This week on the podcast, we’re featuring three segments. First up, A member of DFW Support Committee, then organizers of the A Better World Bookfair in Waynesboro, VA and finally, organizers working to save the UNCA woods
DFW Support Committee
First up, you’ll hear a member of the DFW Support Committee supporting the defendants arrested on and around July 4th in relation to a solidarity noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured. We speak about the case, the expanding web of repression against leftists in the area, what’s at stake in the case and how to support the 11 defendants.
You can reach them at dfwsupportcommittee@hacari.com and you can donate at https://www.givesendgo.com/supportdfwprotestors and here’s a zine of info put out thus far by DFW Support Committee [00:01:40 – 00:35:19]
MAILING INSTRUCTIONS
Guidelines for writing (important!)
All mail is monitored by state and federal law enforcement. Be extremely mindful of what you are writing. Do not under any circumstance discuss the facts of the case, and do not include overtly political commentary. Consider writing about fun things you’ve done, telling stories, or sending poetry!
All addresses must be formatted as follows and should include a return address if possible.
Full name
Johnson County Detention Center 1800 Ridgemar Drive
Cleburne, TX 76031
NAMES AND BOOKING NUMBERS
- Savanna Batten 202502020
- Ines Soto 202502008
- Elizabeth Soto 202502014
- Seth Sikes 202502010
- Maricela Rueda 202502018
- Meagan Morris 202502011
- Joy Gibson 202502016
- Nathan Baumann 202502009
- Autumn Hill 202502023
- Zachary Evetts 202502013
- Daniel Sanchez Estrada 202502039
A Better World Book Fair
Next, you’ll hear Beet and Mad Dog, two anarchists organizing the upcoming A Better World Bookfair in Waynesboro, VA on Saturday, July 26th. We talk about the bookfair and taking space in rural locales as leftists and strengthening our bonds amidst the rise of the right under Trump 2.0. [00:35:56 – 01:02:11]
- Website/RSVP form: https://linktr.ee/shenandoahliberation
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shenliberation
- Email inquiries to: abetterworldbookfair@protonmail.com
Save The UNCA Woods
Then, you’ll hear Callie and Heather of Friends of the Woods talking about their campaign to save the UNCA woods, 45 acres in Asheville’s Five Points neighborhood from destruction by the university in a scheme to build a 5,000 seat soccer stadium, market rate housing and retail spaces. You can learn more at www.SaveUNCAWoods.org. [ 01:02:58 – 01:42:44 ]
Finally, Sean Swain speaks about the ODRC’s war on art… his art… [ 01:42:44 – 01:51:10 ]
. … . ..
Featured Track:
- Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by Cannonball Adderly from The Best of Cannonball Adderly The Capitol Years
. … . ..
DFW Support Committee Transcription
DFWSC: I am a member of DFW Support Committee, and my pronouns are they/them.
TFSR: And what is the DFW Support Committee?
DFWSC: DFW Support Committee is a group of people’s loved ones, comrades, friends, family members, who are supporting the 11 people who were arrested in connection with the Prairieland Detention Center activity. Σome of us have legal support experience and anti-repression experience but our main goal is to get our loved ones out, to get them free.
TFSR: So it’s pretty ad hoc, it was created for the purpose of…
DFWSC: Yes. Yeah, it’s totally ad hoc, it was created out of the arrests happening. The thing about DFW is that DFW has sort of an up and down cycle of things happening, but in general, I think it doesn’t have the sort of long-term developed movement infrastructure that a lot of other places around the country have.
Part of what we’re thinking about here with this as well is like, “how do we ensure as things move forward that there is more sort of standing infrastructure to support people around legal support and anti-repression?” Because, you know, I think this is not the last time this kind of thing is going to happen here in particular.
TFSR: And DFW, again, is the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, which is a pretty conservative state, right? As far as the governing politics go, it’s a kind of reactionary part of the country, you could say?
DFWSC: Texas is extremely conservative. What we joke about here is that Texas is trying to out-fascist the Trump administration at this point.
DFW, as a metroplex, has over 8 million people in it, so it’s actually huge, it takes a long time to drive from place to place. In terms of how things work, Dallas itself as a city is actually a fairly progressive city in the context of Texas, there’s a lot of sort of democratically elected officials.
Dallas is an extremely multinational city, it has an incredible amount of immigrants from all over the world, an incredible amount of people speaking different languages, cultural enclaves for different ethnicities. It has historically had a large population of folks that are Black and a large population of folks that are Latino, specifically Mexican. And then you have Fort Worth, which is the sister city, which is sort of less diverse and more conservative. There is still a very large population of Latino folks in Fort Worth and a smaller population of Black folks that live in Fort Worth as well.
One of the things economically to understand about Dallas and Dallas-Fort Worth: Dallas is sort of the secret center of capitalism in the United States. It’s got the defense industry, it’s got a ton of manufacturing, it is like the center of logistical supplies in the South. A lot of trains and different things go through Dallas. There’s like extremely, extremely, extremely wealthy people that live in the city. There’s like $30 million plus homes regularly sell in the city of Dallas. This is a place where a lot of the ruling class of capitalism is actually living and intentionally not interested in having people oppose them and challenge them.
Fort Worth is a little bit less the center of capital in the same way, but because it’s very close in proximity, it has a lot of the same sort of impact and Dallas does in terms of like ruling elite and global capital. The difference really is that Dallas elite want to think that they’re New Yorkers, but they live in the South and Fort Worth elite are really interested in being cowboys. The stockyards are there, there’s a rodeo there, there’s a lot more sort of stereotypical Texas traditional infrastructure that exists in Fort Worth. The other way that this matters is that like there is a split in terms of counties.
Dallas County has the city of Dallas and then Tarrant County has the city of Fort Worth. Tarrant County is notoriously corrupt and one of the worst places to get arrested in the state of Texas. Then where everybody is right now is in Johnson County, which is south of that, and is even worse. This area of Texas has one of the most conservative federal courts. When we’re thinking about like the people who were trying to say that the FDA authorization of mifepristone should be revoked, those are the sorts of people that are judges and in the judicial system, especially in like Tarrant County area.. People really combine Dallas and Fort Worth because literally if you were to drive from Dallas to Fort Worth, you would never realize that you had changed cities, honestly, because there’s complete development between the two. But in terms of sort of the political context, they’re different.
In terms of the left, people on the left here really act together in terms of Dallas, Fort Worth, right? Because the left here is so small, people will go to things in Dallas and Fort Worth and people in Dallas will go to things in Fort Worth. We go back and forth and see ourselves as like one larger community. That’s sort of the political context of where we are at in Texas.
In terms of Texas…Texas right now is passing extremely reactionary bills. We just had a bill that’s going to take all GSA’s (or Gay Straight Alliances), any sort of support for queer students out of all schools. The state is doing a bail reform bill that’s going to make it even harder for people to bond out. We already have a pretty difficult system for people to use to get out of jail, even pre-trial, so even before one is indicted, you have to bond yourself out. You have to go to a bail bondsman usually and that system is very difficult and it’s going to get more difficult now because of these bills that are passing.
We are in the authoritarian fascist playground where I think a lot of things are being tried out here in order to be sort of pushed into other parts of the country because our state legislature and our governor and lieutenant governor and attorney general are incredibly far right, some of them identify as white Christian nationalists. They are funded by some billionaires who are oil people who are also white Christian nationalists. That comes out to play in the fall, when we will have the 10 Commandments posted in all of our public school buildings. So stuff like that is happening here. I think that’s a really interesting context for people to think about as, as moving things. Trump is looking at places like Texas and Florida as places to try things out to then move into other states.
I also think that it’s important a little bit for me to just talk about anti-deportation, detention centers since this sort of case revolves around that. One of the things that’s interesting is that there’s a lot more infrastructure here for the police to act as immigration officials than there are in other states, right? A lot of states, blue states in particular, have sanctuary cities have fought to ensure that the police supposedly have some sort of distance from immigration enforcement, whether that’s what actually happens I think this is a really great question. But legally, in lot of places that are more progressive, I think there’s supposed to be this sort of distance between the police and immigration.
Texas actually has a law on the books that is being held up in court right now that police are, will become immigration agents and that they will have the right to ask about your immigration status and basically detain you based on immigration status. Police right now are not supposed to do that. That has already been challenged, but the thing about Texas sheriffs and police, like other places, is that they do what they want. Our understanding is a lot of where deportation is happening on the ground in Texas is actually through interactions between people and the police, police pulling people over for a broken taillight, seeing that they have a Latino last name, and then taking them into the county jail and then the county jail, doing some investigation and putting them on an ice hold. So there’s sort of less spectacular raids, like we’re seeing in blue cities, where law enforcement is going to people’s works and stuff like that. Some of that is happening here for sure. A lot of the ways that deportation infrastructure is interfacing with folks in Texas is through police interactions and then border checks. The border patrol is setting up checkpoints on the road, or police are setting up checkpoints on the road and then they are using that as a pretext to just take people if they think they may be an immigrant of any kind.
We are also seeing here people being taken at court. I think that’s a universal thing that’s happening across the United States. But that context makes things a little bit different here in terms of challenging the kidnappings and renditions that are happening. The other piece of this that’s important is like some of the main detention centers that people are being flown out of to go to like CECOT, and some of the other places, are here in Texas. The State of Texas has bought a tremendous amount of land and offered to either build sort of open-air detention camps or infrastructure for the U.S. government to detain migrants and undocumented people and really, I think anyone that they’re wanting to detain. Texas is very hot, so there are a lot of problems with the creation of sort of like open-air camps in a state where it regularly reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit for several months.
The Texas state government is also very invested in supporting the deportation process, the detaining of people. For people in Texas this has become a huge daily challenge and it’s been asked of people here different ways to challenge that then maybe you have in a place where, you know, the Trump administration has decided to make this a spectacle. So that’s the context that we have in DFW and in Texas that are really thinking about in terms of how are we stopping people’s kidnappings. Because let’s be honest, these are kidnappings. You know, they’re renditions. I don’t know if anyone was around under George W. Bush’s time, where like people were just secreted away to a foreign country where people couldn’t find them and were tortured by the US government? Back then it was people outside the US being shuffled around, now we’re seeing people from here being taken out of the country. Like people being sent to South Sudan, people being sent to El Salvador, really, really similar vibe and even more intense. You know, these are the kinds of things that authoritarian governments historically have done and ramped up, even in modern times. And then that’s what we’re seeing right now.
That’s why I think people continually feel that it is extremely important to challenge this happening. Because we are in a moment, we’re at the beginning, if we think about historically how authoritarian fascism rolls out, we’re at the beginning of it in terms of a change in how it looks in the United States. The United States government has always been authoritarian, but it’s been sort of liberal, neoliberal, a different version of it. With the Trump administration coming in, we do have a change in context and if we’re looking at how these things happen historically, it is so important in this time that we are challenging, resisting, rebelling against this regime and its implementation of its authoritarianism.
Because if it is not challenged, it’s just going to push further and further, right? I mean, I think there’s a real question around people who are here and have gained citizenship through the naturalization process around whether they will be able to maintain that citizenship. I think there’s a real question around, like, realistically, with the Supreme Court ruling that just happened, in states like Texas, where we were not a part of challenging the executive order, when the days, when the amount of time lapses, Texas will be able to challenge people’s birthright citizenship in the state. Because we were not a part of that lawsuit, unless someone in Texas becomes a part of that class, and there’s a ruling that then halts it in Texas.
Citizenship is a really limited concept, I think there’s a lot of problems with the framing of citizenship, and I think it’s a context that a lot of people in the United States understand, and right now it is a way to invoke a certain set of potential rights that people might have.
TFSR: A friend of mine was just talking to me about this and sort of framed the defense of the 14th amendment and the right of someone born in the country to be a citizen as a byproduct of the end of the civil war and the end of chattel slavery in the US. This administration’s and the Heritage Foundation and whoever else’s approach towards attempting to undermine that is a clear echo back to bringing the US to where it was before 1865 (or parts of the country at least). Law enforcement in Texas is very much still in the heritage of being a territory that was formed in order for white people to own Black people. That’s why the whole war with Mexico happened, to carve out more territory and the like. They’re acting as slave catchers is what they’re doing.
Texas has been at the forefront, alongside of the national conservative news outlets like Fox and parts of the republican party and pushing a narrative of invasion from the south, pushing back on like different states that offer sanctuary or areas that offer sanctuary through its governor and Senator Cruz for years now. This is literally what the Trump administration is arguing that he needs to run national guards or military domestically in the country because we’re facing this “invasion”. It’s very VDare and scary.
Finally I wanted to say with the outdoor containment of people or encampment of people, that we had a guest on who was going through the deportation process and being shuffled from facility to facility before being kicked back to Chile. Angel was on a couple of months ago and they were talking about they were at Prairieland. They were talking specifically about how water was being argued as being a privilege to people that were incarcerated there. There was a lack of Spanish language let alone Mandarin, Creole or other languages that people would have been speaking in there so that people could advocate for themselves with the guards and the administration. But, yeah it’s a hellscape and those are indoor facilities
DFWSC: Yeah, and so imagine believing that water is a privilege in a place that’s 100 degrees with no air conditioning and probably no shade. Like, people will just die. You know? People will just die. I think that’s part of the point, right? I think this is very much a way of creating huge amounts of fear and I want to use the word ‘terror’ in communities, so that people don’t resist and people just accept what’s happening to them. I think it’s so important that you go back and bring up the context of enslavement in the United States and the role that Texas played, right?
I think it’s so important that you go back and bring up the context of enslavement in the US and the role that Texas played. I think a lot of this is about “purifying the United States” and getting back to the United States as a white, settler country. Especially in a state like Texas where the history of Anglo white settlement is so central to peoples mentality here… The role that the Texas Rangers had as its own armed paramilitary, they had a huge hand in massacres of Native and Mexican people in Texas. They acted as slave catchers, because one of the things that was happening is that slaves were escaping from Texas owners and going across the border to Mexico where slavery was no longer allowed, which is also a context of part of that war that happened. We have to really understand that context, too. That it’s not just about, like, getting rid of undocumented criminals, it’s really about purifying the United States so that it goes back to being their vision of this sort of white settler state, right?
You know, there’s only certain kind of people that fit in that vision. And most of us probably listening to this podcast will not fit into that vision if you fit into any set of the identities. I mean, the other thing I would just say as a side note is that a lot of anti-LGBTQ and especially anti-trans stuff has been passed here. The conditions in Prairieland right now are horrible. The conditions in Johnson County Jail also are horrible. What our defendants are experiencing in the jail is pretty horrifying. We have some defendants who are trans and guards are refusing to use their names, even if they legally change them. They are being housed in the part of the jail that does not meet who they actually are, which has created a lot of danger for people. I think those relationships, those issues are really interconnected there in terms of what’s happening.
TFSR: Thank you for that context. I wonder if yeah you would tell us a bit about what happened on July 4th 2025 outside of the Prairieland detention facility?
DFWSC: Absolutely. So I want to just preface this by saying that we have the state’s narrative of what happened and we have our personal sense of what may have led up to what occurred. But in terms of what happened on the ground, nobody knows, really, at this point. We are just wanting to ensure that people have their best chance at a defense case. So, we’re only going to talk to what is really in the public information for that reason.
It seems that a noise demonstration was called at the Prairieland Detention Center because this is one of the places where folks are being held in horrible conditions. A noise demo, in case folks don’t know, is just an event outside a jail or something like that where you make a bunch of noise to show your support for people inside. This is something people do regularly. My estimation is that people really wanted to let people inside know that people on the outside are fighting for them. And, you know, it was the Fourth of July. So the thing to think about with the context of Texas and the Fourth of July is everyone is setting up fireworks everywhere. Everyone is shooting guns into the air. There’s all these stories on July 5th in Texas of “my neighbor’s roof had bullets lodged in it from random people shooting up in the air.” I kid you not.
Texas basically has no gun regulation as a state. There’s very little in the way of getting a gun. Open carry is 100% a thing here. Lots of people own and use guns of all varieties in the state, whether they’re on the left, right, or don’t identify in either of those ways. Having guns is a cultural piece in Texas. Now, we could talk about that at a different time, like, “why that is and how that relates to settlerism” and whatever, but that’s just a cultural touchstone in Texas. People here, no matter their political affiliation, will open carry and all sorts of things.
We had a big fight with the attorney general because the State Fair of Texas decided last year to not allow people to bring their guns. The attorney general of Texas has been fighting this, and now the state legislature has taken up a bill to say that the state fair has to allow people to have their guns at the state fair.
TFSR: Really important fights there.
DFWSC: Yeah, and the State Fair was, like, “yo, all these people have been shot here, and it’s making people not want to come to the State Fair. Anyways…I think that that piece matters, that people are armed here, that is not an unusual thing. I think if you are in a state that that is not a part of the culture, you’re going to hear this narrative and be like, “oh, my God!” And for us in Texas, we’re, like, “Of course!” Everybody’s driving around with guns in this state, literally, everybody has a gun in their car. This is why road rage is really intense here. I think that context is important.
The state of Texas is using some of the cultural elements like that to frame this as this nefarious urban cell of super Antifa soldiers who are doing all this stuff. The state claims there was a noise demo, some police came out to interrupt it, an Alvarado police officer and some ICE guards. They came out to interrupt the action, and something happened, right? The local police officer was injured in the neck and then hours later was released from the hospital. The state says he was shot, but it’s important to note he was only in the hospital for a few hours. It’s not clear who shot, and it’s not clear how that went down. Honestly I take everything the state says with a huge grain of salt. All we have in a charge, which is not fact. The state has this narrative that it was an ambush.
We are challenging that narrative in part because the Trump administration lies, right? They lie, they make up facts. The police have also done this for a long time, this is not a new thing for the police to do as well. People have told us that the Johnson County police are a pretty crooked set of police. If you have a scary stereotype of what you think a small-town Texas sheriff is like, that should be in your mind when you think about Johnson County. We don’t believe that whatever narrative the state is putting forward is accurate in terms of what happened. We have a lot of questions, as do lawyers we’ve talked to, about what actually happened that night.
What else would I say? I mean, again, people have a “constitutional right to bear arms,” you know. They’ve made all this big deal about people having weapons and the reality is that in Texas, your constitutional right to have weapons is protected over anything else. The other thing I would just say about this is that something happened, and everyone present was arrested, as far as we’re aware. That opens the possibility that there are people that were arrested sitting in jail on very severe charges that really were maybe even not present for any of the things that happened. So, everyone present and arrested were charged with terrorism and aggravated assault on a peace officer with either a firearm or a deadly weapon.
The next day, the local police, agents from the Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, and Homeland Security raided several houses of folks that had been arrested. In one of those houses, they alleged that someone else that had been at the detention center was present, and they arrested that person. Following this, one of the defendants called their spouse on the phone, they had a conversation and after that phone call, the FBI decided to start surveilling that spouse. They claim that the spouse was obstructing justice, that they may have moved a box of whatever. The spouse, you know, took some zines to a friend’s house. Authorities then arrested the spouse and raided the house that the spouse had been in. They have been raiding the houses of defendants basically since people have been arrested and since the federal charges have dropped.
I should explain at this point there are two cases right now for people. There is the state case that’s happening in which people have two charges, which are terrorism and aggravated assault either with a firearm or with a deadly weapon. And then then the original 10 people arrested also have federal charges and those federal charges are three counts of attempted murder of federal agent and then three counts of discharging a firearm within a violent crime. There’s some other language there but that’s basically what it means so where things are at. The spouse of the defendant that was arrested has not received any state charges. They have received federal obstruction of justice charges and their case is proceeding at a different pace than the other 10 peoples cases.
Where we’re at right now is that in Texas people have seen a magistrate or judge that has set the original 10 peoples bonds at $10 million each, $5 million for each charge, which is impossible even 10% of that is $1 million dollars so people have to sit in jail until their indictment. In Texas, if you’re sitting in jail the district attorney has 90 days to indict you. Right now, the challenge that we’re facing is that the US Supreme Court interpretation is that until you are charged, you do not have a need for a public defender to be assigned to you. Which is like flapping insane because in Texas if you’re not in jail they can take up to a year to indict you. You could literally be living your life without a lawyer potentially having charges come down at any time. One of the big things we’re trying to do is to get people lawyers right now because the authorities are refusing to let people complete their paperwork for a public defender.
The other thing that’s happened is that people have these federal charges and the person who is the spouse of the defendant who was arrested by the FBI has no state charges, their case is moving at a different pace because they have a different set of charges they have been charged with. They’ve been charged with obstruction of justice there’s also an immigration hold on them as well so their case is proceeding faster because we think the state charges don’t exist. Right now folks, in terms of their federal case, they have not seen a judge in their initial hearing to get a federal public defender assigned to them. A lot of folks are sitting in jail right now and we are trying to find them lawyers.
One of the things that we have encountered that’s interesting is that Johnson County is notorious and lawyers are very hesitant to take cases in Johnson County because Johnson County does things like detain lawyers and like really make it difficult for lawyers to try a case. So we’re in this interesting position where it seems like the government is really trying to slow everything down so that right folks’s cases are uh slow-motion. They are not getting their legal representation and they can continue to do things like they put defendants in solitary confinement. We have a defendant who’s been stuck in a medical cell, a tiny white box, not allowed visits, has to put their hand out of the door to get on a phone call. You know, pretty bad conditions. People are being really targeted and harassed in the Johnson County jail right now that are the defendants. We’ve had people, loved ones, that have gone down to try and visit the defendants and they have been detained and questioned. It’s pretty intense and during this context. The FBI has continued to raid defendants houses and that has resulted in defendants families partners and loved ones being detained and questioned. We expect that that harassment is going to continue.
I think we’re also concerned that the Trump administration is going to use this as a context to do sort of a wider investigation into the left social movement even more. We could see something like a special grand jury being impaneled. In terms of why this case matters, I think one of the things that people need to understand is that this case is a watershed moment for anyone right now who is fighting, dissenting, rebelling against this administration and the actions of the United States and capital. How much we fight this case is going to show to this administration how hard they can push further and so we feel that it’s really important to fight tooth and nail against this case. Not only because these are people that we love but also because we know that if we don’t fight now that this could be used over and over again against people.
I think it’s important to understand the Trump administration is doing a couple of things. One, the Trump administration is trying to take right wing extremist action and create a narrative that those people are like sort of nihilist leftist people. That is one of the things, people have called it like “weird terrorism” or like “extreme nihilism”. But that is one of the things we’re seeing the Trump administration try to do is to be like “oh these far-right people actually are connected to leftists because they’re nihilists,” right?
TFSR: Which is really in some ways not a new narrative right because the anti-extremism that the Democrats have been pushing for a long time has been couching both groups under the same tent but been calling White Nationalists “anti-government extremists” and putting them in the same category as anarchists yeah yeah yeah…
DFWSC: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah it’s a real problem. They’re not on our team! [laughs]
TFSR: This comes after recently after a young man who was alleged to have white nationalist leanings started a fire to ambush and shoot firefighters in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, killing two firefighters and injuring a third before taking his own life. And so this seems like another example like the one you’re kind of pointing to. I think of Trump’s “both sides” rhetoric, famously that he pulled out after the riot in Charlottesville in 2017.
DFWSC: Yeah, right. Right. And I think it’s a way for them to distance themselves from sort of… in Texas we would call them the “lone wolf” kind of gunman people. I think the Trump administration needs militia groups, needs groups like the proud boys to act as its soldiers on the ground, especially in this deportation effort. But I think they want to distance themselves from the most extreme element and, like you said, continue the sort of narratives that include those people into the left. That is a real problem because we are not white nationalists at all –
it’s not where we’re at. So, I think that that piece is really important and that we really have to fight it.
I think the other piece of this is that the Trump administration is really interested in saying that everybody on the left is the same, DSA is the same as an anarchist, and we would say “no!” In terms of the Trump administration, they’re demonizing these defendants and I think they’re really trying to make the case that AOC and that part of the Democratic party are just as dangerous. And that they should also face the same kind of charges. I think that, again, the importance of understanding that we really have to pool resources nationally and support the 11 people who are fighting these cases. The 10 people that are on the federal murder charges and the person who’s charged with obstruction of justice.
I also think that there are probably other people will be charged as well, that’s what they’re saying. You know so it’s important for us to really fight this case so that we show that we are strong and to stop the way forward that the Trump administration is attempting. Because if we can fight a case like this, we also need to think about how we’re fighting the kidnappings and the renditions that are happening. We cannot continue to have people disappeared off the streets, we cannot continue to have people have their children ripped out of their arms and sent into an unmarked car going who knows where. This is the stuff of nightmares and I think unfortunately we are at a place in history where we cannot be on the sidelines anymore. People cannot be on the sidelines, this is the time for you to step off the sidelines and pick a battle. So, think this is one place where people can really make that choice and support these folks in fighting this case.
I think the next couple weeks are going to be really crucial in terms of the narrative that’s out there in the world right because one of the things that’s really crazy about right now is that news cycles go so quickly and it does seem from the conversations I’ve had with people that this story has been really buried. It’s gotten a little bit of news coverage but it seems like there’s probably some reasons why it’s not being picked up as widely. So getting the word out that this is happening is also really important and that people are you know fighting for their lives. I mean folks are looking at spending the rest of their lives in in prison on these charges. These are not light charges and these are people that have kids, these are people that have families and the fact that there’s a potentiality for them to never come out and see their children again to miss their graduations, to miss them growing up you know for us to not have our friends…
TFSR: Or to get sent to El Salvador… The whole basis of the charges against people accused of being members of Tren de Aragua or MS13 or whatever was making the argument that they’re terrorists…
DFWSC: Exactly, yeah. Or they might get sent out of the country. I think that’s a real scary thing. The last thing I also want to point to is exactly what you’re saying. That the Trump administration is picking up people saying their tattoos mean that they’re gangs and we know it’s BS. I think people of a liberal persuasion are confused about this case and are scared about it and I think we have to support people to move through that, and understand that this is BS and that you need to support these people. Because the Trump administration is not going to distinguish between a Democrat wanting to vote and our comrades who are sitting in jail right now right. They want all of the left to disappear, they want us all to be quiet
TFSR: How can people learn more and offer support and is there anywhere that they can keep an eye out for further information or reach out to y’all to get involved?
DFWSC: Yes. So we have a fundraiser right now that’s on GiveSendGo.com/SupportDFWProtestors. And the link will be in the shownotes. And then we have an email address, DFWSupportCommittee@hacari.com.
Right now, the two biggest asks are… There are some graphics going around Instagram and social media about the fundraiser: we ask that people share those. We ask that people share the fundraiser. We ask that people give to the fundraiser if they can. Even $5, right? Like anything you can give. Also talk to the people in your life about what’s happening with this.
If you are out there, engage in activity around any of the many things in our society, in our world that’s like worth fighting right now. Like I think looking at this case and thinking about your own safety and putting things in place like filling out jail support forms, having conversations with the people in your life, in secure ways, about getting prepared for repression to happen, I think is incredibly important right now. Please make sure that someone in your life has your full legal name so they can look your name up in a jail booking if they need to. That’s very important. Things like that, that can make the process of supporting you if you have been arrested, just more smooth. And then also really thinking about what you need to do to ensure that you are not arrested because now really sucks as a time to be arrested. It always sucks, but now especially.