy had been there also, providing $80,000 to the labor movement and $23,000 “to support party training and civic education programs”
Afghanistan 1979 – 1992
Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to Jimmy Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the official story that the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US began aiding the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen six months before the Russians made their move, even though he believed – and told this to Carter, who acted on it – that “this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention”.
Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
We ow know that the US provided billions to the moujahedeen for training and weapons to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, even though many of these people later took action against the US, like Osama bib Laden, who was part of the moujahedeen. Blum then tells us:
Like many other CIA clients, the rebels were financed as well through drug trafficking, and the Agency was apparently as little concerned about it as ever as long as it kept their boys happy Moujahedeen commanders inside Afghanistan personally controlled huge fields of opium poppies, the raw material from which heroin is refined. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport some of the opium to the numerous laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border, whence many tons of heroin were processed with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. The output provided an estimated one-third to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world
The moujahedeen regularly committed human rights abuses, against both Russia soldiers and Afghani civilians, using torture and murder, particularly with women. Once the Soviet military left Afghanistan, the US abandoned that country, allowing the Taliban to come to power.
Haiti 1986 – 1994
The US has had an obsession with Haiti every since the Haitian revolution at the beginning of the 19th Century, when they gained their independence from France. In many ways the US punished Haiti because they did not approve of a Black-led revolution.
The US military occupied Haiti from 1914 – 1934, then eventually installed the Duvalier family dictatorship, first with Papa Doc, followed by his son Baby Doc. The Duvalier dictatorship used their own death squads, known as the Tonton Macoute, which suppressed any opposition. In addition, the Duvalier family plundered the national treasury all the way up til they fled the country during a popular uprising in 1990 that led to the election of a Catholic Priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
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The US State Department and the CIA immediately worked to overthrown Aristide. Here Blum states:
Jean-Bertrand Aristide served less than eight months as Haiti’s president before being deposed, on 29 September 1991, by a military coup in which many hundreds of his supporters were massacred, and thousands more fled to the Dominican Republic or by sea.
The Clinton administration was as hypocritical on the Haiti question as were its predecessors, exemplified by its choice for Secretary of Commerce – Ron Brown had been a well-paid and highly-active lobbyist for Baby-Doc Duvalier. Cédras’s spit-in-the-face deceit on the Governors Island accord appeared to bother Washington officials much less than the fact that Aristide would not agree to form a government with the military. By February 1994, it was an open secret that Washington would as soon be rid of the Haitian priest as it would the Haitian strongmen. The Los Angeles Times reported: “Officially it [the US] supports the restoration of Aristide. In private, however, many officials say that Aristide … is so politically radical that the military and the island’s affluent elite will never allow him to return to power.”
The US continued to intervene, supporting another coup against Aristide, followed by supporting numerous oppressive governments that kept Haiti unstable and one of the most impoverished countries in the world. As was stated earlier, the US has been punishing Haiti for more than 2 centuries, because it dared to fight for independence from colonial powers and not follow US plans for the region.
Student Walkout from Southwest Middle High School was emotional and a powerful statement about ICE terrorism in Grand Rapids
Students from Southwest Middle High School, also known as Academia Bilingüe, took part in a student walkout on Friday. Similar to the student walkout I reported on from February 4th, but in this case virtually all of the students that participated are from families of recent immigrants.
The Southwest Middle High School is located just off of Grandville Avenue/Cesar Chavez Way. The students asked members of GR Rapid Response to ICE to provide safeties for the day and members of the West Michigan Care Collective also joined the walkout to provide safeties and street medics.
The students marched all the way to City Hall, as they wanted to send a message to Grand Rapids City officials that they are mad as hell about what ICE is doing to their families and that the City should take the necessary steps to not collaborate with ICE.
Several students had megaphones to amplify their voices and to lead chants that were done in both Spanish and English. Chants like, “No Hate, No Fear, Immigrants are Welcome Here!”, and When I say Abolish, you say ICE, Abolish ICE, Abolish ICE!”, were just some of they chants that students used during the walkout.
The march wove throughout downtown on Monroe until the students arrived at City Hall. They took the stairs up to the Calder Plaza area and then spent the next 30 minutes making statements and sharing stories.
Several of the student organizers shared statements about why they organized a walkout and then named the Latin American countries of that student’s families originated from. The list was pretty long and you could tell which students were from countries like Mexico or Guatemala, since the cheers from the crowd were the loudest.
More importantly, the Southwest Middle High School students shared stories about the harm and violence committed by ICE, with some of them talking about family separation that they have witnessed themselves. This student group in particular understood the urgency of resisting ICE, since they and their families are part of the communities most affected by ICE terrorism. Their stories were powerful and you could hear how deeply personal it was for the students, many of which fought through tears as they spoke.
Emotions were high and so was the energy from these students. They were just as animated during the march back, maybe even more so after they had collectively communicated their fears, the pain and their anger at ICE and at City officials who have done nothing to help keep their families safe.
When the march was nearing the school along Grandville Avenue/Cesar Chavez Way, residents came out of their homes or honk their car horns in support. There were parents and supporters standing outside of Grandville Avenue Arts and Humanities cheering them on and offering water as the students were ending the march.
Once they were back at the school, many of the students, especially the student organizers, offered thanks and hugs to the safeties who walked with them that day. Again, several of the students fought through tears knowing that people were supporting them and wanting them to be safe from government repression. I was personally inspired by the whole walkout, they student’s vulnerability and thought that they too were teaching the rest of us on how we fight ICE!
The GRPD showed up to a meeting where GR Rapid Response to ICE was invited to speak
Editor’s note: for transparency sake I was the GR Rapid Response to ICE volunteer who attended the meeting mentioned in this post.
For people who are don’t already know, Movimiento Cosecha GR and GR Rapid Response to ICE has campaigns to get the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt 6 specific sanctuary policies, policies that are fundamentally public safety policies for affected communities.
Both Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids have been dismissive of these demands, both the last time people went to the Kent County Commission meeting in early January and based on the response from Mayor LaGrand during a City Commission meeting on January 27.
Volunteer organizers have witnessed throughout the past year incidents where ICE called the GRPD, along with instances where the GRPD showed up the same time as ICE did while GR Rapid Response to ICE was responding to an ICE alert.
On Wednesday, GR Rapid Response to ICE was invited to speak at Madison Square Church during a regular networking meeting they host with people and agencies in the community. I arrived maybe 15 minutes before the meeting started and right away noticed a GRPD cruiser parked in the adjacent parking lot to the building. The parking lot was full, so I went to the next parking lot just south and Parker there, only to see two more GRPD cruisers pull in and park as well.
When I came into the building I checked in with the person taking names and there was already a GRPD cop in the building. I then tracked down one of the organizers of the event and told them that GR Rapid Response to ICE will not share what we do if the GRPD is present.
The response from this organizer was that the GRPD rarely attends these events and I said there were at least two more coming. I then asked if there was a public notice for the event that mentioned that GR Rapid Response to ICE would be speaking? The organizer responded yes, which led me to believe that this was why so many cops were present.
I continued to have conversations with other event organizers to share that GR Rapid Response would not be speaking with the GRPD present and that we have witnessed GRPD/ICE collaboration on a consistent basis.
Eventually, I left the building and went home. However, within the next hour I received several messages from people who stated that the GRPD got up to speak and here are some of the things they said:
The GRPD got to speak in lieu of your (GR Rapid Response to ICE) absence at the meeting today. They said they will not use force or target ICE in their arrests, because they took the same oath they did. And that force is sometimes necessary.
When I asked if people pushed back on what the GRPD said, this person stated: Many leaders did. To the point that the Captain left quickly after her pedestal speech.
Another person wrote: The conversation centered on how people should comply with law enforcement and how they are “not cooperating with ICE” and basically ignored when people said what about Miranda rights and being protectors of the community. Basically still saying the show up when ICE is there to just try to keep the peace.
The other person who messaged me stated: A community officer spoke for a while to this, and then took questions for a while as well. Essentially, she stated that GRPD doesn’t coordinate with ICE but that if they are called out to a contentious scene that they will keep the peace. She also said that jails will notify ICE if someone who has an outstanding ICE warrant is taken into custody for a different criminal offense. There was a lot of pushback and conversation but it was healthy… good to have these conversations, even if they are unsatisfying to everyone involved (they certainly were unsatisfying to us).
I was delighted to get this feedback from people who attended and to know that there was a significant amount of pushback to what the GRPD had to say. Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE invite people to join their campaigns to pressure the City and the County to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies listed here below so that local cops do not collaborate with ICE in the arrest and detention of immigrants in this community.
There is significant pushback on data centers, but the organized resistance cannot get comfortable here in West MI
In recent weeks there have been numerous news stories about public opposition to proposed data centers.
Monitor Township has become the latest Bay County municipality to issue a temporary moratorium on the use of data centers within its borders. Sterling Heights city council approved a one-year moratorium on new data centers Tuesday, Feb. 3, putting a temporary pause on approvals while the city updates zoning rules. Similar opposition occurred in Kalamazoo.
In West Michigan this opposition is also happening. In Solon Township there will be no date centers for at least six months and the organized effort in Lowell and Lowell Township has also been substantial.
Just last week, MLive reported that the Microsoft Corporation, in a letter to the Gaines Township Planning Commission, wants to delay the public hearing scheduled for February 12, “until late March to give the tech giant time to update its rezone application and organize a community meeting to share the revised preliminary concepts and answer questions.” The tactic to delay public hearings is a old tactics used by large corporations so they can buy time to better prepare for public opposition. The delay tactic also gives companies like Microsoft additional time to influence local news media, to get groups like the Chamber of Commerce in to provide more credibility or to offer kickbacks for groups that are willing to support their plans for the data center.
The MLive article did not really explore the reasons behind the Microsoft letter, nor did they provide readers with additional information or analysis of the economic, social and environmental impacts of data centers. MLive could have told readers that the Microsoft corporation already has 133 operational data centers, with 139 more planned. Based on the most recent quarterly earnings, Microsoft data centers are a large part of their profits.
With so much money on the line for big tech companies, they will not give up easily in their efforts to con the public into more and more data centers. According to a recent report from Data Center Watch there has been $65 billion of data center projects that have been blocked because communities have become organized.
However, this type of opposition cannot let up. In a recent article on Truthdig entitled, The Fight to Stop Data Center Creep, the writers states:
Finally, we need to continue publicizing the very real environmental costs of data centers, because their advocates are going to push a narrative that they’re not a problem. There’s already a movement to downplay the groundwater that they’re using up. Thirty years ago, consensus on climate change was bipartisan and broad, but decades of astroturfing and right-wing echo chambers undermined it. The AI industry is going to run the same playbook this time; we need to be louder.
I would also say that we need to be strategic and we need to not rely on local, state or federal governments to protect us from Big Tech’s data center projects. Also, there is a pro-data center/AI forum in Grand Rapids tonight, shown here in the graphic.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 