Over the last seven months, the Trump administration has taken sweeping measures to further detain, deport, and destroy the lives of immigrants. It’s an effort that has resulted not just in the bombastic cruelty of sending hundreds of detainees to a notorious El Salvador prison or building a detention center in the alligator-and python-infested swamplands of Florida, but also in a steep increase in immigrations arrests across the country (in Arizona, they’re up 113% since the inauguration). In June, in response to a government call for and subsequent spike in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and kidnappings, the people of Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Austin, Tucson, and other cities across the country protested and rioted on behalf of themselves and their families, friends, and neighbors. Despite the fierce commitment and bravery of those in the streets, the government’s mass deportation efforts are likely to only accelerate. As we seek ways to respond to these ongoing threats, we can look to—among other examples—rapid response networks, which have long existed in cities across the country, including Tucson.
What follows is an interview conducted by Living & Fighting with a member of the Tucson Community Rapid Response Network. In this interview, they discuss the history the network, what it’s accomplished and the challenges it’s faced, and what principled community response to deportations could look like in the coming months and years.
What is the Rapid Response Network? What does the group do?
The Tucson Community Rapid Response Network is a group of people who meet regularly to maintain a rapid response hotline and recruit people as observers. The hotline is for immigration enforcement activity that is known to be happening in Tucson. And the idea is that if somebody is being targeted by Border Patrol or ICE and they're worried about being detained, or if somebody witnesses Border Patrol or ICE harassing, detaining, or otherwise doing immigration enforcement in Tucson, they can call the hotline. An alert goes out to a list of trusted, vetted observers and the observers go out to be a supportive presence for whoever is being targeted in the community. And then the person who is being targeted by ICE or Border Patrol can have somebody on their side present with them on what might be a day that is drastically affecting their life. Maybe one of the worst days of their lives if they're going to be detained or harassed or basically any of the things that Border Patrol and ICE does.
Observers document what Border Patrol and ICE are doing by filming it, taking notes about it, photographing it. They can do a quick exchange of information with the person who is being targeted. That might mean helping them remember or know what some of their legal rights are. It might be trying to connect them with somebody else by asking, “Hey, do you want me to call someone for you? If you are detained, do you want me to take down your name and date of birth so that we can track you once you get inside?”
At the same time, those things do not address the heart of the problem, which is that we don't want ICE and Border Patrol enforcing immigration law or doing whatever else they do. We don't just want the people to be detained and deported while knowing their rights or while feeling a supportive community presence, we don't want them to be detained and deported in the first place.
Rapid Response Tucson also does some other things like Know Your Rights workshops, and we’ve given workshops to talk to people about the network. And we have maintained the hotline even at times when we were not maintaining an active observer list and going out on lots of calls. So we've answered many, many phone calls and just ended up giving advice to people who, for example, have a loved one who's detained, and they need help navigating the system. Or have a loved one who's gone missing, and they think they might be detained.
Since the beginning, there have also been ancillary projects to rapid response that have formed. Once we saw that this project was bringing us into contact with people who had to navigate the immigration enforcement system, we realized that there was a use for something that we broadly call accompaniment, which is people going along with people to things like court dates or to check-ins at the ICE office if, for example, they have an active case and they're required to do certain things but they want people with them. When I say helping people navigate the system, examples of that would be: How do you find out which detention facility your loved one is in? How do you request a bail hearing when your loved one is in immigration detention? How do you prepare properly for that hearing? Contact information for search and rescue groups, if someone's gone missing in the desert. Contact information for the consulates of countries of origin for immigrants that might have more updated information about their country's citizens who are detained in the US, etcetera.
One approach we are experimenting with doing now is putting together shifts where observers in the network drive around and hang out in areas where a lot of immigration enforcement has been seen in the past and keep an eye out and are ready to respond to anything happening in that area. While they're doing that, maybe they hand out rapid response cards with the hotline number on it to try to spread the knowledge of the network within the community.
What are some high points of the Tucson Rapid Response Network's history or moments you're particularly proud of and want to point out?
High points have included catching a Tucson Police Department officer who called Border Patrol on his cell phone. He was investigating some criminal matter at a motel in town and he called Border Patrol, I guess because he had some intel that the person he was about to arrest was undocumented. We filmed that, we kind of pressured him into admitting that on camera, and then later we found out he got disciplined by his department or whatever.
Another big highlight for me, and I guess this will be illustrative of a bigger theme I would like to point out to people about projects like Tucson Rapid Response, which is that there's always the formal project, and then there's the systems of connection that emerge as people undertake the formal project. The formal project was maintaining the hotline, going out on calls, but a lot of the times the calls wouldn't come in through the hotline, they would come in through this informal network, and now there were more people connected to each other, and so people would show up for those things. And similarly, people who were adjacent to rapid response helped put together this ICE Out of the Pima County Jail campaign in 2018. ICE Out of Pima County Jail did this march down to the Pima County Jail and shut down the driveways there at shift change, so that employees were having a really hard time getting in and out of work. People were standing in front of cars and dancing around, and people brought their kids, and there were people of various immigration statuses there, and it was fun and helped us pressure this particular policy point that ICE had a desk in the Pima County Jail, which they then later did revoke, although I think they said they did it for different reasons.
There was only one rapid response call where something conflictual developed in the first three years that we were doing it, in 2018 or 2019. I believe the Department of Public Safety, the troopers who in Tucson mostly patrol the highway, pulled over a family and the pretense was that their windows were too tinted and they called Border Patrol on the family. It was a father, a mother, and a child. This traffic stop happened close to the Southside Presbyterian Church and close to the Southside Worker Center, another organization that has been around for a while that has contributed to the Rapid Response Tucson project and supported it from the beginning. There was a rapid response call about this traffic stop and the presence of Border Patrol there, and people who were around the church heard about it and came out. So for one of the only times in responding to these alerts, there was actually a small crowd of people gathered, and people were yelling at the Border Patrol, people were live streaming what was happening, and there was some back and forth with the family. People seeing this child in the back of the Border Patrol truck were particularly incensed and they asked the family members, “Hey, would you want somebody to climb under the car to try to prevent the detention? and they said, “Well, if it will help our case” and they said to them, “Well, we don't know if it will help your case,” but it seemed like they were open to it or in support of it. So someone climbed under the Border Patrol vehicle and hung out there for a while. Border Patrol initially thought that they had locked themselves to the bottom of the vehicle, which in retrospect they said they wished they had really played that up to delay them further. They waited for a bunch of other law enforcement agencies to arrive as RR tried to gather as many people as they could to the scene, but Border Patrol and local law enforcement eventually removed the person from under the vehicle and arrested them, and did detain the family and then the father was eventually deported. I don't remember the family’s overall outcome that came to the awareness of the rapid response network people, but the protestor wasn't charged with anything because the prosecutor declined to press charges.
It's something that people have done before in Tucson. I heard about people doing it another time years before, maybe in the SB 1070 era, when there was an arrest of someone at the Southside Presbyterian Church while there was a meeting ongoing and there were a bunch of people that came out and tried to block it. And there was also some kind of direct action at some point where people went to the courthouses and locked themselves to the deportation buses that were part of Operation Streamline, which is this mass sentencing immigration court process that they started in 2005 to increase deportations. So there are these moments of planned intentional obstruction of the physical act of detention, and then less planned but still pretty intentional obstruction by people who expect to be able to get out of jail.
Another high point for the network was seeing how just working together on the project over the years really connected us. Somebody in the network who has been a major contributor to it through the years was detained by immigration. That person spent months in immigration detention. We really showed up for our friend in detention and markedly helped him get out sooner on bail than he otherwise would have, as well as helped him stay connected to his family and stuff like that.
How does the Rapid Response Network fit into larger struggles against Border Patrol, ICE and the existence of borders?
By bringing people to the scene of ICE and Border Patrol enforcement, we introduce an element that doesn't currently exist in our collective consciousness or the public perception of how this battle over immigration can happen, and different things could come from that: People’s attitudes may change as the mechanisms of enforcement become more visible. People may also at some point step in to protect their neighbors directly; they may take someone out of ICE’s hands, and this may lead to conflict in the streets and cycles of repression and greater gatherings of people in resistance.
Even if that doesn't happen through a dramatic conflict where somebody is physically de-arrested or there's literal physical opposition to ICE and Border Patrol, there is the idea that there is a coalition of people who represent different sections of Tucson society through their various identities and outlooks, and they're meeting together regularly to take action on their opposition to borders. So I think that that group of people can become a center of a tendency within Tucson more broadly that imagines and hopes for a life without immigration enforcement. My hope is that Rapid Response Tucson will continue to build those relationships and articulate that vision more and more, which will attract people to that vision and build the movement in the broadest sense.
This is how I see the project, which may be slightly different from others in the group—like I said, it's very diverse outlooks and anything I say about the goals of the group are filtered through my voice—something I want us to do together is build collective political analysis and come to a point where we can say more clearly and more incisively, “What are the goals of the group?” We have mostly relied in the past on knowing more or less that we were all on the same side. We haven't had a lot of broader political conversations.
How did the network get started?
This rapid response network started in late 2016 or early 2017, and there were two things that led to its formation directly. One was an incident that happened in Tucson where someone plugged into the broad and long-standing network of anti-border activists in Tucson noticed a lot of Border Patrol driving around this one neighborhood, in the area of one of the midtown hospitals. Border Patrol seemed to be conducting a search of that neighborhood, which is quite unusual in a random neighborhood in Tucson, especially in that part of town. So this person sent out a message over a big text thread and a bunch of people showed up, friends, I don't know, I guess this was like a bunch of punks on a text thread. Maybe people connected to No More Deaths. But people showed up and went to check out what was happening with Border Patrol in this neighborhood and of course hoped that their presence there would somehow discourage Border Patrol's presence.
It seemed like Border Patrol were staging out of this one small parking lot at the hospital. People went in and asked the hospital employees what they were doing there, and we were able to ascertain that that’s when the hospital realized that it was drawing attention, the fact that Border Patrol was doing some operation from their parking lot. Oh, you know what it was? I think the Tucson Police Department had their own little parking lot outside of the hospital that Border Patrol was using, and then it was the Tucson Police Department officers who were like, “oh people are asking about this,” and they asked the Border Patrol agents to leave because their presence there was drawing a lot of attention in the form of all these punks showing up to the neighborhood and driving around.
That raises one of the key tensions which has contributed to the existence of a rapid response network: the controversial nature of the collaboration between local law enforcement, Tucson Police Department especially, and Border Patrol and ICE agents. One of the predecessors of this rapid response movement is a group called Yo Soy Testigo which, to my knowledge, a couple groups were involved in forming, including the Derechos Humanos, which is still an active group, and a small media company called Pan Left Productions. They were active in 2010, so in a previous era, around the time when the law SB 1070 was passed. People called it the “show me your papers” law, because it was an anti-immigrant law that was in part about enabling local law enforcement to act as border cops, and part of that law was struck down in the courts. But Yo Soy Testigo was a network where people did a similar thing of going out and filming Border Patrol activity in Tucson, and particularly highlighting the collaboration between local police and Border Patrol. I'm not sure whether at the time those police departments, Tucson Police Department, maybe Pima County Sheriff, had committed publicly to not collaborate, and so what the activists were doing was exposing their collaboration, or exposing their non-compliance with their own policies, or maybe it was just that Yo Soy Testigo knew that the people of Tucson didn't want Border Patrol to be enabled by the police departments. In either case, I think that the people who were involved in that felt it was effective at bringing more public attention to that collaboration and getting stronger commitments from the local police and local officials to avoid that kind of collaboration.
So that incident at the hospital inspired the people who started the rapid response network because they felt like their presence in that neighborhood had frustrated Border Patrol and made it more difficult for them to conduct their operations. I don't think that the Border Patrol search was successful that night. And the other major factor in the formation of the network was the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and all this conversation happening among anti-border activists in Tucson and the conversation happening in American society more generally about how horrible the prospect of Donald Trump's immigration enforcement regime was.
I don't feel like I'm the best person to paint an overall picture of that moment, so I'll just share my memory of it, which is I remember big meetings happening where hundreds of people showed up all wanting to be part of some kind of resistance, and the sort of phrases of people being rounded up, people being put in camps, mass deportations, that sort of thing we were all fearing, and then one common thing that people were saying was either, “I would put my body on the line to prevent that,” or, “people should put their bodies on the line to prevent that.” Of course, those are very different ideas, but that was the sentiment.
So a coalition formed of various pre-existing groups that created the Tucson Community Rapid Response Network, and those groups included L.U.P.E, Lucha Unida de Padres y Estudiantes—the United Struggle of Parents and Students, which was a mixed status group of young activists—Tucson Showing up for Racial Justice (Tucson SURJ), and a group called Paisanos Unidos, which was present at the beginning and which would become the main partner in the group of organizations that was shepherding rapid response. There was definitely a No More Deaths contingent, and also Scholarships AZ and the Samaritans. They all had different roles in the landscape of anti-border activism, and a lot of the people involved in them had been working in those projects for years in Tucson. Scholarships AZ supports undocumented students. Tucson SURJ is does an allyship and accompliceship thing, and No More Deaths does their direct aid in the desert, as well as putting work into other projects in Tucson. And the Samaritans also do humanitarian aid in the desert, and they tend to be older people connected to churches, like retiree age people. It was a very diverse coalition in terms of political outlook, some anarchists, progressives, socialists. And along with that, people with different interests: people more interested in direct action, or more conflictual struggle, people more interested in documentation or potential legal contests, or publicity and journalism, or people interested in advocating to local politicians. And then also a very diverse group in terms of the demographics: retiree age people, young people, people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, US citizens, undocumented people. I had just moved to Tucson and joined in a, “well, I'm looking for something to plug into in town,” kind of way.
What are some challenges that the RRN has faced? How has the RRN worked to overcome these challenges?
There have been so many challenges. One is the logistics of running a hotline where the people answering it have to be bilingual. And do you do shifts? Do you do, like, it rings everybody's phone at once? And paying for a phone service that will provide you with that kind of system, which is what we ended up doing after originally coming up with some plan to pass a burner phone around. Challenges because we're trying to do a project that relies on fast communication and technology, and getting people sorted out with the technology that they need to contribute to the project.
We've had problems with state surveillance. On our initial text loop, you could become an observer by texting a particular number. We tried to design it in an anonymous way because we're always aware of the risk of repression or reprisals by law enforcement. But yeah, the initial system had hundreds of observers on there. And then one day somebody was present at a sheriff's stop and overheard them saying, "Oh, those rapid response people are on their way," indicating that somebody had infiltrated and was passing along when alerts went out to the Sheriff's Department. So we ended up burning that whole structure and starting again.
Another important challenge is that the network is structured around this particular pattern of action, of alerts and responses where people are in the group, but they're not regularly interacting with each other. That creates an issue of alienation, of people not forming relationships and not building political analysis together. And that makes people far less likely to participate or respond to these alerts. So one of the things that we're trying to do to overcome that is organize gatherings in person, potlucks, or at least trainings where people will be able to come together and do a mixture of socializing and talking about the project. That's something that we should have done more of and should be doing more of than we are right now.
Another major challenge—which I have come back to many times and has sometimes made me feel like this general project is not a good model, which I continue to go back and forth on—is that it's really hard to get people to these incidents fast enough to have a significant impact on them, or even to do some of those basic kinds of things like documenting collaboration, documenting how the agents are handling it, as well as offering some kind of concrete help to the person who's being detained. Part of that is because apparently back in the day these stops used to take a long time, like if law enforcement was gonna call Border Patrol they'd be standing around for a while. Border Patrol would show up, they're chatting or whatever, or they are taking the time to do whatever paperwork they have to do. Then at some point they realized that observers were showing up and so they started doing things more quickly and streamlined that process, so sometimes it'll just take ten or fifteen minutes. So how can we either offer help or how can we create a more conflictual situation when it’s happening so fast? Because ideally, there would be twenty people gathered around these agents as they're trying to get their arrest done. And there would be more potential for things to happen.
Has the Rapid Response Network’s approach had to change under the current administration/political context? If so, how?
We were basically doing social work on the hotline from late 2020 through 2024: basically the network started functioning like an advice or social assistance hotline. That could be because of a combination of both reality and perception of immigration enforcement being less intense and also people not having the capacity for it during COVID. We definitely made efforts to keep it going during COVID, especially when it was first beginning, and then those efforts kind of petered out as we ran up against a bunch of things, especially the alienation factor. I think people need to see each other in person and talk to each other regularly to motivate people to show up for pretty much anything, but especially for something that is inherently stressful and scary and most likely just going to expose you to other people's trauma. Then when Trump was elected again and people got a sense that immigration enforcement was going to be even more intense this time and he was, you know, running even harder on his brand of fascism, then people got active again and the observing, which had pretty much fallen off entirely, sending out alerts and distributing the hotline cards with the number, that all started again. We were able to jump in pretty quickly and get the observer system running again, which hopefully will serve us well in the coming months.
Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share with folks hoping to start RRN networks in their cities and regions?
For people who are looking to start rapid response networks in their cities and regions, hopefully just sketching out what it is that Rapid Response Tucson has done and does is the most helpful thing. My advice to people is the points that I focused on. Building relationships through the activity, not letting the potentially somewhat alienating form of the activity get in the way of the really valuable aspects of working on something together. I would emphasize the value of working with others across demographic and ideological lines. And that brings us into this whole discourse that all of us on the left, we've been driving each other crazy with these discourses of how do we build coalitions across identity. You know, I am white person from a lot of privilege. I'm up there in the privilege-by-identity hierarchy and I just feel like I want people to stay grounded in their best social instincts around developing relationships and working in coalition. Avoid thinking that because of the huge gaps in experience that this segregated and stratified society creates between you, you're gonna have to construct, through ideology, a way of relating to people that's so different from whatever your best current way of relating and maintaining working relationships with people is. One approach that works well for me is focusing on the project and really allowing things to develop over time: allowing your actions to speak for you over time can build so much trust, sometimes even across those giant rifts. For me it's been a process of questioning instincts that tell me, “Oh, maybe I don't have to be in relationship with these people” when I'm thinking about how different we are.
One strain of this discourse is also about ideology. We classify people and get really intense about people's ideology. People let their anxiety over how complicated relationships will get speak very loudly to them, and maybe they tell themselves something like, “Oh, these aren't the people that I need to be in coalition with.” The people around you that you are capable of working on a project with are probably the people that you need to be in coalition with, unless you can think of some other way to meet some other people pretty soon. And so not letting anxiety over how complicated relationships will be steer you away from building relationships with the people at hand.
Images: Adrian O'Farrill & Paul Ingram