Tampa, FL: ICE’s Criminal Power Does Not Make Us Powerless Criminals

Report from the growing autonomous zone of Tampa’s #OccupyICE encampment.

Several mass occupations against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement continue to endure in large cities across the colonized United States, utilizing direct action to combat the xenophobic policies of the U.S. Empire.

In Florida, ICE abductions spiked by 75% (the highest in the country) in 2017. Tampa, Florida, colonized Indigenous land of the Tocobaga Nation, has seen an emerging occupation of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now in its eleventh day, the encampment of a few dozen people has been enmeshed in an escalation campaign, disrupting activities outside the DHS/ICE processing center.

From soft blockades to banner-drops to an event that saw 900 hearts wheat-pasted on the front steps of the building (to represent the 900 children who were still separated from their parents as the reunification deadline came and went,) this small, artful community has been taking radical action to be a fistful of sand in the gears of the multi-billion-dollar machine of the ICE and Homeland Security Institutions.

Holding and defending autonomous space has meant the common-place exercise of dual-power as a resistance occupation while simultaneously carving out a supportive space where folks doing status check-ins—from which some migrants do not emerge—can wait for their loved ones with food, cold drinks and comrades in the struggle against the border regime.

In this building, from which this update is being crafted before, children waiting for their parents have the option of creating art amongst friends rather than sitting on hot pavement in the parking lot wondering if their guardian will be the next to be abducted by this criminal outfit.

Humans stolen from this building are then remanded to immigration detention centers like Krome in Miami or Glades County—both infamous for committing sexual violence, physical abuse and constant antagonisms against undocumented or status-revoked migrants.  Many of these migrants originate from homelands of escalating violence exacerbated by the U.S. Empire.

But manifesting a mass displacement and tern abusing the ensuing diaspora is just another vestige of a nation freely manifesting the shock-and-awe mayhem of war and economic destabilization. The U.S. Empire’s reliance on nativist fiction only serves as a utility in its fortification strategies, which slam doors in the faces of those whose displacement leaves traces of red, white and blue in their wake.

This occupation has been both the site of several embarrassing failures of white, Trump-supporting racists’ attempted disruptions and a space where immigrant defense attorneys have come out expressing frustration at lost cases and endangered lives.

While have been able to offer our solidarity, we also recoil in horror at the apparatus that plagues these undocumented migrants. We resist the operations of a system which threatens mothers who fear for the safety of their children. One woman we spoke with expressed this horror vividly: she has two days to get her children’s papers in order or else abduction actions would proceed against her family.

This is both the space where folks driving by, who have not been intimidated by front line resistance, can step out of their cars and become part of the resistance. However, this is also the stage for cops to affirm and expose themselves as possessing zero neutrality but existing to serve nothing more than the state and it’s many mechanisms of dis-empowerment and ruthless control.

In just days, international arms-dealing sexual predator, rape suspect, and murderer of civilians Donald Trump will be holding two speaking events in our community.

In Florida, home of Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate—which will be underwater by the end of the century through the effects of climate change and sea level rise—Trumpism and racism are as indivisible from one another as the ways in which immigration and criminalization are conflated.

Our 6 comrades who were arrested at the @OccupyICETPA site today during the police raid have been released!#OccupyICE #AbolishICE #Solidarity pic.twitter.com/6XZgTjC9Oz

— Justine Medina ? (@jnmedina8989) July 31, 2018

But for this day and this time an autonomous zone full of colorful signs of resistance and banners eclipsing the front of the Department of Homeland Security building has the space in seizure and will continue to out this multi-billion-dollar industry, its profiteers, anti-Immigrant legislative architects, and its enforcers of the CBP and ICE which are fully complicit in the human trafficking, sexual violence, and child exploitation they purport to be curbing, through the impossible hardships imposed upon the rights of freedom of movement and safe passage that are inherent to us as sentient beings rather than gifts granted to and removed from us by the state.

People will find a way to survive. And if you make safe passage impossible, you make dangerous crossings inevitable. Trump’s administration is in contempt of court for failing to meet a federally ordered deadline for family reunification. But that would only be the case in a just legal system which is not currently the case.

We exist in a space and time where we are eyed as terrorists for refusing to let the fingers of fascism entangle and endanger vulnerable populations, abduct children, gun down immigrant youth at invisible borders, and commit sexual violence against undocumented detainees, yet war is on the table as a viable option for a political dilettante so inflated with ego that he boasted about serially sexually assaulting women.

Our occupation is a colorful zone conveying what has come to be radical conception: that no human being is illegal. That sexual violence is barbaric. And that fences and false narratives fall when you apply the right tools.

Solidarity across occupations. Until every border falls.