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.
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northeastern Vermont and the next day to a notoriously brutal private ICE detention lockup in Louisiana; her visa had been revoked without notice four days before the arrest.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.”
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.
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.”
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:
We rushed into the dark little apartment that smelled of stale cabbage and put the pieces down and returned for more. Men, women and children seized articles and dashed inside shouting, laughing. I looked for the two trusties, but they seemed to have disappeared. Then, coming down into the street, I thought I saw one. He was carrying a chair back inside. . . .
. . . When I reached the street there were several of them, men and women, standing about, cheering whenever another piece of furniture was returned. It was like a holiday. I didn’t want it to stop.
“Who are those people?” I called from the steps.
“What people?” someone called back.
“Those,” I said, pointing.
“You mean those ofays [white people]?”
“Yes, what do they want?”
“We’re friends of the people,” one of the white men called.
“Friends of what people?” I called, prepared to jump down upon him if he answered, ‘You people.’
“We’re friends of all the common people,” he shouted. “We came up to help.”
“We believe in brotherhood,” another called.
“Well, pick up that sofa and come on,” I called. . . .
. . . “Why don’t we stage a march?” one of the white men called, going past.
“Why don’t we march!” I yelled out to the sidewalk before I had time to think.
They took it up immediately. “Let’s march.”
The actions were not always nonviolent. During the Great Rent Strike War of 1932 in the Bronx, landlords brought in police and marshals to force tenants from the buildings. Hundreds of protesters there to defend the strike fought the police hand to hand.
Such interventions were both numerous and effective. Between November 1931 and June 1932 New York saw some 186,000 evictions. But many tenants were rehoused by popular force. According to Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais in Labor’s Untold Story, the Communist Party’s Unemployed Council moved 77,000 families back into their homes, at least until the next dispossession.
Similar actions were taking place around the world. In Sydney, for instance, the Communist-led Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM), which numbered in the thousands, turned rehousing efforts into weeks-long occupations. Always more than an army of furniture movers, the UWM suffused its mutual aid with political analysis, in leaflets and street corner orations “blam[ing] the profit-driven chaos of capitalism for the destitution facing millions,” wrote Eddie Stephenson on Red Flag, an Australian blog.
For neighborhood groups in the United States, mutual aid was not an end in itself either. The persistent rent strikes and eviction resistance, coupled with political agitation, pushed Congress to enact the Housing Act of 1937—the precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development—which provided loans to local agencies to build low-rent public housing. Activism also led to the passage of the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which established caps on allowable rents nationwide. While that law expired in 1947, some states and cities kept rent controls in place. Meanwhile, the federal government kept building public housing for low-income tenants—which was racially segregated until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (In 1974 President Nixon placed a moratorium on public housing construction, and the feds got out of the building business for good.)
Mutual aid and legislative or electoral campaigns require different systems and skills—and both take resources. It’s not always easy to do them simultaneously. In 2024 Siembra paid a small army of canvassers, who, along with volunteers, knocked 125,000 voters’ doors for Kamala Harris. We know how that turned out. For Andrew Willis Garcés, who co-founded Siembra eight years ago, the Democrats’ fiasco brought up perennial questions about that tension. At the time it seemed obvious that Siembra had to put all hands, and a lot of dollars, on deck to defeat Trump. Yet “without more for thousands of paid canvassers to talk about beyond repeating the uninspiring message from the top of the ballot, Harris still lost,” he wrote in a self-critical post-election piece in In These Times.
Some organizations managed to balance the two. “In Los Angeles, where tenant organizers have aggressively worked to build public support for local and statewide policies to bring down the cost of rent,” wrote Garcés, “those organizers used their door-knocking muscle to win funds for homelessness prevention and help a tenants rights attorney unseat a sitting council member whom they saw as pro-landlord.” Siembra also had some electoral victories of their own. In nine of North Carolina’s ten most populous counties, voters replaced Republican sheriffs who were enthusiastically arresting immigrants and locking them in local jails with “people who are much more protective of public safety”—and the Constitution, Co-Director Nikki Marín Baena told me.
A fascist society is one in which some people are deputized to do violence, and everyone else is forced to defend themselves. Those who have lived under an authoritarian regime know how it weakens collective self-defense. “Nothing binds people together more than complicity in the same crime,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam of life in Stalinist Russia. “The more people could be implicated and compromised, the more traitors, informers, and police spies there were, the greater would be the number of people supporting the regime and longing for it to last thousands of years.” When anyone can be summoned by the state to extract information, she continued, “people lose their social instincts, the ties between them weaken, everybody retires to his corner and keeps his mouth shut—which is a great boon to the authorities.”
In extorting media outlets that have reported on Trump’s crimes and law firms that have helped to prosecute him, the administration achieves one of the goals Mandelstam describes: turning perceived enemies into cowed collaborators. In demanding that universities name names of the foreign students who’ve engaged in protest and withdrawing cultural grants whose applicants used verboten words like “woman” and “inequity,” it shuts mouths. In eliminating every government agency and program that encourages cooperation or empathy, it advances the third, most pernicious, aim: to break social ties.
If we are to have any hope of surviving the coming dark age, we need mutual aid—not just to keep people housed and fed, but to keep them connected.
It makes sense that immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first to organize. They were ready anyway, having worked to keep each other safe for years of draconian immigration policy—during Obama’s, Biden’s, and Trump’s terms—before today’s cruel, spectacular assaults. Other existing mutual aid networks are girding against the Republicans’ next salvos. The feminist underground that has been distributing abortion pills into red states since the bans began is figuring out how to continue its work while protecting its members and the pregnant people they serve in the face of heightened surveillance and penalties. The activists know one thing: even if the Comstock Act is resurrected, they will not stop.
Still more mutual aid formations and institutions will need to be born, or reborn. The Department of Agriculture has canceled over $1 billion in funding for two programs that link local farms with food pantries and public school cafeterias. We need farmers’ cooperatives based in agrarian socialism. Daycare and afterschool programs are under the knife; Christian nationalism is creeping into curricula. Bring back the free school movement of the 1960s. Health and Human Services is closing the Administration for Community Living, which has helped frail elders and people with disabilities live at home, not in institutions. Because caregiving will be even more privatized than it is now (and we won’t have immigrants to do it cheap), the burdens will revert to the family, particularly women. What will family mutual aid look like? Communal, intergenerational housing, shared kitchens, child care shifts, leaving free time for creativity and leisure: let new forms of intimacy and interdependence supplant the patriarchal nuclear family religious fundamentalists and their elected officials have been laboring to reinvigorate for decades.
Mutual aid is not “a thousand points of light,” George H. W. Bush’s euphemism for replacing the public social safety net with charity. There is no substitute for the state, whose obligation is to redistribute the nation’s wealth for the greater good of the greatest number of people. But when the state is a malevolent kleptocracy, mutual aid—neighbors helping neighbors—starts to look like radical civil disobedience, less a thousand points of light than a brilliant beam shining toward a different world.
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