This Month in Criminalization

Written By Tiffany Wang

March 14, 2026


Welcome to the March 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:

  • ✅  Learn more from this statement by Muslims for Just Futures.

    ✅  Join the Center for Political Education, Arab Resource and Organizing Committee, and US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) on Sunday, March 15th at 1 pm ET for No War on Iran! Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Analysis for Organizing Against the War Machine!

    ✅  Join the Rising Majority and Adalah Justice Project in calling for an immediate end to the War on Iran and demand that Congress enact and enforce the Block the Bombs Act!

    ✅  Join the USPCN’s Boycott Chevron campaign linking the struggles of Palestinians, Venezuelans, and U.S. Gulf Coast communities!

    ✅  Eject Elbit: Push Capital One to drop its $90 million loan to Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, supplier of 80% of weapons and equipment for Israeli land forces and 85% of combat drones by the Israeli.

    ✅  Follow Doctors Against Genocide's weekly webinars to learn more about current conditions in Gaza and opportunities to take action.

    ✅  When we fight we win! Brooklyn Navy Yard evicted Easy Ariel, a drone manufacturer that contracts with the Israeli military, Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. This win comes after over a year or organizing by Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard (DBNY). Read more about how they did it here.

  • ✅  Learn more using the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker and take action to stop the ICE warehouse plan using the Detention Watch Network Toolkit!

    ✅  Tell Congress to stop funding ICE and CBP!

    ✅  Purge Palantir! Organizers successfully pushed ICE tech contractor Palantir out of Denver and are now working to purge Palantir from all of our communities — join the Purge Palantir campaign!

    ✅  Demand immediate action from lawmakers regarding the treatment of pregnant minors, more than half pregnant from rape, in detention facilities and the federal government funneling them to Texas, where abortion is banned.

    ✅  Add your voice to these demands:

    • Free Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian organizer involved in the 2024 Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia University who remains in ICE detention for a second Ramadan in a row, despite two separate orders for her release! Leqaa recently suffered her first seizure in detention at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, and was chained to a hospital bed for 72 hours while in medical crisis. Follow and join the campaign to Free Leqaa Kordia!

    • Free Yari, a queer person in Eloy detention center, who has lymphatic leukemia and is a longtime resident of Phoenix Arizona! Sign this petition and contribute to this fund organized by Trans Queer Pueblo

    • Join the call to action from Minneapolis to bring pregnant women home from ICE detention!

    REMINDER:

    There are no quick fixes for fascism — our charge is to confront the criminalization that fuels it!

    ✅  Read more in The Nation from IC co-founder Andrea J. Ritchie and listen to Andrea and fellow co-founder Mariame Kaba on the Death Panel podcast!

    ✅  Learn more about how cities and states are enabling and resisting ICE — and use IC’s Block It! Don’t Build It! Don’t Fill It! Don’t Fuel It! toolkit to take action!

  • ✅  Learn more about the recent, critical cases from the National Lawyers Guild and here.

    ✅  Check out Muslims for Just Futures' resource on Material Support for Terrorism laws.

    Take steps to protect yourself from mounting surveillance and criminalization of dissent:

    ✅  Remember, Signal is Safer, Not Safe — check out these tips to reduce your risk!

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

    ✅  Get off Google!

    • Google recently fulfilled an ICE subpoena for a broad swath of personal data for a student organizer and journalist involved in pro-Palestine organizing at Cornell University in 2024. Although Google has previously notified users of subpoenas from the federal government in time for users to legally quash the request, in this case Google acquiesced to an ICE that the company not "disclose the existence of this summons for indefinite period of time.” Google also didn't initially disclose the full extent of the data sought by ICE — usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers.

    • Another user was notified after writing an email critical of a DHS prosecutor moving to deport an Afghani man seeking asylum that Google had received an administrative subpoena from DHS for his account information. Days later, federal agents showed up at his house to question him, eventually leaving without taking further action.

    • And, keep in mind that no email provider is completely secure, even encrypted ones — for instance, Proton mail provided the Swiss government with payment data that was used to determine the identity of an anonymous user affiliated with Stop Cop City; the Swiss government then turned over that data to the FBI pursuant to an agreement with the U.S. government. Remember, just because it’s encrypted doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to a subpoena!

  • ✅  Learn more and join the national Housing Not Handcuffs campaign or your local organizing to Stop the Sweeps!

    ✅  Follow and support groups led by and for unhoused people like VOCAL-NY, the Safety Net Project, and the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness.

  • ✅  Learn more about Kansas’ recently passed law retroactively invalidating drivers’ licenses for people whose gender markers have been changed: Click here for more information and resources for impacted people

    ✅  Support trans organizers near you!

  • ✅  Join the Beyond Do No Harm Network in organizing to interrupt criminalization in the context of access to care, criminalization of care, and to ensure care to criminalized populations!

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! 

Genocide and War: Imperial Criminalization

➡️  As the U.S. and Israel launched all-out assaults on Iran and Lebanon while continuing the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in the holy month of Ramadan, the criminalization of Muslims in the U.S., Palestinians, Arab, and Middle Eastern people and nations is once again on full death-making display.

To date over 1,200 people from 8 months to 88 years old have been killed in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including 11 health care workers and over 150 young girls at Minab primary school, bombed by a U.S. Tomahawk missile on February 28th. Over 10,000 civilian structures have been damaged across Iran by U.S. and Israeli strikes, including homes, schools, historical sites, cultural and religious institutions, water desalination plants, and almost three dozen medical facilities. Bombs recently struck oil facilities in and near Tehran, spilling burning oil through the streets and sewers, blanketing the city with toxic fumes, and drenching the densely populated metropolitan area with acid rain. These horrific assaults are the latest eruption of a decades long history of Western imperialism in Iran, beginning with the U.S. and U.K.'s joint overthrow of the nation's prime minister in 1953, and are justified by wholesale criminalization of the population of Iran: according to the President, “they’re bad people.”

"...we cannot separate imperialism from domestic militarization, whether that’s the militarization at the border, whether it’s the militarization inland through carceral systems and all forms of policing, or it’s immigration enforcement. These are completely connected to U.S. foreign imperial policy.”

—Harsha Walia

Meanwhile, the U.S. approved more than $6 billion in new arms sales to Israel and is building a 5,000 person military base to facilitate the ongoing occupation of Gaza, while Israel once again shut off all aid to Gaza, placing 1.9 million Palestinians displaced by over two years of genocidal war and currently living in dire conditions, at renewed risk of famine. After briefly re-opening the Rafah border crossing at the beginning of February for a tiny fraction of Palestinians who are in need of serious medical care after more than two years of brutal war, siege, and famine, Israel once again closed all crossings in and out of Gaza. More than 20,000 patients, including thousands of children, in Gaza are currently awaiting medical care, and over 1,000 people have died due to lack of care since Israel closed the Rafah border in May 2024.

➡️  U.S. military aggression fueled by criminalizing narratives extends beyond the Middle East to Nigeria, Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean:

  • The U.S. announced this month that it will increase its military presence in Nigeria, and has previously claimed that U.S. military invention is necessary to protect Christians against “terrorist scum," despite the fact that the majority of violence in Northern Nigeria is experienced by Muslims.

  • The U.S. continues a deadly oil blockade against Cuba, jeopardizing essential services and the country’s economy, while threatening any country that sends oil to Cuba with tariffs.

  • A U.S. warship arrived in Haitian waters in early February under the pretext of "stabilization” efforts, as targeting and criminalization of Haitians in the U.S continues to escalate.

  • The U.S. launched ground operations in Ecuador as part of an ongoing bombing campaign against groups it claims are “designated terrorist organizations" and “drug cartels” which has killed over 150 civilians through strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Central America, describing the deadly operation as "land strikes on horrible people.” The U.S. also recently bombed a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing three people who they claimed to be "narco-terrorists."

 

Communities Continue To Resist ICE Occupation, Expansion, and Detention

➡️  Communities across the country are fighting back against ICE’s plans to purchase nearly two dozen warehouses to convert into privately run detention camps for migrants that would double current detention capacity. The effort is part of a DHS strategy to move away from utilizing smaller, scattered detention facilities primarily operated by private companies or renting bed space at local jails, and towards buying and retrofitting warehouses that would be operated by federal contractors like GEO Group. DHS describes this as a "hub and spoke model" of detention, in which fewer extremely large detention centers are each serviced by several smaller nearby processing centers. Or, in the words of ICE officials, "like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings."

The federal government has already purchased nine warehouses across seven states for $631 million, claiming they will be used to detain 41,500 people — including one in Western Maryland, prompting fears of an ICE surge in Baltimore.

Yet some deals have faltered under local pressure in places like Kansas City, Missouri, Salt Lake City, Utah, Ashland, Virginia, and Oklahoma City, as communities across the country threaten consumer boycotts, turn out in droves to local hearings, and pass ordinances blocking federal authorities from purchasing or operating detention facilities in their jurisdictions.

In the face of widespread local opposition to a potential ICE mega-detention center outside Nashville, the federal government recently announced that it has currently has no plans to build a detention center in Tennessee. In small town Social Circle, Georgia, where the federal government bought a warehouse that it plans to convert to a detention facility incarcerating 7,500-10,000 people, local officials and residents are fighting back, raising concerns about potential impacts on local infrastructure and the loss of tax revenue.

➡️  Meanwhile, organizers continue to call attention to deadly and torturous conditions inside migrant detention centers.

➡️  And footage of ICE agents killing Ruben Ray Martinez during a traffic stop in Texas over a year ago recently came to light, confirming that he was the first of three U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration enforcement agents since the current administration came to power.

 

Remember: There are no quick fixes for fascism — our charge is to confront the criminalization that fuels it!

 
 

Escalating Surveillance and Criminalization of Dissent

➡️  The DOJ announced arrests and charges against an additional 30 people under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act — ostensibly enacted to protect access to abortion facilities — in connection with a protest against an ICE official at a Minneapolis church following the murder of Renée Good by ICE agents. The announcement comes weeks after high profile arrests of Black journalists, organizers, and officials, bringing the total number of people charged in connection with the incident to 39. The administration has declared that it will no longer enforce the FACE Act in defense of abortion clinics facing escalating violence, but has used the legislation on several occasions to target protesters at religious facilities.

➡️  The trial of 9 of 19 Prairieland defendants in connection with a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility, which has been described as a “five alarm fire” for the criminalization of dissent, concluded this month when a jury returned a verdict of guilty on a number of counts. Federal prosecutors charged protesters — and several people who were not present at the protest as accessories after the fact — with "material support" of "domestic terrorism” and violations of federal laws, citing individuals’ use of Signal, and seized firearms, body armor, radios, flyers, first aid kits, ‘zines, and Faraday bags as evidence of a “militant enterprise” defined as an “antifa terror cell.” 

➡️  DHS has a new "masked engagement" program in which over 6,500 field agents can use false identities and interact with users to infiltrate closed groups, access personal photos, and more. So far, DHS has reportedly used this tool to infiltrate pro-Palestine groups and build databases focused on Mexican and Mexican-American communities.

➡️  Despite denying the existence of a "domestic terrorist" database, DHS has internally identified a protester, who has never been charged with a crime, as the "leader of Antifa in Portland, OR" in leaked documents. Reporting reveals multiple platforms are used by DHS to collect, store, and cross-check the personal information of anti-ICE and pro-Palestine protestors and label them as "domestic terrorists." Much of this information is pulled from "open source intelligence" found on right-wing platforms.

➡️  Local police departments in Miami and LA have obtained GeoSpy, an AI technology that can quickly geolocate photos. This is the first confirmed purchase of the geolocation technology by law enforcement agencies.

➡️  State officials are attempting to criminalize student protests by going after school administrators and teachers who "aid" in student-led anti-ICE protests. In Los Angeles, a teacher was fired after opening a school gate to prevent students from dangerously hopping over a gate amidst a school walk-out against ICE actions in Minneapolis. Additionally, federal immigration authorities have been using school cameras to target parents and students.

➡️  As part of a national fight to squash leftist movements and their infrastructure, multiple bills in the Florida legislature have been proposed which would further criminalize student organizing and expand definitions of terrorism and statues on material support for terrorism.

  • ✅  Learn more about the recent, critical cases from the National Lawyers Guild and here.

    ✅  Check out Muslims for Just Futures' resource on Material Support for Terrorism laws.

  • ✅  Remember, Signal is Safer, Not Safe — check out these tips to reduce your risk!

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

    ✅  Get off Google!

    • Google recently fulfilled an ICE subpoena for a broad swath of personal data for a student organizer and journalist involved in pro-Palestine organizing at Cornell University in 2024. Although Google has previously notified users of subpoenas from the federal government in time for users to legally quash the request, in this case Google acquiesced to an ICE that the company not "disclose the existence of this summons for indefinite period of time.” Google also didn't initially disclose the full extent of the data sought by ICE — usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers.

    • Another user was notified after writing an email critical of a DHS prosecutor moving to deport an Afghani man seeking asylum that Google had received an administrative subpoena from DHS for his account information. Days later, federal agents showed up at his house to question him, eventually leaving without taking further action.

    • And, keep in mind that no email provider is completely secure, even encrypted ones — for instance, Proton mail provided the Swiss government with payment data that was used to determine the identity of an anonymous user affiliated with Stop Cop City; the Swiss government then turned over that data to the FBI pursuant to an agreement with the U.S. government. Remember, just because it’s encrypted doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to a subpoena!

 

Challenge Mounting Criminalization of Poverty!

➡️  New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he will reinstate the homeless encampment sweeps despite campaign promises to end them, noting that they will be conducted by the Department of Homeless Service rather than the NYPD, prompting opposition from community organizations.

➡️  Arrests of unhoused people in Albuquerque have similarly skyrocketed despite the Mayor’s promises.

 

Resist Targeting of Trans People!

➡️  Kansas legislators passed a law retroactively invalidating drivers’ licenses overnight for people whose gender markers have been changed, impacting over 1700 transgender residents.

➡️  New Hampshire's House of Representatives passed a bill that would fine trans people $5,000 for using bathrooms that match their gender. The bill has yet to be passed by the state's senate and the state's governor has repeatedly vetoed other "bathroom ban" bills, but the move signifies a potential legislative coupling of anti-trans state violence and the criminalization of poverty.

➡️  West Virginia’s Senate similarly passed legislation that would prohibit “drag performances” in public places or locations where they could be seen by children, and barring trans people from changing in locker rooms aligned with their gender identity under penalty of being charged with indecent exposure, an offense that requires those convicted to register as sex offenders. The legislation has not passed the House.

  • ✅  Learn more about Kansas’ recently passed law retroactively invalidating drivers’ licenses for people whose gender markers have been changed: Click here for more information and resources for impacted people

    ✅  Support trans organizers near you!

 

Fight Abortion Criminalization!

➡️  In Kentucky, a second woman in under two months has been charged with homicide for undergoing a miscarriage. The woman and her husband were arrested after being reported by medical staff at the hospital where they sought care.

  • ✅  Join the Beyond Do No Harm Network in organizing to interrupt criminalization in the context of access to care, criminalization of care, and to ensure care to criminalized populations!

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.

 

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Tiffany Wang
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This Month in Criminalization