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police brutality
LA Protester Permanently Blinded After DHS Agent Unloads 'Nonlethal' Round Into His Face
The victim—whose skull was fractured and nearly died—said federal agents mocked him, saying, "You're going to lose your eye."
Jan 13, 2026
A young protester in Santa Ana is permanently blind in one eye after being hit in the face at close range by a "nonlethal" round fired by a Department of Homeland Security agent last week amid nationwide protests against an immigration agent's killing of US citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis.
According to a report from the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, the 21-year-old "underwent six hours of surgery and... doctors found shards of plastic, glass, and metal embedded in his eyes and around his face, including a metal piece lodged 7 mm from a carotid artery."
His aunt, Jeri Rees, told the Times that doctors feared removing the shrapnel from her nephew's face, concerned it could kill him, and that he had also suffered a skull fracture around his eyes and nose and had permanently lost vision in his left eye.
The shooting outside the Civic Center Plaza that took his sight on Friday evening was caught on film and has circulated widely on social media, and came hours after an earlier protest, organized by the organization Dare to Struggle, saw hundreds of demonstrators gather in downtown Santa Ana to oppose President Donald Trump's flooding of US cities with immigration agents.
The video shows a group of protesters standing on the steps of the center, with several chanting and holding signs and one holding a megaphone. An officer then grabbed one of the young demonstrators—who appeared to be standing peacefully—by the arm, and dragged him up the steps.
As he attempted to wrest himself free from the agent's grip, one of the protesters in the crowd threw an orange traffic cone in the direction of the struggle. This prompted at least one other officer to begin firing their weapons toward the crowd, striking one woman before striking Rees' nephew in the face, causing him to drop to the ground.
The agent then grabbed him by the hood of his sweatshirt, dragging him across the ground. His face is visibly bloody and he appears to be struggling to breathe as he is dragged away by the neck.
According to the Times, another video shows Rees' nephew lying bloodied on the ground inside the building while another agent fires pepper balls at another person who approached the building, attempting to film the incident.
Under Trump's watch, a DHS agent shot a protestor in the face with a non-lethal round at close range, fractured his skull, and then dragged him around as he choked and bled. He is now permanently blind in his left eye.
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— Rep. Judy Chu (@chu.house.gov) January 13, 2026 at 12:32 PM
While such projectiles are often described as "nonlethal," Ed Obayashi, the Modoc County sheriff’s deputy and legal adviser to police agencies, told the paper that firing one just feet away from a person's face "constitutes as deadly force as far as the law is concerned" because "these projectiles can cause serious injury [or] death.”
He added that officers are only supposed to deploy deadly force in situations where they believe their lives are in imminent danger or that they are at risk of grave bodily harm.
Rees said that her nephew told her agents pressed his face into the pool of blood and did not immediately call paramedics. She said her nephew also told her that "the other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye.'"
"This is an egregious abuse of power," said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). "Americans have the right to protest without fear of retaliation or worse. Trump's violence must stop now."
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When the Margins Catch Fire, We Should Ask Why
Mainstream coverage—especially in conservative media—attempts to pathologize public rage, diagnosing it as deviance or irrationality rather than consequence.
Jul 05, 2025
The press was all over the unrest in Los Angeles about a month ago. But since then, the impatient gaze of the industry turned toward Iran, beautiful budgets, trials of the century, and Elon v. Donald. Still, the cycle of urban margins catching fire needs attention—not just as spectacle, but as the result of fixed systems and broken promises.
The recurring tableau of public rage in urban America has been reduced to visual shorthand—burning cars, shattered glass, tossed stones, fleeing reporters, looting desperados, and the theater of rubber bullets, tear gas, and battle gear. The corporate media narrative rarely strays from this script, obedient to its reflexive calculus: Unrest equals lawlessness and unmoored anger.
Regardless of editorial intent, such mainstream coverage—especially in conservative media—attempts to pathologize public rage, diagnosing it as deviance or irrationality rather than consequence. In doing so, the narrative dismisses the very legitimacy of grievance among those already made to feel they do not count because they do not carry the full weight of citizenship. In supremacy logic, “noncitizen” is often polite talk for racialized otherness.
Peace without justice is an anesthetic, and anesthetics wear off.
This reduction of protest to pathology has consequences. It gives cover to expanded exercises of state power, such as, normalizing greater surveillance capacities, lowering thresholds for suspicion and probable cause, suppressing dissent and academic freedom—all upheld by populist rhetoric and sycophantic media amplification.
We’ve seen this spectacle before. In Baltimore in 2015, protests following the death of Freddie Gray were reduced to a looped image of a burning CVS pharmacy, as if fire alone explained a century or more of exclusion. The substance of the protest—calls for justice, dignity, and police accountability—was overwhelmed by sensational visuals. In Ferguson the year before, armored police vehicles rolled through suburban streets, rifles trained on unarmed civilians, creating scenes indistinguishable from war footage. The tableau was complete: disorder, danger, deviance.
In 2019, nearly 700 undocumented workers were arrested in Mississippi in a high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid conducted on the first day of school—leaving children stranded and traumatized. No white-collar managers were arrested. The arrests were real, but the performance was unmistakable.
Normally locked in the vaults of academia, scholarship occasionally does help in offering names to describe what we all know and recognize through lived experience. For example, scholarship on “advanced marginalization,” as Loïc Wacquant words it, documents the corrosive effects of persistent exclusion of marginalized communities and their political, social, and economic exclusion. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s research argues that state institutions produce and maintain zones of “organized abandonment”—communities targeted not only by economic disinvestment but by punitive state power and carceral responses: false imprisonment, law enforcement overreach, racial profiling, and harassment. When entire communities are hemmed in by political structures and policies that monitor, contain, and discipline rather than support or uplift, protest becomes not a departure from reason but its rational consequence.
The truth in our current context is simpler: ICE raids—often carried out by masked agents who withhold identification—serve not merely as immigration enforcement, but as public theater: performative acts of state power designed to instill terror that pushes minorities into greater marginalization.
More recent victims of government signaling include Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, who was forcibly detained by six masked DHS agents and transported through a multi-state labyrinth of detention centers before being released. Kilmar Ábrego García was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, despite a 2019 court order barring his removal. At Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding graduate student and Palestinian rights activist, was arrested by ICE as he prepared to graduate. He was released last month..
I fear that these incidents are part of an unfolding pattern in which immigration enforcement becomes a form of ideological policing, where dissent, origin, appearance, or even academic expression can become grounds for removal. These actions are not just about controlling borders—they are about signaling who belongs in the nation’s narrative and who can be disappeared from it.
The carceral logic of state power is vulnerable to disrespecting constitutional protections and rights. Once these rights are on the run, there’s no corralling them back. It is logistically impossible to deport all people who are in the country illegally (as they say). As such, it seems that ICE has been transformed into a performative arm of white nationalist fantasies—a tool not only for deportation but for public signaling. Migrants from south of the border, Muslims, and international students from the Global South are subjected to raids, surveillance, and public humiliation.
These are deliberate acts of political semiotics—meant to declare who belongs and who does not, a specious restriction of what qualifies as the right kind of identity. The cumulative effect is a wounding of body and psyche—a slow, grinding reminder that certain lives exist only at the mercy of others. The nationwide protests over ICE mandates, arrests, and their social meaning are, in a way, a protest to dismantle the “mercy” arrangement.
The aftermath of unrest is often met with rhetorical sleight of hand: Chaos is condemned while its causes are conveniently ignored. Calls for peace are often made by those woefully insulated and racially protected from the very conditions that make public rage inevitable. Peace without justice is an anesthetic, and anesthetics wear off. The question is not why rage appears, but why so little has been done to acknowledge the legitimacy of frustration and address it without the militarization of American cities.
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Family of Robert Brooks Says Killing by Prison Guards Must Be 'Catalyst for Change'
"We are demanding that every single person, every single thug, that had anything to do with the death of Robert Brooks be fired and arrested," said one advocate.
Dec 31, 2024
As family members and supporters held a vigil at Monroe County Jail in Rochester, New York, on Monday night, inmates in the prison cells above them flashed their lights on and off in solidarity with Robert Brooks, who suffered an apparently fatal beating at a facility more than 100 miles away earlier this month.
Body camera footage of Brooks being savagely beaten by 14 correctional officers and prison staffers at Marcy Correctional Facility was made public on Friday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The video, which was taken on December 9 from body cameras worn by four of the staffers, showed officers choking Brooks, one person kicking him and forcing him onto an exam table, one punching his upper body, and two officers dragging his limp body over across the room and trying to hoist him up against a window.
Brooks, who was 43, was pronounced dead the following day at a hospital. An autopsy report has not yet been released. A preliminary report from the medical examiner's office showed "concern for asphyxia due to compression of the neck as the cause of death, as well as the death being due to actions of another."
At the rally on Monday, his son, Robert Brooks Jr., said Brooks "had a loving, generous heart and a special concern for young people" and said the family's "deepest wishes are that my father's death will not be in vain."
"His killing must be a catalyst for change," he said.
Brooks' father also spoke at the vigil, decrying the actions of both the people who beat his son and of a nurse at the facility who, according to the video, stood by and watched while the beating took place.
"When you have taken the law officers' oath of honor, the Hippocratic oath, or the Florence Nightingale Pledge for nurses, but you participate or sit idly by smiling and chatting as if this was just another day at the office, while a man is being beaten to death, that's evil," he said. "Between 2016 and 2019, approximately 15,679 fathers, daughters, mothers, and sons died in state prisons. They say 47% died from illnesses—I don't believe it. After watching that video, there is nothing they can tell me that I will believe."
Brooks was more than halfway through serving a 12-year sentence for assault, which he had been serving at nearby Mohawk Correctional Facility. He was moved to Marcy on the day of the attack, The New York Times reported.
The Correctional Association of New York, the state's independent prison watchdog, completed a report on Marcy in 2022, finding that 70% of inmates reported racial bias among staff members. Brooks was Black and the officers in the video—like 91% of the prison's staff members, according to the 2022 report—were white.
Four out of five inmates reported having experienced or witness abuse my correctional officers or other staffers, with one saying physical abuse was "rampant" and reporting that an officer had told him Marcy was "a hands-on facility."
The Times reported on Saturday that at least three of the guards implicated in Brooks' beating had previously been named in federal lawsuits filed by inmates who they attacked; one plaintiff was left using a wheelchair after the beating and another was disfigured.
Elizabeth Mazur, an attorney who is representing Brooks' family, told Rochester-based CBS affiliate that the reports about the officers raise "questions about you know whether there's a real cultural problem that's been allowed to fester at Marcy or sort of within the prison system in general."
"The way that Mr. Brooks was killed is just horrifying," she said. "It's terrible enough to lose a loved one, especially an incarcerated loved one when the family knows that they weren't with them during their final moments, but I think it's especially hard to know that you've lost a loved one this way—to this kind of senseless act of violence."
The family is planning to file a civil lawsuit in the future, Mazur said.
Rallies were also held to demand justice for Brooks in New York City, with supporters gathering outside Gov. Kathy Hochul's office.
"We are not going to sit down and just pray, and just hope," said Rev. Kevin McCall, a community activist. "We are demanding that every single person, every single thug, that had anything to do with the death of Robert Brooks be fired and arrested."
The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said Monday that 13 people involved in the attack have been suspended without pay, while one person has resigned.
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Rights Groups Demand End to 'Heavy-Handed' Crackdowns on Pro-Palestine Campus Protests
"We're urging schools once again to exercise restraint, practice de-escalation, and protect free speech and dissent on campus," said the director at the ACLU's Human Rights Program.
Oct 31, 2024
Three leading human rights groups on Thursday responded to U.S. university and college crackdowns on pro-Palestine campus demonstrations by jointly calling on higher education presidents and administrations to respect and protect "the right to protest under the First Amendment and other international human rights law," citing potentially unlawful uses of force.
"Universities are responsible for protecting both physical safety and free expression on campus," Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program, said in a statement. "It's deeply concerning to see universities needlessly expose students to police violence for peacefully expressing their political opinions. We're urging schools once again to exercise restraint, practice de-escalation, and protect free speech and dissent on campus."
In the open letter, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote that "we are exploring claims of heavy-handed and excessive responses by some university and college administrators and police following campus protests in support of Palestinian rights. In many cases, peaceful protests were met with use of force by campus police or local law enforcement summoned by university officials."
"Universities have a responsibility to protect academic freedom and the rights to freedom of expression, and to peacefully protest, and we will be watching to ensure they do."
Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice over its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, launched after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. As the U.S. Congress and Biden administration have backed the Israeli campaign with billions of dollars in weapons and by blocking United Nations cease-fire resolutions, students and professors at campuses across the United States have gathered to call on their government and educational institutions to divest from the war.
While student demonstrations have occurred over the past year, they escalated last spring, when protesters from Columbia University in New York City to the University of Texas at Austin faced police violence. Meanwhile, Biden and federal lawmakers in both major parties smeared all the protests as antisemitic‚ even as Jewish students have often led the events. After cracking down on anti-genocide actions this spring, New York University even kicked off the current academic year in August with a new policy equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
The rights groups wrote that "we have serious concerns about the violent consequences when university officials call in police to quell protests, and the impact on freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly. Based on news reports, student protesters were often met with police in full body armor who used physical force, including batons, kinetic impact projectiles such as rubber bullets and foam-tipped rounds, and chemical irritants such as pepper spray and, in at least three instances, tear gas."
"Media reported witness accounts of injuries such as bleeding puncture wounds, head injuries, broken teeth, and suspected broken bones, most notably at the University of California Los Angeles, Columbia University, and the City College of New York, among others," the coalition highlighted.
The groups noted that "criticism of summoning law enforcement to disperse protests has been widespread, including from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and a number of U.N. human rights experts, including the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to education."
"While privately owned universities do not have the same obligations as state-owned universities, all universities have a responsibility to respect human rights," they explained. "Though not bound by the First Amendment, private universities are bound by their policy commitments to freedom of expression and academic freedom."
Tanya Greene, director of the U.S. program at HRW, stressed that "instead of resorting to police action that both shuts down free speech and heightens the risk of injuries, universities need to do more to protect student speech from violence and intimidation, and actively ensure that peaceful student expression continues without interference."
Amnesty International USA researcher Justin Mazzola said that "the information we have gathered on excessive use of force against student protesters is extremely worrisome and we are still in the beginning of our investigation."
"With the continuation of the Israeli military's assault on Gaza and the risk of U.S. complicity through the sending of weapons, campus protests in favor of stopping the violence and destruction will continue," Mazzola added. "Universities have a responsibility to protect academic freedom and the rights to freedom of expression, and to peacefully protest, and we will be watching to ensure they do."
The rights groups' letter and remarks came after a federal judge in Austin determined on Monday that pro-Palestinian student groups can sue multiple Texas universities' presidents and board members for alleged discrimination and First Amendment violations.
The judge's decision is "a major win for anti-genocide protestors across the country," said the Council for Islamic American Relations (CAIR), which is representing plaintiffs in Texas.
"The court's ruling confirms what we already knew," said Gadeir Abbas, a national deputy litigation director at CAIR. "The government cannot make special rules insulating Israel from criticism, and pretending those rules are about antisemitism does not save them from constitutional scrutiny."
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The Criminalization of Tyreek Hill
The detainment of the Miami Dolphins star is an example of what happens when society refuses to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
Sep 14, 2024
In the old 1990s Nike commercials, Mars Blackmon, played by Spike Lee, asks basketball great Michael Jordan, “Is it the shoes?”
In a much more serious, disturbing incident, Tyreek Hill, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was taken down, handcuffed, kneed in the back, and manhandled by Miami-Dade police not far from the stadium where he plays.
I can guarantee you it wasn’t the shoes that got the attention of officers in a potentially deadly encounter.
It was the car, the constant criminalization of Black men, and a refusal to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Hill, a well-paid athlete, was driving an expensive car. He’s paid his dues, sacrificed, and should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a short distance from his Black job.
But “Driving While Black” has long been a crisis in America, and you don’t have to drive a fine car to be targeted.
“Almost every African-American or Latino can tell a story about being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason other than the color of his or her skin, especially if he or she happened to be driving in the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ or even driving the ‘wrong car,’” said the American Civil Liberties Union, citing cases stretching back to the 1990s.
Hill was born March 1, 1994.
“Victims of these racially motivated traffic stops rarely receive a traffic ticket or are found guilty of any violation of the law. It’s a practice called Driving While Black,” said the ACLU. “The U.S. Supreme Court established an open season on motorists in 1996 when it ruled that police could use any traffic offense as an excuse to pull a car over.” Black and White drivers engaged in illegalities “at about the same rate—28.4% in searches of Blacks and 28.8% in searches of whites.”
Yet, the ACLU noted, 41% of Black Americans say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their race and 21% of Black adults, including 30% of Black men, reported being victims of police violence.
Hill came before microphones September 8 saying he did nothing wrong and was confused about what happened and why. He calmly explained how his mother taught him to be respectful and cooperative, how he wanted to be a police officer and respected them. There are bad apples everywhere, he continued. But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Death.
“If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us,” Laura Washington wrote earlier this year about a controversial Chicago case.
Body cam footage of his killing, which many call an execution, captured the 26-year-old Black man sitting in his SUV. Five cops in street clothes jumped out on him in a city known for often violent, deadly carjackings.
“One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting,” Washington wrote. A civilian oversight body said an officer was wounded in the wrist.
“The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying ‘motionless on the ground,’ according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,” wrote Washington.
“This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car.”
“Did Reed shoot out of terror?” she asked in a Chicago Tribune piece.
Organizing around Reed’s death has been going on in the Windy City with many outraged and demanding justice.
“Chicago police officers reported making more than a half million stops last year on the city streets, continuing to stop Black and Brown motorists at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the driving population,” the ACLU reported in 2024. “In 2023, CPD officers stopped Black drivers at a rate 3.75 times that of white drivers and stopped Latino drivers at a rate 2.73 times that of white drivers. These disparities are similar to racial disparities reported in prior years in Chicago. CPD has never explained why it disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers.”
There are bad apples in every system. But when institutions fail to act to correct wrongs—especially with folks having guns, handcuffs, and badges—the whole system is rotten.
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Remembering Mike Brown: Recommitting to the Fight for Power
As the nation reflects on how Ferguson changed the world, I’m asking that you think about what we have to do in the next 10 years to ensure that we’re moving closer to a world where uprisings like that one aren’t necessary.
Aug 14, 2024
On August 9, 2014, I was at the United Nations, attending the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, or UN CERD, as part of a delegation of Black organizers and activists who were testifying to the conditions of Black people in the United States organized by the U.S. Human Rights Network. I cried for the greater part of that day, sitting with the weight of the injustices and murders of Black people.
There was a chill in the air and not a dry eye in the room at the UN CERD as Trayvon Martin’s mom, Sybrina Fulton, testified about the murder of her son. I remember the testimony of Jordan Davis’ father, Ron Davis, about the murder of his son and the silence that fell as he broke into tears. Both of their sons were murdered by state-sanctioned violence—by the state emboldening police, or even neighborhood watch volunteers, to take Black lives with impunity. I can still hear the testimonies of Black feminist organizations like Black Women’s Blueprint and activists from Chicago who spoke about police violence and murders of Black women and men. I spoke and testified about housing insecurities and violence against LGBTQI+ people. For us, all of those stories were connected and shared—they were all about Black lives not being valued and Black folks needing to build people power in order to stop it.
While at U.N. CERD, an African diplomat asked, “What is happening in Ferguson?” This was the first time I had heard of Ferguson, Missouri. I quickly researched all I could about Ferguson and what was happening. As a parent, I immediately felt another profound loss of another child, Mike. The murder of Mike Brown Jr. felt as intimate, as close, and as violating as that of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Aiyanna Jones, and the many others taken by state-sanctioned violence before August 9.
Our work continues as we navigate the rapidly growing rise and threat of fascism, a complex electoral landscape, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and the continued murder of Black people by the police, such as the killing of Sonya Massey
It was all overwhelming. It was clear that, as a people, we had lost too much. In our time of deepest need, the state responded by further declaring war against its people with tanks, tear gas, and militarized occupation. We were outraged. We knew that we had to take action; we didn’t know what to do, but we knew we needed to be there with those brave freedom fighters in Ferguson. A few comrades and I left the U.N. CERD meeting and headed straight to Ferguson.
Upon arriving in Ferguson, we learned about Mike through the memories his people shared of him. He was beloved by the community, and more than that, he represented so many of us, and we all shared so many similarities with him—Mike’s life was not abstract; it was real, tangible, and familiar. Mike Brown Jr. looked like many in our families and neighborhoods. Mike Brown Jr. looked like my nephew and other young men in my own life. It is a psychological terror when faces and bodies so much like your own are hunted down and killed. We still grieve and mourn Mike, and his memory continues to fuel our fight for power and liberation.
As revolutionaries, our role is not only to grieve and mourn but to honor our people—present, past, and those who will come after us—by acting to create the society we deserve. For months, Mike Brown Jr. was honored through the sustained action and rebellion in the streets of Ferguson and actions around the globe. Uttering his name invited millions to say the names of Black people killed by police, and that reverberation ignited a new conversation about racialized violence. Each day, each hour, there was resistance against police murders and state-sanctioned violence and an assertion that Black people deserve to live without the fear and threat of police terror. The days were consumed with marches, rallies, escalations, and time in community, and the nights were long and filled with strategy meetings, event prep, and far less rest than our bodies needed. But even when those protests ended, the work did not. Mike Brown Jr. and the Ferguson Uprisings woke something up in us, inspiring a new era of the Black liberation movement that has sustained for a decade and counting. Our lives, my life, changed forever.
At the Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL), we are fighting for a fundamentally different world, one where he and all of us would be safe, protected, and given the best conditions to thrive and determine our own outcomes.
Since the Ferguson Rebellion, M4BL has remained committed to advancing abolition, anti-capitalism, and Black Queer Feminism. We organize and advance our vision in local communities and nationally. Our strategies range from advancing policy and electoral shifts to building our own institutions and alternatives to oppressive systems. We are proud of the organizing of our member organizations in Ferguson and St. Louis, who have been vital in the resistance and power building, such as Action St. Louis and the Organization for Black Struggle.
In our 10 years of building social movement power within Black communities, we are proud of our interventions to create policy and legislative change through the Vision 4 Black Lives, Breathe Act, and People’s Response Act that all emphasize divesting from the carceral state and instead investing in alternatives that support and nourish Black lives and communities. We are excited to report about the dozens of campaigns that have won and advanced local wins, ranging from removing police officers from schools to creating housing, changing educational policies, creating safety pods and alternatives to policing, advancing reproductive justice, and engaging communities in environmental and climate change preparedness.
Our work continues as we navigate the rapidly growing rise and threat of fascism, a complex electoral landscape, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and the continued murder of Black people by the police, such as the killing of Sonya Massey. We are clear about our need to build more power to position ourselves to create the world we need and deserve. Now and forever, we honor Mike Brown Jr. in our organizing work and all those who have been taken from us. Today, as the nation reflects on how Ferguson changed the world, I’m asking that you think about what we have to do in the next 10 years to ensure that we’re moving closer to a world where uprisings like the one that rattled the foundation of our nation aren’t necessary. We are still feeling the impact of what happened 10 years ago across all aspects of society: culturally, politically, socially, and economically. And we are less than 80 days away from a presidential election where the freedom to engage in our democracy is literally on the ballot.
We know that much of what is being promised in Project 2025 is a direct response to the transformational change that came out of the Ferguson Uprising. So, I’m asking that you keep that front of mind as you consider the change you want to see in the next four years. I’m asking that you don’t overlook the communities in Ferguson who never asked for their city to be thrust into the spotlight but acted quickly to demand change and accountability from their local police and from the system of policing at large. Please remember Mike’s family, loved ones, and the organizers on the ground who carry on liberatory work in ways that can only be described as revolutionary and rooted in a deep love for their people. Today, consider your personal responsibility in changing our world over the next 10 years.
We began seeding M4BL during the Uprising because we knew there were necessary things we could do together that we could not do apart. And we still believe that. Join us in building people's power to make liberation more than a freedom dream; let’s make it a reality.
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Unity at the RNC Looks a Lot Like Jonestown
We should be worried about the far right’s Project 2025, but we should be horrified by what we’re seeing right now in 2024, right here in the all-American city of Milwaukee.
Jul 18, 2024
I came to the American Heartland to cover a political convention, but all I found was a tent revival, Brother Trump’s Traveling Salvation Show.
The Republican National Convention took just minutes after Monday’s opening gavel to officially nominate its Dear Leader for the third and probably not the last time. The roll call, once the highlight of past conventions, is now an empty ritual. A party platform that was probably written on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail napkin was rammed though with no dissent. RNC schedulers quickly liberated all four nights for the only real purpose they had here in Wisconsin.
The deification of Donald J. Trump.
I never thought I’d see a four-day national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had been convicted on 34 felony charges.
The undulating white hats that staked a claim for Texas; the buttoned-down accountants under their ill-fitting, newly purchased red MAGA hats; and the tightly-wound blonde women in their adult cheerleading outfits—all of them populated the crowded floor of the Fiserv Forum wearing a badge that read “Delegate,” but they were only extras in the ultimate reality show. They mildly whooped for the transphobic jokes and Second Amendment bravado of faceless GOP congressional candidates but by 8 pm Central most were sucked by a cosmic force toward the back corner of the floor, iPhones aloft to capture a moment of political transubstantiation.
It reaches fever pitch as the Village People’s gay disco anthem “Y.M.C.A.” floods the massive basketball arena, with images of the Leader’s goofball dancing on a big screen. A house band segues into The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” as he finally enters the long tunnel and climbs to his seat, white bandage covering the stigmata of his right ear, which bled from Butler, Pennsylvania, to Milwaukee for the salvation of America and this delirious throng.
In the minutes that follow, vanquished rivals like Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plead for mercy by pledging their undying fealty. The faithful thank their God for intervening Saturday to save Trump and save America. Eventually, the speeches all start sounding like a riff on The Manchurian Candidate: “Donald J. Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
But the camera is drawn, like a moth to flame, to Trump—head-cocked, absorbing the adulation, probably hoping the TV talking heads are speculating wildly about this obviously changed man. Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown.
“It seems that our party is really getting unified quite well,” Daniel Bobay, an ex-Californian who retired near Sulphur Springs, Texas, and was attending his first RNC as an alternate delegate, told me inside the Fiserv Forum. It was a variation of a quote I heard again and again and again. Bobay said he hopes the Trump shooting will reduce overheated rhetoric—but only from the media, and not especially from Republicans. “That’s always been the message,” he said with a slight chuckle, referring to tough talk on immigration. “You can’t only build half the wall, or deport only half the people.”
Like any cult, the real mysticism in Milwaukee was the things that went unsaid. I never thought I’d see a four-day national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had been convicted on 34 felony charges, stemming from his efforts to win the 2016 election by paying off the porn star who would later testify she had sex with him.
But I’m much, much more flabbergasted by how quickly those convictions just vanished from your TV screen and the national conversation—just like the massive financial fraud, just like the E. Jean Carroll rape case, just like the taking of our top secret documents, just like the role he played in trying to tamper with his 2020 election defeat, and his summoning of a violent mob to the U.S. Capitol.
Any need to “tone it down” or “lower the national temperature” after Saturday’s shooting in Butler doesn’t undo the fact that all of those disqualifying things have happened. But here’s the other thing: Nobody at the RNC was really toning it down or lowering the temperature. Instead, it was like a weeklong heat dome of baseless accusation settled over eastern Wisconsin.
What’s more outrageous—that Republicans only want the rhetoric cooled off toward them? Or that the elite media is letting them get away with it?
The harsh tone was set early on Monday, when Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson welcomed the faithful to his home state by declaring “the Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values, and our people.” Johnson then claimed that “the wrong speech” had been stuck into the teleprompter.
Really? In that case, the teleprompter guy must have brought all the wrong speeches. Because if there was some kind of memo about a new GOP message of peace, love, and understanding, it was not widely circulated. As I looked on from the upper deck Tuesday night, I heard a string of “everyday Americans” present a nonstop saga of murder, rape, and drug-related deaths. I wasn’t sure at times if I was watching the RNC or if Comcast had reactivated FEARnet. While some of the crimes were committed by undocumented migrants and others they sought to blame on liberal prosecutors, these truly awful, heartbreaking incidents were always tied back to President Joe Biden.
“I hold Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—the border czar, what a joke—and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son,” a Southern California mom named Anne Fundner, who lost her 15-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose, told the delegates. Fundner burst into tears while the crowd erupted in chants of “Joe must go!” It was a moment which, like so many at the RNC, turned only emotional dials, without context about any link between Biden’s actual policies—or Trump’s, for that matter—and the calamity that befell Fundner’s son.
And look, no one expects convention goers to mount the RNC podium and admit that Biden’s border policies—which refugee advocates say are too strict and too similar to what Trump did—and his recent curbs on asylum have brought southern border crossings to their lowest levels of the 2020s, But did anyone expect that emotional dog-whistle speeches like Fundner’s would be greeted with delegates waving pre-made placards, “Stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath”?
Did they bring “the wrong signs,” just like Johnson brought “the wrong speech”? Or is this how the Republican Party lowers the temperature, even as it commits a type of stochastic terrorism by describing the most awful rapes and murders and telling America: Biden did this? Their version of “tone it down” is...”bloodbath”? Seriously? And yet when I walked around the inner bowels of the Fiserv Forum, RNC delegates swore that only Democrats are responsible for violent rhetoric.
“The level of violent rhetoric on the left has been escalating for years—they’re awful,” Bob Witsenhausen, the GOP county chair of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an alternate delegate wearing a red MAGA hat autographed by Laura Loomer, told me. He insisted that the “bloodbath” signs were OK because they address undocumented migrants—but he claimed Biden is “trying to label every MAGA Republican as a domestic terrorist.” He slammed Black Lives Matter, but when I asked about the violence on January 6, 2021, he replied with debunked tales about undercover FBI and “antifa” infiltrators. “Jan. 6 was a set up. Anybody who has their eyes open can see that.”
The mostly desolate city blocks here—with cops on bicycles and helicopters and in large gaggles of officers on street corners—feel like a sneak peek at what Trump has in store for Democratic-run cities if he wins in November.
But paranoia strikes deep. Big-time Republicans here in Milwaukee like Donald Trump Jr. and the veep pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, both said in interviews that “they” had tried to kill the GOP nominee in Butler County. Wait, I thought the GOP absolutely hates “preferred pronouns.” Why are they calling a 20-year-old registered Republican male “they”? What’s more outrageous—that Republicans only want the rhetoric cooled off toward them? Or that the elite media is letting them get away with it?
The bubble of disinformation walled off in downtown Milwaukee from the rest of America by a maze of concrete barriers could be suffocating at times. I kept wondering one thing: What would the great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson have made of all of this? How long before he started seeing hideous green lizards crawling from underneath the MAGA hats of these rhinestone cowboys, before the numbing conformity revealed the psychedelic terror of the grim American future that crawls just underneath the surface?
But even if everything they said here about Biden and his porous border were actually true, there still wouldn’t be enough illicit pharmaceuticals to satisfy the Hunter S. Thompson of 1972, or to make sense of this Republican Kool-Aid acid test. Besides, America needs less hallucination and more clarity.
The 2024 RNC is indeed all about unity, but only the creepiest and most cultist kinds. I saw unity of fear, in a party of ritual humiliation where dissenters like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney are tossed down the memory hole. I saw the unity of people professing their love of community and a so-called “real America” that looks like the floor of the Fiserv Forum, overwhelmingly white, with any “different” folks pushed down the escalators.
We should be worried about the far right’s Project 2025, but we should be horrified by what we’re seeing right now in 2024, right here in the all-American city of Milwaukee. The cult of personality around Donald Trump is already creating its own reality, starting with his campaign’s refusal to release any medical information about his treatment or prognosis after Saturday’s shooting.
Monday’s shock cancellation of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” proved that Big Media can be cowed from asking any tough questions that might pierce this bubble. The mostly desolate city blocks here—with cops on bicycles and helicopters and in large gaggles of officers on street corners—feel like a sneak peek at what Trump has in store for Democratic-run cities if he wins in November.
On Tuesday afternoon, five members of the RNC’s massive security force—imported from Columbus, Ohio, patrolling in a unfamiliar neighborhood one mile away from the Fiserv Forum—confronted a 43-year-old homeless man wielding a knife in an apparent altercation and killed him. The incident is still under investigation, but it felt like an opening volley of a Trump presidency that promises to send law enforcement and even troops into cities like Milwaukee, to round up the homeless or knock on the doors of undocumented migrants.
“Had that been Milwaukee PD, that man would be alive right now,” a neighborhood resident, David Porter, told HuffPost. “I know that because they know him.” You could argue that the homeless man, Samuel Sharpe, from the wrong side of the concrete barriers, is the first victim of a Trump restoration. And as the cult of Donald Trump swoons and sways toward November with little resistance, you can probably guarantee he won’t be the last.
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Taking Action for Public-Safety Alternatives to Policing
Having people who are uniquely trained and qualified to respond in moments of trauma or mental health struggles could mean drastically better care, support, and outcomes.
Jul 01, 2024
Imagine someone you love, your sibling, partner, parent, or child, has been struggling with mental illness recently, a reality for more than 1 in 5 people in the U.S. You’ve been offering support however you can, helping them find the right resources, doctors, medications, or treatment, saving up to help them afford it.
One day, they have a particularly difficult episode, and you’re afraid they might hurt themselves or even another person. You try to de-escalate, but it’s more than you can handle, and you realize you need help to ensure everyone’s safety. You decide you have to call 911, but you hesitate, especially if you’re Black, knowing police could just as easily hurt your loved one as help them, but knowing there’s no one else to call for support. You call and tell the operator everything, emphasizing that it’s a mental health crisis, saying everything you can think of to prevent police from responding with force. But when police arrive, they still perceive your loved one as a threat and make the choice to kill them rather than help them. The person you love, who just needed help, is gone, and you’re left forever wondering if there was something else you could have done instead of calling the police.
This is the reality for the families of Takar Smith, Marcus-David Peters, Tanisha Anderson, Miles Hall, Walter Wallace Jr., Eudes Pierre, Jada Johnson, Christian Glass, Ricardo Muñoz, Angelo Quinto, and thousands of others in the U.S. left with guilt, grief, and anger because police should not be the responders for a mental health crisis.
We are building toward a system of public safety that treats us with care and humanity, and we are doing so with a clear mandate from our people.
Ten years ago, the Movement for Black Lives formed around the imperative to address the violence policing imposes on the Black community. We’ve felt the pain of that first scenario, some personally and all as a community, and we’ve committed ourselves to fighting for liberation from being forced to experience that pain ever again.
As we enter our 10th year doing this work, we decided it was time to hear from Black people collectively across the country to determine what our people need from this movement next in our fight for liberation. We found some important and powerful answers. The comprehensive report Perspectives on Community Safety from Black America, in partnership with GenForward, surveyed a broad sample of Black people across lines of gender, generation, region, and partisanship in the U.S. on their experiences with policing and their views on alternatives for public safety and mass incarceration.
This survey showed strong, clear support among Black Americans for divesting from traditional policing in their communities and investing in public-safety alternatives, especially those that would center de-escalation, mental health support, and solutions that do not rely on incarceration.
- 67% of Black Americans support reinvesting part of their community’s police budgets toward crucial areas such as healthcare, education, and housing, while 55% support reallocating entire police budgets toward such investments.
- 86% of Black people support creating a new agency of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and providing mental health support and other social services that would take over these responsibilities from police.
- 78% support a process whereby city officials promote public safety by investing in solutions that do not rely on incarceration. 82% of respondents support increased federal funding for states to develop crisis-response systems that do not rely on incarceration.
- Half of respondents admitted to fearing calling the police in crisis and emergency situations, yet 55% would still turn to them for help.
The reality of that contradiction, paired with the overwhelming support for alternatives, called us to action and inspired The People’s Response Campaign. Through our new campaign, we’re shifting the narrative on what keeps us safe. In partnership with 20 Black-led organizations across the country, we’re centering public safety as a public health issue, advocating for non-police response to mental health emergencies, and engaging with the 2024 elections, especially on the local and state levels to prioritize ballot initiatives and candidates who support non-police, non-carceral public-safety solutions. Our fellows will work together to build Black political power at all levels and get us closer to a more safe and free future.
Think back to what you pictured earlier in this piece, but instead imagine that when your loved one experienced that crisis, you didn’t hesitate to call for help because you knew that your community had a mental health first-responders team, highly trained in de-escalation and support, who come instead of police. They even know your loved one from past interactions; they’re a familiar and trusted face that puts you and your loved one more at ease; you know they can help you both through this. They help soothe your loved one, discuss next steps with both of you, and come up with a plan to get them the support they need. They connect your loved one to accessible and quality care and resources to get them to the right medical facility. Your loved one’s difficult episode was just a moment in their life instead of the end of their life.
The People’s Response Campaign’s goal is to make that vision a reality. On a local level, we’re turning our data into action as our fellows campaign hard for resolutions in their cities in support of a non-police community wellness first-response system. Having people who are uniquely trained and qualified to respond in moments of trauma or mental health struggles could mean drastically better care, support, and outcomes. It will definitely mean fewer people in those moments of crisis will be killed by police when they need help.
On the federal level, we’re advocating hard for the People’s Response Act (PRA) alongside its champion, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). The PRA, directly inspired by M4BL’s BREATHE Act, emphasizes an inclusive, holistic, and health-centered approach to public safety by creating a public-safety agency within the Department of Human Health and Services—because our communities know first-hand what experts have found for decades: Public safety is a matter of public health. The PRA would fund programs for non-carceral first responders, trauma-informed healing, restorative justice, survivor services, harm-reduction-based treatment for mental health and substance abuse, and so much more. Our fellows spent just one day lobbying on the hill and already gained five new co-sponsors for the bill.
Lastly, our campaign will focus on activating voters for the 2024 elections. Major decisions are being made to take away our right to vote, to protest, to make decisions for our own bodies, especially at the state and local level. We’re pushing for public conversations and candidates that will enshrine our rights and advance progress toward liberation while also fighting off the emboldened white supremacist right wing.
The truth is that Black people in America desperately want to feel safe in our communities. Policing is the only option for public safety we’ve ever really been offered, so we’ve been taught to think the solution must be more policing. But we’ve tried more policing. Police have massive budgets, act with impunity, are given military equipment, and still we don’t feel any safer. In fact, the threat of the police against the people feels more palpable than it has in years as they attack college students protesting genocide, invest in new military technology to surveil us, and build cop cities across the country to train for urban warfare. That’s why when people are presented with real, viable solutions for public safety that don’t involve policing and instead address the root issues that create unsafe conditions, Black people eagerly support them.
We are building toward a system of public safety that treats us with care and humanity, and we are doing so with a clear mandate from our people. Safety that does not come at the expense of our freedom, our health, or our lives, the kind of true safety found in solutions that meet our needs and prioritize our humanity above all else. This year, we are answering the call from our people; it’s time to make way for a new system of public safety.
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First They Came for the Homeless, Now the Students
As healthcare workers, we see haunting similarities in the use of expanded police power and the weaponization of public health and safety to criminalize dissent and control oppressed groups.
May 09, 2024
People across the world are watching in horror as scenes of violent crackdowns on peaceful student protests reach the news and social media. Students protesting America’s role in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians face police in riot gear wielding batons.
In Boston, as police closed in, Amina Adeyola, an Emerson College student organizer working with hundreds of protesters , made an impassioned speech urging the mayor to call off the city’s police. She highlighted that the city ordinance used by the police to arrest protesters was the same one first designed to remove unhoused people from a large encampment just months earlier.
Immediately after her speech, she was arrested. Scenes of Emerson students being dragged, body-slammed, belongings being torn from their hands, were live-streamed on social media. Students reported substantial injuries.
The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force.
As physicians caring for people experiencing homelessness in Boston, we are all too familiar with the anti-homeless ordinance used to arrest the students. The context was different, but the swift crackdown in the name of public health and safety was the same. We see haunting similarities in the use of expanded police power and the weaponization of public health and safety to criminalize dissent and control oppressed groups.
Just a few months earlier, facing a crisis of increasing homelessness and rising housing costs, Boston enacted the new ordinance banning tent camping throughout the city. The mayor called on the police to sweep encampments of homeless communities and to ticket and fine individuals for living outside. While the ordinance required that police first offer storage for belongings and a shelter bed, this seemed disingenuous. The largest shelters in Boston were already full, with people routinely sleeping on the floor.
We vociferously opposed the measure based both on personal experience and on evidence from encampments across the country. After prior sweeps, our patients who were receiving life-saving medications, including treatments for HIV and other serious infections, would disappear—whether in jail, pushed to a more distant encampment, or dead, we often did not know. Disturbing images from previous encampment removals were fresh in our minds: wheelchairs being confiscated and crushed, medications and other crucial belongings being forcibly taken from patients. Mounting public health research shows that law enforcement-led sweeps of homeless encampments do not bring health and safety. They do not result in less violence. They do not result in less drug use. They result in disconnection from life-saving harm reduction services and medical care. They result in more hospitalizations and fatal overdoses.
To hear city officials, including physicians, cite “health and safety” as the motivation for the ordinance was deeply unsettling. The well-being of the unhoused individuals who were ultimately arrested, or pushed into less visible parts of the city, was never the primary concern. Instead of investing the necessary money and time into tackling hard problems—lack of affordable housing, cycles of incarceration and poverty, inadequate addiction treatment—the city chose to expand police power against an already marginalized group.
Today we see this same ordinance wielded against students demanding divestment from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In defending the police action, Mayor Michelle Wu cited the “health and safety” of Bostonians. The morning after the Emerson College protest crackdown, city workers cleaned up blood from the protest site. It’s difficult to square the sight of protesters’ blood on sidewalks resulting from police violence, with that call for health and safety. How could they do this?
As Adeyola astutely pointed out, we gave them the tools.
Rather than fund housing and other necessary services to prevent homelessness, our elected leaders use our tax dollars to fund police and prisons which are full of unhoused people. Rather than disclose and divest from Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide, university leaders invite police forces (often militarized by the Israeli Defense Force) onto campus in the name of student safety, to brutalize and arrest students and their faculty and community supporters.
The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force. They demand that we not shield our eyes from our leaders’ brutal disregard of Palestinian life in the false name of Israeli security. As medical providers, we have an obligation to speak out against the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s critical infrastructure and the mass murder of healthcare workers who are desperately trying to save civilian lives. As healthcare workers committed to the genuine health and well-being of all—whether unhoused people, student protesters, or the people of Gaza—we must denounce everywhere the use of state violence in the name of safety. And beyond rhetoric, we must protect and support those most vulnerable who speak out and demand a more just world. We cannot abandon our young people to risk everything alone. Healthcare workers must be by their sides, flooding every student encampment across the nation.
In these dark times for democracy, we as homeless medicine physicians witnessing attacks first on homeless people and now on protesting students, are reminded that our collective silence and inaction endangers us all.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
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Militarized Police 'Indiscriminately' Attack Nonviolent Stop Cop City March With Tear Gas
"This is the type of 'training' they will get if Cop City is built," said one activist group.
Nov 13, 2023
Militarized state and local police on Monday attacked a peaceful protest against the construction of the so-called "Cop City" training center outside Atlanta, Georgia with "less-lethal" weapons including tear gas, pepper balls, and flash-bang grenades, journalists and activists there said.
Hundreds of #StopCopCity activists marched from a park toward the Weelaunee Forest in suburban DeKalb County early Monday morning. Some carried large and elaborate puppets, others had saplings to plant in woodlands bulldozed during construction, and a few carried banners reading "Block Cop City" and "Viva Tortuguita"—a reference to forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, aka "Tortuguita," who was fatally shot 57 times with live ammunition by police during a January raid on a protest camp.
A marching band and members of the Wanbli Ska Society—a South Dakota-based Indigenous advocacy group—hyped up the activists, who then started their two-mile march toward the Cop City construction site.
Journalists and protesters said police blocked the road about half a mile from the march's planned destination.
"The police have effectively separated the press at the front of the march from the rest of the march," the group Defend the Atlanta Forest wrote on social media. "Police are preventing them from rejoining the march and threatening to tow their cars."
NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy group, posted video of police pushing reporters away from the march, calling the area a "crime scene" and threatening to arrest journalists.
Backed by menacing SWAT vehicles, including one labeled "The Beast," police attacked the nonviolent marchers, some of whom attempted to push through the line of armored officers.
Many of the activists chanted: "Don't panic, stay tight, we gonna be alright!"
Some protesters lobbed tear gas canisters back at the officers.
"Protestors and police both retreated because neither group was wearing gas masks," Defend the Atlanta Forest reported. Neither were the police dogs, whose only protection appeared to be goggles and noise-reducing ear coverings.
The activists regrouped and continued their march. Eight activists reportedly made it to the construction site and locked themselves to equipment there.
Responding to the police action, Mary Hooks, field secretary for the Movement for Black Lives, said in a statement: "We just witnessed overt violations of our civil rights on a road named after the U.S. Constitution. Atlanta claims itself to be a civil rights hub, but it erases its own legacy when protests arise that confront the power of politicians and police. The police's violence against protestors today affirms our belief that Cop City must never be built."
Prior to the march, activists gathered in a local park, where speakers included community organizer Kamau Franklin and Tortuguita's parents.
"Now is not a time for cowardice. You are either with the oppressed or with the oppressors," Franklin told the crowd. "You cannot stand in the middle. You cannot be [on] both sides. You cannot close your eyes to the terror of policing that happens in this country and in this world. And you cannot deny and cannot be silent on the capitalist economics and the system that controls all of our people across the world."
"You're either with the colonialist or the colonized," he added. "So today when you march and demonstrate and conduct acts of civil disobedience… you are doing it with the oppressed people."
Cop City—which is funded by the private Atlanta Police Foundation and backed by major corporations including Amazon, Home Depot, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS—is being built on land stolen from the Muscogee people, many of whom were forced westward during the genocidal Trail of Tears period in the late 1830s.
Since Terán's killing, more than 40 Stop Cop City campaigners have been criminally charged as domestic terrorists, while over 60 activists have also been indicted under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—some for simply handing out fliers.
On Monday, Belkis Terán, Tortuguita's mother, said that "we are here to protect nature."
"To fight the police, we must be happy. And to be happy we must be strong," she added. "This is one step. We will continue."
Echoing Terán, Joel Paez, Tortuguita's father, told the crowd: "We are going to continue defending the forest. We are going to continue defending the legacy of Tortuguita. We are family. You are my family."
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