Fears over increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations have kept students out of classrooms and farmers out of their fields, and relegated food trucks to garages. But a coalition of activists on the left is working to provide the tools to help immigrants stay in the United States.
ResistMap, a project of TurnLeft PAC that launched Thursday, offers immigrants and their communities an opportunity to monitor and track ICE via text updates and a national map. The group hopes that through reports made by people witnessing ICE raids, they can create a live nationwide registry of ICE activity. With time, that could provide archival data on which areas of the country have faced increased scrutiny from the deportation agency under Donald Trump’s helm.
TurnLeft managing director Samantha Boucher, the brains behind the project, described ResistMap as a “national network where communities protect each other.” Initially, the site will feature a simple map identifying areas across the country where reports have been logged. Users will be able to submit reports via a form and sign up for text alerts through the platform. But with time, the project also plans to fold in reports of extremist militia activity, police violence, hate crimes, and state discrimination into its data center.
The goal, per Boucher, is to create “a single national picture of the administration’s overreach.”
“The more information we gather, the more we can understand,” she told The New Republic, likening the map to “air support” for ICE watch groups.
The centralized resistance effort comes at a time when Trump’s emphasis on immigration has ushered a surge of ICE raids across the nation. By the end of February, more than 20,000 undocumented immigrants had been arrested since Trump’s inauguration, marking a 627 percent increase in monthly arrests since President Joe Biden was in charge, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
But even that’s not enough for the current president’s appetite, as he pushes to enact the “the largest deportation program in American history.” (This is, after all, the man who expanded detention centers, separated families at the border, and ended “catch and release” during his first term.) Trump has reportedly rung his border czar, Tom Homan, every week since he’s returned to the White House, demanding that the administration “increase the arrests,” according to The New York Times.
The massive executive appetite for deportation makes ResistMap more crucial than ever. But verifying reported raids has been a significant problem for local organizing efforts with scant resources. Due to the expediency of social media combined with the “fog of war” level of fear fostered by the Trump administration, a significant number of self-reports have turned out to be duds. In order to counteract well-intentioned but incorrect reports, ResistMap’s founders have built out and trained a volunteer network to sort through what’s fact and fiction before sharing the data with local communities.
Troy, a ResistMap volunteer who chose to speak with TNR on the condition of partial anonymity, warned that the site’s anonymous self-report function could also attract a number of “bad actors,” underscoring the need for a thorough fact-checking process.
“The key feature of all of this is the coordination of multiple reports, triangulating between different groups in a community, connecting with not just individuals but also agencies and folks who are in those communities to be able to verify” the data, Troy said.
The group’s online training sessions for volunteers have “run the gamut” from introductory sessions to personal and digital safety tips intended to maintain the safety and anonymity of the people reporting information, according to Troy.
And despite the difficulties, helping to keep people in their communities safe has given Troy a sense of “agency” amid the Trump administration’s widespread attacks on Americans’ civil liberties.
“As a country, we’re suffering from a real nihilism, a real sort of, ‘Why do we even care now?’” Troy, who has a background in the tech industry, told TNR, adding that ResistMap has given him a sense that he can help protect his community. “That’s the medicine, right?”
It took a matter of weeks to transform ResistMap from an idea into a practical application. The team behind it is composed of former emergency managers, intelligence analysts, civil rights advocates, and career public service workers. Through thousands of contributions, TurnLeft say they’ve raised around $100,000 to fund the project. That’s the cumulation of crowdsourced donations coming in at $20 or $100 a pop, a fact that the project’s organizers believe points to an appetite among the American public for tools to resist the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda.
Trump has based his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the falsehood that people who have entered the U.S. are murderers and rapists, and that they are a drain on the country’s economy and government resources as unemployed migrants struggle to obtain work and housing. In reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. And in 2022, approximately 4.5 percent of the workforce was undocumented, contributing to some $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.
But a significant portion of the country is apparently willing to buy into Trump’s divisive rhetoric. After Trump’s joint address to Congress last week, in which the president spent nearly 15 minutes hammering on immigration, roughly 76 percent of viewers believed his proposed policies on the issue would “take America in the right direction,” according to a CNN poll.
As such, TurnLeft says it is prepared for challenges from conservative coalitions that would like to see Trump’s plans come to fruition. But they rationalize the legality of their mission by likening the platform to Waze: If you can report the location of a cop in one map app, then why not ICE in another?
Boucher encouraged everyone, even people who aren’t directly affected by the ICE raids, to help fight back.
“Even if you are not personally at risk yourself from many of these things at the moment, there is strength in numbers,” Boucher said. “There is safety in the crowd.”
The post Want to Help Fight ICE Raids? There’s a Map for That. appeared first on New Republic.
