ICE Invaded Their Community. Their Grassroots Response to the July 2025 Glass House Farms Raids Is a Model for Strategies of Resistance From Sea to Shining Sea

Welcome new subscribers! I’m thrilled to share that our community is growing. Slowly, but surely, we are turning into a mighty chorus, singing ever louder in glorious harmony: this is not the people we wish to be! I am deeply grateful to all of you who have pledged to support this work, and while I intend to keep this newsletter and podcast free, I may soon need to turn to donations to cover my mounting costs at the back end, especially to run the Hope Knows No Border Book Club & Webinar Series. Until then, if you find my Tales of Humanity newsletter and/or From the Borderlands podcast useful, please consider recommending it to your friends, family, and community. We’re growing the movement for JUST migration here, which, in the face of rising fascism, means being billions of tiny grains of sand thrown into the gears of the evil machinery to keep them from turning, until these dark days are behind us. Because they will end. And when they do, we’ll be ready to lock elbows to build a better world from the ashes. The only way through this is … together. In Solidarity, ✊🏼 SarahOn July 1, 2025, the MAGA-controlled US Congress voted to do what I warned in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, they would do if given the keys to the White House once more: turn the most-troubled, least-transparent law enforcement agencies in the land into a private presidential paramilitary. Bequeathed a purse greater than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Bureau of Prisons (BOP), US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) combined, and signed into law on July 4th, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are now fully unleashed to feed Trump & Co’s detention to deportation pipeline.Less than one week later, ICE rocked the quiet community of Camarillo, California, when it rolled into Glass House Farms in fortified military-grade vehicles, supported by National Guard forces and the local Ventura County Police Tactical Unit armed and outfitted for war.In what is said to be the largest workplace raid in California history, 361 farmworkers were abducted and disappeared into the US gulag. One person fell to his death. Many others were injured. It was cruelty on a mass scale: one worksite; one day; 361 workers and their families — a harbinger of what’s to come.But here’s what the armed intruders probably didn’t count on: The Ventura County community stood up in defense of civil liberties, human decency, and human rights. To me, an outsider looking on from afar, their response appeared organized. It looked coordinated. It was not. But within the grassroots response of family members, community organizers, and journalists alike, there is much to offer the growing resistance nationwide.If you’re looking for strategic tips and tools to fuel your community’s efforts, you won’t want to miss this interview with folks on the frontlines of the July 10th Glass House Raids. I invited Glass House Farms leadership to comment as well, but they did not respond to my requests.While the July 10th Glass House workplace raids may have been the largest in California to date, they were not the largest in US history. That would be the attack on the Swift meatpacking plants on December 12, 2006, which involved over 1,000 ICE agents with the support of local police, simultaneously targeting plants in Utah, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Minnesota, and affecting as many as 20,000 workers and their loved ones. Then there was the August 7, 2019, raid on seven Mississippi poultry plants, involving more than 600 ICE agents and impacting 680 families.We must remember that in every case, when the raids are over and the dust has settled, when insurance claims have been filed and companies have been reimbursed for the cost of damages incurred, parents are gone; families are torn apart, possibly forever; children cry themselves to sleep at night, traumatized for life, not knowing if they will ever see their loved ones again.These are the real costs of our immigration policies. And they are human.If this is not the nation you wish to be, stand up for the children. Stand against tyranny and for the rule of law. Join the resistance today. Skill up on how we got to this wretched place with Crossing the Line: Finding America in the borderlands, available in print, eBook, and audiobook. Discounts available on books purchased by the box and ordered through me. DM me today. Links for engagement, donations, training, etc… * Humanitarian assistance: mixteco.org/donate* Legal assistance: 805undocufund.org* Civic engagement: buen-vecino.org Thanks for reading Tales of Humanity! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Get full access to Tales of Humanity at sarahtowle.substack.com/subscribe