. HUMAN RIGHTS .

Information from the The Detention Watch Network

Detention Watch Network (DWN) members are working at the international, national, regional and local levels to fight against detention and deportation, while advocating for humane and just immigration policies.

According to the Network, as of March 14, 2025, the US immigration authorities are holding 46,269 people in detention.

DWN video

Network members include formerly detained people and their families, community and faith-based groups, legal service providers, lawyers, national and regional advocates and organizers, and law school clinics.

Learn more about our diverse organizational membership.

International Organizations

• Promotores de la Liberacion Migrante
• Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights

National Organizations

• American Civil Liberties Union
• American Friends Service Committee
• Amnesty International USA
• Asylum Seekers Sponsorship Project
• Black Diaspora Liberty Initiative Inc
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Community Justice Exchange
• Freedom For Immigrants
• Friends Committee on National Legislation
• Immigrant Defense Project
• Immigrant Legal Resource Center
• Innovation Law Lab
• Just Futures Law
• LatinoJustice
• Latinx Therapists Action Network
• National Immigration Law Center
• National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild
• National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• National Religious Campaign Against Torture
• Never Again Action
• Project ANAR
• Sheriffs for Trusting Communities
• Sisters of Mercy of the Americas
• Southeast Asia Resource Action Center
• Southern Poverty Law Center
• Tsuru For Solidarity
• UndocuBlack
• United Stateless

Regional Organizations

• Alagape
• Amica Center for Immigrant Rights
• Envision Freedom Fund
• First Friends of NJ & NY
• Immigration Services & Legal Advocacy
• SouthEast Dignity Not Detention Coalition
• Southeast Immigrant Rights Network (SEIRN)
• Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice (UUSJ)

State and Local Organizations

Alabama

• Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice

Arizona

• Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project
• Mariposas Sin Fronteras
• Trans Queer Pueblo – Semilla de Liberación

California

• Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus
• Asian Prisoner Support Committee
• California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance
• Immigrant Legal Defense
• Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity
• ÓRALE – Organizing Rooted in Abolition, Liberation & Empowerment
• Orange County Justice Fund
• NorCal Resist
• Public Counsel
• Union Trans-GNC

Colorado

• Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition
• Immigrant Freedom Fund
• Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network

Connecticut

• Make the Road Connecticut

Florida

• Florida Student Power Network
• University of Miami School of Law Immigration Project

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The struggle for human rights, is it gathering force in the USA?

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Georgia

• Community EsTr(El/La)
• El Refugio Ministry
• Georgia Detention Watch
• Team Libertad, a program of Inspiritus
• The ICEbreakers

Illinois

• Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Illinois Community for Displaced Immigrants
• Organized Communities Against Deportations
• Scott D. Pollock & Associates, P.C.

Indiana

• Mariposa Legal

Louisiana

• Home is Here NOLA
• Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention

Maine

• Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project

Massachusetts

• Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN)
• Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice of Western MA
• MIRA Coalition

Michigan

• No Detention Centers Michigan

Minnesota

• Minnesota Interfaith Coalition on Immigration
• Release MN8

Missouri

• Migrantes Unidos

New Jersey

• Make the Road New Jersey
• Movimento Cosecha New Jersey
• New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice
• Resistencia en Accion NJ

Nevada

• Make the Road Nevada

New Mexico

• NM Dream Team
• New Mexico Immigrant Law Center

New York

• The Bronx Defenders
• Families for Freedom
• Lighthouse Equality Advocacy Project
• Make the Road New York
• Mami Chelo Foundation
• South Bronx Mutual Aid
• Una carta salva una vida

North Carolina

• Carolina Migrant Network
• Comité popular somos Raleigh

Oregon

• PCC Legal Resource Center

Pennsylvania

• Free Migration Project
• Make the Road Pennsylvania
• Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition

Rhode Island

• Providence Youth Student Movement
• Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance

Tennessee

• Comunidades Unidas en Una Voz

Texas

• Grassroots Leadership
• Mano Amiga

Virginia

• La ColectiVA

Washington

• Jefferson County Immigrant Rights Advocates
• Northwest Immigrant Rights Project
• Washington Defender Association
• Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network

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. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article from Common Dreams (reprinted according to Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

In communities across the United States and also overseas, coordinated “Hands Off” protests are taking place far and wide Saturday [April 5] in the largest public rebuke yet to President Donald Trump and top henchman Elon Musk’s assault on the workings of the federal government and their program of economic sabotage that is sacrificing the needs of working families to authoritarianism and the greed of right-wing oligarchs.

Video of protest in New York City
(Click on image to enlarge)

Indivisible, one of the key organizing groups behind the day’s protests, said millions participated in more than 1,300 individual rallies as they demanded “an end to Trump’s authoritarian power grab” and condemning all those aiding and abetting it.

“We expected hundreds of thousands. But at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates,” the group said in a statement Saturday evening.

“This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office,” the group added. “And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy.”

According to the organizers’ call to action:

They’re dismantling our country. They’re looting our government. And they think we’ll just watch.

They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.

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The more than 1,300 “Hands Off!” demonstrations —organized by a large coalition of unions, progressive advocacy groups, and pro-democracy watchdogs—first kicked off Saturday in Europe, followed by East Coast communities in the U.S., and continued throughout the day at various times, depending on location. See here for a list of scheduled “Hands Off” events.

“The United States has a president, not a king,” said the progressive advocacy group People’s Action, one of the group’s involved in the actions, in an email to supporters Saturday morning just as protest events kicked off in hundreds of cities and communities. “Donald Trump has, by every measure, been working to make himself a king. He has become unanswerable to the courts, Congress, and the American people.”

In its Saturday evening statement, Indivisible said the actions far exceeded their expectations and should be seen as a turning point in the battle to stop Trump and his minions:

The Trump administration has spent its first 75 days in office trying to overwhelm us, to make us feel powerless, so that we will fall in line, accept the ransacking of our government, the raiding of our social safety net, and the dismantling of our democracy.

But not today. Today we’ve demonstrated a different path forward. We’ve modeled the courage and action that we want to see from our leaders, and showed all those who’ve been standing on the sidelines who share our values that they are not alone.

Citing the Republican president’s thirst for “power and greed,” People’s Action earlier explained why organized pressure must be built and sustained against the administration, especially at the conclusion of a week in which the global economy was spun into disarray by Trump’s tariff announcement, his attack on the rule of law continued, and the twice-elected president admitted he was “not joking” about the possibility of seeking a third term, which is barred by the constitution.

“He is destroying the economy with tariffs in order to pay for the tax cuts he wants to push through to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies,” warned People’s Action. “He has ordered the government to round up innocent people off of the streets and put them in detention centers without due process because they dared to speak out using their First Amendment rights. And he is not close to being done—by his own admission, he is planning to run for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow.”

The protest organizers warn that what Trump and Musk are up to “is not just corruption” and “not just mismanagement,” but something far more sinister.

“This is a hostile takeover,” they said, but vowed to fight back. “This is the moment where we say NO. No more looting, no more stealing, no more billionaires raiding our government while working people struggle to survive.”

(Editor’s note: This Common Dreams article includes many videos as well as the one cited on the image above. They include videos of protests in Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, ME, Buffalo, NY, St Paul, MN, Oakland County, MI, Columbus, OH, Colorado, Catawba County, NC, as well as London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels.)

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. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article by Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam in Waging Nonviolence

“Where is the resistance?” is a common refrain. Our research affirms that resistance is alive and well.

Many underestimate resistance to the current Republican administration because they view resistance through a narrow lens. The 2017 Women’s March in particular — immediate in its response, massive in its scope and size — may inform collective imaginations about what the beginning of a resistance movement should look like during Trump 2.0.

In fact, our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest. Although it is true that the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025 — held on Jan. 18 — saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.

(Click on image to enlarge)

In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. Coordinated days of protest such as March Fourth for Democracy (March 4), Stand Up for Science (March 7), rallies in recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8), and protests demanding the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil suggest little likelihood of these actions slowing down. These are all occurring in the background of a tidal wave of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s early moves.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Consider the protests against Tesla in response to Elon Musk firing federal workers and blocking federal funding. The multifaceted campaign has a quite specific goal: punish Tesla, Musk’s signature company. In addition to protests at Tesla showrooms and charging stations, people have also sold their Teslas. Others have called on mutual funds to divest from Tesla stock. The stock price has dropped significantly in the last month, perhaps in part due to Musk’s DOGE work.

This shift toward noncooperation over large-scale protests may be strategically wise. In 2017, many who attended Women’s Marches remained deeply engaged in civic activity, funneling into groups and coalitions like Indivisible, Swing Left, Run for Something, Fight Back Table and the like. People who aligned with Indivisible and groups like it were almost certainly responsible for saving the Affordable Care Act in 2017, largely through pressure on elected members of Congress. The MAGA faction had not yet consolidated control of the GOP, and within a year the “blue wave” flipped the House during the 2018 midterms. Under such conditions, protests and political pressure made a lot of strategic sense.

Those groups and others still remain active, but today’s political terrain may call for a more muscular movement strategy. The MAGA faction controls the GOP and enforces strict discipline among its members through fear and the threat of a well-funded Republican primary opponent in the next election. The Supreme Court majority is solidly on the right. Elected GOP officials are abandoning town halls and discouraging constituents from calling their offices. Street protests endure but are increasingly surveilled and high-risk, as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil suggests. Uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will ignore the First Amendment and weaponize the government to persecute political oppositionists looms large.

In the face of such changes, the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. Calling in sick from work or school, refusing to buy and stay-at-home demonstrations are notoriously difficult to police. Last month, an inestimable number of people participated in such actions to highlight a Day Without Immigrants. The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate.

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Indeed, the diversification of resistance methods puts the United States on a similar trajectory to many democracy movements of the past. In anti-authoritarian movements of the 20th century, economic noncooperation — more so than protest alone — was the coordinated activity that split elites and made way for democratic breakthroughs. In apartheid South Africa, it was the enormous economic pressure — through boycotts of white-owned businesses, general strikes, divestments and capital flight — that brought the white supremacist National Party to heel and elevated reformers who were willing to do business with Nelson Mandela and the ANC. In communist Poland, it was the ability of trade unionists to credibly call for general strikes (and credibly call off such strikes) that gave the Solidarity movement the leverage to negotiate a peaceful democratic transition. Gandhi’s noncooperation campaigns in India made the colony ungovernable by British colonial authorities.

And when the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark in the 1940s, noncooperation was near-total. No one remembered how to run the railroad. Teachers had to leave school early to tend to their gardens. Factory workers slowed down or stopped production altogether. Danes obscured the identities of their Jewish neighbors, gave them temporary haven, and secured their passage through fishing boats to neutral territory, saving thousands of lives.

Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Vecerni Prah published “10 commandments,” writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.” These oppositional habits of thinking and practice, nurtured over two decades through underground popular schools, art, literature and outlawed news sources, ultimately paved the way for the Velvet Revolution.

Indeed, the United States has its own storied history of resisting authoritarianism through noncooperation. Pro-independence colonists living under the British crown organized campaigns to refuse to buy or consume British goods; refuse to abide by laws requiring colonists to export raw materials to Britain; refuse to serve on juries under crown-appointed judges; and develop alternative institutions including the Continental Congress itself. The Boston Tea Party was a defiant act of noncooperation — a refusal to import, consume or pay taxes on the crown’s tea. In 1815, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson of his hope that historians would recall those acts of noncooperation — and not the war of independence — as “the revolution,” that “was in the minds of the people.”

Much later, during the civil rights movement, desegregation was first tangibly achieved in large part through noncooperation campaigns like the courageous school attendance by the Little Rock Nine, the Montgomery bus boycotts, the lunch counter sit-ins and boycotts of businesses in Nashville and elsewhere, strikes among sanitation workers in Memphis, and other acts of refusal to abide by the Jim Crow system of racial segregation. These took place in combination with marches and demonstrations that were powerful and dramatic displays of the moral power of the movement, and legal action that demanded the government abide by its own Constitution.

That Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science and potency of noncooperation — combined with a robust protest capacity and legal action — shows that resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started.

Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium. Chenoweth is the author of “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know” and co-author of “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.”

Jeremy Pressman

Jeremy Pressman is a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium. His most recent book is “The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force.”

Soha Hammam

Soha Hammam is a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Nonviolent Action Lab, where she researches political mobilization and law enforcement responses across the U.S. She was previously a Democracy Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a Peace Scholar Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.

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