My colleague and friend Sonali Kolhatkar has a new book entitled Breaking ICE: Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. From the publishers' description:
“In Breaking ICE, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents her conversations with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars on the frontlines of the fight. Through their courageous stories, Kolhatkar documents the impact of ICE violence, workplace raids, mass surveillance, and intimidation tactics, and how communities from Maine to California are organizing for a better world.”
Her introduction is also excellent! She lays out today’s stark realities under Donald Trump but she is also unsparing in her critiques of past presidents from both parties wherever they are warranted.
Please give the interview a listen. A transcript (lightly edited) is below. There's more info about the book here and more about Sonali and her work here.
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Transcript
Richard Eskow: Sonali has a new book out and I’m partway through it now. Her introduction is great. It’s called Breaking ICE, subtitled Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. I have to look down, sorry for that. So first of all, Sonali, as always, welcome back.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you, Richard.
Richard Eskow: And congratulations on the book. It’s really a great achievement. You interview a lot of great people in the book. And as I said, your introduction to it is also really excellent. So I guess we’ll start with the obvious, even though I suspect I know the answer. What was the inspiration for writing this book?
Sonali Kolhatkar: Well, I had been covering ICE raids since the Trump administration took power for a second time. Especially around last June, June 2025, I was in Los Angeles doing street interviews as LA was raided by ICE agents. I interviewed folks from North Carolina and Georgia, Chicago and Minneapolis. And around January of this year, when everything, especially in Minneapolis, was exploding, I did an interview with a historian named Yohuru Williams, who has been on the show frequently.
He’s based in Minnesota, and he helped put it into historical context. Seven Stories saw that interview. My longtime editor there, Greg Ruggiero, saw it and asked me, do you have more of these? Because if we could put these interviews together and fast-track it, we could put together a really important book, a book that could capture this very historical moment that we’re in and also be a handbook for how people might engage in community defense against ICE.
And I was like, yes, I think I have a few interviews. And I ended up with nearly 20 interviews. I did a few extra interviews to supplement those I’d already done, where I thought we needed some extra framing. And basically, Greg was like, oh, and can you fast-track it?
Basically, could you put it together in six weeks so that we can have it published within a few months? And so I don’t know what possessed me to say yes, but I did. And the book is in two parts. I deliberately curated it. I really worked on how to create a through line, a flow. And so the first part of the book is people you may never have heard of, community activists, frontline people who do the hard work of figuring out how to distribute Know Your Rights cards, how to follow ICE agents and document them and alert the community, and how to protect the community.
Very nuts-and-bolts tactics. Some of the things that were in common, some of the things that were unique, in rural parts of the country and urban parts of the country. And then the second half is the storytellers, the academics, the historians, those people who can put it into a broader context, who can explain this moment that we’re in in a global framework, in a historic framework, in a framework around storytelling and how we move forward, and how we’ve come from history.
And so that is people like Robin D. G. Kelley and Josefina López and Ibram X. Kendi, Luis Rodríguez, Kent Wong, et cetera. And then I wrote a framing essay to try to tie it all together. And also, I’m an immigrant. I was born an immigrant. I’ve been in this country as an immigrant for 30-plus years.
And so I have a lot of personal relation to it. I wanted to really put together the framing around the post-9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria as the beginning of this latest chapter of anti-immigrant attacks. This country’s history is rife with differing and constantly changing notions of who gets to belong. This particular chapter we’re in, I trace it back to the months after the September 11th attacks.
Richard Eskow: And I appreciate that you did that because there’s a tendency to have a very short memory span sometimes in this country, even among progressives, when we talk about the immigration issue. So we need to understand that it’s been a long time coming and that, in fact, ICE didn’t even exist until the response to September 11th.
We had other ways of handling immigration, and other less-than-honorable ways we’ve handled immigration throughout the history of this country. But ICE itself is a product of 9/11. So you mentioned that the book, besides capturing the historical moment, also serves as a handbook, which it certainly does. I think there’s a third valuable service it provides, if I may, which is: nothing succeeds like success.
And the stories it tells of successful resistance to what seems like absolutely overwhelming force on the part of ICE. You point out in your introduction that ICE has more funding than most, virtually all, of the world’s armies. So when ICE descends on a city like Minneapolis or the countryside in North Carolina, wherever it may be, it feels like too much force for people to resist.
And so I think it also has that motivating factor of saying, no, we can fight back against this. We have, we are, we will. Here are some pointers on how to do it. So I appreciated that aspect of the book a lot.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Yeah, because the mainstream media isn’t going to tell these stories, right? The fact that a community organization might be successful in driving ICE out might be a footnote in a larger story. It’s not going to be a headline. And when we consume this news of what has been happening over the past year and a half, it’s dominated by the ways in which we are being bludgeoned, dominated by the ways in which we’re being terrorized and beaten down.
And constant exposure to that really can convince us that nothing we do matters, when actually it was the opposite. So much of people’s actions had an impact and mattered, and countless numbers of people were saved from ICE’s clutches. Far too many weren’t. But I think it’s so important for us to learn from these stories, to get the sense that when you fight, you win.
When you stand up for people, you will have some success. You may not succeed all the time, but you figure out what you succeed at and what you don’t. And that was so important. Ron Gochez, who’s one of the activists that I interviewed, is from Los Angeles. He helped start the Community Self-Defense Coalition in LA and heads this organization called Unión del Barrio.
And he pointed out how the enormous amount of resources that ICE and the government spent on going after undocumented immigrants in LA, in the end, over this two-month period last summer, they arrested less than 1 percent of the estimated undocumented population. So this was important context. It meant that what people did worked, and it meant that those same tactics, or some version of them, can be applied to the next place that ICE shows up, and that people didn’t just roll over.
They fought back, right? And that was so important to capture.
Richard Eskow: And you mentioned, when you were talking about how the book came together, that you’d interviewed a lot of people about this topic on your show, your show being Rising Up with Sonali. And so I assume most of these interviews were already done. You went back and edited them. Did any kinds of patterns emerge to you as you edited them and brought them together that maybe weren’t initially evident when you were doing the interviews in real time, as the events were happening and all of that?
Sonali Kolhatkar: The patterns were that some of the same kinds of things worked in a lot of urban centers. So you could apply Chicago’s tactics to Minneapolis because there were some similarities in culture, but mostly in geography. But then places like Maine, which is very rural and spread out, and places like Georgia, where the Hyundai factory or plant was raided, had to adapt.
And their way of adaptation was quite unique because they had to contend with winter, much harsher winters. That was another thing.
Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.
Sonali Kolhatkar: They also had to contend with the fact that there weren’t big congregations of people, and so small groups of people had a bigger impact. The other thing that was really interesting was the way in which multiracial organizing happened differently in different places. So, for example, in Maine, the majority of Maine’s immigrants are from African nations, very different and newer immigrants, as opposed to LA, which has multigenerational families with mixed status, people who have been here largely from Central America and Mexico for 20, 30, 40 years who are undocumented.
So they’ve lived in this country for a very long time. Such different things were emerging. And yet one of the through lines that came about was this repeated notion that the government... no one’s coming to save us. We can’t call 911 and have cops save us because cops are part of the problem.
No one’s coming to save us. Even our local city council people have very limited resources. Only we can save ourselves. And that was such an important and very empowering message that I saw coming up over and over again. And of course, here in LA, the day laborers have their saying, which applies: only the people can save the people.
So that kept coming up. The other thing that I noticed was that people were building on the racial justice movements of 2020. They were building on networks that had formed, especially in places like Minneapolis. Those people who came and marched in the George Floyd protests had been there before, not that long ago.
So that was something really interesting that people were applying. And the other thing was that existing organizations were best poised to take on what was happening. It’s hard to build something brand new in the middle of a crisis.
Richard Eskow: Right?
Sonali Kolhatkar: You scramble. You have to figure out how to organize. And so the places where they had the greatest success were places where people had preexisting organized resistance that went back years, sometimes decades, and then mobilized the networks that they’d already built. So there were some really interesting common threads that jumped out at me.
I learned so much from these people that I had interviewed.
Richard Eskow: So I was struck in particular by the mention in the book of the fact that the Minneapolis resistance was able to build on the Black Lives Matter organizing that had been done during Black Lives Matter. That was particularly striking. And it makes me think, Sonali, of the fact that I interviewed the author of a book called 1999 about the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle.
And he talked about how those demonstrations, which had such a global impact, were also built on decades of organizing. So in a sense, it seems to be that when we’re in a crisis, whether it’s the ICE invasion of our city or town, or whether it’s Black Lives Matter or anything else, when we’re in the moment, it’s actually a good time to stop and look around and see: what channels have already been dug?
What institutions are in place that might be adapted to this purpose? Does that make sense? I think it’s what you’re saying, right?
Sonali Kolhatkar: Yes, exactly. There are a lot of things that can be adapted. One of the most moving parts of the stories that I learned and heard was how people were using things that they learned during the civil rights movement. Song, the power of song.
I think that was North Carolina, where Nikki Marín Baena told me that to bring the temperature down, they realized that people would hold hands and start singing civil rights-era songs. And I think people like Kent Wong, who I interviewed in one of his last interviews, he was somebody who cut his teeth during the civil rights movement, worked in the United Farm Workers boycott movement, and worked with Reverend James Lawson.
So that insight, that background, that historic analysis, I think, was very, very important because, again, we don’t just do activism in vacuums. We build on the work of our elders and our predecessors and our ancestors. And this movement is showing that. I think now the scary question is how to respond to ICE’s different tactics.
How to respond to the fact that they have changed the way they are attacking communities. The numbers of people they’re arresting are going up, and their tactics are not garnering as many headlines. So it’s almost more dangerous now.
Richard Eskow: One of the dimensions that was in my mind going through the book was, for example, one of your interviews is entitled, let me get it right, it’s with Yohuru Williams, “From George Floyd to Alex Pretti,” if I’m pronouncing Pretti right, about Minneapolis’s fight. As ICE oppression intensified, they even became unable to avoid killing white people.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Right.
Richard Eskow: And we had Robin, is it? The woman who was killed.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Renée Good.
Richard Eskow: Renée Good. I was going to say Robin Good. And we had Alex Pretti. And two things about it struck me as relevant to your book, because I am of that population that you rightfully describe in the introduction as the only remaining privileged population, a privilege which is conditional, we now know, but a privilege nonetheless. It strikes me that this is largely a movement of people of color.
And as these acts of violence show their willingness to take extreme measures against white people, too, who get on the wrong side of it, whether it’s killing Renée Good and Alex Pretti, whether it’s the horrific sentences you reported on recently for the protesters in the... well, the Golden Gate case was one.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Texas. Yeah, the Perry—
Richard Eskow: There’s the Texas one, which is the really terrible one. It seems to me that one of the services works like yours can provide is that the white population has a lot to learn from the Black and brown people of this country who’ve been through so much more and who have experience and leadership to offer. Rather than just getting paralyzed in terror: well, I’d like to protest Palestine, but I don’t want to go to jail for 35 years on a terrorism charge.
Well, maybe take a look at what the Black and brown people of this country have been through. Ask them how they deal with it. Does that make sense?
Sonali Kolhatkar: Yeah. That is reminding me of the fact that there were a lot of folks who, and you and I have talked about this before, when the ICE raids happened, were like, how can we just allow masked armed thugs to roam unaccountably through our communities? Why aren’t the cops doing something about it?
And that revealed an ignorance about who cops terrorize, right? There’s such a racial divide between the people who are policed most harshly and disproportionately and people who feel that police keep them safe because it’s really them who the police are sort of charged with protecting. And so it revealed this kind of ignorant attitude about what policing is.
And it was very important for me to bring this issue up over and over again, that armed enforcement has always gone after non-whites, and poor whites to some extent, but generally non-whites throughout the history of this country. And if we actually want to live in a country where everybody thrives, if we take money out of policing, any kind of policing, city policing to federal policing, and put it into the things that keep all of us safe, we will all be better off.
And this is an abolitionist idea that Black abolitionists and Black-led abolition movements have been putting out over and over again. And I think the greatest promise for a multiracial democracy is this kind of framework where we can learn from the vision of people who’ve been the most policed, the most harshly policed.
And all of us will benefit, all of us except the billionaires and the politicians who back them. We all benefit when we take money out of ICE and put it back into the things that were stripped for ICE, like food stamps, like Medicare, Medicaid.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Right? We will have money for Medicare for All if we want it, and we may have less money for the US military, which is perfectly fine. And that is something that Black and brown activists have been saying for generations.
Richard Eskow: One of the things that the book strikes well, I think, and it’s a tough thing to balance in my experience, is the long context of racism and xenophobia in this country and the totalitarian aspects of it with the rather startlingly unique stylistic differences, at least, that Donald Trump represents. But it’s important to have the broader context.
So in that sense, I wanted, first of all, to understand that this has been going on for a long time. I was glad you mentioned George W. Bush’s role in all of this, Obama’s role. I remember during Obama’s presidency compiling all the statistics on deportations and being absolutely shocked at how he had accelerated them.
As you mentioned, they were calling him deporter-in-chief at one point. Trump is taking it to his own unique levels. But one of those interviews that struck me was with Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote the book How to Be an Antiracist, on the Great Replacement Theory. This didn’t just pop out of nowhere.
It isn’t new. It isn’t unique to the United States. And how did that fit into your thinking about all of this? Because that seems to me to be driving some of the extremist views that are fueling the MAGA movement.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Yes, absolutely. The Great Replacement Theory, which Ibram X. Kendi writes about in his own book, Chain of Ideas, which I highly recommend, is such an important part of this conversation because he is putting it into global context. You can trace direct lines between the MAGA approach to white supremacy and Hitler’s project, and back to the project of enslavement and settler colonialism in the United States.
And there are many modern manifestations of it today, including in places like Chile, in France. And the perpetrators of this agenda meet very openly, have conferences, exchange ideas, have their ideas put out in things like Project 2025. And also, it’s so important that we acknowledge that liberal politicians, instead of taking a stand, instead of actually articulating that they’re for justice, keep trying to appease that right-wing racist extremist ideology.
So Obama did this, and Biden did this. Biden certainly undid a lot of things that Trump did in his first term, including removing the green card ban, which enabled my parents to be able to come here and live with me so I could take care of them. And so thank goodness for that little respite between Trump 1 and Trump 2 for many immigrants.
But he still doubled down on border rhetoric and didn’t completely undo some of Trump’s worst excesses. Instead, he could have gone a completely different way. So what happened was that in Biden’s last year in office, Trump, who was pushing for reelection, spent 2024 beating the anti-immigrant drum so loudly and not being opposed effectively enough by his opponents, by Kamala Harris, for example.
And so you saw public opinion shift: oh yeah, we need more immigration enforcement. And then Trump overplayed his hand, and now public opinion has shifted again, where people are like, oh no, that’s not what we want. One of the things that just keeps coming up for me is how malleable, sadly, public opinion is.
We’re so susceptible as a society to propaganda, and we really have to do better. And we need leaders who’ll do better, right? So we need to demand from anybody who’s running in 2028 that you don’t get to just be against Trump. You have to be against everything he stands for and say what you’re going to do instead, build up that better vision for a better world.
Richard Eskow: And I think that’s a perfect example in terms of public consciousness. If one person, or one side, is advocating forceful ideas, including xenophobia, racism, hatred of immigrants, and the other side is saying, well, we sort of agree, but we want to do it in a more moderate way, the energy that directs and shapes public thinking is with the first person, not the latter.
But before we conclude on this, certainly I want to say that brings us to, I think, your final interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, who is somebody I admire a lot, who is a historian and commentator, political analyst, and has written a lot of great books, including a book I love, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
And you’ve entitled your interview with Professor Kelley “Resistance and Solidarity in an Age of Fascism and Genocide,” which, can it get more timely than that for a topic? So what did Professor Kelley have to say?
Sonali Kolhatkar: Robin is such an amazing person. He did the foreword for my previous book talking about abolition, A Police-Free World Is Possible. And one of the big reasons why I wanted to bring him on, and I did so also at the urging of my editor, Greg Ruggiero, was that he brings that historical framework, and he’s a historian.
And so he was able to articulate so beautifully that this is not new, what we’re experiencing in the United States. It’s not just age-old globally. It’s age-old here in the United States. And I wanted to ask him, how do you define this word that we just bandy about, the F-word, right?
Fascism. What does it really mean for us, for you as someone who studied history? And he was able to define fascist authoritarianism as basically something that routinely violates human dignity. And then there’s so much history. We lived in fascist times that people don’t necessarily currently think of as fascist times.
They use different words, right? Mass enslavement and dispossession, Jim Crow segregation, et cetera.
Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.
Sonali Kolhatkar: And so I think he was able to be so clear about what fascism is and how all those things in the past that we haven’t labeled fascism were indeed fascism. And to apply that framework to today was really, really important. So I’m so glad we were able to bring him in.
And for folks who want to get a copy of the book and read it in its entirety, they really should. But also this week, Truthout is reprinting Robin’s interview as a standalone, so that if people want to see an excerpt from the book, they’ll get to read Robin’s interview in Truthout this week, the week that the book comes out.
Richard Eskow: And that’s such a great point, by the way: fascism is a continuum. It’s not a switch that gets turned on and off. So I think that’s an excellent point. I don’t know if you have to go now, but in any case, I highly recommend the book. Again, the book is Breaking ICE.
Because I couldn’t... it didn’t sync to my computer. Breaking ICE: Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, by Sonali Kolhatkar, available at fine booksellers that are not Amazon everywhere, and probably at Amazon too, but we don’t want you to go there, right? So yeah.
Sonali Kolhatkar: And the book’s official publication date is September 15th, and the first-week sales really, really matter for those who keep track of things like bestseller lists and stuff. So if you’re thinking of buying the book, do it this week, please. I really appreciate it. It’s published by independent publisher Seven Stories.
My local independent bookstore is taking pre-orders and orders and sending them all over the country. Actually, if you order it through Vroman’s Books, that’s Roman with a V, Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, you can get a personally signed copy because I can just walk into the store and sign it for you.
So they’re taking personal pre-orders, signed, through Vroman’s Books. But otherwise, yeah, just support the kind of work that the activists in this book are doing and get a copy of it. And we need to spread this notion that we are winning, but we have to keep working at it.