As ICE Disappears Our Neighbors, We Must All Be A Pebble In The Gears Of Fascism

It’s Saturday June 7th, 2025 and this morning I sit in sullen silence as I watch the video footage I’ve been sent of a woman being detained at the Seattle Immigration Review Court on Thursday, June 5th. It isn’t the first detainment I’ve seen on video, just the first sent directly from a comrade, and it isn’t the masked men skulking around like Dementors haunting the halls that turned my stomach upside down. The video was long and unedited and within this raw footage I was given proof of a suspicion I’ve had for a while now; this targeted terror campaign against immigrants is just happening while we all go about our day. We’ve seemingly become accustomed to this, the elevator doors just open and close, people get on, and people get off. 

When we read about Nazi Germany, we read about the horrors; the trains packed with people and the concentration camps, we read about the refugees and the bombing campaigns on civilians. What doesn’t make its way into the textbooks or onto the silver screen as often, is the boring bureaucracy of it all. The mundane nature by which everyday people went about their jobs, pushing paper, serving tables, cooking food and fixing cars. A janitor will change out the trash-bin in the restroom down the hall of that courthouse this weekend so that it can get filled again on Monday with the tear soaked paper towels of someone who may end up in the back of an unmarked van off to an unclear future.

This is the slow, yet steady normalization of dehumanization that allows for millions of people to be systematically detained, disappeared and damned to a fate any of us would fight like hell to avoid for ourselves and our loved ones. 

Since the September 11th, 2001 attacks, under the guise of fighting terrorism, we’ve watched as local police and federal agencies have militarized their weaponry and tactics against civilians. These hired thugs remain largely unaccountable to the cities and public officials that employ them and we are now watching this violent, sprawling and purposefully opaque security apparatus get put to use by a President that many liberals have grown very comfortable calling “Orange Hitler”.

I won’t argue that Donald Trump is an awful, evil, cruel and vindictive leader, and his racist and xenophobic core are comparable to the likes of Hitler. So, if that is true, and if it is also true that he is now using armed, masked men to round up and detain, without due process, immigrants, and students, if this is all true, then, what do we do now? How do we go to work tomorrow knowing a co-worker, or a friend’s parent is spending every day looking over their shoulder wondering if today is the day they’re disappeared?

There are local organizations like La Resistencia, Superfamila King County and the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network that are working day and night to fight back against this fascist police state. I encourage you to get involved in direct action, I encourage you to engage in civil disobedience. Do not cooperate with police, under any circumstances. Film them when you see them and make them know you’re there. I encourage you to go to the Seattle Immigration Review Court and witness the machinery that your tax dollars keep well oiled while your kids' schools fall apart and your public transportation projects get delayed. I encourage you to talk about this with your family and your friends and your co-workers and ask them what they are going to do? Will they be bystanders to this inhumanity, or will they use whatever privilege and power they have to push against it?

We the people, in solidarity, can protect our communities from the President and the thugs he has hiding in every corner of this country. We must find ways to safely transport and house immigrants that need safe harbor, we must band together to refuse cooperation with ICE agents. Each of us must be like a pebble in the gears of fascism. 

We must make the work of being a hired hand for the police state a miserable, isolating and ostracized existence. If during your adolescence you’d have liked to believe that you would have hidden Anne Frank in your attic, now is your time to prove it.