This Month in Criminalization

Written By Tiffany Wang

January 30, 2026

You can also read the original newsletter in Mailchimp here.


Welcome to the January 2026 installment of "This Month in Criminalization," in which IC co-founder Andrea J. Ritchie shares hot topics and current legislative and policy developments in criminalization, and points people to calls to action and relevant resources. You can find previous editions of this newsletter on our website here. 

You can find the full newsletter below, with action items and resources listed in drop-down sections, indicated by a "+” sign on the left. If you prefer to go directly to checking out all of the “action items,” you can find them in this white box section below:

Action Items:

Our goal in these monthly roundups is not to contribute to overwhelm, but to help you sift through the firehose of information and focus in on a few things we can and must do wherever we are — as organizers, community members, health care providers, educators, policy advocates, 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 co-author Kelsey Kitzke and 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! 

ICE OUT! NATIONWIDE SHUTDOWN!

➡️  For the past six weeks, Minneapolis has resisted ferocious and deadly violence by over 2,000 ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and other federal agents rampaging through neighborhoods, engaging in random interrogations, assaults, and detentions of Black and Brown community members. As journalist Margaret Killjoy describes, “Masked, unmarked men are simply snatching people out of their cars, throwing them into unmarked SUVs, and driving them away, often to never to see their loved ones again.” 

Federal law enforcement are deploying chemical weapons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas against community members, including high-schoolers, at close range, in some cases spraying them directly into people’s faces, masks, and car ventilation systems. ICE is using school parking lots as staging areas to target students and parents, abducting children to use as bait to capture distraught family members, targeting people going into food banks, breaking into people's homes and dragging them outside in freezing temperatures, following ICE watchers’ cars at highway speeds, smashing their windows, and dragging them out and into the street, slamming adults and children alike to the ground, and detaining people for hours without access to a lawyer or a phone call, only to release them into arctic temperatures far from home. In an egregious violation of Indigenous sovereignty, ICE detained members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and is attempting to force the Tribe into an immigration enforcement agreement. 

On January 7th, an ICE agent murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood in front of her wife, dog, and fellow observers as she was documenting ICE actions and protecting a local school. Federal authorities unleashed a torrent of misogyny and homophobia during and in the wake of her killing, and DHS deployed an additional 1,000 ICE agents (including 200 agents pulled from ICE operations in Louisiana) to the Twin Cities to suppress protests across the city. On January 23rd, Minnesotans organized a massive general strike, shutting down the city in fierce defiance of federal violence. 

A day later, Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed VA and ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti as he attempted to assist a woman thrown to the ground by federal agents. The rising death toll in the streets — ICE agents also killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez during Operation “Midway Blitz” in Chicago — and at migrant detention centers around the country, along with egregious and escalating violence by federal immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and beyond, sparked protests across the country, including at the notorious Dilley detention facility in Texas where many Minneapolis residents were taken, as well as calls to defund immigration enforcement agencies, including a call from the nation’s largest nurses’ union for the abolition of ICE. Undeterred by violent and murderous repression of neighborhood resistance, thousands filled churches and community spaces for ICE watch trainings across the country last weekend in the midst of a massive winter storm. 

Building on the success of last week’s Minneapolis strike, Somali and Black students in Minneapolis are calling for a National Shutdown

— TODAY, January 30th —

with walkouts, strikes, boycotts, and actions in solidarity planned across the country through the weekend. Find an action near you

 

Lessons from Minneapolis

➡️  Minneapolis has met escalating state violence — part of a larger strategy of targeting Democrat-controlled cities and states ahead of this year’s midterms — with courageous, leaderful, decentralized, skilled, and adaptive resistance at scale, rooted in decades of Black and Indigenous resistance, and in the rapid response and mutual aid networks built during the first months of the COVID pandemic and in the 2020 Uprisings. 

  • Wherever there is an ICE vehicle, multiple cars and bikes follow behind, sounding the alarm with horns and whistles. 

  • Staff, parents, and community members are guarding blocks, schools, childcare centers, and apartment buildings. 

  • Noise demonstrations are mounted nightly outside of hotels housing ICE agents, hotel workers deny ICE access, and people book out hotel rooms to make it harder for ICE to find anywhere to sleep. 

  • Mutual aid networks are supporting people who can no longer leave their homes.

  • Organizers are pushing the state to issue an eviction moratorium to protect people who are afraid to go to work for fear of ICE.  

  • Rank-and-file health care providers are organizing to defend their patients from ICE assaults and violations.  

And so much more. Pre-existing networks are being reformed and renewed; while people without prior organizing or community defense experience are picking up whistles and joining rapid response chats.

Together, they are creating hyperlocal, block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood networks of community defense.

When no one is a leader, everyone is, and the ubiquitousness of resistance is its strength. 

 

“If there’s a conspiracy, it’s the entire city conspiring to be free.”

— Margaret Killjoy

—————————

“They want deference — we serve back defiance because we know we have each other. Minneapolis doesn’t cower.”

— Beatrice Adler-Bolton

➡️  As federal enforcement violence continues in Minneapolis, it is extending into Maine and Ohio, and intensifying in Los Angeles — as is resistance:

  • Read Brendan McQuade's piece on ICE operations in Maine.

  • ICE is expected to move into Springfield, Ohio for a 30-day kidnapping surge when Temporary Protected Status (TPS) expires for Haitian immigrants on February 3rd. 

  • Kidnappings in LA have been intensifying as community groups see ICE and Border Patrol implement a new "cluster raid" model involving a few agents profiling then grabbing one or two people in public spaces, frequently street vendors, concurrently in a specific neighborhood/region. These operations are meant to be short and intense, but community watchers in LA are still managing to document, interrupt, and frustrate ICE in the neighborhoods they try to terrorize. 

 

Resist A Return to Criminalization As Usual

➡️  While Border Patrol "Commander-in-Chief" Greg Bovino has moved on from Minnesota, he has been replaced by current "border czar" Tom Homan, who held a leadership position in ICE during Trump's first term and was the executive associate director of Enforcement and Removal Operations under Obama when he began advocating for the family separation policy implemented by the first Trump administration. 

After arriving in Minnesota, Homan announced that ICE and CBP would "draw down" their numbers in the city, would direct agents not to physically or verbally engage with "agitators," and would aim to get ICE agents off the streets. The trade-off is that Homan wants Minnesota state and local officials to grant ICE access to jails, as Homan has directed agents to focus on targeting immigrants with "criminal histories."

➡️  While the brave resistance work of community members in Minnesota and around the country has produced a shift in tactics, ICE will continue to kidnap and disappear people criminalized and confined in state and local jails, away from public view. Combatting this turn will require adjusting strategies and tactics and, most importantly, not turning away from people who are unlikely to capture national attention based on their "innocence," but for whom we must abolish ICE (and all criminalization), too. 

 

End ICE Data-Sharing and Surveillance Expansion

➡️ Recent developments in ICE's access to data and surveillance systems continue to be alarming:

  • ICE gained access to Medicaid data at the beginning of the month. The data-sharing agreement allows ICE to access recipients' citizenship, immigration status, address, phone number, date of birth, and Medicaid ID and will make it easier for ICE to locate people to kidnap. 

  • TSA has also been recently reported to be sending ICE multiple lists per week to aid in detention and deportation at airports.

  • This month, ICE purchased access to Tangles and Webloc from Penlink. The two surveillance systems allow ICE to monitor a neighborhood or block for phones, then track the movements of those phones over time.

  • Palantir is reported to be at work on a new software "ELITE" that will help ICE locate deportation targets. The tool would populate a map with potential targets, a dossier on each person, and a "confidence score" on that person's address based on data from the federal Department of Health and Human Services and a variety of other internal government sources. Palantir founder  Joe Lonsdale is also the founder of the Cicero Institute, the think tank behind state and federal advocacy to redirect money from permanent housing models to encampment sweeps and enforcement. Numerous states have already implemented several of Cicero's policy recommendations to criminalize homelessness, and unhoused people continue to be punished through encampment sweeps.

  • ✅  Join Mijente and Media Justice on 🗓️ April 17-19 in Atlanta for Take Back Tech, a gathering for organizers, artists, tech workers, academics, lawyers, and more to rally together and strategize to resist technofascism and the surveillance state!

 

Push Back Against Abortion Criminalization

➡️  The federal administration continues its march toward minimizing access to abortion through regulatory action. 

  • In December, the Department of Veteran Affairs implemented a near-total ban on abortion counseling and services for veterans based on a December 18th memo authored by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Josh Craddock, who supports fetal “personhood” and banning abortion pills and IVF. Craddock has authored proposals advocating for a declaration that the 14th Amendment’s protections to “all persons” apply from the moment of conception, and for a nationwide abortion ban. Abortion advocates warn that Craddock also favors banning shipping abortion pills and potentially supplies like forceps and suction devices, and for rescission of FDA approval of mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion. 

  • This month, Congressional Republicans held a public hearing on whether tele-health prescriptions for medication abortion should be disallowed by the FDA, advancing baseless claims that medication abortion is dangerous and ramping up attacks against the most common abortion method across the country.

➡️  Meanwhile, lawmakers continue efforts to criminalize abortion at the state level:

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

    ✅  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.

    ✅  Continue to pressure elected officials, health care providers, and advocates to push back against efforts to criminalize and limit access to abortion and reproductive care.

    ✅  If you are a health care provider or advocate interested in interrupting criminalization in the context of care, join the Beyond Do No Harm Network!

 

Don't Look Away: Stay Informed and Take Action As Genocide and Authoritarian Violence Continue Around the World

Authoritarianism continues to entrench, expand, and consolidate across the globe:

➡️  Iran is conducting an all-out assault in an attempt to repress a country-wide resistance movement to oppose the authoritarian regime and economic depression. The Iranian state has cut internet, opened fire on protestors, and driven through crowds on motorcycles, beating people who cannot escape. In the internet blackout, it is hard to verify casualties, though reports estimate 3,000+ have died. Tens of thousands have been arrested in the bloodiest crackdown since the 1979 revolution. The U.S. has moved military ships and equipment to the region in preparation for action against Iran.

➡️  U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife at the beginning of January in a military action that killed over 80 Venezuelans. The Maduros were brought to the U.S. and charged with "narcoterrorism," an escalation in the U.S.'s imperialist drug war, serving as cover for a blatant ploy to gain control of Venezuelan's oil resources. The U.S. continues to seize oil tankers, making baseless claims that the country "stole" U.S. oil when the industry was nationalized in 1971.

➡️  In Gaza, the IOF has killed more than 480 Palestinians since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, while thousands more freeze and suffer as aid continues to be severely restricted and critical aid and health care infrastructure is decimated. The Trump regime has set up a “Board of Peace" to govern Gaza that will include the architect of the ongoing genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jared Kushner. The Board has proposed a "Master Plan" for U.S.-backed governing of Gaza that includes setting up a "coastal tourism" zone across the Mediterranean Sea with high rises, a port, and an airport as well as data centers. Remaining Gazans will be forced into a “planned community" in which all residents would be subject to biometric surveillance, controlled checkpoints, and education programs that “prevent diversion...to misaligned activities.”

 

Free Support

➡️  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. 

➡️  A reminder that Interrupting Criminalization also offers a number of free help desks:

 
 

  • Resisting Criminalization Help Desk — for organizers and groups looking for thought partnership and one-on-one consultation and support around organizing, advocacy, budget, policy, legislative or litigation strategies to interrupt criminalization, policing, and state violence.

  • Transformative Justice Help Desk — for groups and individuals who are working on projects and community-wide interventions to respond to, transform, and interrupt harm and violence without using the police and other carceral systems, and are looking for support or thought partnership.

  • Abolition Media Office Hours — for journalists, communicators, and media makers who want to challenge "copaganda,” shift the narrative about Palestine, crime, community safety, and other subjects, or directly support incarcerated people in telling their own stories; for organizers looking for help on how to build relationships with journalists or hone in on messaging their campaigns.

  • Beyond Do No Harm Health Care Strategy Consult — health care workers committed to preventing and resisting harm in health care, or looking for a thought partner on practical strategies for organizing to interrupt criminalization in health care environments.

 
Tiffany Wang
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This Month in Criminalization