Welcome to the August/September 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:

• Fortifying ourselves for fall
• Mass de-documentation of 300,000 Haitian, 170,000 Salvadorean, 6,300 Syrian, and tens of thousands of Somali, Sudanese, and Ethiopian migrants
• Stealth surge: DHS reports highest monthly number of abductions ever in July
• Federal infiltration of Minnesota ICE resistance
• Watching the watchers: anti-surveillance resistance
• ICE leverages unprecedented funding levels to buy existing and new surveillance technologies
• Resist empire on Native land
• U.S. military continues to expand operations
• Right continues pushing for a national abortion ban
• Attacks on trans health care continue

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 September, 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.

As we head back to school and into the fall, federal enforcement surges, occupations, and repression are expected to intensify and expand leading up to, during, and following midterm elections, amid ongoing and escalating targeting of migrants, trans people, and reproductive care, as well as deep cuts to health care and social programs.

As things heat up and mainstream focus shifts to electoral races, it is essential that we continue to build, fortify, and expand our community defense, rapid response, and mutual aid networks and ecosystems of resistance — particularly in light of threats to flood our communities and deploy federal enforcement agents at the polls.

As we do so, it is important that we:

✅  Map and build our ecosystems of community defense and collective care:

• Revisit IC’s Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care toolkit and check out the mapping tool created by Kelly Hayes based on the toolkit. Stay tuned for an update to the toolkit in early 2027!
• Find and build your overground railroads!
  

✅  Streamline, coordinate, and amplify secure communications within and across local ecosystems:

• Check out these tips for safer Signal use (also shared on our Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn)
• Understand that even the tightest digital security doesn’t protect us from subpoenas, search warrants, and discovery.
• Read Shaping Reality, our report on building informational power.
• Save the date to join us for our informational power skill share on October 10th!

✅  Prepare for and navigate conflict and harm — both are inevitable in any organizing effort, particularly when external pressures ramp up. Without structures, skills, and relationships rooted in trust to address them, they are not only likely to create greater harm and potentially stop organizing in its tracks, but they also create significant security risks.

• Revisit In It Together, our toolkit for conflict transformation In movement-building groups.
• Listen to this two-part Movement Memos series on conflict (part 1, part 2).
• Check out this Accountability Beyond Punishment ‘zine.
  

✅  Create collective spaces of sense-making, connection, and fortification — we don’t know exactly what will happen, but it is clear that coming months are likely to bring increased pressure on us as individuals, collectives, and ecosystems, and require us to show up as our best, most effective, creative, and impactful selves, even as many of us are feeling depleted and burned out from the past 18 months (or 18 years).

As we navigate feelings of powerlessness, burnout, rage, and grief, we need to create and hold spaces to come together, care for each other, experience joy, and rededicate ourselves to our shared values and practices, counter disinformation, and dream and practice the liberatory futures we are fighting for.

• Check out this new toolkit from Kelly Hayes and Tanuja Jagernauth, on creating spaces of reflection, belonging, and collective care.
   

➡️  In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that courts can’t intervene in federal immigration enforcement, 350,000 Haitians were stripped of temporary protected immigration status (TPS) overnight, immediately making them targets for detention and deportation.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared, "We're going after them right now," as Haitians are ordered to report to immigration offices around the country to turn in their passports, wear ankle monitors to more easily track them, and check-in regularly with authorities, and two deportation flights have already taken place. Immigrant justice advocates in Ohio warn that ICE is setting up conditions for mass round-ups, detentions, and deportations of Haitians as soon as they build the necessary logistical capacity.

➡️  ICE’s use of ankle monitors has tripled since June 2025. Whether used on migrants or other criminalized groups, ankle and wrist monitors are simply an "alternative form of detention."

✅  Learn more about ICE "e-carceration" from Mijente, Community Justice Exchange, Just Futures Law, and others in "Tracked and Trapped: Experiences from ICE Digital Prisons."

✅  Check out more resources from Just Futures Law's ICE Digital Prisons.

➡️  TPS has now also been terminated for Salvadorean, Syrian, Somali, South Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Burmese people, despite ongoing genocide, war, violence, and dire economic and social conditions in their home countries perpetrated and facilitated by U.S. foreign policy, and judicial recognition of racial animus motivating the regime’s decisions.

✅  Follow and support organizations working directly with communities impacted by TPS revocations, including:

• Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) — including HBA's Black Immigrants Bail Fund
• National TPS Alliance
• Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)
• Just Futures Law
• Muslim Advocates
• Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC)
• National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON)

➡️  The Department of Homeland Security reported the highest number of ICE kidnappings since its founding in July, confirming that at least 51,000 people were arrested and detained by ICE last month, up almost 10,000 from 43,000 people in June.

➡️  An increasing number of migrants — including people with pending asylum cases, visa extension requests, and scheduled court appointments — are being snatched at airports, during traffic stops, and at traffic checkpoints (and in one case, a checkpoint within a National Forest). In other words, ICE is stepping up “quiet” enforcement in contexts and places with a regular flow of people through controlled/regulated infrastructure, requiring fewer ICE agents, and offering lower visibility than surges of large numbers of officers into communities.

• In mid-July, two plainclothes ICE agents attempted to arrest one person at Harry Reid airport outside Las Vegas but were stopped by bystanders who took immediate action to intervene in the arrest. Unfortunately, according to ICE's LA field office, the person was later arrested by ICE agents when they arrived at Los Angeles' LAX airport.
• Over 30 ICE arrests were reported at airports in July.
• DHS reported that they arrested 51 truck drivers in the Midwest over two days in late July in "Operation Highway Shield."
• A mother and daughter were kidnapped by ICE, tipped off by local law enforcement, from an emergency room where they were receiving treatment after a near fatal car accident.

✅  Check out Immigrant Defense Project’s latest guidance on ICE presence at airports.

✅  Join the Beyond Do No Harm Network to learn more about protecting spaces of care from ICE and police.

✅  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.

➡️  On January 28th, four days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE) sent undercover agents to infiltrate online and on-the-ground resistance in Minneapolis, citing the White House’s NSPM-7 memorandum.

Information regarding the secret investigation was revealed in responses to discovery requests filed by attorneys defending the "Minneapolis 15" — fifteen organizers arrested and charged with conspiracy in connection with resistance to the ICE surge and occupation of Minneapolis earlier this year.

• For months, ICE agents involved in “Operation Puppet Master" and "Operation Whipple Shield," secretly obtained financial records of national labor unions and social justice nonprofits without their knowledge; attended public demonstrations and in-person, closed door meetings; attempted to entrap organizers into committing criminal offenses during protests; infiltrated and became active in Signal chats; captured and used license plate numbers from organizing meetings to identify attendees; and attempted to link 18 organizations, ranging from immigrant justice nonprofits, to labor unions, to citywide ICE watch groups, to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), into a conspiracy to obstruct federal enforcement agents.
• Though the official HSI investigation began in late January, federal agents began infiltrating groups seemingly as soon as the ICE surge began in December.

✅  Check out IC's Digital Security and Doxxing Prevention Checklist! Written with journalists in mind, it has helpful tips and information for everyone!

✅  DO NOT SPEAK TO FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT AN ATTORNEY PRESENT!

✅  Publicize the National Lawyers Guild’s Federal Repression Hotline in your community and check out the Center for Constitutional Rights If An Agent Knocks resource!

✅  Contribute to the legal defense fund for the Minnesota 15 here.

✅  Revisit these 5 questions for cultivating solidarity when responding to political repression, from our friends at Community Justice Exchange.

➡️  Organizers in 20 towns and cities in the U.S. — including Los Angeles and, most recently, two Massachusetts towns — have successfully organized to cancel or end Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) contracts, or deactivate cameras just in the last month, up from 5 the previous month!

➡️  The struggle continues:

• More than 100,000 cameras remain active across the country. Some jurisdictions are using opioid settlement funds to purchase them.
• Some cities and towns have ditched Flock cameras only to replace them with Axon's AI surveillance cameras, which are designed to be hard to spot by attaching onto existing streetlamps.
• In response to the growing tide of public opinion against Flock cameras, Flock has been providing police departments around the country guidance on how to speak at city council meetings in defense of the technology.
• State-based fusion centers and federal law enforcement agencies have been surveilling anti-Flock social media posts, warning police about local DeFlock events, and advising police departments to increase patrolling around Flock and other ALPR cameras.
• Flock cameras were recently used by police to surveil a local activist who had spoken out against local police, and track a person regularly traveling from Michigan to Wisconsin and then use his movements as justification to search his car and arrest him for marijuana possession. They have also regularly been used as tools of police sexual harassment and violence, and to track abortion seekers. According to the Women’s March:
• • One cop used the Flock database 717 times to track his estranged wife.
  • Another cop conducted 192 searches to track a former partner, texting her details about what she was wearing.
  • A detective ran 47 searches to track her husband’s ex-wife.
  • 152 ICE and CBP agents have been accused, arrested, charged, or convicted in connection with violence including abduction and sexual assault of a child, possessing child sexual abuse materials, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, domestic violence, and strangulation.
    
• More than 1,000 police departments have also turned to surveillance drones powered by AI.

Fight Flock!

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

✅  Read this Surveillance Self-Defense guide by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

✅  Find a DeFlock campaign near you!

✅  Learn more about how police use surveillance tools to enact gender-based violence and what you can do about it in IC’s report Shrouded in Silence and the accompanying curriculum Breaking the Silence.

➡️  ICE will spend $20 million on 6,000 pairs of “shock gloves” that deliver an electric shock when applied to bare skin as part of a “deescalation” strategy. Electroshock gloves are not a new phenomenon — they are already being used in schools and jails and against disabled people by cops and other agents of control across the country, illuminating the continuum of violence that connects ICE to everyday systems of policing and punishment.

➡️  The agency also recently announced it will spend millions to buy “robot dogs,” which are also already being used by cops across the country.

➡️  ICE will pay over $6 million to LexisNexis for continued and expanded access to sweeping amounts of data to plug into its applications, including those created and operated by Palantir.

✅  Check out and get inspired by National Nurses United’s recent National Day of Action in support of efforts to Purge Palantir! Palantir facilitates expansive data sharing with ICE, including patient Medicaid data. Meanwhile, ICE has stopped paying for medical services provided to people incarcerated in its detention facilities, including trans people in detention, and a Durham man who died of leukemia while incarcerated by ICE.

➡️  ICE has contracted Koniag Services to operate a new 287(g) National Coordination Center near Nashville, Tennessee, scheduled to open at the end of September. The Center will operate 24/7 to support kidnapping operations for over a thousand local law enforcement partners by creating "enforcement packages" (targets for local police to detain), running immigration checks for local police across national databases, and directly advising police when apprehending non-citizens.

➡️  The contract call originally placed by DHS also instructs the contractor use 287(g) resources to locate unaccompanied children ("UACs") and create "targeting packages" of "missing children" to provide to local police, under the pretext that undocumented unaccompanied minors are at risk of exploitation. Yet the administration:

• is trafficking people who came to the U.S. as minors to third countries, where they are highly vulnerable to exploitation;
• hired a defense contractor accused of torture to hunt migrant children;
• is working with organizations like Our Rescue, whose leader has been accused of sexual violence and trafficking; and
• is incarcerating children in camps where they are subject to extreme violence, deprivation, torture, exploitation, and denial of effective representation.

✅  Read this explainer by FWD.us to learn about 287(g) agreements and how they've ballooned since January 2025.

✅  See if your town (or towns near you) has a 287(g) agreement in place.

✅  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.

✅  Check out this list of city and state governments contracting with ICE for everything from parking to access to municipal facilities to data-sharing.

• Read more about DOJ funding to cities for Memphis-style federal “surges” despite the fact that 4 people were killed by 4 federal agents in the city since federal occupation began a year ago.

✅  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!

➡️  The Tohono O’odham Nation have said they will not let anyone onto their lands who is not a tribal member in response to a court order permitting border wall construction on Tohono O’odham ancestral homelands.

✅  Learn more about the Tohono O’odham Nation’s strategy and resistance, and check out coverage on Democracy Now.

➡️  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a key permit for the construction of a pipeline to cross Michigan waterways crucial to the livelihoods of tribes in the state. Several days later a truck accident led to a significant gas leak.

✅  Learn more about legal and organizing strategies to stop Line 5.

➡️  Indigenous communities remain a particular target of the AI data center construction boom: Over 100 hyper-scale data centers are currently proposed on Native land where construction would not only take over land, but drive up the price of electricity and consume large quantities of water.

✅  Listen to Honor the Earth talk about their No Data Centers on Native Land campaign and read their organizing toolkit.

➡️  The U.S. killed two more people when it resumed lethal boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific this month.

➡️  The U.S. has been reopening previously defunct bases across Latin America and the Caribbean — including in Puerto Rico — possibly in preparation for a war on Cuba, a country struggling through blackouts, medical supplies shortages, and a lack of drinking water amid a continuous U.S. blockade of oil shipments to the island.

✅  Check out the National Lawyers Guild's Cuba Solidarity guidance.

➡️  Anti-abortion advocates inside and outside the administration continue their push to outlaw the mailing of abortion medication. The major anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, amongst others, released a letter endorsing the use of the 19th century Comstock Act, originally intended to criminalize the mailing of “obscene” materials, to ban the mailing of not just abortion medication but all supplies used in abortions.

If this strategy is taken up by the regime, it could threaten the distribution of standard medical supplies to clinics all over the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.

➡️  The administration has nominated Heidi Overton to become head of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency overseeing a review of the “safety” of medication abortion. Overton is a virulent opponent of abortion, including medication abortion.

✅  Check out John Oliver’s roast of “fetal personhood” on Last Week Tonight.

✅  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.

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

➡️  On August 11th, HHS finalized a new rule barring the use of federal Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) funding for gender-affirming care for minors. The rule goes into effect October 13th. Advocates are working to ensure that state Medicaid funds are available to fill the funding gap in the short term.

➡️  Connecticut Children's Medical Center became the third hospital to agree to end gender-affirming care for youth in a settlement with the DOJ. The hospital already began “winding down” gender-affirming care for trans youth under the age of 19 last July, citing an “increasingly complex and evolving landscape.”

➡️  On the same day, Bossier Parish, Louisiana advanced a bill that could send trans people to prison for up to six months for using a public restroom — a trans couple in Bossier Parish were violently assaulted by a mob for using a public restroom. Despite the fact that the couple was hospitalized for their injuries, they were arrested by police and charged as if they were agitators in the assault.

• In Kansas, trans men are using restrooms designated for women as a form of protest, leading to confusion and intrusive questioning.

➡️  Five ballot measures targeting trans youth's access to health care, education, and public space are up this fall in 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).

✅  Plug into one of the campaigns opposing these ballot measures: No Hate in WA State; Families, Not Politics (Colorado); and Stop the Ban Missouri. (Nebraska and Arizona appear to have no broad campaigns to stop their dangerous ballot measures.)

✅  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 in linking movements to trans youth solidarity.

✅  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