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Title: Occupy ICE Portland: Policing Revolution? Author: CrimethInc. Date: July 9, 2018 Language: en Topics: Portland, reportback Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/07/09/occupy-ice-portland-policing-revolution-some-critical-reflections
We’ve received the following report from participants in the occupation
around the Portland facilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE). While our collective has no official position on issues internal
to the occupation, we consider it important to promote constructive
conversations about power dynamics within our movements and the ways
that they can impose limits on what we can accomplish together. For more
material on this subject, consult our earlier report, “The ICE Age Is
Over: Reflections from the ICE Blockades.” Shortly, for the sake of
amplifying multiple perspectives, we will add one more text from
Portland.
---
“Criticize the comrade, take a criticism from the comrade.” -Bambu
“We do NOT touch the police tape. We do NOT block the street,” a
“leader” of the Portland occupation screamed through a megaphone at a
crowd of newly arrived demonstrators near the reopened ICE facility.
Organic anger from a group of mostly liberals led to a brief
confrontation with Federal Protective Services (FPS/DHS), which was
quickly quashed by an internal security team. People were ushered onto
the sidewalk and scolded for not following supposedly “collective”
agreements. The building remained untouched as protesters who were eager
to agitate were made to feel guilty and illegitimate.
In the last three weeks of Portland’s occupation at the ICE building,
we’ve found ourselves caught between a desire to build with folks and a
need to critique the ways that violence is sustained by our work. We’ve
failed to address interpersonal violence and have left people isolated
from the movement. We’ve prioritized the security of our “leaders”
because of their contributions and their assumed necessity to our
commune rather than making space for conversation about sexual violence
and the strategies we must implement to make sure folks are held
accountable rather than simply “vouched for.” And we’ve lost sight of
the initial goal of abolishing ICE.
Our occupation is said to be leading the movement against deportations
across the country. We’re currently cohabitating with the ICE facility;
as their work continues, we continue to sit back with our La Croix in
hand and practice “self-care.” In many ways, this commune has been
helpless since its inception, demonstrating the need to build
conversation and criticism into our work.
When it comes down to it, the vast majority of us here have no idea how
to coexist in a commune; we are improvising. We offer up this criticism
knowing that it’s much easier to critique than to build. We write this
in hopes of making space for continual analysis, collective reflection,
and commitment to future organizing.
More than anything, we must practice humility and be conscious of our
role in this organizing work. Shutting down an ICE building for over two
weeks is a huge feat, and we do not want to diminish this
accomplishment. But we cannot forget the people who our commune is said
to be built on behalf of: undocumented folks, and specifically
undocumented children, who are suffering in detention centers around the
country. We remind ourselves first and foremost that these people do not
need our saving. Amazing organizing efforts have been led by
undocumented folks in and out of detention centers, often largely by
undocumented women. They’ll be doing that whether or not we sleep out
here tonight. Still, solidarity efforts are crucial to dismantling these
walls and to abolishing ICE.
The commune is exciting because it’s an opportunity to experiment with
different organizing strategies and visions for another world. We have
an amazing kitchen staff, an incredible kids area, and overall an
impressive space. But we also have a pseudo-policing unit, extremely
flawed approaches to navigating accusations of sexual violence, and
potential security threats. At this point, preserving the commune has
become a more central project than actually disrupting ICE. We’ve failed
to build a space to assess and change our strategies as they inevitably
fail or are co-opted. Consequently, our commune has done little to
interrogate the ways it reproduces and legitimizes policing,
surveillance, and heteropatriarchal violence.
Ultimately, much of our work has been whitewashed, neutralized, and made
non-threatening to the state—that’s how we’ve been able to be
legitimized as an action that will not be touched by the Portland Police
Bureau (PPB). We supposedly decided that the commune will now only
engage in “passive resistance,” a concept as oxymoronic as “good
policing” or “public property.” The commune’s internal police force,
known as the “Care Team,” has worked to ensure that protesters “keep in
line.” Our commitment to the commune’s continued existence has become a
commitment to establishing a framework in which insurgent and
revolutionary politics become unimaginable.
Seizing the lack of structure as an opportunity for a power grab, a
group of people created a self-appointed security team within the first
few days. Sporting pink bandannas as an emblem of this new committee,
the group established a visible manifestation of their higher status.
From the beginning, the team consisted primarily of individuals with a
pattern of taking control and policing others at past demonstrations.
Masquerading as anarchists and radicals, these people implement
authoritarian practices and recreate the state structures we have set
out to abolish. The ideology of many of those on the security team is
indecipherable; sometimes it appears that their primary motive is power.
The security phenomenon is a recurring issue in Portland. At almost
every rally or march, one finds the same dozen people role-playing as
cops, following around “suspicious” people. They hold themselves above
the participants, who they are there to “protect.” The people who assume
this role never appear on the front lines fighting riot police; they
can’t be found when there is a real security threat. They pounce on the
lone agitator, getting enough action to bolster their ego and flex their
power. The anarchist symbols covering the camp are purely aesthetic,
since we continue to let security govern us.
The security team created a monopoly on information, keeping important
reports about threats to themselves. Using this lack of transparency to
their advantage, security members were able to justify their existence
through distorted threats and the instilling of fear—a tactic habitually
used by the state. Calling a “code red” one night, security commanded
people to retreat into tents while refusing to offer information as to
what the situation was. Terrified newcomers and children scrambled back
with no grasp on how severe the threat actually was.
Their authority allows them to determine the political legitimacy of
people’s thoughts and actions, as well as deciding which actions are
“too risky” for the commune to engage in. We’ve seen women enter the
space with questions about the work, only to be told, “Do you really
want to know or are you just being facetious?” We’ve seen folks heckling
Homeland Security Officers told that they’re “kids” and therefore should
get back in line and listen to the commune authority. We’ve seen
comrades lambasted and told to leave for attempting civil disobedience.
All of this is done under the guise of “protecting” people of color and
trans folks. We are open to discussing tactics, but we will not stand
for a security team that grounds its work in the patriarchal protection
of black, brown, and trans people and that insists on policing all forms
of political action, analysis, and engagement.
The members of the security team are able to absolve themselves of
responsibility for their policing efforts by leaning on “consensus-based
decisions.” In confronting someone who is “out of line,” they argue that
they’re simply carrying out orders. Whose orders these are is entirely
unclear. Consensus by itself can be employed as a tactic for repressing
autonomous action. But the commune takes it one step further by
neglecting to actually engage in true consensus decision-making. The
general assemblies here occur sporadically and happen at inaccessible
times. The result is that an invisible, unknown, exclusive committee of
people reach a decision which is then stamped as group consensus and
forced on everyone else. There is a hidden rigid hierarchy disguised in
careful leftist language to isolate critics. Blatantly false statements
are thrown around, such as “EVERYONE living at camp agrees that…” or
“the overwhelming CONSENSUS is…” This destroys any space for critique
and gives those new to the camp the impression that everyone is in
unanimous agreement.
We understand the need to disrupt the “ally industrial complex” in which
white people, those new to the movement, and other “privileged” folks
sit on the side and cheer on our POC comrades. At this point, more and
more people want to get involved, and that’s crucial. People who show up
must be understood as potential comrades and legitimate political
actors. The liberal who decides to scream at the cops is engaging in an
activity that might further radicalize them—and yet we choose to police
that work, tell them it’s out of line, and demand that the ways we
disrupt ICE be narrow and pre-approved. How do we expect to expand this
movement if we teach our potential comrades that their political
analysis is irrelevant? Why should they return to this work if they are
told that their ideas, opinions, and forms of action are incorrect? If
our goal is to build a new world, we have to start by not replicating
the old. Ultimately, we’re isolating potential comrades and disciplining
our collective political imagination.
After initial criticism of the internal police force, the security team
rebranded themselves as “the Care Team.” This attempt to rebrand leans
on understandings of the importance of care—the feminized labor that
sustains the social and emotional well-being of the commune. When we
think of care, we think of our kitchen staff, the folks who hold down
the childcare tent, and those partaking in other forms of feminized
work. Excluding those folks from “the” Care Team is not only a tactic
the internal police uses to to avoid accountability, but is also a
disrespectful manipulation of feminist understandings of care.
We hear more and more in leftist circles about the need to build a new
world based on a politics of care. We understand care as feminized work
of listening, working to understand people’s emotional needs, and
validating and supporting all who enter our spaces. It’s a call to
collectivize our traumas and strategies for healing, which should not be
conflated with neoliberal notions of “self-care.” We see much of the
work of care tied to Black Feminist analysis, the work of the Movement
for Black Lives, and in prison abolitionist circles. We want to expand
that work in order to build a movement for each other.
Contrary to many beliefs, “care” is not about a practice of patriarchal
protection, nor a politics based on policing potential threats. The
current campaign of Critical Resistance, “Care Not Cops,” does the
necessary work of disrupting notions of “good policing,” making it clear
that policing and care are incompatible. Care is an acknowledgement of
our vulnerability to others and a recognition of the need to collaborate
for our collective survival.
Communities
Within minutes of entering the commune we learn that one of the core
organizers is a person with serious accusations against them. Of course,
it’s not our job to snoop around and try to determine whether or not
this specific person is “guilty,” nor necessarily to call for their
immediate removal. But we do want to know whether there is a process by
which accusations are heard, people’s experiences are validated, and
action is taken to hold people accountable and to ensure that those
making these accusations feel welcomed in. We want to see a commitment
to addressing and disrupting gendered violence and other forms of harm.
And we want to know that these conversations are at the forefront of the
community we seek to build.
When men are in charge, apparently, this becomes too much to ask for.
When we ask why someone is still on the core “Care Team,” we are told
that despite accusations, this person has been “vouched for.” His
leadership position and the amount he’s contributed become grounds for
delegitimizing and failing to address accusations. We hear excuses about
organizational capacity used to put accusations of sexual violence on
the back burner until we can give them the attention they need.
Our shared critiques of criminal justice procedures and commitments to
abolishing the prison industrial complex are being used to justify not
addressing the sexual violence accusations against people. The
counterargument that people of color are more likely to face
incarceration is not wrong; however, to use this as a justification not
to hold people accountable is disappointing. To manipulate these
realities in order to avoid even having conversations about feminist
praxis only further embeds our work in the same patriarchal structures
that we claim to oppose.
The work of transformative justice is tricky and we’ve seen few attempts
at it done well. But that should not cause us to conclude it is not
necessary in our work. If we learned anything from zines like Why
Misogynists Make Great Informants, essays like Betrayal: A Critical
Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures, and the book The
Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist
Communities, it is that this sort of misogyny in our circles is nothing
new. We know that these forms of violence and harm take place within our
communities. We build with our shared commitment to holding ourselves
and each other accountable.
If you’ve spent any time at the camp, you are probably familiar with the
obsession with “passive resistance.” It’s hard to miss. The phrase is
posted on the entrance to the camp, mindlessly thrown around by
“leaders,” and praised by the liberals who come and go. As much as it is
used, nobody seems to know what it means or how we came to embrace it.
This section will not be focused on the failures of nonviolence. That
story has been written countless times and we’ve all sat through
arguments over it. Instead, we focus on how self-appointed leaders twist
the idea to shut down virtually any resistance to ICE.
Passive resistance is not about passivity, it is about resistance. It is
peaceful, but it is not compliance. At the camp, the term is being
pulled further and further from its definition. When a few daring
comrades tried to lock arms on the side entrance, blocking in the
federal agents, they were attacked for not practicing proper resistance.
Other people tried linking themselves together in the driveway, but were
criticized by leaders for poking the bear. Even yelling at police is a
bit too provocative. Passive resistance has lost its meaning and value,
and it seems that the leaders don’t care about resisting, just about
passivity.
The assumption at the camp seems to be that by engaging in their version
of passive resistance, we will swing the media coverage and stall a
police attack. It sounds great in theory, but it appears to ignore
history altogether. Those who embrace this framework are operating under
the illusion that if we are peaceful and compliant with police orders,
we can exist in harmony with the state. This ignores every peaceful
protest that has been ambushed by riot police, every “passive”
mobilization that has been squashed by the state, every instance of
police brutality. It buys into the notion that our behavior dictates how
the police will treat us, the same idea recited by Fox News pundits
after police murders. In reality, the state cares little about how we
behave. The authorities make their own excuses with the assistance of
the media and attack on their own initiative. The goal of abolishing ICE
and the practice of physically shutting it down puts us in conflict with
the state. Since the camp is diametrically opposed to the state and its
wishes, a police attack is inevitable. Peacefulness and compliance will
not seduce the state into inaction, it will just take away our power. In
conceding our power, we let our safety lie in the hands of the police.
On June 28, while most of the camp slept, federal police cleared the
entrances and arrested multiple people. Our barricades were ripped down,
and the veteran camp in the driveway was torn to pieces—despite their
peacefulness. The police proved that they didn’t need an excuse to move
on the camp. Yet leaders are still calling for “passive resistance” and
employing vulnerability politics to suppress militancy.
The Care Team frequently falls back on the claim that any escalation
would “put __ group at risk,” using the most convenient marginalized
identity at hand to make this argument. The “risk” that they claim to be
defending people from is the potential for arrests or police brutality
directed towards people of color and trans people. This analysis is not
incorrect; less privileged people will be further targeted by police,
face harsher sentences, and gain less sympathy from white civil society.
However, the weaponizing of identity in order to police certain actions
not only means speaking on behalf of a population “in need of
protection,” it also attempts to make any discussion about risk,
tactics, and actions impossible and to shut down political conversation.
If we believe that we can remove risk and danger from this work, then we
ultimately must commit to reproducing the existing social order. There
will be risk in disrupting ICE and danger in threatening white civil
society. People should analyze the risks, the dangers they face
personally, and determine whether or not they want to take an action or
be in a specific space. We need to build in support so we do not reserve
specific actions for more privileged people—but winning with “passive
resistance” is a fantasy.
To assume that we must resist passively in order to accommodate more
vulnerable commune members falsely ties militance to whiteness. We think
of Jackie Wang’s essay, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the
Politics of Safety,” in which she takes on this question of risk. Wang
writes,
“When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that
asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only
politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and
retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while
erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the
Black Liberation Army.”
We think about people who have been resisting in deportation centers
since before ICE’s inception,about militant direct action taken by
undocumented students across the country and the need for further
militancy to dismantle patriarchy, white supremacy, and the
settler-colonial state.
A feeling of complacency has spread throughout the camp as it has
transitioned from a militant attempt to shut down ICE operations to a
sort of Burning Man commune peacefully coexisting with DHS. With an
assortment of sparkling water, open yoga sessions, and nightly concerts
contrasted by armored snipers on the roof and makeshift barricades
covered in circle-As, the camp has the look of a leftist music
festival—Anarchoachella, if you will. Camaraderie is important and
nothing is inherently wrong with creating a comfortable space. But our
focus has been abandoned and our inclination towards action has
dissipated.
When attempting to initiate an urgently-needed discussion on possible
actions the night before ICE resumed work in the building, organizers
were met with hostility for interrupting a music show and berated by a
crowd of mostly newcomers about the necessity of “self-care” and “taking
a break.” After a night of dancing and consuming kale salads, they put
up no resistance as ICE agents poured into the building the next
morning. While this is unintentional, we are capitalizing on the
suffering of children and wasting resources to live out our collective
ideological fantasies. If holding space is prioritized over disrupting
deportations and separations, the commune is nothing more than a
bourgeois liberal playground.
In our struggle to smash the borders and end the deadly policing of
them, we have replicated the same institutions we oppose. Our camp is
encircled in barriers separating ourselves from the capitalist hellworld
and the flow of people is strictly controlled. Our own security cameras
monitor the movements of occupiers and the entrances and exits are
restricted to a few gates. We have created categories of those who
belong and those who don’t. A list has been compiled of commune exiles
that includes critics, utopians, and anti-authoritarians. ACAB adorns
the wall but the “Care Team” is a border patrol of its own. Rampant
anti-houseless rhetoric prompts exclusion of those perceived as
houseless while simultaneously labeling ourselves a tent city. If
nothing changes, our commune will collapse before the police even
attempt to raid it.
The occupation has been remarkable in garnering support and sparking
grand aspirations. The amount of effort and organization put into
sustaining the commune is commendable. But right now, we are doing
nothing to hinder deportations or support detainee organizing. Occupiers
are living comfortably while ICE continues its reign of terror next
door. With all its flaws, the commune has taught us and transformed us.
Still, it’s time to abandon our notions of space and romanticized
community and consider what it would mean to build a movement based on
unconditional hospitality, real care, and actual militancy.
If it stays as it is, the commune will continue to drain resources and
police insurrectionary potential while amounting to nothing more than a
mild inconvenience to ICE employees. With the widespread popularity of
increasingly radical abolitionist politics, we have the opportunity to
bring people into our analysis and agitate against state control and
hierarchy in general. We must back up our utopian visions by showing the
revolutionary possibility of a world free of borders and authority. This
is not a call to abandon the occupation altogether or to allow ICE to
resume as normal. This is a reminder of the need for constant critique
and a space to have these conversations. We ask our comrades to consider
our goals and examine our tactics. Opportunities for meaningful action
exist within the commune but only if we overhaul our current commitment
to passivity and let go of our desire to be palatable to the state.
Furthermore, we call for a decentralized approach. ICE isn’t just a
building, so don’t let your actions be limited to it. Seek out all of
the appendages that keep the machine running and strike while we have
the power. The information is out there. Find your comrades, form an
affinity group, and get to work. Redecorate your local GEO Group
building, throw a block party in front of an ICE agent’s house, and
always hold yourself and your comrades accountable. ICE is starting to
melt, but we’re just warming up.
with love,
Your local mindless anarchists hell-bent on nothing but destruction