An anonymous submission from some friendly neighborhood defenders
Over the last two months, inspired by the courageous and inspiring resistance of neighbors in Minneapolis, we have seen an explosion of neighborhood based organizing against ICE in Austin. This turn to neighborhood organizing is an exciting development, and faces important challenges that require creative experimentation: adopting the minneapolis strategy to the geography of a sprawled Texas city; interrupting deportations in a context where most arrests are carried out by state and local police rather than federal agents; a border state with some of the highest concentrations of deportation infrastructure and a police state built to defend it.
SmashXSmashWest is a festival and convergence that calls for creative experimentation and going on the offensive. Some of us have been engaging in it for the last few years, and we see it as an important opportunity for us. So this is an invitation to all neighbor defenders, rapid response networks, and neighborhood councils to take action in our neighborhoods during the week of SmashXSmashWest, March 13-22! Let’s use SmashX as an opportunity to deepen our neighborhood connections, flex our muscles for mobilizing and disruption, and asserting more power over our lives together, as neighbors. We want to see activity across every neighborhood throughout the week, so that we come out of the other side of SmashX with energy, moment, and increased collective power.
Get creative on how to take action in your neighborhood! Here are a few suggestions for what to do to build neighborhood power against ICE and police:
- host a neighborhood block party, happy hour, or a show at a local venue
- organize a march through your neighborhood
- host a neighborhood meeting on how to divest from the police/ICE in our daily lives
- go on copwatch/ICEwatch patrol around your neighborhood. Record their activity patterns
- rally at a spot that police/ICE frequently stage or mobilize at, or at a local police/ICE facility
- establish a defense hub at a site of high police/ICE activity and connect with people targeted
- distribute whistles & resources throughout the neighborhood
- remove FLOCK, ALPR, Ring, and other surveillance cameras from the area
- blockade or barricade a street temporarily to keep police/ICE out
- host neighbor-to-neighbor trainings and skillshares
If you want your event promoted on the SmashXSmashWest calendar/social media/signal announcement thread ahead of time, send it to @smashxsmashwest on IG, smashbysmashwest@protonmail.com, or @smashby.26 on Signal. Social media promotion not required–neighborhood, Signal-based, or word of mouth only events strongly encouraged, especially for protests, block parties, and other actions!
Free to use flyers and logos available at tinyurl.com/smashby.
You can also reach out to SmashX if you’d like literature or other materials relevant to the festival to distribute at your local event! Whatever you do, write up a few sentences after the fact describing how your event went and submit it to SmashX to publish the reportback.