This Month in Criminalization

Written By Tiffany Wang

May 27, 2026


Welcome to the May 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:

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! 

If you are looking for thought partnership around your efforts to interrupt criminalization wherever you are, please reach out to the Resisting Criminalization Help Desk!

 
 

Criminalization Couched as "Counter-terrorism"

Earlier this month the regime released a "Counterterrorism 2026" strategy memo calling for:

➡️  Intensification of the “war on terror” through ongoing military aggression in the Middle East, framing the region, as well as the Sahel, Sudan, Somalia, and Mozambique as “incubator[s] or exporter[s] of terror” against American interests, and naming Israeli security, access to energy supplies, and control over trade routes including the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea as policy priorities.

➡️  Continued and escalated military aggression in Central and South America in the “war on drugs,” featuring a worldwide boat bombing campaign under the pretext of addressing “narco terrorism.” To date the U.S. has engaged in 57 bombings, killing 192 people.

➡️  Designation of organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs), exposing people deemed to be members or supporters to detention, deportation, military operations, drone strikes, prosecutions, and financial sanctions.

➡️  Protection of white and Christian supremacist organizations from scrutiny branded as “overreach,” despite the fact that "over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people,” a number vastly exceeding those attributed to groups named as primary security threats in the memo.

➡️  Targeting of "a new type of domestic terrorism ... driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life,” including "Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.” In other words, the regime is now openly declaring anyone who opposes fascism to be a violent threat.

  • The memo states: "our national CT [counter terrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa [sic], and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally.”

  • This rhetoric echoes that of the National Security Presidential Memorandum issued last September naming beliefs deemed to reflect "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as security threats, and directing Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus investigative and prosecutorial efforts on individuals and groups who espouse them.

  • While there is currently no legal basis for designating a group as a “domestic terrorist organization,” the administration nevertheless claimed to designate “antifa” — which is not an actual organization, but simply an abbreviation of “anti-fascist” — as such by executive order last year, and now appears to be making an end run around the absence of legal authority to do so by painting “Antifa” as an “international” organization, paving the way for designation by law as an FTO.

 

Prosecution of Resistance

➡️  The trial of the Spokane 3, three organizers charged with impeding federal agents in connection with efforts to stop the detention and deportation of two Venezuelan asylum seekers, began on May 18th. The case is one among a wave of federal prosecutions of anti-ICE protesters across the country from Spokane, WA and Portland, OR to Chicago and Minneapolis.

➡️  Late last month the DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a racial justice nonprofit known for tracking white supremacist groups, on charges of fraud, claiming that compensation of undercover investigators ran afoul of the purpose for which charitable donations were made to the organization.

 

DOJ Turns to Forum Shopping and Cooked-Up Criminal Subpoenas to Target Trans Health Care

➡️  Facing a series of losses in its efforts to enforce civil subpoenas to hospitals and health care providers providing gender-affirming care to trans youth seeking information about patients, providers, and policies, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) went forum shopping to a notorious judge in the Northern District of Texas to find a sympathetic ear for its claims that providing evidence-based care to young people somehow constitutes fraud against the federal government. Following a ruling by a federal court in Rhode Island quashing the subpoena and unsuccessful appeals to both the 5th and 1st Circuits to stay the Texas federal court's orders, the hospital eventually complied and turned over anonymized patient information to the Texas federal court where it will be held by the court clerk (not to be made available to the government) pending resolution of the hospital’s appeals.

In other words, despite a series of adverse rulings on the civil subpoenas, no patient information has yet been turned over to the federal government, and providing gender-affirming care to minors is still legal where not banned by state law.

➡️  In the midst of the litigation around the Rhode Island Hospital civil subpoena, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas issued criminal grand jury subpoenas to “several” institutions, including NYU Langone Hospital in New York City, for the same information the DOJ has been seeking through the civil subpoenas, under the same legal theory that has been rejected by civil courts, claiming that a federal criminal investigation is underway, although DOJ attorneys have not been able to provide any details. This represents the latest move in the regime’s effort to scare providers away from offering gender-affirming care to trans youth:

➡️  On May 7th, the Tennessee Governor signed into law a bill that requires health care facilities who receive state funding to provide anonymized information about people receiving gender-affirming care to a public registry, "including the age and sex of patients receiving any type of gender-affirming care, as well as the type of procedure, names of drugs, dosages, frequencies, methods by which drugs are administered, and any diagnoses of mental health or neurological conditions. Clinics will also have to disclose the name, contact information and medical speciality of any health care provider who offers gender-affirming care."

➡️  Attacks on trans health care are taking place against a backdrop of broader efforts to criminalize trans people supporters, and existence.

 

Medication Abortion Access Maintained — For Now...

➡️  After a dedicated campaign by federal and state Republicans to severely restrict access to abortion medication, a federal appeals court overturned FDA regulations for the telehealth prescription and mailing of abortion pills. The decision was indefinitely stayed by the Supreme Court early this month, maintaining access to medication abortion through telehealth as the lawsuit continues to play out. In the meantime, state legislators and administrators continue to seek to limit access to abortion medication through FDA regulations and beyond.

 

Summer of Resistance to ICE Heats Up

As calls to Abolish ICE heat up across the country and growing numbers of people held under torturous conditions in migrant detention centers are rising up in resistance through hunger strikes across the country, including New Jersey, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida, supported by community members, organizers are increasingly focusing on the connections between immigration enforcement machinery and existing systems of policing and punishment through former prisons turned into immigration detention camps, the rise of laws criminalizing being in the country without documentation, and the deputization of police, sheriffs, and jails and facilities through 287(g) agreements.

➡️  In recent weeks ICE's warehouse buy-up plan has faltered in the face of community opposition and stalling lawsuits.

➡️  Now, the regime has begun to turn its attention to existing infrastructures of the carceral state: buying up privately owned and operated prisons and using 287(g) agreements with police departments across the country to hold people in local jails. The specificities of these agreements vary by municipality (read about the three different kinds of 287(g) agreements and their implications) but broadly they allow ICE to expand its mass detention and deportation plan by using the infrastructure, human power, and logistical capacities of police to kidnap more people and hold more people in detention while awaiting the purchase and opening of large facilities.

➡️  With increasing visibility to these agreements, some counties have dropped 287(g) agreements between ICE and local/state police — yet other counties are newly adopting them, and some states are making them a requirement.

  • Texas and Florida lead the charge with the most 287(g)g agreements — Florida has seen a 577% increase in 287(g) agreements since January 2025 (and now ten public universities in Florida have signed campus police to collaboration agreements with ICE). Miami has been a particular hotbed of ICE/police collaboration. There were DOUBLE the number of detentions in Miami than in Minneapolis during the same period of the latter city's three-month ICE/CBP "surge." Because of a 287(g) agreement passed in Miami in June, these kidnappings have happened quietly and without the same public outcry, as police do ICE's job for them.

  • Multiple major cities in Texas, where one in four ICE kidnappings happen nationally, curtailed proposed limitations to local police collaboration with ICE under funding cut threats from the Governor.

➡️  Even police in states and cities that explicitly do not allow collaboration with ICE have been reported to be collaborating with ICE in violation of the law, or — more legally but no less harmfully — greasing the wheels for ICE by quashing community resistance.

  • At the beginning of the month in Brooklyn, two hundred people gathered outside a hospital to block ICE from leaving with a person they brought in for medical treatment after violently injuring him during arrest. ICE agents were eventually able to leave the scene with the person they had detained but not before pepper spraying the crowd. Despite New York sanctuary laws barring local/state police collaboration with ICE, New York police officers were present on the scene, arresting eight protestors, pushing people away from an ICE vehicle, and appearing to escort ICE agents as they dragged the detained person on the ground and into a waiting car. City officials deny that NYPD officers "collaborated" with ICE but we know that whether police are directly involved in kidnapping immigrants from our communities or just punishing people who try to get in the way, the results are all the same: the criminalization of immigrants and those who defend them.

 

Fighting Data Centers and the Imperialist War Machine

➡️  As the Trump regime plans to ramp up production of nuclear weapons, the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan voted for a year-long moratorium on a municipal water supply to a planned data center intended to be used for nuclear weapons research, including and especially the production of plutonium pits which require large computational power. This temporary win comes after a months-long campaign by community members.

➡️  As the U.S. races to secure the supply of minerals critical for the production of weapons and data centers alike, land and communities in the Global South, particularly Indigenous land and communities, are vulnerable to the extraction and exploitation.

➡️  Communities across the country continue to win and lose against hyperscale data centers, and fights continue

 

No Bombing in Lebanon, No Siege on Cuba, No Weapons for Genocide, No War on Drugs!

➡️  In southern Lebanon, Israeli troops have been ordered to destroy all infrastructure, with quotas on the number of destroyed homes.

➡️  As the Israeli military pushes forward the agreed upon "yellow line" demarcating the zone of military activity and IOF-control, displaced people in Gaza burned their own tents this month in protest of ever-worsening living conditions.

➡️  The U.S. has expanded sanctions on Cuba, as the country has announced it has run out of oil, and has threatened an invasion of the island.

➡️  On Negros Island, 19 people were shot dead and 650 farmers were displaced by the Philippine military after the government of President Marcos labeled the community fighting for autonomy as dangerous terrorists — a tactic known as "red-tagging" and which begun as a state repression tactic in the '60s and intensified during the previous Duterte regime.

 

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