Stop police harassment of No ICE Philly!

Sept. 9 marked the one-year anniversary of No ICE Philly, a community organization sponsored by the Philadelphia Friend’s Center. Guided by core values of non-violence, anti-racism, and an open invitation to all, No ICE routinely meets to build solidarity with immigrants through fund-raising for separated families, letter writing, rapid response networks, and street demonstrations.

This meeting was interrupted by Civil Affairs cops, an arm of the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). As stated on the No ICE instagram: “Two PPD officers tried to enter our general meeting, and when told they couldn’t enter a Quaker meetinghouse with guns on their hips, chose to stand outside and harass people coming in instead. @phillypolice Instead of spending taxpayer dollars surveilling our community meetings, how about you stop ICE from kidnapping our neighbors off the streets???”

This author witnessed this event first hand. An officer came into the meeting hall at the Friend’s Center armed with a pistol on their belt and a camera on their chest. Friend’s Center Staff informed the cops that as a place of worship and as private property, they had no right to be in the building without a warrant. Nobody was arrested or hurt in this incident.

Like many activists practicing their constitutionally protected rights of free speech and peaceful protest, No ICE is subject to surveillance and harassment by law enforcement. This is in-line with the Feds’ strategy of targeting prominent labor and immigrant activists with frame-up charges in order to intimidate the movement, including the prominent case of the Minnesota 15. We must continue to protest the terrorism of ICE in defiance of these tactics, and remain united against government repression.

Civil affairs and the Philadelphia police

Any Philadelphian who has attended or organized a public demonstration for anything even resembling a left-wing cause has seen them. Civil Affairs police officers show up in plain clothes, with a badge and cameras, and sometimes armed. They claim to be a safety precaution and a liaison between the people and street cops. In reality, they serve as an open part of Pennsylvania’s surveillance apparatus, which has an over 50-year history of electronic spying and use of informants, going back to the openly racist Philadelphia administration of Frank Rizzo.

Civil Affairs began as an arm of the so-called “Red Squads,” the secret police that were initiated in the 1930s and revived in the 1960s. They were dedicated to infiltrating and disrupting communist, socialist, Black liberation, and labor organizations. Like other arms of U.S. law enforcement, these units have been turned against environmentalists, LGBTQ activists, Palestine activists, and even AI skeptics. If Civil Affairs comes to a meeting or protest, activists should be aware that they are being tracked and likely added to illegal databases for law enforcement.

The unspoken cooperation between local and federal law enforcement is known. No ICE Philly has fought against this first hand at the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, where ICE thugs routinely kidnap lawful immigrants attending routine check-ins and immigration hearings, turning the courthouse into a site of open terror against working-class families. While the Philadelphia police officially don’t cooperate with ICE, we know this isn’t true in practice.

Rather than retract inward, or limit our activity, our response to such repression should be to do as much as we can to expand the scope of our activity and involve as many participants as we can. Civil Affairs’ action at the No ICE anniversary proves that our collective efforts to combat this are being noticed. Their intimidation means that we have a lot of potential power that is yet to be tapped. How can this power be mobilized? Independent mass action is the key to any successful strategy against government repression.

Mass action and united front defense

The modern McCarthyism we are experiencing in the U.S. is a consequence of ruling-class fear of the mass movement. The mass resistance in Los Angeles or Minneapolis against ICE terrorism, as well as earlier mass protests such as Black Lives Matter, strike fear into the money-bags that deeper and more widespread unrest, including work stoppages by labor, could threaten their profits or even the entire system.

They pursue a strategy of divide-and-conquer and pick off individual leaders on trumped-up charges of “conspiracy,” with anything as innocuous as donating to a GoFundMe site listed as evidence. Their point is to criminalize solidarity itself and generate an atmosphere of fear that anyone could go to jail for thinking “wrong” (i.e., not Christian-fascist, not pro-capitalist, etc.). But the fatal flaw in this strategy is precisely the assumption that people will stop resisting the brutalization of their communities by unaccountable agents of murder. This continued resistance from all corners must be encouraged and amplified.

Labor unions, churches, and community groups of all kinds must learn how to act together in unison in order to place demands on the government (no matter what party is in power!) that can’t be ignored. Mass demonstrations and general strikes can be the vehicles for these demands.

In particular, the threat that a city or municipality can be shut down must be backed by collective action. Workers and farmers in Bolivia have shown how effective massive and coordinated work stoppages, road blockages, and neighborhood committees of defense can be at resisting an unjust government. Minneapolis showed the beginnings of such widespread coordination, and we should do everything to emulate and improve upon these networks in every city so we can act as the Bolivians have done.

Civil liberties defense campaigns is another such way to build the movement. As with the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia, or the Tom Alter case, the defense of targeted individuals can be used to put the system itself on trial, and to educate around the issues that these people are being targeted for. Beyond the value of solidarity, struggling for the defense of our civil liberties is central to building a broad and lasting movement.

The issue is not merely that many more individuals participate in the movement against ICE. It certainly matters that more people want to do direct actions, rapid response, and non-violent resistance. It also is important for activists to build up secondary leaderships and train more people with fundamental organizing skills. But the issue is rather struggling for a movement that can truly act collectively, building mass actions on such a scale that they can’t be suppressed.

Workers’ Voice calls on every civil society group, union, and community group in the city to stand with No ICE Philly as well as anyone else targeted by the police or ICE.

• Abolish ICE! Free all detainees! Reunite the families and return them home!

• Dismantle mass surveillance!  No new data centers! Defund the police!

• For unity against government frame-ups! For free speech, open assembly, and the right to organize a union!

First published here by Workers’ Voice

Top photo: Members of No ICE Philly rally outside the Criminal Justice Center in November 2025, calling on the sheriff to cut off Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to the building. (Philadelphia Inquirer / Jose F. Moreno)

Below: Philadelphia plain-clothes police harass a person at a protest against the unjustified arrest of two Black men in a Starbucks coffee house in 2018. (WHYY)