This week, we’re featuring an interview with Shannon, one half of the mutual aid project operating in Washington DC known as Remora House. For the hour we talk about Remora House, the impact on houseless and non-citizen communities has been impacted by the Trump Administration’s crack down and sending in of troops to DC and some ideas on strengthening the resistance as the feds and national guard are deployed into our neighborhoods to break up our communities and our resolve
Links from Shannon:
- Remora House Linktree: https://linktr.ee/remorahousedc
- Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid (MSMA): https://www.dcmigrantmutualaid.org/
- Critical Exposure: https://criticalexposure.org/
- Black Swan Academy: https://www.blackswanacademy.org
- FTP Mutual Aid: https://linktr.ee/FeedThePeopleMutualAid
- Food Not Bombs DC: https://linktr.ee/foodnotbombsdc
- Ward 2 Mutual Aid: https://linktr.ee/w2ma
Links from Sima Lee:
- MXGM DC: https://freethelandmxgm.org/washingtondc-chapter/
- DC Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression: https://www.dcaarpr.org/
- 411 Collective: https://linktr.ee/411collective
- Pan African Community Action: https://www.pacapower.org/
- Peace House DC: http://www.peacehousedc.org/
Then you’ll hear Parias of Athens from the June 2025 episode of B(A)DNews podcast. It’s a chat with participants in a project called Research Critique about the distraction of the Greek public from media coverage of the deadly Tempi train disaster by a heavy dose of culture war discourse about lawlessness on University campuses and social decay. The rail accident was caused by negligence and understaffing under the neoliberal New Democracy regime, killing 57 and injuring nearly 200 and led to heated demonstrations for months more than a year to follow. You can hear the full interview by finding B(A)D News #92 on the website a-radio-network.org or in our shownotes.
Announcement
Update on T. Hoxha Hunger Strike
In a brief update to last week’s announcement of Casey Goonan’s solidarity hunger strike with T. Hoxha in the UK of the Filton24. Casey has ended their participation after 12 days, but as T. Hoxha continues, she has been joined by the anarchist prisoner we spoke to a few episodes ago, Malik Muhammad (currently held in the Oregon prison system). As of Sunday September 7th, Casey is on their 11th day of hunger strike and T. Hoxha is on her 28th against the conditions of her confinement. You can read more and find how you can offer support at https://calla.substack.com/p/international-hunger-strike-grows
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Featured Track:
- March On la Migra by Guerrillaton from Made in Mexico
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Remora House Transcription:
TFSR: Would you mind sharing your name, pronouns, location and affiliation for the listeners?
Shannon: Sure. My name is Shannon. My pronouns are she/they. I live in Washington, DC, and I’m one of the founders and one half of the two person team that is Remora House.
TFSR: Cool. And could you tell us a bit about Remora house, how it started, what y’all do and who you work with?
Shannon: I so Remora house started in March of 2020 as did a lot of mutual aid groups in response to the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic. So the other half of Remora, my partner had been working with a particular unhoused community in the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, DC. When the pandemic started, we were greatly concerned about them. At first we we’re primarily focused on getting PPE. Mostly we were trying to find hand soap, hand sanitizer. Then we learned masks were important so I got a sewing machine and started making clothe masks. Then just as we learned more and more about the pandemic and what the response needed to be, we adapted from there. Through building relationships with the people that lived outside, through doing weekly supply distribution, sometimes a little bit more than that, we grew the supplies that we were providing folks as well. So we expanded to getting tents and sleeping bags, camping gear, other supplies that folks can’t always access at other service centers. Phone chargers and phone batteries and things along those lines. As we got to know folks, more and more, we could help meet specific needs.
People got comfortable asking us for things like backpacks for their kids when it was time to go back to school, or money for Halloween costumes for their kids, which we thought were really important ways to be connected with folks and let them also have joy in their life, and not just the immediate needs that they had. That’s been going for five years. We’ve just kind of grown and changed over the years. Were super relationship focused, so we’ve pivoted a lot to doing just direct cash support. On the first of every month, today when we’re recording, we send out $150 to 15 people that live in DC and who are either currently experiencing homelessness or are recently housed, and we do other things like eviction prevention support. We help pay off people’s utility debt to keep their lights on. And a lot of that is just based on relationships that we’ve built with folks that have lived outside over the years and with other organizations that work with people that live outside.
TFSR: That’s pretty crazy. That’s a lot of work for a team of two. How do you not burn out?
Shannon: It’s a lot. But, you know, we work. We fluctuated. We’ve had more folks helping out before, and we were able to do meals every week alongside our supply distribution. It’s a lot. We were both grad students, when we started, and so hopefully my advisor isn’t listening, but our primary work was doing this. Then we would, in the evenings, try and get around to our research and our writing. But, yeah, it’s a lot, but we have really great supports in the community. We collaborate a lot, so all of the response stuff that we’re doing in this moment is in collaboration with other organizations and individuals and comrades who are also equally dedicated to getting support out to our neighbors.
TFSR: I’m going to feel a little silly making this commentary, but I hope that maybe it’ll spark a response that someone wouldn’t have heard or wouldn’t think of. A lot of people have varying levels of experience around houselessness or being under threat of, or being personally houseless. Hearing examples of some of the support that you offer to folks, like help getting their kids Halloween costumes or helping with back to school supplies, I don’t know what most people think of when they think of houseless folks or people that are living in a situation where their housing is unstable, or maybe they’re living out of their vehicle, but I think the image that a lot of people have is of a young adult or an older adult, or maybe a couple living in that manner, and don’t necessarily think about kids, and don’t think about engaging in “normal activities” I guess. Could you comment on that?
Shannon: Yeah, that’s a really helpful question. It gets into something. The way that unhoused people are spoken about and portrayed is often incredibly dehumanizing and focuses on their poverty, their suffering, the extreme circumstances that they’re in. It disconnects them from the family, the community that they have. So when this occupation was announced to be a press conference, one of the things that the administration’s press secretary kept saying was, “we don’t know where these people are from. There’s people living in the nation’s capital streets, and we don’t know where they’re from.” We do know where they’re from. They’re from Shaw, they’re from the neighborhoods here in DC. They still have family here. We had friends that slept in a park that was right next to one of them. Their aunt still lived in those apartments, and he could go over there and see her and maybe have a hot meal sometimes when she was able to help. Another guy that slept in that park had grown up in those apartments. People still have strong family relationships here. The vast majority of people that are living outside in your city are probably from there too and being displaced by similar systems of gentrification and development that are pushing people out of their homes here in DC.
There’s people whose kids will come visit them at camp. Sometimes, these are strong communities, even the camp communities themselves. We have cookouts, we have celebrations, we have memorials when people pass away. It’s a very deeply personal and connected group of people. They still have ties to, you know, their kids that live maybe up right up out in Maryland or in Virginia or right down the street. So they still see them. They’ll still go to family events. They just sleep outside at night.
TFSR: Some people are, “defined” by institutions as being chronically homeless. This might be a definition that people apply to themselves and their experience as well. But it feels helpful to think about an opposition to the presentation that either nonprofit organizations or government institutions, whether they’re the police or politicians or maybe even care-based support nets or whatever, they kind of talk about homeless people as homeless being the primary activating thing. As if it’s a permanent status of that individual, as opposed to a state that a person is in at a time, that may be one that they experience for a very long time, but it doesn’t but it doesn’t necessarily define the person or their experience or their worth or whatever else. Instead, it says a lot about the society that is around them, and the way that we treat private property or class. Is that touching on something? Does that make sense?
Shannon: Yeah. So I know a lot of people that do primarily identify as homeless as a way to point to kind of the violence of the world and what it has done to them. I also know people who don’t feel that that’s like a really strongly defining aspect of their identity. It’s a stop along their path, and at the end of the day they’re an artist or a writer or aspiring to be a lawyer. I think the even the systems that unhoused people touch and getting support and the nonprofit industrial complex can also recreate some of that same kind of dehumanizing rhetoric. I don’t want to bash on outreach workers. I think they do incredible work, and I think a lot of them care really, really passionately about the people they’re trying to support. But there also might be one person with 70 folks that they’re trying to support. So the system itself creates a sense of people being numbers or products running through a mill, instead of actual human beings who need to be listened to and understood. By understanding their connections to their family and their community, they could be better supported. If people were given the time to be treated as whole human beings, we could, I think, better respond to people’s needs and better help them. So that’s why, when I say, we’re really relationship focused. The supplies that we hand out (especially when we make these pretty basic hygiene kits) it’s a way to start a conversation. Yes, it’s meeting a need that someone has, but it’s also a way for me to meet you and start to build trust and start to get to know who you are and what you actually need. Do you need colored pencils? Do you want yarn because you love to crochet? And meeting those other needs that someone has that aren’t just basic survival needs, I think speaks to the whole humanness of people. I hope that it has helped people feel more connected and supported also.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And thanks for responding to those off the cuff questions that I didn’t script out. So you mentioned the occupation. How have you seen the Trump administration’s deployment of national guards and the sending of troops from other states impacting your life as a resident of DC, as well as the work of Remora House and communities in DC. This could be a different question but does this feel like a shift, or how is it different from how MPD (or whatever the various law enforcement agencies that operate in the District of Columbia) interact with you and the communities you participate in?
Shannon: Yeah, the day to day impacts of the occupation, are really different depending on who you are and what you look like. I’m a white woman, so I do not feel the same immediate fear and risk of criminalization that a lot of my neighbors and community members do. Just to speak to what I’m seeing on the ground, every time you leave your house (I live in a less affluent area. I am not of the majority color in my area) there’s a solid chance you’re going to see someone being arrested. I was just grabbing one other day, exhausted and going through a drive through line. We have a lot of delivery drivers that ride mopeds and scooters here in DC, and they’re predominantly from our migrant community, and are predominantly people that were sent to DC from Texas by Governor Abbott’s political stunt, starting in 2022. We’ve had a large and growing migrant community here, and a lot of them have turned to delivery work as a means of generating income for themselves.
I was just sitting in my car, in my drive through with my dog, about to go for a walk, and a delivery driver, still with his helmet on from his moped, came sprinting past my car. Right behind him were two ICE agents. I have never seen that. That does not happen here, but this was just right over the line in DC, and thankfully, one of the ICE agents absolutely ate S*#t on a median in the middle of the road. So the guy definitely got away safely. I watched the two of them come back and they thought they were just going to go in and pick up their lunch, and everyone inside the restaurant was just screaming at them. That is so out of the norm. DC is a sanctuary city. We do not cooperate with ICE. There are protections in place for our migrant community that mean they don’t have to constantly live in fear of trying to go about their day and an ICE agent just picking them up. That’s a huge shift. Another is, coming home from work one day and seeing two border patrol cars parked in a neighborhood that I knew had a lot of migrant community members in it. I’m just trying to get home from work, and this is what a lot of people in DC are doing right now. I just pulled over and watched and waited. Are they going to try and raid this house? Are they waiting for someone? Is this a targeted arrest or what’s going to happen? I spent 15, 20 minutes of my day sitting there watching and waiting for them to leave. They finally did. I followed them for a bit until we got gas and went about my day. But that’s it’s constant. It’s everywhere now, in a way that the DC community has not had to have the same level of constant acute awareness of needing to do ICE watch. Just the constant presence of it everywhere is really exhausting. People trying to just go to regular places that you go out to- the bars, U Street- there’s just patrols of a group of like 14 officers from MPD, FBI, ATF, DEA, you name it, just walking in massive clumps up and down the streets, up and down 14th Street, up and down H Street. It is a show of force to go to heavily populated areas where generally our black community is out trying to have fun and be out at night, and there’s just this massive over display of force and violence everywhere you turn. That doesn’t even mention the National Guard that we now have stationed at most of our metro stops in DC at this point. Driving to work you see them. The National Guard, for some reason, is putting out mulch at the local park. The visuals of it being constant everywhere is just exhausting and terrifying. And again that’s for me as someone who is not in a targeted group right now. I mean, I think the city of DC is squarely in the cross hairs, but I’m not facing the same threat of criminalization as a lot of my community members are, and I’m exhausted by it.
TFSR: Yeah, you’ve mentioned the increase in people being chased down for racial profiling, and based on the neighborhood that they’re in, the assumption that they might not have documentation or might not have citizenship. Have you seen corresponding increases with all the law enforcement in the area of sweeps of houseless camps or parks or what have you, also?
Shannon: Yes. The targeting of our unhoused neighbors was one of the first things that happened. For context, here in DC, we used to have an encampment engagement protocol, which required a two weeks notice if a camp was going to be cleared. This is on city property so this applies to almost none of our green space. All of our green space is federal. If you are on federal property, there is no protocol in place. You will just be cleared and you will be cleared by parks police, who are notoriously brutal. Anyone that has lived outside will tell you the parks police are brutal. Anyone that has tried to have a spicy protest in DC will tell you parks police are brutal. But on city property there’s an encampment protocol. You get two weeks notice and often, and this is before 2020, camps would be allowed to then be cleared. So they would move all of their items. The city would come in, remove anything left behind, abandoned tents, garbage, whatever. If you’re on a sidewalk, they might come power wash it, and then you could move back as of 2020, that started to drop off, and instead of being allowed to return to their camp, they were permanently evicted from that space, and often then that space was closed off, either with fences or (with the camps that Remora house started working with in 2020) there are these massive arrays of jersey barriers blocking off a sidewalk to ironically, create a pedestrian passageway. That has largely been dwindling since 2020.
There had already been an escalated attack on unhoused spaces and our unhoused neighbors, happening from the city of Washington, DC, and then when Trump came into office, he, within a couple of months, identified this one camp that was near the White House, saying it needed to get cleared out. It was outside of the State Department, and he posted about it on Truth Social. Within 24 hours, the city cleared it. They still publicly claim that those were unrelated, but that camp was not slated to be cleared, that camp did not get notice they were being cleared, and it was cleared within 24 hours of Trump complaining about it. Then, with this announce of escalation, with the federal police coming in, he similarly took photos of some of the camps that are along his route to the Kennedy Center, which he has developed an obsession with, that we can maybe talk about. He posted photos of those camps on true social and the city came and cleared them. So things have escalated in a trend of already escalating. All that to say there was already not a ton of encampments in DC. There’s this idea that he’s putting out, that there’s just a camp in every park, there’s tents on every sidewalk, and there just really isn’t. That’s just not the case. There were very few camps to begin with. Those were cleared early by the city, then some of the last camp standing that were near the White House. MPD and for some reason the FBI, came on a Thursday night and threatened to clear them, even though they’d been scheduled to be cleared the following week by the city, per the protocol that we supposedly still have. I think the presence of community members there that night when they came to clear the camp (again, this is the police. The MPD does not clear encampments in DC. I have never seen that. I don’t know anyone that’s done unhoused support in DC that’s ever seen MPD, touch anyone’s belongings to clear them. They do not do that because we have an encampment protocol, and the city does adhere to it, kind of. But this night, it was MPD, it was FBI) was able to staved it off for the night. I think they were convinced it’s going to be too much trouble for you. They left, but then they came back 9am the next morning. It was MPD with FBI. The public statement is that the FBI was the security for MPD, as MPD dragged people’s tents with absolutely no notice. If they were not there, then their stuff just went into the back of a dump truck. I have a lot of issues with the city. I don’t think any of these engagements should happen at all, but they would at least figure out who was there. Are they coming back? Why aren’t they here yet? Do they know? Did they decide to abandon this tent and they’ll give people time to pack up and move. This was “we’re grabbing your tent. You can grab whatever you can grab from it as fast as you can, and then it’s gone. And whatever you didn’t get, whether it’s your medications, whether it’s your ID, your birth certificate, your medical records, your family photos, it’s now gone.” So that was an extreme escalation in terms of encampment engagements. That does not happen, even when it is more immediate, even when there isn’t notice. It’s still a multi-hour process, to let people pack, let them talk to their caseworker, try and make sure they’re connected, figure out if they’re going to put stuff in storage, right? This was a camp of nine people. It was cleared in 30 minutes, and then they rolled down the street to another, and that was done in 20 minutes. Then they rolled down the street to another, and that was done in 20 minutes. So that is an escalation unlike anything we have seen. But since then, they’ve essentially hit all the camps again, because there weren’t many to begin with. The other terrifying piece of the targeting of our unhoused neighbors was the threat of escalation of involuntary commitments, or it’s called an FD-12. I don’t know if that’s a universal term. That’s what we call it here in DC.
We were getting these like warnings from the city and from parks police (who is the other counterpart that has predominantly dealt with unhoused neighbors in DC) that anyone that was sleeping outside, not just in a tent, but if you’re sleeping on a bench, if you’re sleeping on church steps, you can either go to shelter or you can go to jail. This is what we were being told in the early days of the occupation to the level that local hospitals were sent out a notice to prepare for an increase in FD-12. This extends to hospitals out in Virginia that were being told “you’ll need to prepare your staff for an increase in involuntary commitments of unhoused people.” That didn’t happen, as far as we know. As far as we’ve heard through our network of folks, both more official and less official and our unhoused neighbors, neither of those things has really been carried through with. Still, when I see someone out sleeping on a bench, there’s still this question. That threat is still hanging over everyone. “Okay, well, is tonight the night that they decide they’re going to start this shelter or jail policy?” You know? We just don’t know. There used to be this separation of federal and city property. We would always tell people try and sleep on city property, because you’ll get a two weeks notice. If you sleep on federal property there are no protections. Parks police will F%$# you up. Everyone knows that. There used to be this kind of landscape that we could navigate, but now, with a complete federal takeover where MPD has been partnered up with different federal units and are just escorting them around the city, there’s no separation between federal and city property anymore. There’s nowhere that’s safe or a safer bet to sleep anymore. So that’s kind of where we’re at now. The biggest impact is people are going underground. This is what we’ve been telling them. This is what the nonprofit outreach organizations are telling people. You have to go hide. The impact of that is, yes, they are hopefully somewhere that is not visible, that they’re sleeping, that they will be left alone. But what that means is I can’t find them. Outreach workers can’t find them. Their caseworkers can’t find them if they don’t have a phone, or if they don’t have access to a phone charger, or somewhere they can go to charge their phone. They have now lost contact with all of their support systems and resources.
This is what was already happening with the escalation of encampment evictions, of pushing people out of parks and into more unsafe places, pushing people into highway underpasses, pushing people into on-ramps. Literally, one of the big camps that was cleared is on the side of an onramp for a highway. So it was already dangerous. It was already hard to keep people connected, and unless it is people that were already able and comfortable, for a number of reasons, to go seek out services themselves, anyone that doesn’t fit that category, who is disabled and not able to get across town to a place that has showers and dinners or is queer and don’t feel comfortable always going into shelter systems, etc, etc. They have pets, they have partners, they have whatever reasons why they already weren’t going to access services. Now those people, I can’t even go out and find where their camp is and try to connect with them where they’re at. So yes, the kind of direct, targeted attack of unhoused spaces has paused, but the general terror aspect of it remains and is still harming people who now probably not getting as much food as they once were, are losing contact with caseworkers, and therefore maybe falling behind or falling out of their housing process. All of those ripple effects that happen from people just not being able to stay connected to support.
TFSR: So I’ve heard on Democracy Now, who’s done more work looking into the numbers, they’ve said over and over again that crime rates have declined monstrously in the last few years in DC. So the argument that, for instance, when Asheville says that we’re going to ramp up our harassment of homeless populations or people that are panhandling or whatever, they cook the numbers afterwards to justify that. Like “There’s been an increase in violent crime in this neighborhood and it’s attributable to homeless people.” Numbers don’t pan out, but they try to find a reason. Our society is classist and racist, so it’s pretty easy to put it on to people that you know are the boogeyman in our society. In a lot of cases, houseless folks who make people scared that they’re going to be in that position. But as I understand this increase in policing and beefing up of policing and use of federal, not only nationalized National Guards, but also employees of these federal level policing agencies or investigative agencies like DEA, border patrol, FBI, it’s not responding to an increased amount of violent crime, right? Can you talk about the motivations behind this? You mentioned that it’s a sanctuary city.
Shannon: I’ve seen a lot of conversations about “what is the motivation here?” I think there’s one big one, and I think there’s a lot of others, all in this mixing pot of horror. Like you’re saying, DC is a very complicated place politically. My greatest theory is, he’s doing it here because he can. He tried this in LA, and it didn’t work, but DC… for some context about our politics and our representation- we do not have direct representation in Congress. We have shadow representatives that can propose a bill or speak on something. They do not have any actual power. They can’t hold any kind of official seats within Congress. They can’t vote or anything like that. So we have no congressional representation, but we do have home rule, which we got in 1973. We then could have a mayor and a city council, but any local laws that are passed have to be approved by Congress, where, again, we don’t have any representation. So there has already been this congressional attack on DC and our laws, especially focusing on laws that protect, support, uplift our migrant neighbors. For example, the law we passed to allow non-citizens to vote in our local elections, there’s already this just very complicated and disenfranchising political system that we have here. I am an anarchist. I do not believe in representational politics. I think it’s a trap. I think it does not actually solve the issues that we have, etc, etc, etc, but it does have some impacts here of we can’t pass our own laws. We’re a city of 700,000 people who don’t have ultimate control. A congress person from Utah has more say over what our laws here in DC are than we do.
When we’re looking at what are Trump’s goals and motivations, I think that he hates DC. DC is a very black city, and as much as he says it’s not beautiful, it really is, just in ways that don’t fit his white supremacist metrics. It’s a very democratic city, to the extent that when they’re tallying up the Electoral College votes for president with 0% reporting last year, they called DC for HARRIS. They didn’t even need to look. We know how it’s going to go here. So I think those are motivations. We put him in a bunker in 2020 and he’s still upset about that. There’s a lot of those things also at play, but I think what he wanted was authoritarian control over a city that he could then use federal forces to come and round up migrants.
We talked about the impact on our unhoused neighbors that very much fit in with his kind of “beautify the city, Make America Beautiful Again” goals. Then there’s also this other extremely racist, anti-immigrant piece that is at the core of his politics and at the core of his bases politics. So what the main impact? I’ve lost track of time. It feels like it’s been years, but I guess we’re three weeks in, maybe four at this point. The longest, sustained, ongoing violence that’s happening in DC is against our migrant neighbors. As a sanctuary city, ICE couldn’t just come in and take people. But now, I don’t know the exact numbers, but just anecdotally, 10 plus people a day, likely are being kidnapped. He’s very much accomplishing that. That that was his goal, right? A mass deportation.
There are political, legal loopholes in DC that he could exploit in order to do it here. So yes, all these other things about DC, but I think that at the end of the day, he’s here doing it because he can, because we don’t have a governor, because we don’t have these other systems that State governance gives, at least purportedly, some autonomy from the federal government. So it was just easier to do it here than it is in Philly, Chicago. He wants to do it there, if the legal loopholes or if the door is opened. He was just saying about Chicago “well, the governor of Illinois hasn’t asked so I don’t know.” That’s why he’s here. He didn’t have to ask anyone. He used the assault on Big Balls by a few teenagers to justify what he’s calling an emergency, in order to activate these loopholes that let him do all of this. Does that answer your question?
TFSR: I think so, yeah. And Big Balls being a contractor of DOGE, right? I don’t believe it’s their legal name.
Shannon: It’s not. I refuse to remember his legal name but yeah, he’s a contractor with DOGE. I’m not sure exactly what department he’s currently, “working in”, but yeah, he was assaulted by a few unarmed teenagers who, again, were immediately arrested. It was used as this justification for what he’s doing now. He needed a catalyst to declare the emergency.
TFSR: Yeah, but I mean, clearly he’s going to use whatever catalyst he can employ, right? And I’m sure that Big Balls wasn’t asking for it. So this has been super helpful in understanding what’s going on. I really appreciate this. You mentioned Los Angeles, where they’ve already sent federal troops, where it sounds like there’s threats of redeploying, and he’s also been and you also mentioned, talking about other cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland, New York City, Philly, places that have large democratic populations and also have large populations of people of color, to be targets for the next sort of invasion like this. So maybe it makes sense to think that he is pulled back from one where he was getting blocked, and now he’s trying to develop tool sets that he might try to apply into other cities. I think it’s notable for us as people that would be resisting this sort of thing, that we are also iterating through this and figuring out things that work to resist. And while DC does have these differences around representation, around governors, I wonder if you have any examples of lessons over the last three or four weeks, of methods of resisting that you’ve seen that are interesting, that might be helpful to folks that are in cities that are going to see the next round of this sort of occupation.
Shannon: As an anarchist and antifascist, I always have my belief within me that no one is coming to save us. It’s on us to take care of each other and to fight back against this. So while there are maybe some politicians out there that are trying to block what’s happening, the way that our local government is responding, is to talk about how we need more police, that, “Oh yes, we do have a crime problem. We need more police.” Our mayor’s saying it, or council people are saying it. It’s because they are politically in alignment with his goals of criminalizing people, of expanding the prison industrial complex, etc, etc. Using that as a tool to maintain capitalism, maintain business interests, etc. With that out of the way, people here are doing amazing things. I’ve talked about how people are scared and it is terrifying, but we’re also really pissed off, and we’re really pissed off at our local government too. People are just mobilizing and doing the things that need to be done to keep each other safe. I think about resistance in this moment. There’s kind of three main communities that are being targeted by police right now, federal, local, etc. It’s our unhoused neighbors, it’s our young people and our migrant community. Across the city, there’s amazing community defense projects that are happening to support each of those groups of people that are really at the most risk right now.
In supporting our young people, we were already dealing with a local government that was criminalizing our young people, our black young people here in DC by instituting a citywide youth curfew at 11pm and establishing these targeted youth curfew zones where the curfew started at 8pm for people under 18. That was already something that youth organizers and people that support our youth in the city were pushing back against. But now, instead of just MPD at the metro station where a young person might be trying to get home from their friend’s house, we have the National Guard, we have DEA, we have ATF, we have FBI, we have ICE, HSI. You name it, they’re there. They are also apprehending our young people. So there’s people have set up like metro station patrols to keep an eye, to advocate if a young person is there. A big thing that we’ve heard is you can get exemptions to be out past the curfew, but they’re often not respected by police when young people are being stopped. So people are setting up patrols and metro station watches. If a young person is being bothered by NPD, they’ll go and help advocate for them and say, “No, they’ve got this paperwork, you need to abide by the rule and let them go” and doing other kind of community defense projects like that.
Folks have set up drop in spaces for young people so they can have a third space that’s safe away from the police. One of the absolute most impactful things that has been done is Know Your Rights trainings for young people. There are so many videos coming out around the city of people asserting their rights, saying the lines that we learn in Know Your Rights trainings, to shut things down, move them along. And it’s working. There are a lot of videos of people going through these Know Your Rights trainings, and the next day, they get approached when they’re just trying to play basketball, and they’re like “am I free to go? Am I free to go?” And the cops are giving up and leaving. So really basic stuff is really powerful and actually making a really big impact now.
Then for our unhoused community, we’re showing up to encampment evictions if they’re happening, as fast as we can. There’s groups here in DC, Food Not Bombs, Ward2 Mutual Aid, People For Fairness Coalition, are getting people up in hotels if their camp has been cleared. We’re really trying to pivot on supplies. People are having to be more mobile now, so we’re trying to address that with getting them carts and different kinds of chairs that they can sleep in. People are afraid to set up a tent. They think they’ll just lose everything or get cleared immediately. We’ve also made a Know Your Rights guide, because there’s this demand that everyone go to shelter. A lot of unhoused people in DC can’t even tell you where a shelter is, much less get themselves there. Then the most outstanding work that has happened has been around our migrant solidarity and the way that everyone in the city is showing up to support that. Everyone, like people unaffiliated with organizations, are just going out and looking for cops and filming them. They are filming arrests and sending it out. We’re getting videos of it, and we’re getting it along to people that can actually follow up, and find that person and support them. So everyone in the city is on high alert and looking for one another, and we have a system in place with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, who has a hotline. We’ve already got robust networks of mutual aid work going on that people now are able to either send information to or tap into.
Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network has been just incredible. They run a hotline. They do rapid response for arrests. They’re reporting online whenever there is a checkpoint. We’ve had checkpoints every night, pretty much from 6 to 8pm, at least one place in the city. They’re getting those warnings up online. They’re getting eye sighting warnings up online. They’re connecting families to legal support when their family members are detained. They’re providing material support for those families. They’re bringing them dinner. They’re providing them emotional support. There are so many ways to show up for people right now and keep them safe and building those networks of support now, before this happens, or finding them and supporting them, now, before it happens in your city, is going to make your ability to respond in the moment, so much more impactful. If we had just as a city, start from the ground up with a hotline in the middle of this… I mean Migrant Solidarity received over 1,600 calls to their hotline and hundreds and hundreds of texts in the three weeks since the occupation started. In the two weeks before the occupation started, they’d only received 181 calls. That’s a massively exponential growth in hotline calls and texts that they’re trying to process and then match people to resources to support them. My biggest advice for everyone right now. There probably is mutual aid work already happening to support your migrant neighbors, support the young people in your city, support your unhoused folks like those. There are people already probably there doing the work, and you should go find them and support them and learn from them. And also go get to work, because this mutual aid work is always needed, but in a moment of crisis, it can be life saving.
TFSR: And just to note that we had hoped to have Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid on the in this conversation, but they they’re so busy that they weren’t able to.
Shannon: Yeah, they’re really swamped. I can’t speak highly enough about the work that they’re doing, and I don’t know. I hope I did some justice in representing what they’re up to.
TFSR: We can definitely put links to their social media and their website and such, so if people feel like making a donation or getting in touch to learn some of the models that they’re operating off of, to be able to reproduce them where they’re at. That would be super good. Yeah, I think that one of the lessons to take from this sort of thing, not being where you’re at, not knowing the lessons that you’ve got, but with you talking about how one way to prepare for this is to start getting involved in mutual aid right now. One of the ways that this nightmare is escalating and has always been more horrific for some people than it has been for other people, but it’s this one encapsulating nightmare that all of us, to some degree, participate in and kind of hope to keep our heads down and just do our thing and go home and play video games and then go back to work the next day. I think that what we’re seeing right now is a ramped up version of the terror of living under capitalist, white supremacist, christo-fascist America. That point that you’re making of go out do mutual aid, get to know your neighbors, whenever any of these occupations get stepped up like this, it seems like the strongest communities to respond are the ones that are harder to break into differing groups with competing interests, or just hoping that the baton will hit next to them at that other community and not hit them. It’s kind of a weird way of saying it, but you know it rings back to the whole “they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I wasn’t a Jew” or the communists, I guess was the first one listed. But yeah, I think that that was really well put by you. I really appreciate that. Besides MSMA (which is really cool name when you say it out loud, I’m like okay, “same” in Spanish. Cool) are there any other projects that you feel like shouting out that are doing good work that that people might pay attention to or maybe paying or offer some support too?
Shannon: So the two, especially for supporting the young folks in DC, are Critical Exposure and Black Swan Academy. They’ve been doing Know Your Rights trainings with young people and they’re the ones that are hosting the drop-in space and feeding people. They’re doing really incredible work. For unhoused neighbor support, it’s primarily us, FTP Mutual Aid, Food Not Bombs. Ward2 Mutual Aid, and I can text you these. Then for the migrant support, Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid is kind of the hub. There’s other orgs that are associated with and plugged into this broader network that is MSMA, but they’re really the main ones that are currently doing that. Just to comment on what you just said, me and my partner were just talking the other day about how the response in DC right now is so smooth. There’s no conflict. Like everyone is just putting down their head and getting to work and also supporting each other in all sorts of ways. We primarily do work with unhoused folks, but we’re also soliciting reports for ICE to try and take off some of the work from MSMA. Then I can direct through the noise, if I see something that’s super urgent. Or we’re going and volunteering at the Know Your Rights training. Or the young people are showing up and making demands to support our unhoused neighbors right now, right? Everyone is showing up for everyone and all of these kinds of networks that have largely, but not entirely, operated in their own kind of organizing bubbles are all leaning on and supporting one another right now. I told my partner, I was like, “yeah, it’s because the whole city is under attack.” It’s not this kind of isolated event of big encampment eviction campaigns that we’ve dealt with before, where it felt like you were having to shake people to get them to understand how serious this is. When the whole city is under attack and everyone is feeling it in their corner of organizing work, everyone is showing up, everyone is on high alert and making sure “do you have enough people to spoon out the tacos at your Know Your Rights training? Do you have posters at your rally?” Everyone is just in lockstep right now, and it’s building on a lot of work over years of learning hard lessons, learning how to make all of this work, but then also learning that we do it best when we’re all working in tandem. This moment’s really horrifying, but that aspect of it has been really hopeful for me. Like “Oh, right. When s^&t hits the fan, we all have each other’s back, and we can keep each other safe through that.
TFSR: That’s making me think a lot of having this common enemy or common purpose among people. It creates beautiful alliances, and sometimes they dissipate when the terrain shifts, or when the enemy moves on. But in a similar way that people around here talk about the reaction, initially and over the following weeks and months, to hurricane Helene, when it hit here. Would you normally go over to that church and offer to help with distributing food? Well, they kind of suck, but also, they’re doing this thing. What about the people down the street that you usually wouldn’t get along with, or you’ve got a political faction deal competition with someone else down the road, the progressive Democrats or whatever. Everyone can hopefully put some of that stuff aside to get the important work done, and then maybe that’ll build stronger connections and more trust for the harder fights moving forward.
Shannon: Yeah, I think it opens doors for conversations. Like we’ve been helping organize a community defense of a particular kind of food distribution program here in the city. Another thing that the terror campaign is targeting churches. They’re targeting soup kitchens. They’re targeting the places that they know people most desperately in need are going to be going to, to round them up and kidnap them. But we’ve been organizing a community defense for one of them, because this executive director of this nonprofit has no idea how to deal with ICE showing up at his door. So they called the anarchists, and we were like, “Yeah, we’ve got you. We’re gonna organize some patrols, and this is what we’ll do, and this is how we’re gonna report and keep people safe and what we’ll do in an emergency.” At one point in the chat he said “Oh, yeah, MPD showed up and they were super helpful.” And we were all like, “No. No. We’re gonna keep supporting you, but this is a learning opportunity for you to see the people that are showing up to do this, on the ground, we will confront the police if we need to work, to keep the people that your organization is serving safe. We’re gonna remind you that MPD is over at the metro stop in Navy Yard, terrorizing black youth. So it creates very unusual alliances like you were saying, that I do think open opportunities, hopefully for people to learn from a different perspective. Okay, I can get it. You thought that MPD solved your problem right then, but hopefully I can help you understand the broader picture that the issue with policing is not, “oh, I had one good interaction this one time, and that means all this other stuff is incorrect.” Maybe listen to the gaggle of anarchists that have shown up to do on the ground, community defense for your people, when we kind of check you a little bit, on your very quick praise of the Metropolitan Police Department. So it’s been a very weird few weeks, but there have been a lot of interesting experiments that I hope some new relationships can come out of.
TFSR: Well, Shannon, thanks a lot for the chat. Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that you want to mention or discuss at this point?
Shannon: Not that I can think of. Would just love if y’all could plug some of the groups that are here and just reiterate the point that we’re two people and a dog, and we put out a lot of information on social media. We’ve spoken to other media outlets but it is not just us. There’s a really huge network of people supporting one another right now and showing up for one another. I just want to be sure to also show some love and recognition to the other people, like MSMA which we’ve already talked about, but also Feed The People Mutual Aid, FTP, and all the other groups in DC that are just working their asses off right now and then going to their full time jobs to make sure that folks are safe. We’ve got a marathon ahead of us so as much support and love as people can send our way is appreciated.
TFSR: I reached out to Sima Lee, who had a show on the Channel Zero Network, who’s a hip hop artist who lived in DC for a long time (for the audience.) Do you mind if I mentioned a couple of the groups that they had suggested reaching out to?
Shannon: Oh, please do. I love Sima Lee so any of their suggestions are most welcome.
TFSR: They had mentioned the 411 Collective, PACA, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement DC, as well as the Peace House DC and the DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression as projects that that were worth following up with too.
Shannon: Yeah, that’s great. They’re not folks were connected to but I have a ton of respect for the work that they do.
TFSR: Well, thanks a lot. Where can people find out more about Remora House, follow you, support, all that stuff?
Shannon: You can find us @RemoraHouse_DC, on the app formerly known as Twitter, for now, Instagram and Bluesky. That’s the best way to find us and keep up with what we’re up to. If you want to throw some dollars, you can find all those links also in our bios on there.
TFSR: Cool. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and also for having this conversation, taking the time out of a busy day. I appreciate it.
Shannon: Of course. Thanks for having us.
