On February 2, 2025, Highway 101 — one of the busiest freeways in Los Angeles, California — shut down. Instead of the usual rush of cars heading towards Alameda Street, protestors filled the 101, donning Mexican and American flags and holding signs that both celebrated the city’s 3.6 million immigrants and rejected anti-immigrant entities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). Residents of Los Angeles have not been alone in expressing support for its immigrant communities. In the early months of 2025, protests and rallies have been held in cities across the country, both in red and blue states, to affirm the rights of their immigrant community members. From Alabama to Missouri to Colorado, city parks, plazas, and streets filled with everyday people, united under the common cause of immigrant rights.
Support for immigrants and specifically undocumented people has not stopped at protests. Communities nationwide have mobilized resistance efforts at the local levels. Organizations have been hosting “Know Your Rights” workshops designed to educate people on how to exercise their rights in the face of increased ICE activity. These workshops inform individuals of how to respond when confronted by actions that stretch beyond ICE’s prescribed authority, such as requiring judicially signed warrants and invoking rights to remain silent. Employers are learning their roles too, understanding how they can defend immigrant communities by exercising their rights as owners of private businesses when ICE seeks protected information.
In response to recent ICE raids, “ICE patrol” watches have become prominent forms of resistance. Community members take to the streets, bullhorns in hand, searching for ICE activity. When ICE is spotted, patrols announce its presence through their loudspeakers, advising residents to stay indoors. Even during enforcement actions, organizers communicate critical rights, like requiring ICE agents to have a signed judicial warrant. These efforts have proven effective, with ICE reporting that such organizing tactics have aborted enforcement actions.
Most recently, the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrant students has sparked a wave of community mobilization. Despite inaction by many university administrations, and in some cases increased repression, student organizers and local community groups have united to protect their own. For example, when ICE abducted Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, thousands rallied in protest. The gathering served both as a condemnation of the act and a space to learn how neighborhood defense can prevent similar incidents in the future. Importantly, the rally also provided a clear-sighted analysis and critique of today’s political structures. Organizers explicitly recognized how “[t]he Democratic Party is not going to save [individuals]” from the growing threats posed by ICE. They emphasized the power and potency of community defense, grassroots mobilization, and collective action.
As 2025 continues, the visibility of immigration enforcement, particularly highly publicized ICE abductions, has given the contemporary immigrant rights movement a markedly different tone than in the past. Under pre-Trump administrations, especially President Obama’s, immigrant rights organizing largely focused on Congress as a potential source of relief. Activists during that period prioritized naturalization bills and legislative reforms that emphasized lawfulness and assimilation. Many past, mainstream campaigns neither challenged the legitimacy of ICE as an institution nor questioned the necessity of immigration detention itself. All the while, immigration detention quietly solidified its role within the American prison-industrial complex. This solidification helped lay the groundwork for the types of enforcement actions we are seeing today, actions that are not only more expansive but also more normalized. The infrastructure, legal justifications, and public tolerance that developed during this time have now enabled a broader range of surveillance, detention, and deportation practices to operate with little scrutiny.
But in 2025, attitudes are changing. Cases like Rümeysa Öztürk’s — instances of what scholars would characterize as “spectacular violence” — have intensified public scrutiny of the entire immigration system. These moments have generated a deeper skepticism toward ICE and the systemic violence embedded in immigration detention. Immigration detention is no longer a distant structure, far from everyday life. It now holds an immediate presence, potentially reaching as close to one’s classroom or doorstep. In this context, prison abolition is more plausible, and more urgent, within mainstream conversations on immigrant justice. This shift reflects a recognition that the current administration exploited, rather than invented, existing enforcement systems. The scale and cruelty of recent policies have laid bare how easy it is for abductions and deportations to occur, revealing a system already designed for dehumanization. As a result, what once seemed like a call from the margins — the abolition of detention and incarceration altogether — has become a logical and necessary demand.
Amidst uncertainty with how the latest wave of federal immigration policy will be implemented, one thing is clear: Local immigrant rights organizing, with its newfound and evolving character, is thriving.
So why are commentators quick to lament the supposed absence of opposition to the Trump administration’s agenda? Melissa Grant provides an answer: It’s because the resistance looks different, in both appearance and location. High-profile Democrats in Washington D.C. have struggled to present a unified front against the new administration, counseling that they must “fight the feeling of being disoriented.” In some ways the “Flood the Zone” or “Policy Blitz” strategy has succeeded in Congress, where Democrats are “so battered that they won’t” be able to mount a cohesive opposition.”
But Congress was never going to legislate to protect politically unpopular communities like undocumented immigrants, especially when so many Democrats readily embrace opportunities to over-punish and over-incarcerate immigrants. If the opposite of President Trump’s offense is a Democrat-led defense, those looking to congressional leaders might be kept waiting indefinitely. However, people who care about immigrant rights would do well not to wait for Godot. As thousands protesting and organizing demonstrate, the “resistance is alive and well.” It just won’t have Nancy Pelosi at the front.
Instead of Capitol Hill, then, it is states and cities that will continue to prove critical battlegrounds for robust immigrant rights organizing. It is here, away from Congress, where immigration related rights-discourse thrives. Around the country, local advocates protect immigrants rather than treating them as political talking points. Immigrants aren’t abstract concepts; they’re neighbors. As a result, advocates move past obsessions over border security or stigmas surrounding criminal legal involvement. They identify clear sources of marginalization — ICE, the federal government, xenophobic politicians — and organize against them. The vibrancy of city-level organizing this year has brought this into clear focus.
Indeed, this grassroots organizing is part of a rich historical tradition. In the 1950s, the civil rights movement did not begin, gain momentum, or succeed because of Congress alone. It began with ordinary people, like Ella Baker and Septima Clark, with extraordinary ideas. Visions and plans for liberation happened at the local level, in places like the Highlander School. History tells us clearly: Substantial change happens only after many people — not just politicians in Washington D.C. — plan, protest, and disrupt.
Still, much work remains for immigrant rights organizing. While some national campaigns have emerged, a united immigrant rights movement with clear demands, nationwide constituencies, and defined emancipatory horizons has yet to fully coalesce.
This is no small task. The immigrant rights movement represents diverse experiences and interests; the needs of an undocumented immigrant with criminal legal involvement differ greatly from those of lawful permanent residents who once held an H1B visa. Previous immigrant rights movements struggled precisely because they excluded and further marginalized immigrants who stood the most to lose, such as those ineligible for any legal status and those with criminal legal involvement. For example, organizers under the Obama administration cinched wins like DACA, but such victories rested on tenuous legal grounds that failed to precipitate further, more wide-scale relief. All the while, undocumented immigrants faced near record deportations. And private prisons sunk their claws deeper and deeper into the U.S. prison-industrial complex through expanding immigration detention.
This fractured movement landscape often meant that advocacy prioritized “winnable” cases over structurally transformative demands, leaving the most carceral aspects of the system largely unchallenged. In this sense, internal exclusions of movements past helped reinforce the very enforcement regime it sought to dismantle. Silky Shah breaks this ground effectively in her recent book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. She critiques immigrant rights movements of the 2010s that aimed primarily for congressional legalization bills with pathways to citizenship. She writes how organizers sought to “convince the American public that legalization is worth supporting,” and to do so, attempted to enhance the reputation of undocumented immigrants by convincing the public that they are “patriotic . . . productive[,] and hardworking” (pp. 91, 97). Democrats could then distinguish “good” immigrants from “bad” ones, claiming to welcome the former and justify incarcerating the latter, a too familiar solution to “public safety” (p. 86). Consequently, the movement failed to meaningfully check the growing legitimacy of ICE enforcement and embedded inhumane, overreaching, and violent immigration enforcement within the acceptable range of policy discourse.
In sum, years spent defining immigrants as perfect, productive workers caused these movements to overly emphasize naturalization. Advocates defined liberation as something only Congress could bless. This agenda necessarily required distancing immigrants who didn’t fit a pristine mold, like those with criminal records or without legal status. As a result, the “good/bad immigrant” binary became embedded into the lingua franca of immigration discourse, doing little to stymie the growing prevalence of immigration incarceration.
So, what are the best next steps to develop a renewed, national immigrant rights movement amidst widespread local activism?
In line with Shah’s most recent work and the years of labor by abolitionist organizers, the mainstream immigrant rights movement should ground its local efforts in abolitionist principles. This approach not only enables collaboration across social movements, but also ensures that previously excluded, and highly vulnerable, members of the immigrant community can be centered as advocates, not afterthoughts. An intersectional approach — one that considers mass incarceration, anti-Black racism, and criminalization of immigration as interconnected struggles — creates deeper solidarity and could lead to more effective organizing.
But this embrace may not be seamless. While abolitionist principles offer a powerful vision for immigrant justice, organizers must anticipate tensions that arise in practice. One such tension is the push to close immigration detention centers. While this is a central goal of detention abolition, the closure of a local facility can unintentionally harm future immigrants. Without alternatives in place, individuals may instead be transferred to remote detention centers in states like Texas or Louisiana — regions where conditions are often harsher, legal outcomes more punitive, and access to counsel or family support severely limited. At the same time, the federal government does not wait for local closure to shift detainees elsewhere; under the second Trump administration, for instance, ICE routinely transferred detainees out-of-state.
But these tensions can be welcomed by organizers, and they can be seen as ways to strengthen their demands with thoughtful deliberation and timelines. For instance, immigrant rights organizers can — and should — learn from the history of prison abolition. That movement has long contended with the unintended consequences of decarceration, including transfers and the expansion of surveillance technologies. Crucially, prison abolitionists have emphasized the importance of coupling prison shutdowns with the release of detainees, developed care networks, and local alternatives that weaken the broader carceral infrastructure. Immigrant rights organizers would do well to adopt similar strategies: ensuring that any push to close detention centers is paired with sustained support for release and investments in community-based systems that prevent re-incarceration. Immigration detention abolitionism, in this sense, must be both disruptive and protective. It must challenge the legitimacy of detention while advancing practical strategies to safeguard immigrants in the aftermath of closures.
Furthermore, abolishing immigration detention also means pushing beyond symbolic victories in liberal strongholds. A truly national movement is essential—one that prioritizes organizing and infrastructure in the very states that anchor the detention apparatus. This means that building power in regions like Louisiana and Texas, where prison economies are the most entrenched, is especially urgent. These states serve as critical nodes in the detention network. If abolitionist campaigns do not reach these areas, closures elsewhere will only reroute the problem. To effectively hamstring the national detention regime, organizing must expand to meet it everywhere it operates. This requires investment in rural coalition-building, cross-state coordination, and a theory of change rooted in national strategy — one that treats detention not as a local aberration, but as a systemic and nationalized tool of racialized control.
To begin this type of thinking, a helpful first step may be for organizers to ask the following questions: What specific steps can our community take to dismantle immigration detention? What does immigration detention look like for our locality? How can we take those steps while also enacting local laws and policies to better protect immigrant neighbors from ICE? For organizers who are agnostic to the geographic place of their organizers, they may also consider how their labor may have outsized impact within the “critical nodes” of the extant detention network.
After addressing these questions and creating a localized agenda, movements in various jurisdictions should take active steps to communicate and collaborate with one another. Given already limited resources, this coordination can be challenging, but local governments can play a crucial role in bridging these resource gaps. Cities and counties typically have the infrastructure — such as Office of Immigrant Affairs departments, human rights commissions, and public meeting spaces —that can facilitate collaboration and institutionalize support for immigrant justice work. Organizers can leverage these existing channels to connect movements across jurisdictions, share best practices, and amplify collective impact.
Governments can further support movements by providing space for organizers to meet, funding organizing initiatives, offering technical expertise with city officials and legal consultants, and allocating meaningful budgets aligned with movement priorities. Importantly, organizers themselves can become part of this infrastructure—not just as advocates, but as local officials, commissioners, or civil servants shaping policy from within. Such engagement ensures that movement priorities are embedded in government decision-making. At a time when many communities are increasingly disillusioned with federal policy, they are beginning to view their local governments more favorably. This creates a critical opportunity to build power not only outside of government, but also from within it.
Critical to understanding grassroots immigrant rights organizing in 2025 is the reality that organizers have accepted that legal or political institutions will not deliver salvation. Legal remedies have a role to play, but as Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen reminds us, they are inherently limited; in many cases, the rule of law has reinforced, rather than dismantled, the structures we now seek to resist. Recognizing this does not require abandoning the law, but it does demand a strategic shift. Instead of prematurely declaring the end of immigrant rights resistance, especially from positions of institutional power, we must redirect attention and resources toward the transformative work already underway. And an embrace of abolitionism charts the way forward. These campaigns can demand transformation of the existing systems, a transformation that eliminates root causes of detention related harm. In doing so, we can sharpen the tools of both law and organizing to build a unified national movement capable of truly and fundamentally challenging the carceral immigration system we see today.
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