This Month in Criminalization
April 17, 2026
Welcome to the April 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 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:
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✅ Check out CAIR’s recommendations for safer travel here.
✅ Protect your data from ICE.
✅ Check this list of who is and who is not ICE in airports and which airports they are currently stationed in.
✅ Read Matthew Rodriguez's account of his encounter with ICE agents at TSA last month here, in which he argues that ICE presence at airports is intended to test our tolerance for presence of federal enforcement ahead of the midterms.
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✅ Continue to demand that Congress defund ICE & DHS!
✅ Join and initiate organizing around increased police and ICE presence in World Cup cities!
A union of 2,000 stadium workers at Sofi stadium in Los Angeles are organizing to push FIFA to ban ice from stadiums in the U.S.
Black Alliance for Peace calls for World Cup to be relocated.
✅ Build toward a Summer of Resistance through actions marking May Day, Juneteenth, and the 250th anniversary of the U.S.
✅ As momentum behind demands to Abolish ICE grow, IC joins with Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Critical Resistance, Detention Watch Network and others who have been organizing around ICE abolition for decades to emphasize that:
No ICE! means NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement and detention operations and REPEAL the billion$that they were given last summer in the reconciliation (One Big Betrayal Act, OBBA)
NO ICE! means no more ICE, CBP, or DHS hiring sprees and no more commandeering of federal agencies to engage in immigration enforcement! No ICE! means NO MORE immigration detention facilities, warehouses, or holding cells, and closing existing detention facilities, including Dilley!
NO ICE! means NO collaboration between local law enforcement agencies and immigration enforcement through deputization of local police, sheriffs, or state police to enforce immigration laws!
NO ICE! means no ICE prosecutions or deportations!
NO ICE! means NO information or data sharing between local, state, or federal government agencies with immigration enforcement authorities!
NO ICE! means NO ICE! (not ICE with body cameras, ICE without masks, ICE with training, ICE with more rules, ICE but nicer, ICE under a new name, ICE in a new structure, ICE with new leadership etc.)
✅ To take action, visit:
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✅ Learn more using the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker and take action to stop the ICE warehouse plan using the Detention Watch Network Toolkit!
✅ Learn about ICE expansion in Federal Bureau of Prison facilities in this DWN explainer!
✅ ICE is using a vast network of private contractors for the construction and staffing of its disappearance facilities and for the identification and kidnapping of immigrants. Make it bad to do business with DHS:
Find businesses near you that contract with ICE using this ICE Contract Tracker.
Join BAJI’s Operation Break the ICE Machine, a campaign targeting Hilton Hotels.
✅ Read about the connections between ICE detention and Palestinian prisons from Leqaa Kordia, a recently freed Palestinian woman who was incarcerated for a year in a Texas ICE detention camp after participating in the 2024 Columbia University Palestine solidarity encampments.
✅ Be inspired by the beautiful art people are making while inside ICE detention centers demanding their freedom.
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Join or support these campaigns:
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✅ Organize against war, occupation, and militarization in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and Cuba:
No tax dollars for war, weapons or ICE— join Grassroots Global Justice Alliance’s call to action.
Join the Rising Majority on April 20th for a No War, No ICE, Free Palestine: May Day Mass Call in the lead up to May Day Against Empire.
Organize to get your city to divest from the war machine using this toolkit from World Beyond War.
✅ Demand immediate divestment from Israeli bonds funding genocide.
Learn more about the Break the Bonds campaign.
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.
✅ Join Palestine Youth Movement’s Mask off Maersk campaign!
✅ Boycott Teva pharmaceuticals!
✅ Donate to the Sameer Project.
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✅ Read the NLG's Statement of Solidarity with the Prairieland Political Prisoners and learn how you can support the defendants.
✅ Read Zohra Ahmed on the Prairieland convictions in the long history of political repression in the U.S.
✅ Read Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity in the Face of Political Repression.
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✅ Remember, Signal is Safer, Not Safe — check out these tips to reduce your risk!
The FBI was able to access a Prairieland defendant's deleted Signal messages from iPhone's notification database, despite the fact that disappearing messages were set and Signal was subsequently deleted. This is a security vulnerability for all secure messaging apps, not just Signal.
You can turn off Signal notification's message content and names in the notification settings in the Signal app.
✅ Get off Google! Google has fulfilled federal subpoenas for users' personal data, sometimes without notifying the user whose information was turned over to law enforcement.
Similarly, Apple turned over the identity of a paying "Hide My Email" customer to the FBI.
The "secure" messaging app TeleGuard is actually incredibly un-secure with its encryption codes accessible to all users.
✅ Remember, just because it’s encrypted doesn’t mean it can’t be subpoenaed! It doesn’t matter how securely your information is stored — if a criminal or civil court orders you to turn it over, you are at risk of having to disclose it (or go to jail indefinitely for contempt of court) if you can’t successfully quash the subpoena! Don’t keep it if you don’t want them to read it!
✅ Check out IC's Digital Security and Doxxing Prevention checklist! Written for journalists in mind, it has helpful tips and information for everyone!
✅ Organize a digital security party for your community!
Host a "self-doxxing" event to clean up your internet visibility
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✅ 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 who doesn't want their coworkers to turn their patients into the cops, join the Beyond Do No Harm Network!
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 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!
As the Feds Move Toward Occupation, We Need to Build Toward a Summer of Resistance
➡️ As the regime continues to wage, fuel, and threaten war across the globe from Iran to Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, it also appears to be taking additional steps toward occupation within U.S. borders, deploying ICE beyond our neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities into airports in what White House advisor Steve Bannon has explicitly described as a “test run” for midterm elections, while continuing to threaten to send federal enforcement to urban centers "whether they want it or not."
Hundreds of ICE agents are now stationed at airports assisting TSA with security and checking IDs. Over 800 people have already been arrested by ICE over the past year based on TSA data (although only a handful of arrests have taken place at airports), leading to widespread concern for migrants traveling domestically, as well as other groups targeted by federal law enforcement agents, given that ICE has also been authorized to conduct criminal enforcement actions at airports. There are some reports that ICE presence at large airports began diminishing this week, but caution is still advised.
➡️ DHS also announced that ICE agents will be present at Marine Corps graduation events in South Carolina this Spring to check documents of graduates and their family and friends and provide general security. The White House has similarly announced that ICE agents will also be deployed at World Cup games this summer to provide "critical security operations,” further extending ICE presence and function to "general security."
As resistance to ICE street operations and kidnapping people from their homes, workplaces, and schools continues, challenges to ICE presence at airports, graduations, and sporting events is essential to combating the normalization of performance of “security” functions by nation’s largest police force as part of the consolidation of authoritarian power.
➡️ At the same time, the regime is attempting to secure state voter lists in order to enable the U.S. Postal Service to restrict the use of mail-in ballots while threatening to ban them altogether, legislate voter identification requirements, and nationalize elections. As resistance to ICE street operations and kidnapping people from their homes, workplaces, and schools continues, challenges to ICE presence at airports, graduations, and sporting events is essential to combating the normalization of performance of “security” functions by nation’s largest police force as part of the consolidation of authoritarian power.
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✅ Check out CAIR’s recommendations for safer travel here.
✅ Check this list of who is and who is not ICE in airports and which airports they are currently stationed in.
✅ Read Matthew Rodriguez's account of his encounter with ICE agents at TSA last month here, in which he argues that ICE presence at airports is intended to test our tolerance for presence of federal enforcement ahead of the midterms.
-
✅ Continue to demand that Congress defund ICE & DHS!
✅ Join and initiate organizing around increased police and ICE presence in World Cup cities!
A union of 2,000 stadium workers at Sofi stadium in Los Angeles are organizing to push FIFA to ban ice from stadiums in the U.S.
Black Alliance for Peace calls for World Cup to be relocated.
✅ Build toward a Summer of Resistance through actions marking May Day, Juneteenth, and the 250th anniversary of the U.S.
✅ As momentum behind demands to Abolish ICE grow, IC joins with Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Critical Resistance, Detention Watch Network and others who have been organizing around ICE abolition for decades to emphasize that:
No ICE! means NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement and detention operations and REPEAL the billion$ that they were given last summer in the reconciliation (One Big Betrayal Act, OBBA)
NO ICE! means no more ICE, CBP, or DHS hiring sprees and no more commandeering of federal agencies to engage in immigration enforcement! No ICE! means NO MORE immigration detention facilities, warehouses, or holding cells, and closing existing detention facilities, including Dilley!
NO ICE! means NO collaboration between local law enforcement agencies and immigration enforcement through deputization of local police, sheriffs, or state police to enforce immigration laws!
NO ICE! means no ICE prosecutions or deportations!
NO ICE! means NO information or data sharing between local, state, or federal government agencies with immigration enforcement authorities!
NO ICE! means NO ICE! (not ICE with body cameras, ICE without masks, ICE with training, ICE with more rules, ICE but nicer, ICE under a new name, ICE in a new structure, ICE with new leadership etc.)
✅ To take action, visit:
The Time is NOW to Break ICE's Warehouse Purchasing Campaign and Expansion of the Surveillance State
➡️ At least 14 people have died in ICE detention since the beginning of the year, including Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano, found unresponsive in a California detention camp late last month. Meanwhile, a measles outbreak in a Texas facility continues to spread.
➡️ The federal government is continuing its efforts to turn warehouse facilities into large-scale “processing" (1,000-1,500 beds) centers and detention sites (as many as 10,000 beds).
"This is the time for people to make noise." … These are windows of opportunity for us to apply even greater pressure!
ICE purchased a warehouse it claims will have a 7,500-10,000 bed capacity in Salt Lake City for $145 million, amidst mounting opposition from local officials.
Multiple state governments are suing to prevent the “retrofitting” of warehouses into detention camps using environmental regulations. Litigation has resulted in a temporary block to construction in Maryland through mid-April.
In Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation bought a $1.24 million square foot facility ICE was considering purchasing to turn into a detention camp it claimed would hold 8,500 people. This is the second time that a potential warehouse sale to ICE in Oklahoma has not gone through.
➡️ Warehouses aren't the only infrastructure that ICE is seeking: the feds are also looking to lease existing co-working office space in over 100 cities.
➡️ "This is the time for people to make noise." Since ICE's warehouse retrofitting strategy became public, more sales have been cancelled than have ultimately gone through: 13 sales have been cancelled compared to 10 successful purchases. According to DHS spokespeople, the agency is pausing its warehouse purchasing campaign as of early April as part of the department's leadership transition, although reporting suggests that internal resistance to the program and pushback from local communities has been making DHS' strategy increasing untenable. A temporary pause is not a win, but it does present a window of opportunity for even greater pressure!
➡️ Stop Public and Private Investment in Palantir:
The media company and date broker Reuters contracts with Palantir to provide data to a tool ICE uses to identify neighborhoods to target for deportation operations.
Public pension funds in nearly half of U.S. states hold billions in Palantir stock. Unions, groups, and workers across the country are pushing back against their pensions being invested in state violence. Read here for a full list of pension funds invested in Palantir.
A WIN: New York City's public hospital system announced that it will not be renewing its contract with Palantir after an organizing campaign.
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✅ Learn more using the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker and take action to stop the ICE warehouse plan using the Detention Watch Network Toolkit!
✅ Learn about ICE expansion in Federal Bureau of Prison facilities in this DWN explainer!
✅ ICE is using a vast network of private contractors for the construction and staffing of its disappearance facilities and for the identification and kidnapping of immigrants. Make it bad to do business with DHS:
Find businesses near you that contract with ICE using this ICE Contract Tracker.
Join BAJI’s Operation Break the ICE Machine, a campaign targeting Hilton Hotels.
✅ Read about the connections between ICE detention and Palestinian prisons from Leqaa Kordia, a recently freed Palestinian woman who was incarcerated for a year in a Texas ICE detention camp after participating in the 2024 Columbia University Palestine solidarity encampments.
✅ Be inspired by the beautiful art people are making while inside ICE detention centers demanding their freedom.
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Join or support these campaigns:
No War on Iran, No Bombing in Lebanon, No Siege on Cuba, No Weapons for Genocide!
➡️ The U.S. continues to threaten to level civilian infrastructure in Iran as it restricts shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, central to global oil economies, amidst a fragile two week ceasefire. To date 3,000 Iranians have been killed amidst threats of a possible ground invasion to secure regime change like "what [they] did in Venezuela,” while oil and gas infrastructure, health care infrastructure, universities, and religious sites, including a synagogue, have been bombed by the U.S. and Israel.
➡️ Israeli airstrikes have killed over 2000 people in Lebanon and injured over 5,000 in the largest coordinated strikes since the war began in early March, and 1.1 million — more than one fifth of the country's population — have been issued displacement orders. Though Israel has been consistently bombing the area with daily attacks since its November 2024 ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, attacks have multiplied since the launch of the war on Iran. Israeli attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially bridges, in southern Lebanon threaten to cut off the region and prevent residents from escaping to the north of the country. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, explicitly referencing the Gaza "model," has announced intentions to occupy the whole of Southern Lebanon and ethnically cleanse the region of Shia Muslims even after the conclusion of the ground invasion. More than 600,000 evacuated residents will prohibited from returning home as Israel continues to destroy homes and villages near the border.
➡️ On March 30th, the Israeli parliament passed a law instructing military courts to impose the death penalty on Palestinian political prisoners. Israeli military courts in the West Bank, where exclusively Palestinians defendants are tried, have a 96% conviction rate. The new law, which harkens back to British colonial rule in the region nearly a century ago, passed amidst the government's approval of a record number of new settlements and escalating settler violence against Palestinian residents in the West Bank and an increase of "price tag" attacks — retaliatory attacks by Israeli settlers for resistance to settler expansion.
➡️ U.S. threats to “take care of Cuba” are mounting amidst a devastating blockade on the island.
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✅ Organize against war, occupation, and militarization in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and Cuba:
No tax dollars for war, weapons or ICE— join Grassroots Global Justice Alliance’s call to action.
Join the Rising Majority on April 20th for a No War, No ICE, Free Palestine: May Day Mass Call in the lead up to May Day Against Empire.
Organize to get your city to divest from the war machine using this toolkit from World Beyond War.
✅ Demand immediate divestment from Israeli bonds funding genocide.
Learn more about the Break the Bonds campaign.
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.
✅ Join Palestine Youth Movement’s Mask off Maersk campaign!
✅ Boycott Teva pharmaceuticals!
✅ Donate to the Sameer Project.
Prairieland Convictions and "Antifa" Repression
➡️ Signaling a new phase of repression of dissent, 9 activists were convicted of material support for terrorism in connection with a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in what is considered a test case for criminalization of "antifa" as domestic terrorists. Using tactics reminiscent of the “Red Scare,” the Prairieland prosecution appears to be the first to successfully criminalize a group of protestors by designating them as an “antifa cell,” arguing that "because they endorsed the same ideas" or "offered support to the same political causes," they are liable for each others actions, and convicting them of material support of terrorism based on tagging a building with the phrase “ICE = Pigs.”
Eight of the nine defendants were convicted of terrorism charges (and some on attempted murder charges) based on evidence that included wearing all black, using Signal, membership in an “Emma Goldman book club,” their social media feeds, possessing and moving “radical zines” from one location to another, “anti-government memes,” “drawings of burning cop cars," and even a movie review, all used to establish their connection to “antifa" and "ideologically motivated intent." Prosecutors also introduced evidence from an "expert” who wrote a book about “black identity extremists" and contributed to the definition of “antifa” in the prosecuting documents.
The current federal budget request includes funding for a new FBI led “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” with personnel from 10 federal agencies that is “proactively” implementing a presidential memorandum defining “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” “anti-law enforcement” beliefs, “extreme” positions on issues of “migration, race and gender,” and views “hostile to" traditional views on family, religion, and morality as potentially linked to “antifa,” which the administration has named a “domestic terrorist” “group” (despite the fact that no such group exists and no such classification exists in federal law). Among other tactics, the center uses "social media tracking" to identify "ideologically-motivated terrorists."
The regime is promoting its “antifa” message globally, as the administration announced plans for an international summit this summer to share strategies, tactics, and information on countering “extreme" left-wing movements.
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✅ Read the NLG's Statement of Solidarity with the Prairieland Political Prisoners and learn how you can support the defendants.
✅ Read Zohra Ahmed on the Prairieland convictions in the long history of political repression in the U.S.
✅ Read Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity in the Face of Political Repression.
-
✅ Remember, Signal is Safer, Not Safe — check out these tips to reduce your risk!
The FBI was able to access a Prairieland defendant's deleted Signal messages from iPhone's notification database, despite the fact that disappearing messages were set and Signal was subsequently deleted. This is a security vulnerability for all secure messaging apps, not just Signal.
You can turn off Signal notification's message content and names in the notification settings in the Signal app.
✅ Get off Google! Google has fulfilled federal subpoenas for users' personal data, sometimes without notifying the user whose information was turned over to law enforcement.
Similarly, Apple turned over the identity of a paying "Hide My Email" customer to the FBI.
The "secure" messaging app TeleGuard is actually incredibly un-secure with its encryption codes accessible to all users.
✅ Remember, just because it’s encrypted doesn’t mean it can’t be subpoenaed! It doesn’t matter how securely your information is stored — if a criminal or civil court orders you to turn it over, you are at risk of having to disclose it (or go to jail indefinitely for contempt of court) if you can’t successfully quash the subpoena! Don’t keep it if you don’t want them to read it!
✅ Check out IC's Digital Security and Doxxing Prevention checklist! Written for journalists in mind, it has helpful tips and information for everyone!
✅ Organize a digital security party for your community!
Host a "self-doxxing" event to clean up your internet visibility
Continue to Resist Criminalization of Medication Abortion!
➡️ Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urging the agency to investigate and crackdown on medication abortion pills and collaborate with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the U.S. Postal Service to intercept packages containing abortion pills.
➡️ An update to drug laws in Mississippi that make it a felony to distribute, or intend to distribute, abortion-inducing medication passed the legislature and was signed into law by Governor Tate Reeves.
➡️ In South Carolina — where abortion is currently banned at around six weeks of pregnancy — lawmakers introduced legislation that would ban nearly all abortions, explicitly outlaw self-managed abortion, make it a felony to provide abortion-inducing drugs to a pregnant person, follow Louisiana’s lead in designating mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances, and prohibit clinics that provide abortion care from receiving any government funds for family planning services. The bill would also create new penalties for doctors who fail to report any abortions they perform within seven days, and includes a “bounty hunter” provision allowing people to sue over abortions they believe were performed illegally. Senate Bill 1095 is similar to legislation that didn’t advance out of committee last year, but is being considered in committee once again.
➡️ In Georgia, a Black woman was arrested after she told hospital staff that she took the abortion drug misoprostol to end her pregnancy. The prosecutor later told her public defender that he wouldn't be bringing the case to a grand jury but wouldn't be dropping the charges either, leaving the woman in legal and criminal limbo.
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✅ 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 who doesn't want their coworkers to turn their patients into the cops, join the Beyond Do No Harm Network!
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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