Solidarity is a verb. True solidarity comes from the ground up. This event centers autonomous organizing outside of instituutional frameworks. Let us come together to strengthen our networks of collective resistance and community care.
By 7 A.M on April 8th, the Phoenix Convention Center ballroom was beginning to fill up. Attendees included local law enforcement and top officials from an alphabet soup of agencies: the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
This week, Tucson saw two successive wins in the fight against state violence. Two demonstrations, organized in earnest but with cautious and liberal strategies, didn’t go quite as planned.
A comrade and I arrived at Arizona State University around 11 am on Friday, April 26, hoping to witness, support, and participate in the campus occupation in solidarity with the people of Gaza. We arrived to find a densely clustered collection of tents on the lawn of ASU’s Old Main building, surrounded by about 100 people chanting, singing, and drumming their expressions of solidarity with Palestinians and their condemnations of the Israeli state. Across from the protesters, blocking a lane of traffic on University Drive,was a similarly dense cluster of a dozen Tempe and ASU police cars. Their red and blue sirens flashed as the officers looked on at the nascent occupation, which they had failed to crush earlier that morning.