We sat down a few months ago with one of the organizers of RI’s Deportation Defense Line. The Defense Line’s origins are organic and multifaceted. No one person is in charge of it. No one organization is either. But the end result is a system that, while far from foolproof, is effective and responsive, driven by volunteers with a passionate drive to protect their neighbors and stand up for potential victims.
The following interview is with one of the organizers who is also an organizer of the RI Party for Socialism and Liberation. The discussion addresses the Deportation Defense Line, but also the philosophy of the socialist movement. It should be pointed out that one does not need to be a socialist to participate in the Anti-ICE movement, and most current volunteers are not socialists.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mike Ryan (Motif): So what’s your role in this movement?
Anonymous Activist: I am… someone involved. It started off as a coalition between the Party for Socialism and Liberation, AMOR, and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association. My role is technically flexible.
Neighborhood associations are usually very safe in terms of what they’re willing to take on: Fix the grass, not larger social issues. But this defense line was inspired by organizing work from about a decade ago, during the Obama years.
MR: People tend to talk about immigration enforcement as a Trump-era thing.
AA: A lot of this honestly started during the Obama administration. Obama deported four times as many people as Bush. That was really the beginning of the migrant detention-center system.
Then Trump was worse. Then Biden was worse than Trump’s first term. And now this Trump term is the worst thing on fire. It’s cumulative.
The Democrats and Republicans might have distinctions that are meaningful to them, but they’re united against us.
MR: It wasn’t better under Biden?
AA: No. The ruling-class politics are cumulative. They’re rolling back rights across the board. Roe v. Wade got struck down during Biden. Why wasn’t it codified before? Democrats had multiple chances.
As long as we engage with politics only on their terms, we’re not really going to win.
MR: Why is the Party for Socialism and Liberation involved in this specifically?
AA: Because we seek political independence. We don’t have Congress. We don’t have billionaires. We can’t compete with the money of the capitalist class. But what we do have is people.
Part of the reason the party is involved is because this is a way to intervene in the immigration struggle directly. People ask, “What can we do?” Well, this is something we can do.
All the gains the working class has ever won came because people fought for them. The eight-hour workday. Civil rights. Voting rights. None of that happened because politicians were nice.
MR: One of the reasons Occupy Wall Street faded was that it didn’t really have a practical ask. It identified a problem, but didn’t know what it wanted.
AA: Exactly. Energy and mobilization aren’t organization. If there’s no goal, there’s no strategy. Occupy was historically correct. But the kings of feudal Europe didn’t step down because somebody out-argued them.
MR: Only when there were swords at their necks.
AA: Exactly. Everything we do, we understand we’re doing as a historical duty.
MR: Is this fundamentally about immigrants?
AA: No. Immigrants are at the forefront of it, but this isn’t charity work. It’s a call to action. We can be missionaries in this country, but we’re not encouraged to be comrades. We’re not encouraged to say, “We have the same enemy.”
MR: You mentioned revolution during the meeting [deportation defense volunteer training meeting a week prior to this interview]. Is that really the long-term goal?
AA: Ultimately, yes. The goal is revolution.
The United States is romanticized, but it’s a 200-year-old empire. Rome lasted a thousand years. The Byzantine Empire lasted a thousand years. The idea that America won’t reach a breaking point is fantasy.
The question is what happens after that. Will working people be organized? Or isolated and afraid of each other?
MR: A lot of people, including a lot of liberals, are terrified by that language.
AA: Violence is already the soup of the day.
Every person who dies from hunger, every homeless person, every person bankrupted by medical debt, every police killing. That’s violence too. We’re already living inside violence.
MR: So how does the defense line actually work?
AA: Somebody calls the hotline. Operators answer in English and Spanish. We get the location, descriptions, license plates, all of that.
Then verifiers go out. Sometimes we confirm ICE activity. Sometimes we don’t. If we don’t, we still hand out flyers and hotline information. But we’ve had real successes already.
MR: Like Central Falls?
AA: Yeah. Somebody saw ICE vehicles and called immediately. We sent verifiers out, confirmed multiple ICE vehicles, and followed them out of Central Falls. Somebody followed them all the way into Massachusetts before turning around.
ICE runs away from us sometimes. They see numbers, they see cameras, and they leave.
MR: Cameras are your weapons.
AA: Exactly. Our weapons are cameras.
And it’s funny because ICE agents hate being recorded. But imagine if a cop pulled out a camera because somebody was filming them. You’d laugh. That’s the real nature of ICE. They exist to terrorize vulnerable people.
MR: Are you worried about retaliation? ICE knows who some of you are.
AA: They know my car. They know who some of us are. But I’m not afraid.
If they attack us publicly, people see that. And more people join.
“To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing,” right? That’s an old socialist phrase.
MR: One thing that fascinates me is how much technology shapes all this. None of this organizing could’ve happened twenty years ago.
AA: Tech is essential. We use messaging apps, hotline systems, social media, all of it. We wouldn’t be able to do this otherwise.
But obviously the state uses technology too: surveillance, tracking, monitoring. Technology can liberate people or become a weapon against them.
MR: How big has this gotten?
AA: We’re over 300 volunteers now. Most of them had never organized before.
That community meeting? We expected maybe a few people. We ended up dragging chairs downstairs because the room filled up.
MR: That happened almost organically?
AA: We posted on Instagram. That’s basically it. People are hungry for something they can actually do.
MR: You’re also very intentionally not operating like a nonprofit.
AA: Because nonprofits are still inside the system. We’re choosing the path of what’s politically effective, not what’s institutionally comfortable. We’re not trying to make nice with the people who fund and empower ICE.
MR: Do you see a distinction between ICE and police generally?
AA: ICE knows where people’s court dates are because police and courts collaborate with them. As institutions, police exist to protect the interests of the state and capitalism. That’s their role.
People get caught up in whether individual cops are good or bad. But institutions matter more than personalities.
MR: The system doesn’t actually reward socially valuable work very well.
AA: That’s the reality. If things are working for you, you tend to believe in the system. But most people now are working two or three jobs. Most people in the defense line are. That’s why people are moving toward socialism again. Material conditions push people there.
MR: What’s the actual political ask, then? “Affordable housing” is still vague. Or…
AA: “Abolish ICE” is a concrete demand.
Shrek is older than ICE. ICE is not some eternal institution. The country existed before it.
And more broadly: nationalize the Fortune 500 companies. Utilities should belong to the public. Energy should belong to the public. We already understand this logic with things like the postal service.
MR: The bigger point seems psychological almost.
AA: Exactly. The defense line isn’t only about physically stopping deportations. It’s about changing what people think is possible.
People in this country have been trained to think politics means voting once every four years and hoping somebody saves them. But mass politics means ordinary people acting together every day. That’s how every right we have was won in the first place.