As people are being deputized to do violence, building connections is political resistance.

Armed self-defense against armed Nazis in Lincoln Height, Ohio, in 2024.

Judith Levine

Boston Review

April 10, 2025 – Around sunset on March 25, Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the grassroots Muslim Justice League in Boston, was winding down after a call with a group of attorneys. They had been strategizing their response to a widening pattern of “foreign student abductions”—unwarned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests based on allegations of support of terrorism, aka protest of Israel’s war on Gaza. “We’re a city with a lot of universities,” said Ahmad. “We knew it was going to happen here.”

And then it did. Not two hours after the meeting, Ahmad got an email from one of the lawyers, Mahsa Khanbabai, informing her that she’d just gotten her first student abduction case. Right then the phone rang. It was Danny Timpona, an organizer from Neighbor to Neighbor, a twenty-eight-year-old “base-building” organization that works on immigrant, racial, and environmental justice in cities across Massachusetts. Neighbor to Neighbor is helming a statewide ICE watch hotline called LUCE. On March 25 it was barely two weeks old.

“At about 5:30 a guy called in from Somerville, frantically saying, ‘Someone is being kidnapped,’” Timpona told me. The hotline operator asked the routine questions: What did you see? What is the address where you saw it? Did you witness it yourself or hear about it secondhand? They determined the report was more than credible—it was urgent. Within five minutes, LUCE’s rapid responders were on the scene.

When anyone can be summoned by the state to extract information, “people lose their social instincts.”

Timpona and Ahmad quickly established that the first abduction case and the kidnap victim were the same person: Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University PhD student on a valid visa who’d been surrounded by masked plainclothes officers, handcuffed, and hustled into an unmarked car. The officers did not show their IDs—which revealed them to be ICE agents—until after they’d taken her phone and backpack and restrained her. And, although a federal judge ordered that night that Öztürk could not be removed from the state or the country until a court ruled on jurisdictional matters, ICE had already driven her to a detention facility in northeastern Vermont and the next day to a notoriously brutal private ICE detention lockup in Louisiana; her visa had been revoked without notice four days before the arrest. Öztürk’s offense: coauthoring an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the university to divest from Israel.

LUCE’s rapid responders have three tasks: verify, document, witness. They were not rapid enough to do the last one; Öztürk’s abduction had taken less than two minutes. But they could verify and document. Canvassing door to door, they learned that two unmarked vehicles had been parked in the area for two days. Neighbors showed them phone videos, but most were illegible. Then someone contributed their building’s front-door surveillance video. In it, Öztürk’s face is recognizable, the agents’ efficient movements chillingly clear. “The fact that you can hear Rümeysa screaming makes it particularly horrifying,” noted Ahmad.

Öztürk was not rescued. Intervention is never the aim anyway, Neighbor to Neighbor’s executive director, Dálida Rocha, told me; especially under a Trump regime operating with new aggression and impunity, that’s too risky. In fact, verification and documentation are the most important parts of the process. They do nothing less than free the community for something like normal life. The chaos and randomness of ICE’s arrests under Trump II are causing terror in immigrant neighborhoods. Panic fuels rumors and misinformation, which in turn exacerbate panic. People worry: Should I take the kids to school, show up at work, shop at the bodega? The insecurity may become so overwhelming that they “self-deport”—which, of course, is the point of ICE’s terror campaign.

In one instance, someone thought they saw ICE agents lurking outside an elementary school; they made a TikTok, which went viral. Parents were scared. Through loose community networks, LUCE got wind of the rumor and sent verifiers, who chatted with teachers, parents, and neighbors and determined that ICE was not and had not been in the school’s vicinity. They relayed the intelligence back to LUCE and other trusted community leaders, who corrected the misinformation by word of mouth and social media. The TikTok was taken down—and relative calm was renewed. Reliable information allows people to assess risks rationally. In the context of collective action, all this builds “power over fear,” Rocha told me.

The video of the abduction obtained by LUCE proved invaluable far beyond Somerville. Released to the press, it became a major story, published, posted, and reposted around the world. Some who lived under authoritarian regimes saw a familiar tactic: a disappearance. No matter how long it takes to yield justice, witness must be borne, said Timpona: “Visibility is accountability.”

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The coordinated response to Öztürk’s kidnapping exemplifies community self-defense and mutual aid at their best. Timpona and Ahmad were connected by a comrade in LUCE’s network of grassroots organizations. The frightened caller contacted a friend, who recommended the hotline, which he’d heard about by word of mouth. That the first impulse was to call a community organization, not the police, was itself a kind of win.

The Boston housing rights nonprofit City Life/Vida Urbana defines mutual aid as “networks of people in a community voluntarily supporting one another with resources and services, such as providing food and housing, financial support, education around and connection to government and social service systems, and more. It is based on the principles of solidarity and collectivism rather than profit and individualism.”

Mutual aid is the brigade of volunteers mucking out basements after a flood, the church basement food pantry staffed by retirees, the GoFundMe to pay the rent for a tenant about to be evicted. It can look like an easier alternative to politics, which requires not just generosity but toughness, not just tolerance but side-taking.

But mutual aid is more than glorified good neighborliness. The response to the Somerville abduction is a case in point: such projects can channel rage and fear into disciplined, concrete action, linking movements and bringing new individuals into them. Rather than sidestep politics, it can make politics happen. The LUCE group encompasses immigrant rights and tenants’ rights, prison abolition and workplace safety; it unites communities from Asian Pacific Islanders to Dominicans, Muslims to Unitarians.

And it links activists across distances. LUCE was born under the guidance of Siembra NC, an immigrant rights and anti–wage theft nonprofit, which also helped groups in Missouri, South Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas, and Texas establish hotlines and learn to run engaging and effective know-your-rights “parties.” And Siembra, in turn, has learned from other groups. At the top of its YouTube page is “LA Fights Back,” a witty riff on why ICE can’t find enough people to deport that lifts up the Los Angeles Community Self-Defense Coalition. The coalition conducts daily patrols seeking ICE vehicles, sends out social media alerts, and waits for defenders to arrive. One person with a bullhorn telling residents to bolt the doors can sometimes be enough to torpedo a raid. Siembra means seeding.

Immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first to organize.

Bridging racial and generational divides, coordinating ad hoc good works into workable systems, and cultivating leadership, mutual aid builds progressive movements for the long haul. As we learned from the COVID pandemic, the dynamics forged by crisis can last after the crisis has passed. A 2024 report authored by several community groups in East Boston found that the collective response to the needs of the community—distributing 5,000 cooked meals per week, donating everything from diapers to furniture, driving people to the hospital, convening healing circles and gratitude ceremonies—strengthened existing collaborations, sparked new ones, and “dissolved some silos.” Informants “emphasized the importance of relationships and trust as the building blocks of this work,” in which “practices of reciprocity and mutuality . . . shifted mindsets away from one-way dependence on charity towards recognizing that everyone has the capacity to give and to receive.”

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For activists looking to history for inspiration, Communists and fellow travelers during the Great Depression offer plenty. Much of their local organizing centered around the twin scourges of unemployment and eviction. When landlords hired marshals to throw unemployed tenants and their belongings onto the street, nonviolent eviction resistance squads put their bodies in the way and the families back into their homes.

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s unnamed protagonist comes upon two white men carrying the shabby belongings of an elderly Black woman onto the street, as she weeps, pleads, and pummels the chest of one of the men. The narrator is shocked, infuriated by the racism of the scene, then ashamed to be watching without intervening. As he is drawn into a spontaneous act of collective resistance, shock turns to exhilaration, racialized rage to cross-racial solidarity, and mutual aid to politics: