Welcome to the October 2026 installment of "This Month in Criminalization," in which IC co-founder Andrea J. Ritchie and researcher Kelsey Kitzke share hot topics and current legislative/policy developments in criminalization, and point people to calls to action and relevant resources. Prefer reading this in a web browser? The full text is available on our website here, alongside previous editions of this newsletter.

In this edition of the newsletter, you will find information, resources, and ways to take action and learn more about:

• Defending our communities beyond "democracy" and beyond the U.S.
• Marking 3 years of genocide and resistance in Palestine with action
• Stopping the machinery of surveillance
• Surging detentions and deportations
• Inside ICE detention camps
• Continuing expansion of ICE detention infrastructure
• ICE expansion
• Suppression of resistance
• Feds attack bodily autonomy from abortion to disability justice
• Federal rule on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care for trans Youth goes into effect; fighting state ballot measures

Our goal in these monthly roundups is not to contribute to the overwhelm, but to help you sift through the firehose of information and focus in a few things we can and must do from wherever we are — as organizers, community members, health care providers, educators, legislators, and funders — to interrupt the criminalization that is the core mechanism and methodology of implementing and rationalizing Right-wing, authoritarian, and fascist agendas and regimes. Deep thanks to TMIC co-author Kelsey Kitzke and to our partners at the Building Movement Project, Muslims for Just Futures, Autonomy News, and FWD.us for their contributions.

Let us know if you find these roundups helpful, how you are using them, and what you’d like to see more or less of in these monthly updates by completing this very short survey.

The Resisting Criminalization Help Desk is on a temporary break through the end of the year, but please reach out to info@interruptingcriminalization.org if you are in urgent need of time-sensitive thought partnership around a campaign or intervention to interrupt criminalization.

In the meantime, check out the latest updates to our Block It! Don’t Build It! Don’t Fill It! Don’t Fuel It! toolkit and (re)visit our Block & Build: But Make it Abolitionist tool.

As U.S. midterm elections rapidly approach, ramping up blatantly racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, white supremacist, xenophobic, ableist, and transphobic rhetoric, and featuring an effort to smear, criminalize, and denaturalize of one of the regime's most vocal opponents, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar — threats of escalated federal enforcement presence at the polls and election interference, military surveillance of cyberspace in the name of protecting against influence of "foreign interests," and white supremacist violence are ongoing. Amid all of this, our collective attention and resources are increasingly focused on foiling threats to intimidate voters and elected officials and preserving "democracy" against anti-democratic authoritarian forces.

Yet, many of these efforts stop at the voting booth on November 3rd, without taking into account what happens and what is normalized — while our collective attention is focused there, we sometimes don't think about what comes after election day. In the next two weeks and beyond, we must extend our collective attention and resources beyond the polls to protect our communities over the long term against: 

➡️  Increased ICE, police, and National Guard presence and check points in our communities under the pretext of targeting "voter fraud" and "protecting election integrity"

• Organize to expand well-resourced election defense and legal observer efforts to bolster ICE watch, CopWatch, and community safety teams at and beyond vulnerable polling stations on and beyond election day!
• Utilize election protection initiatives to engage in political education about the connections between criminalization and authoritarianism, and to invite people into ongoing community defense and organizing — check out our Block & Build: But Make It Abolitionist 'zine for easy printing!
• Continue to weave together community defense efforts into connected ecosystems of people engaged in clinic defense, defense of trans and queer spaces, ICE Watch, CopWatch, mutual aid, and community care — check out our Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care toolkit and the tool created by our comrade Kelly Hayes based on it!

➡️  Ongoing violence and harassment by non-government actors fueled and emboldened by virulent white supremacist, anti-migrant, transphobic, misogynist, patriarchal, and Islamophobic rhetoric

• Organize de-escalation, bystander intervention, and self-defense trainings in your community — check out our Bystander Intervention and De-Escalation 'zine and the resources listed at the bottom of the page for more info!

➡️  Expansion of criminalization, policing, and incarceration under cover of unbridled state violence within, at, and beyond U.S. borders. While attention is focused on federal elections, many cities and states — progressive and reactionary alike — are expanding surveillance, sweeps of unhoused people and criminalization of public spaces, suppression of dissent, and police forces, jails, prisons, and migrant detention camps, building the machinery and legitimacy of criminalization that fuels and enacts authoritarianism and fascism.

• Build and bolster campaigns around municipal and state budgets, contracts, policing initiatives, surveillance, data sharing and collaborations with the federal government — make continued investment in criminalization a key issue in your local elections!
• Build and join efforts to protect unhoused people!

➡️  Efforts to frame, target, and prosecute political opponents — for instance, over 200 letters containing unknown substances have been sent to government officials amidst efforts to frame the Democratic Socialists of America as responsible.

➡️  Misinformation and disinformation designed to sow fear and chaos, and attacks on physical infrastructure

• Build reliable information infrastructure, including communications strategies that don't rely on social media, the internet, or cell service — check out Shaping Reality: Building Informational Power to Resist Authoritarianism for more on the importance of building informational power.
• Build and share disaster preparedness information and infrastructure in your community!

➡️  Efforts to violently consolidate authoritarian and fascist power in the face of electoral defeat — faced with the prospect of losing power, money, and consequences for their actions, people currently in political and economic power are likely to engage in increasingly violent efforts to hold on to it, and to shift strategies and allegiances in ways that could reinforce technofascist and white supremacist christofascist segments of the current ruling coalition. The midterm elections are not the end point of our struggle, but rather a critical inflection point that requires us to prepare and organize for what is to come.

• Read this post from Margaret Killjoy with tips to prepare for election night and beyond!

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➡️  And, as global authoritarian forces collaborate and consolidate and anti-authoritarian movements grow worldwide, it remains essential to continue to find ways and spaces to build transnational connections and solidarities:

• In India, tens of thousands of students and young people have risen up as the "Cockroach" movement against the right-wing government of Narendra Modi, protesting national exams and the deletion of 130 million names from voter rolls. Police and state security forces have responded with extreme violence, arresting almost 10,000 people across the country and shutting down transit in the capital of New Delhi where a majority of protests have taken place.
• France is entering the fourth week of collective rebellion against austerity measures, in which hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country and occupied territories in student-led protests against cuts to education, rising racism in classrooms and the streets, and food prices. Protesters have faced extreme police violence: one 15 year old's hand was blown off by a police grenade and a 14 year old experienced extensive facial injuries after being shot by a grenade launcher.
• In Brazil, thousands of people, including many students, protested after the Flavio Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate and son of deposed dictator and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, won of the country's first round presidential election round. A run-off between Bolsonaro and incumbent progressive President Lula da Silva will take place on October 25th.
  • The U.S. is actively interfering in the election in an effort to grow the number of authoritarian right-wing governments in the region aligned with the U.S. authoritarian regime.

Learn more about building transnational solidarities from groups like Grassroots Global Justice and World Beyond War's 2026 virtual conference October 23-26!

➡️  As the world witnesses the passage of three years of escalated genocide in Gaza in the midst of continuing bombing, blockades, and destruction of medical infrastructure, driving ongoing death, disablement, food insecurity, and sexual and reproductive violence, state-sponsored violence is intensifying in the West Bank as settlers seize homes, attack Palestinian olive harvesters, and burn olive groves in the midst of the harvest season. Since September 27 there have been 170 settler attacks in the West Bank, including a violent assault of a Washington Post photojournalist. Meanwhile, the regime is seeking to circumvent growing opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel by officially merging military operations and funding streams. 

✅  Take action today using the updated Stop Genocide Toolkit and join efforts to Stop the Deadly Merger!

✅  Organize at the city and state level to demand immediate divestment from genocide. 

• Learn more about the Break the Bonds campaign.
  • Check out Break the Bonds New York City's recent divestment win, joining North Carolina, Michigan, and Minnesota!
  • Find out if your state, municipality, or institution holds Israeli bonds, and follow the example of AFT and UAW workers and Ohio and Illinois organizers in demanding divestment.

•  
• Organize to get your city to divest from the war machine using this toolkit from World Beyond War.

✅  Turn up the heat on your federal representatives to join the growing consensus: No tax dollars for war, weapons or ICE!

✅  Boycott Teva pharmaceuticals.

➡️  A 1980s drug war law is being used to funnel local license plate reader data into a federal database accessible to local, state, and federal policing agencies through "High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area" (HIDTA) programs in all 50 states.

➡️  Five Detroit-area Michigan policing agencies were found to have used Flock camera footage for immigration-related reasons on behalf of federal agencies like the FBI, the DEA, Border Patrol, and ICE. Though the company that makes the cameras claims they do not share data with federal policing agencies, this does not prevent local police from searching Flock databases on behalf of federal agencies.

• Resistance is growing! DeFlock's city council tracker shows 89 cancellations or non-renewals of surveillance camera contracts in September!

✅  Check out this toolkit on how to kick out Flock and organize to stop mass surveillance.

✅  Find your local DeFlock group.

✅  Tell Congress to support the Ban Flock Act.

Surveillance at the Border and Beyond

➡️  A federal appeals court recently ruled that U.S. Customs and Border Control can go through a person's phone at the border without reasonable suspicion.

• California already allows for manual cellphone searches at the border without reasonable suspicion so long as authorities claim to be looking for digital contraband such as export-controlled information, restricted or classified information, or materials related to child sexual abuse.

➡️  As the Everywhere Border project has extensively documented, U.S. borders and those of other Western countries extend beyond the literal borders of nation-states. Rather, the border is the "all-encompassing system of ideas, policies, practices, and infrastructures...with the goal of controlling the movement of the majority of humans." For instance, the U.S. border regime is criminalizing migrants long before they ever reach physical U.S. borders by moving money, knowledge, and equipment to Mexico and Central American countries to track, surveil, and detain migrants thought to be traveling to the U.S.

• Read more in the Border Externalization in the Americas report!

➡️  As widely reported, as part of the regime's ongoing border hardening, ICE is building an expansive surveillance drag-net within the U.S. to identify, track, and arrest targets for detention and deportation, benefiting from unprecedented funding and using infrastructure developed to wage the "war on drugs" and post-9/11 counterterrorism operations. Additionally, DHS is currently seeking proposals from federal contractors to build an AI-powered surveillance system to review phone and video calls, messages, and camera data from inside ICE detention camps.

✅  Attend Know Your Rights at the Airport on Thursday, 11/5 at 4-5 PM PT / 7-8 PM ET — registration required: Join this training regarding travelers' rights when responding to searches, questioning, and detention at airports based on immigration status. Learn best practices regarding how to protect yourself and your devices, and get up-to-date information regarding recent trends in inspection and detention at U.S. ports of entry. Check out more Know Your Rights information on airport travel here!

✅  Read this Surveillance Self-Defense guide by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and follow these steps to protect yourself and others at the border:

MINIMIZE YOUR DATA EXPOSURE before traveling by:

• Factory-resetting your device, or leaving your primary device at home and traveling with a temporary device. Be prepared for questioning about why you are using a temporary device and be aware that cheaper and older devices are generally more vulnerable to forensic search.
• Deleting sensitive data and apps from your device — be sure to empty trash and check for “recently deleted”  folders in photos, browsers, and apps, and be aware that some information may be accessible to forensic searches even after apps and data are removed.
• Transferring data to cloud storage.

PROTECT YOUR DATA before traveling by:

• Enabling full-disk encryption (not just a screen lock)
• Disabling biometrics (face/thumb scan)
• Powering down your devices.

➡️  ICE agents across the country have been instructed to ramp up daily arrest numbers by 1,000 to 3,000 people a DAY — a number the regime has been pushing for over a year.

• Immigration enforcement has been surging in Southern and Central California under what has been dubbed "Operation California Safe", starting in and around San Diego in early to mid-October and expanding to Los Angeles and the San Jaoquin Valley, where 100 people were detained in a three-day period. Migrant justice organizations are urging those who are concerned about their safety to remain inside.
• Jurisdictions across the country are reporting "quiet surges" in which detentions are rapidly ramping up through ongoing enforcement efforts.
  • In New York City, migrant justice groups have seen a uptick in detentions during traffic stops.
    • On October 8th in New York City, Oscar Belgal was shot while driving a car with a 5 year-old child in the backseat — joining at least 25 people shot by ICE while driving. Witnesses also described seeing an undercover ICE agent dressed as a construction worker, a tactic ICE has been known to use when staking out targets.
    • Despite a city and now state-wide ban on "official" cooperation with ICE, the New York Police Department (NYPD) was seen communicating with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) on the scene of the shooting and transported Belgal to the hospital where he was treated and later released into ICE custody, with NYPD clearing the road for federal vehicles to pass. Cops also violently cleared protestors gathered near the hospital, shoving some to the ground. According to his lawyers, Belgal is currently being held in New Jersey with the bullet still lodged in his neck despite hospital doctors insisting that it be removed.

✅  Connect local cop watch and ICE watch efforts to highlight collaboration between local and state police and immigration enforcement, and support and defend all people and communities targeted by traffic stops.

✅  Read up on and share these resources around ICE activity surging in the Los Angeles area.

➡️  3.5 million people (57% of people who had protected status as of January 2025) are projected to lose immigration status in the U.S. and become subject to detention and deportation by the end of 2028.

• As of August 2026, 1.1 million people have already lost immigration status since 2025, and a total of 2.2 million are projected to lose their status by the end of this year through:
  • TPS revocations, including revocation of TPS for Haitians leading 350,000 Haitians to become undocumented overnight;
  • cancellations of asylum hearings and cases;
  • cancelation of DACA renewals; and
  • rising restrictions on existing visas and immigration relief.

✅  Read this full report from FWD.us: Losing Status

✅  Check out our Block It! Don't Build It. Don't Fill It. Don't Fuel It. toolkit for ways you can support migrants and interrupt the detention/deportation machine.

➡️  Hunger strikes continue:

• People incarcerated at El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville, Texas have gone on hunger strike to protest indefinite detentions, demanding to be transferred out of the area governed by the 5th Circuit of Appeals (Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) which has rubber stamped the regime's practice of incarcerating people indefinitely without bond hearings. Hunger strikers are being subjected to solitary confinement as punishment.
• At Folkston D Ray James ICE processing center, run by GEO Group in Georgia, at least 73 people are on hunger strike to protest indefinite detentions and poor conditions. In a video and open letter, hunger strikers describe poor medical care, threats by the facility's guards, moldy food, and denial of due process.

➡️  55th known death in ICE detention:

• On September 18th, 2026, Carlos Josué Marchena-Marchena was found unresponsive after being denied insulin shots for his Type 1 diabetes at Winn detention camp in Louisiana.

➡️  Pregnancy and miscarriages:

• ICE is incarcerating a record number of pregnant people and losing count of the number of miscarriages inside ICE detention camps. As is routine in ICE detention, pregnant people and people who have experienced miscarriages are being denied medical care, placing them at risk of serious infections and reproductive health complications.

✅  Join the Beyond Do No Harm Network to learn more about interrupting criminalization in the context of care and supporting incarcerated people subject to medical coercion and neglect.

➡️  Criminalization of queer/trans migrants:

• Trans women in ICE detention camps are locked up with men, denied hormone therapy, and subjected to harassment, sexual assault, and solitary confinement.
• LGBTQ asylum seekers kidnapped by ICE are being deported back to home countries or to "third countries" where they face extremely dangerous conditions.

➡️  Children disappeared by ICE:

• Data complied by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Marshall Project shows that ICE has arrested over 8,500 children, twice as many as this time last year.
• While unaccompanied children and families detained for long periods of time are frequently sent to the notorious Delaney detention camp in Texas, children held for shorter periods are being incarcerated in a range of locations their lawyers describe as "black boxes" where it is near impossible to locate them, including in Border Patrol offices with little access to food, medical care, or communication, and even more disturbingly, in unsupervised hotel rooms with Border Patrol officers or ICE contractors.
• DHS is opening a 528-bed detention camp for children and families on a toxic waste site in Louisiana.
  

✅  Tell Congress to stop the ICE expansion in LA.

✅  Visit FWD.us to support their NoChildJail campaign.

✅  If you're in Louisiana, tell the England Economic and Industrial Development District Board to stop the ICE Child Jail.

➡️  After significant resistance to ICE's warehouse expansion plan — 7 warehouses purchased by the agency earlier this year are back up for sale — ICE is finding new ways to expand its arrest and detention capacities in the next year, including by building additional detention spaces and contracting with local jail facilities (leading some jurisdictions like Nashville, TN, to plan to build new jails to accommodate ICE detainees). For instance:

• On October 2, DHS bought its fifth private detention site since July, a three-site complex, 2,644-bed facility in Adelanto, California, purchased for $950 million from the GEO Group, who will continue running the facilities under an ICE contract.
• At the end of September, DHS signed over $7 billion in contracts to expand detention capacity at government-owned sites in New York, California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida.
• According to federal records, ICE is soliciting contract proposals from companies for "turn-key detention facilities" in the Seattle, Denver, Miami, and Philadelphia.
• ICE is requesting information from companies for building and maintaining 50 pre-made, 900-square-foot "modular" detention units for field offices, what they're calling a “Field Detention Unit." The sites would have space for processing, interviewing, and holding people in temporary detention, as well as a "Virtual Immigration Court Unit” where immigrant hearings could be held.
• ICE is contracting with Akima Infrastructure Protection, the company that runs the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and subsidiary to the Alaska Native-owned company Akima, which has provided guards to Camp East Montana, to build a "soft-sided" tent detention facility to house 100 women in Batavia, outside of Buffalo, New York. ICE is claiming that its necessary for them to expand detention capacities in New York state due to the recently passed state law barring counties from detaining people on ICE's behalf in local jails and banning municipalities from entering in or continuing 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE.
•  

✅  Follow and support Justice for Migrant Families in its efforts to evict ICE from its headquarters in Buffalo and stop the construction of the tent camp! Get more info on the campaign here.

✅ Check out Project Saltbox's (new) Detention Expansion Tracker and join Detention Watch Network's Communities Not Cages campaign!

✅  Check out this list of city and state governments contracting with ICE for everything from parking to access to municipal facilities to data-sharing. Organize against and boycott contractors and companies building and servicing ICE facilities:

• Check out this interactive map of ICE contractors!
• Check out this database of businesses working with ICE!
• Read more about boycotting companies collaborating with ICE.

➡️  ICE is hiring 5,000 more employees — the majority are expected to be deployed to kidnap people from our communities.

• Military lawyers are being recruited to serve as temporary prosecutors for "immigration-related" cases through April in Manhattan as well as Southern and Central California. The government previously sent military lawyers to Minnesota in January to support last winter's ICE surge amid resignations from career DOJ prosecutors, as well as to DC and Memphis to accompany "crime-fighting" National Guard deployments.

➡️  ICE is fast-tracking a program to bring 142 intelligence agents to more than two dozen cities. The program called Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement (ERO ONE) has been referred to by immigration surveillance experts as "an internal spying agency" and a massive expansion of the agency's capacity to surveil private lives by mapping individual networks of relationships.

✅  Find out more about how you can take action where you are in our regularly updated Block It! Don’t Build It. Don’t Fill It. Don’t Fuel It. toolkit!

➡️  In Williston, Vermont 13 people protesting the presence of ICE's National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center — one of two ICE intelligence hubs in the country finding and tracking deportation targets for ICE agents on the ground — are facing state and federal charges in what organizers describe as an effort to suppress dissent during the campaign's week of action against the Center.

✅   Learn more about Vermont organizing against ICE!

➡️  In Southern Arizona, two dozen organizers blocking the expansion of the border wall and the destruction of trees, land, and environment were violently arrested by Border Patrol while protesters supporting them were subjected to "extreme pain compliance" by federal agents dispersing the crowd, including dragging protestors across barbed wire and deploying pepper spray.

WINS:

🎊  No Love for ICE Air Coalition has successfully kicked deportation flights out of Dallas Love Field by pressuring Signature Aviation to cancel its contract with ICE. However the contract has been picked up by Alliance Texas, and deportation flights will continue from the area now out of Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport.

🎊  ICE protester outside San Francisco field office found not guilty!

➡️  The FDA announced it will complete its review of the abortion drug mifepristone in March of 2027, after the midterm elections. Abortion advocates fear that the FDA are waiting to pull approval for the drug until after the election to prevent political backlash at the polls.

➡️  At the end of September, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama sued nearly 30 providers for providing abortion medications to patients in violations of their state's abortion bans.

➡️  Last month, the Department of Justice settled a case which would allow disabled people to be forcibly institutionalized outside their communities — foregoing a 25+ year old Supreme Court ruling that states that held that disabled people have the right to live outside asylums, hospitals, and nursing homes.

✅  Support your local abortion funds — demand continues to increase for support to travel to places where abortion is still legal to receive essential health care.

• Divest from Zionism and invest in abortion — support abortion funds that have lost funding due to their support for Palestine at Fund Abortion Not War.
• Support Abortion Care Tennessee in resisting a state subpoena demanding wide-ranging information about supporters and the people it supports.

✅  Share accurate information about abortion medication and how to access it.

✅  Read Pregnancy Justice's resource Pregnancy as a Crime, an interim update on pregnancy-related prosecutions in the U.S. during the first three years after the Dobbs decision.

✅  Support Crip Justice's campaigns to free disabled people from jails, hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and other institutions — check out Disabled and Punished Defense Campaigns.

✅  Learn more about the central role of eugenic targeting of disabled people in authoritarianism and fascism from the Transgender Law Center’s Disability Project.

✅  If you are a health care provider or advocate committed to interrupting the criminalization of disabled people join the Beyond Do No Harm Network!

➡️  A new HHS rule barring the use of federal medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding for gender-affirming care for trans youth went into effect this month. However, states continue to be able to use state medicaid to fully fund gender-affirming care for trans youth, and organizers are pushing states to commit to fully funding gender-affirming care for trans youth.

• Check out the Queer Trans Project for state-by-state information on funding coverage.

➡️  Seven ballot measures targeting trans youth's access to health care, education, sports, and public space are before voters in five states; Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, and Missouri (where a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth is bundled with a repeal on the state's abortion rights amendment).

✅  Support and plug into campaigns opposing these ballot measures:

• No Hate in WA State;
• Families, Not Politics (Colorado); and
• Stop the Ban Missouri.

✅  Read, use, and share safety resources for trans folks and loved ones:

• Pride is Ours: A Safety Guide for Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender-Nonconforming People
• Trans Relocation Guide: Finding Trans Asylum and Safe Havens
• Trans legal survival guide

✅  Seek or offer support for the Campaign for Southern Equality's Trans Youth Emergency Project:

• Take action to raise funds for the project using this toolkit.

✅  Check out IC's We Must Fight in Solidarity with Trans Youth for practical strategies to fight back.

✅  Find and support your local trans organization, mental health crisis support through Trans Lifeline's Hotline, and spaces that offer safe independent housing like Grammy’s Place, My Sistah’s House, and SisTers PGH.

Feeling scared? Overwhelmed? The Liberation Line is there to support you! The Liberation Line provides free mental health support calls to organizers and activists, offering support, listening, resources, processing, debriefing or strategizing. These are confidential, non-crisis, non-therapy phone calls facilitated by a trusted volunteer with experience in offering mental health support and who aligns with Palestinian and collective liberation. The Liberation Line is open to any organizer or activist involved in social or political change, who may be impacted by police or state brutality, counter-protestor violence, racism, oppression, or is experiencing conflict, stress, burnout or trauma related to their community organizing or activism. Learn more.

In solidarity,
Andrea, Kelsey, and the IC Team