Resisting 'The Resistance'

The American Civil Liberties Union is a powerful, influential and storied legal nonprofit that’s often been at the center of highly-visible courtroom battles. Almost 100 years ago, the ACLU set out to defend the free speech rights of anti-war protesters. Today, it’s considered one of the, if not the, most influential civil liberties organizations in the country.

Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump , the ACLU raised more than 24 million dollars – in a single weekend. Silicon Valley investors and venture capitalists rushed to their side offering to match donations up to $25,000. Trump’s election had loosened wallets. A few months later, up to their eyeballs in ‘resistance’ money, the ACLU announced a “grassroots organizing” campaign:

During an event over the weekend attended by more than 1,500 people in Miami and livestreamed to more than 200,000 at 2,341 house parties across the nation, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a national grassroots initiative to organize communities to promote policies at the local level that respect the constitutional rights of all residents.

While the launch, headlined by TV host Padma Lakshmi and singer Milck, may have been a source for champagne flute clinks across the country, this “Freedom Cities” campaign sounded awfully familiar to organizers in New York City. Earlier this year, months before the ACLU launch, a coalition of worker centers representing mostly immigrant low-wage workers, the New York Worker Center Federation, began a campaign of the same name.

For the moment, let's put aside the irony of a huge legal organization trying to do "grassroots" work while being oblivious to an actual grassroots effort. Let's also give the ACLU the benefit of the doubt and assume they didn't just copy that campaign's name. Instead, let's compare both efforts, one which was formulated by immigrant workers; and the other which was launched with celebrities in Miami.

Both the Worker Center Federation and ACLU "Freedom Cities" campaigns promote the idea of moving beyond the framework of 'sanctuary cities', a set of mild protections for immigrants implemented in some progressive cities, like New York, which seek to limit the reach of immigration officials. Under Trump, there has been a growing realization that those protections aren't actually very good at keeping immigrants safe from ICE.

That may be where the similarities end.

The ACLU's campaign boasts about the "guidance of law enforcement leaders who are committed to smart policing." The Worker Center Federation campaign calls for cities to "divest from policing and militarization." The ACLU pitches nine model state and police rules as a wish list of reforms for newly mobilized 'resistance' activists to work to enact in their towns. This includes the underwhelming but sharply worded demand that ICE agents clearly identify themselves.

While the ACLU points to smart policing and seeks to work through the political process, the Worker Center Federation campaign says that "elected officials are complicit with Trumps deportation machine when they are not doing away with broken windows [policing] and are collaborating with ICE." Their focus is not only on ICE or Trump, but also politicians and police. Recently they crashed an NYPD event in the Bronx, part of the coordinated National Night Out Against Crime initiative (read: a national police pep rally).

Its always imposed on us and the police, they talk about building partnerships with the community but at the same time, they are the ones who are policing us, that are putting our communities behind bars, that are enforcing a racialized criminal justice system, one organizer told The Observer. And so for us, we want them to understand that we dont want more cops in our neighborhoods.

Can there be two "Freedom Cities" campaigns representing vastly different approaches to defending immigrants? There are not simply strategic differences (inside strategy vs. outside) between the two. Both campaigns represent their own respective vantage points from which they not only produce, but attract entirely different sets of politics ("smart policing" vs. less policing). These approaches may not be able to coexist for very long.

Hamid Khan, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, isn't surprised by what he sees is the ACLU's cooptation, intentional or not, of a grassroots fight. The "institutional privilege," Khan says, of lawyers and powerful organizations not only undermine grassroots efforts, they "legitimize things that actually hurt everyday people."

Khan's had his own battles with the ACLU. In 2015, Stop LAPD Spying published an open letter to Southern California ACLU's staff and board, calling out their secret meetings with the LAPD. FOIA-provided emails showed the ACLU's SoCal office had been reaching out to the police department for input into its police surveillance guidelines. Stop LAPD Spying described that as tantamount to "asking a fox to design the henhouse."

Similarly, in New York, some of us have opposed police worn body cameras as a dangerous new tool for police and surveillance. The NYCLU (NYC's iteration of the ACLU) and other organizations have instead scrutinized the body cam program, which police have embraced, for a lack of better rules. They want to improve it.

In 2015, the Illinois chapter of the ACLU was criticized by grassroots groups after reaching a settlement, to the surprise of many, with Chicago Police over access to their stop and frisk data. Under the agreement, the ACLU not the public would receive the data. This, local activists argued, undermined the work of Black youth leadership who wanted structural changes. "Your settlement represents just one of many efforts by City officials across the country attempting to co-opt our movement by engaging with less threatening groups," the letter read.

What Chicago organizers point out is that the involvement of liberal-leaning organizations don't actually help the cause of combatting the police department, they help the police. If social justice movements are political negotiations between power systems and the rest of us, the interjection of more compromising negotiators narrows the goalposts and moves them away from things that these systems want to avoid: accountability, less surveillance, less policing, etc.

Chicago Police, LAPD and even the NYPD can say that they've negotiated or collaborated with the fierce lawyers over at the ACLU. The ACLU can, of course, say that attaining access to data or haggling over better rules are worthwhile goals. But are they?

The ACLU, which is centered around a legal, constitutional analysis of justice, is "masking their work as building power," Khan argues, though they're not actually building power on the ground where it counts. Moreover, questions of "bad" laws or rules, according to Khan, embrace the incredibly privileged notion that the system can self-correct through lawsuits.

These ideas can spread quickly as the ACLU doesn't only have lots of money, they have instant visibility, which can suck the air out of the room for others. The name recognition that has the civil liberties organization rolling in 'resistance' money also extends to another institutional force: media.

For many journalists, seeking out well-known organizations can be a result of a certain comfort level shared among the professional class. Its certainly convenient and formulaic. Reporters get an expert to quote for their story. Legal organizations get press, which can help attract more attention (and funding). Why talk to affected people or street activists when you can quote a concise, eloquent lawyer or communications expert?

To the general public, debates on issues as important as policing, surveillance or protections for immigrants are whittled down to one between power systems and lawyers, leaving grassroots voices virtually erased.

"Freedom Cities" is more than just a name, it's a choice between whose freedoms and whose cities we want to fight for. One is fueled by star power, prestige and money, with the goal, it seems, to keep the message in a space safe enough for white liberal imaginations that are ready to fight the Trump administration but not necessarily the broader system.

With 'resistance' money pouring in to defend immigrants from Trump (if not Barack Obama ), we should think long and hard about what the future might look like when powerful organizations essentially parachute in and water down movements. No one is claiming that the ACLU hasn't helped people. They have. But what does that mean for grassroots organizers across the country who want more radical change? Is social justice work a place for venture capitalists or an organization whose executive director makes somewhere around a $400,000 annually, as Khan points out?

The ACLU, I'm told, is aware that a campaign with the same name created by immigrant workers already exists. As of yet, they haven't issued any clarification. They should. Whose freedom are they fighting for? Yours? Mine? Those, I suppose, are the $24 million dollar questions.