New Orleans, LA: ICE Vehicles’ Tires Slashed

The following communique was anonymously sent to It’s Going Down which we re-post here.

It reads:

White nationalists talk about a coming “race war” but it seems like the state has been waging race war on Black, Brown and Indigenous people for a long time already. The concentration camps on the border, shocking as they are, are just another expression of a genocide that’s been underway in various forms for centuries.

Still, while it’s boring to discuss the president, him promising Kristallnacht for brown people as a gimmick to launch his reelection campaign is definitely fucked up; definitely an example of terrorism.

Irrelevant liberals want to discuss elections, but this not a parliamentary matter. We are living through an ongoing, actively waged race war, and it will continue to be a one-sided slaughter until more of us step up.

This weekend a few who didn’t feel like being afraid went out and disabled a handful of ICE vehicles that were parked on the street in New Orleans. It’s easy – get some snippers, clip a couple valve stems on each vehicle. It’s a matter of moments. Clip or cut the stem partway and the whooshing air is barely noticeable. This one weird trick works on the vehicles of all kinds of pigs. Your city and state police who shoot people of color daily are no better than ICE.

Allowing these butchers, these fucking taxpayer-funded fascists, to roll around our communities daily without pushback is a form of complicity. Cutting a few valve stems isn’t a big deal, just an everyday act of resistance against fascism. It doesn’t require extraordinary heroism, merely firm moral conviction and the clarity to recognize our situation for what it is. Even these kind of small symbolic acts can accumulate, demoralizing the enemy and encouraging allies.

It now seems like the major roundup the president was promising might have been a feint, just a stunt to inspire terror, but not everyone backs down like politicians do. We’d already decided to go cut their valve stems, right in front of their offices, so we did.

You can too. Go ahead, try it. There’s not much to it. Practice on a civilian car with a right-wing bumper sticker, just to get your confidence up. When you see how easy and low-risk it is, you’ll feel better, and you’ll be doing something concrete and real instead of just living in fear.

May the pebbles become an avalanche…