Beyond Protest: It's Time for Civil Disobedience
The White House is warning us that it plans to suspend habeas corpus. How long do we wait to push back?
A friend has recently been raising the point that protests against the Trump regime are important, but protests alone are not enough. Personally, I’ve been saying since Trump was re-elected that Americans need to be taking to the streets in massive numbers to make our opposition visible. But now it seems clear that, while it remains true that we need millions of protestors in the streets on a regular basis, we must also take the necessary next step and engage in overt acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.
True civil disobedience isn’t just, for example, mounting a demonstration without a permit. It’s putting yourself at some personal risk while acting to obstruct the government’s abuse of power. It’s not just the refusal to obey unjust laws or orders, it’s engaging in an expressive act that may put your actual body or liberty in some danger in order to prevent a larger evil.
As the White House announces, via Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, its intention to suspend the writ of habeas corpus — which means, essentially, to impose martial law — and as the judiciary and especially Congress fail(s) to restrain the executive branch, all that is left is for “we the people” to do what we can.
Recent Examples of Protest and Civil Disobedience
We’ve recently seen ordinary people resisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in various ways, and I think the point is well taken that we’re beyond the moment where merely voicing our objections to abuses of power is enough.
In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on May 6, bystanders took videos and demanded warrants from presumed ICE officers who arrested a migrant. I say “presumed” because though the officers were armed and clad in camouflage clothing, they bore no clear insignia indicating they were actually government officials. (This raises the question of how we can tell the difference between armed civilian vigilantes and actual agents of the U.S. government when they swoop in and drag people away. Or does it even matter?) The bystanders’ actions were praiseworthy, but I can’t help but wonder whether they could have done more.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, a crowd intervened in an ICE raid where a noncitizen woman was arrested and shoved into an unmarked vehicle. Onlookers surrounded the ICE vehicle and tried to stop it from leaving as they demanded to be shown a warrant. This was more than mere protest. Witnesses engaged in civil disobedience to try to prevent an illegal arrest.
And in Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested after being rebuffed in his attempts to visit an ICE detention facility along with three New Jersey members of Congress. Civil disobedience by an elected official is yet another level of resistance.
Civil Disobedience is Justifiable Resistance
I shared a video recently by Tad Stoermer, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who calls himself a “resistance historian.” Here is another video from Professor Stoermer that I think is critically important and worth watching.
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As Stoermer wrote in his introduction to the Instagram post of this same video (which for some reason Substack wouldn’t let me share):
Real opposition begins where the warrant ends. The Underground Railroad, Danish rescue boats, Freedom Riders — each made repression costly by taking risks most people avoid. Today that means you and your neighbors linking arms when ICE shows up without a judge’s signature, sheltering doctors under attack, shadowing detainees through courts so no one “vanishes.” No calls to Congress, no performative outrage. History shows us that if the system won’t check itself, we become the check.
I am well aware that in writing this blog, I am engaging in what Stoermer counsels against. Simply posting on social media, within my own small echo chamber, is little more than a performative attempt to align myself with the righteous resistance. What I do is not enough. Joining the recent May Day protests was not enough. Writing to members of Congress or authoring blog posts is not enough.
So what is enough?
In her post-screening Q&As at public showings of the documentary Las Abogadas: Attorneys on the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis,* Rebecca Eichler — one of the immigration attorneys featured in the film (and the friend I referenced at the top of this post) — recounts the insight from Dutch historian Rutger Bregman (in a short e-book called Wat maakt een verzetsheld? [in English: What Makes a Resistance Hero?])** about the one common denominator among people who hid Jews from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II. It wasn’t necessarily religion, or ideology, or political affiliation, or even altruism that motivated those brave people. It was that they were asked to help. Bregman thus suggests that when individuals are specifically asked to participate in helping others in danger, they are more likely to say yes.
But guess what? We do not need to wait for someone else to ask us to do the right thing. Let’s all ask ourselves: what can we each do to help when we witness injustice? Can we stand in the way of masked government agents dragging away migrants from our communities? Can we offer help to women denied reproductive healthcare in states with punitive legislation in place? Can we speak up at local town hall meetings, obstructing local initiatives to cooperate with ICE or strip away LGBTQ rights?
Civil Disobedience Resources
It’s been a long time since I’ve received formal civil disobedience training (probably sometime in the late 1970s — I’m old!), but it’s worth checking out some resources so as to be prepared when the moment to engage in civil disobedience arrives.
For example, Amnesty International has created a Civil Disobedience Toolkit aimed at organizations that are contemplating the use of civil disobedience. The toolkit “provides guidance on when and how to engage in acts of civil disobedience in a way that maintains an organization’s duty of care to those acting on its calls for civil disobedience and mitigates reputational, financial, legal and other risks.” This approach is geared not so much toward individuals as toward organizations planning specific “public, nonviolent acts that involve the intentional breach of a domestic law undertaken with the aim of bringing about human rights change.” But it contains lots of useful information for individuals to contemplate.
ACT UP, originally founded in the 1980s as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and focused on ending the AIDS pandemic, has a long history of engaging in effective civil disobedience. Its Civil Disobedience Training document focuses on techniques for responding nonviolently even in the face of potential or actual violence by agents of the government.
The National Lawyers Guild — the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association — supports civil disobedience through its Mass Defense Program and its Legal Observer Program. The Mass Defense Program is a network of activists, community members, organizers, legal workers, law students, and lawyers providing legal support for protests and movements in support of human rights. The Legal Observer Program sends people to protests and marches to “create documentation during events which can later be used in defense cases, public statements, and litigation which aims to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for the actions of their officers.”
The War Resisters League — a venerable organization founded in 1923 as a successor to an earlier organization that supported the rights of conscientious objectors during World War I — offers nonviolence trainings tailored to participants’ specific goals and experience. “Training may include learning from the history of nonviolent social change, dealing with conflict, deescalation, group process, preparing to engage in nonviolent direct action…. Training is a participatory process of preparing people for action. It takes time to do this. While an Introduction to Nonviolent Action can be a two hour workshop to prepare people to vigil and demonstrate, especially at a time of tension and conflict, Nonviolent Direct Action Preparation takes longer to ensure people understand what it means to risk arrest if that is their choice.”
These are just a few national resources. You can also find toolkits and trainings sponsored by local organizations in your community. And to remain informed about organized protests or rallies, I recommend you get on the mailing list of groups such as Indivisible and 50501.
Final Thoughts
I ask again: What is enough?
And by this I mean … what is enough lawless action by the government to compel us to act, and what is enough for each of us to do to resist?
We each need to decide for ourselves what our own limits are: when can we no longer remain silent or unengaged, what we are willing to do, and what we are willing to risk?
All I know is that I cannot remain silent. I cannot simply stand by. I cannot just live my comfortable life and ignore the horror that is going on in my country of birth. Please help me, and help us all, find the ways we can each best resist the destruction of democracy.
Notes
* Full disclosure: for those who don’t already know, I was the Executive Producer of Las Abogadas.
** The Dutch book What Makes a Resistance Hero? has not been translated into English, but the substance of the point it makes is incorporated in Bregman’s latest book, Moral Ambition.
Excellent essay! Thank you for including concrete steps and places to get training.
I was in ROTC in college, learning to be an Army officer and trained in leadership. I noted then how much easier it is to motivate people to act out of fear and self-preservation, vs reacting in a nonviolent way.
Excellent post! I will share widely.