This Month in Criminalization: July 2026

Written By Tiffany Wang

July 22, 2026


Welcome to the July 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! 

The Resisting Criminalization Help Desk is on a temporary break for the rest of the summer, 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.

In the meantime, check out the latest updates to our Block It! Don’t Build It! Don’t Fill It! Don’t Fuel It! toolkit as well as Block & Build: But Make it Abolitionist.

 
 

The Regime Continues Its Murderous Rampage and Efforts to Suppress Dissent

Over the past month:

➡️  Federal agents killed three people:

  • Tyrin Johnson was killed by National Guard who continue to occupy Memphis, Tennessee as part of the “Memphis Safe Task Force."

  • ICE agents killed 52-year-old father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas as he was driving himself and a crew on their way to work, and 26-year-old father Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddleford, Maine, dragging both men bleeding out of their cars, failing to provide medical assistance, and, in Guerrero’s case, leaving his body in the street for hours. Their deaths brings the total number of people directly killed by ICE since 2025 into double digits.

➡️  45-year-old Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva died of heart failure during an ICE transport, joining over 55 people who have have died in ICE detention since January 2025.

➡️  A man in St. Augustine, Florida was killed by a tractor trailer while fleeing ICE agents.

➡️  ICE arrested 10,000 people within a five day period, setting a new goal of 2,000 abductions a day. Following widespread resistance to highly visible and violent ICE enforcement surges that dominated headlines, the regime has shifted to less spectacular, but no less violent tactics, arresting people at court hearings and mandatory check-ins, during traffic stops, and on the street, drawing less national attention.

➡️  The Supreme Court ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for migrants from Haiti (over 300,000 people) and Syria (over 6,000 people), placing them at risk of becoming undocumented and targets of immigration enforcement overnight as early as July 24th, when their work permits are scheduled to expire. Over 1.3 million people in the U.S. currently have TPS status, and termination will potentially trigger what organizers from Muslims for Just Futures describe as the "largest de-documentation effort in modern U.S. history" and what Haitian Bridge Alliance describes as a mass family separation event. Four other countries retain TPS status (El Salvador, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Sudan) but are up for renewal this year — meaning that TPS status for all refugees in the U.S. could end by 2027.

➡️  A fourth woman died at Huron Valley Prison in Michigan, a facility which has been under investigation for years.

➡️  On July 16th, the U.S. the State Department hosted a gathering of representatives from over 65 countries dedicated to building international infrastructure to fight “far left extremism.”

 

As the regime continues its murderous rampage at, within, and beyond U.S. borders while building domestic international infrastructure to violently suppress dissent — making clear its intention to deploy ICE throughout the U.S. during midterm elections under the pretext of fictitious “voter fraud,” and celebrating 250 years of genocide, land theft, and criminalization — communities under siege are fortifying themselves and each other, sharing information, strategies, solidarity, and resources for resistance.

As we do so, it bears repeating that Abolition is Still the Only Way Out of This — there are no quick fixes for fascism. We cannot stop the violence of the state by turning to the institutions that produce and are directly implicated in it. When we legitimize them, we are feeding the very beast we are fighting.

 

“…There are no quick fixes for fascism. We cannot stop the violence of the state by turning to the institutions that produce and are directly implicated in it. When we legitimize them, we are feeding the very beast we are fighting.”

We can’t afford to continue to:

 

Instead, we need to continue to focus our efforts on building the power to starve and stop machineries of death by:

➡️  Blocking the $1.5 TRILLION (with a “T) National Defense Authorization Act of 2027, which would:

  • represent one of the largest transfers of our collective resources to military, federal enforcement, surveillance, policing, and punishment in U.S. history;

  • further merge U.S.-Israeli military infrastructure and operations, including the appointment of a Pentagon position to coordinate joint weapons research, production, and integration of surveillance technologies.

✅  Reject the Deadly Merger!

✅  Organize for divestment from the war machine using this toolkit from World Beyond War.

➡️  Organizing to claw back the $240 billion dollars fueling ICE surges, killings and kidnappings!

➡️  Fighting to abolish ICE in real terms, for immediate termination of federal, state, and local agents responsible for killings, violence, abuse, and abductions and an end to all immigration enforcement operations, and for full reparations to individuals, families, and communities harmed — in concert with efforts to interrupt criminalization, defund police and prisons, and secure reparations for survivors of police violence;

✅  Join the Detention Watch Network call to End the ICE Age on 🗓️Wednesday, July 21st at 8 PM ET.

➡️  Campaigning for closures and blocking construction of new detention camps, jails, and prisons;

➡️  Demanding divestment from tools of mass surveillance;

➡️  Showing unwavering solidarity and support for individuals, communities, and organizations targeted for repression in the U.S. and beyond.

✅  If you are an organizational leader, join IC co-founder Andrea J. Ritchie, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Vince Warren, and Judith Browne Dianis for Fighting Fire With Water: Collective Power and Legal Strategies on 🗓️ July 23rd at 7 pm ET

✅  If you are a lawyer, join the upcoming Movement Law Lab Mass Defiance training on 🗓️ July 28th at 3 ET

 
 

We are in for a fight for our lives as the forces of fascism consolidate in the U.S. and around the world. Banding together to interrupt criminalization in all forms and on all fronts represents our best chance of defeating them.

1000 days of U.S.-Funded Genocide in Gaza — We Owe Palestinians Sumud

➡️  Over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed (including over 20,000 children), over 170,000 wounded, close to 60,000 children have been orphaned, and more than 90% of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed in the last 1,000 days. Now, famine is returning to Gaza as Israel blocks entry of all but 25% of needed supplies. Newborns and babies continue to die preventable deaths, mothers continue to experience miscarriages, undergo C-sections without anesthesia, and suffer debilitating conditions following birth, including infant and maternal mortality.

➡️  The Israeli regime announced this month that it has directed the Israeli military to take 70% of the Gaza Strip in flagrant violation of the October “ceasefire" agreement which provided for occupation of just over half of the area. The IOF has been in consistent violation of this provision since the agreement was announced.

➡️  The U.S.-Israeli controlled "Board of Peace" met in early July after months of silence to propose Palestinians in Gaza be concentrated into camps (euphemistically named "humanitarian corridors") while Israel expands its occupation of Gaza.

➡️  Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician, is on the brink of death after being subjected to torture and imprisonment in Israel for over 18 months.

➡️  As attacks by settlers in the West Bank intensified this month, the Israeli cabinet approved 13 new settlements in the West Bank, and began building the first IOF base in the occupied West Bank since the Oslo Accords of 1990. Palestinian officials warn that the new settlements are strategically positioned to isolate major Palestinian cities to the North and South and further entrench Israel control of the occupied West Bank and repression of Palestinian life. Additionally, a coalition of Israeli settler groups, with the support of the Israeli military, are reportedly planning on building 100 new settlements in Areas A and B — land under full or partial control of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords.

➡️  Israel has also begun the first phase of construction on the "Crimson Thread," a 500-kilometer-long barrier along the entire eastern side of the West Bank, designed to separate the fertile Jordan Valley from the rest of the Palestinian West Bank. As part of construction, the IOF has destroyed the Palestinian farmland around the barrier, knocking down structures, killing livestock, and cutting off water to irrigation systems.

➡️  The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is removing Gazan journalists from international protection lists based on Israeli allegations of connections to terrorist organizations — demonstrating how international institutions and organizations continue to reinforce criminalizing narratives of Palestinians that subject them to continual genocidal violence and terror.

 

Florida Names CAIR Domestic Terrorist Organization

➡️  After Texas designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a foreign terrorist organization under state law in November of last year, the state of Florida has gone a step further and declared CAIR a domestic terrorist organization under broad new legislation aimed at criminalizing any organization the state names as such.

➡️  Florida's new law is different and potentially broader than federal domestic terrorist designations — one of two such pieces of legislation in country passed this year. Under the Florida law, a Domestic Terrorist Organization (DTO) designation mobilizes “gang” laws, defining targeted organizations as a "criminal gang," meaning they are "prohibited from doing any activity with the intent to benefit, promote or further the interests of the criminal gang," — essentially criminalizing operations of the organization entirely.

  • Under the law, a designated organization "may not employ directors or staff, coordinate with volunteers, solicit or receive donations, use bank accounts, use social media accounts, retain legal counsel, lease or rent property, receive internet services, or engage in any activity intended to further its organizational mission and interests"

  • The law also criminalizes anyone who provides "material support" (money, property, service, advice, personnel, training, safe house, communications equipment, weapons) to designated organizations.

➡️  The designation of CAIR is part of a decades-long history of state surveillance and repression of Muslims and Islamic organizations that has only intensified since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza.

  • ✅  Read more from Muslims for Just Futures about the implications of the new law and how it is connected to decades of Islamophobic repression.

    ✅  Visit Muslims for Just Futures' Community Defense Hub to learn how to protect your group or organization from state repression.

 

Federal, State, and Local Surveillance Strategies

➡️  After a protest outside of an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington in June of last year — the same protest that resulted in the convictions of nine protestors on conspiracy charges — the FBI extracted data from the phones of at least 13 protestors. 23 protestors’ phones were seized and held for close to two months following their arrest; public records later revealed that of these, data was extracted from 13 by the FBI using Cellebrite software. Charges were later dismissed for 12 protestors, but one was indicted on conspiracy charges along with the Spokane 8.

➡️   FBI documents recently surfaced through a public records request reveal that the agency now considers "anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-government, or anti-law enforcement graffiti" to be indicators of "AVE (anarchist violent extremists)." The report also names “conducting pre-operational surveillance of government personnel or buildings, law enforcement personnel or facilities, critical infrastructure, or symbols of capitalism;” “making claims of or calling for criminal action against business, government, or law enforcement entities on extremist websites;” and “seeking and acquiring materials to construct” explosive devices as precursors to violence.

  • AVE is a term that recently emerged in internal FBI reports, in line with the Trump regime's national security memo (NSPM-7) signed in September 2025 linking various kinds of "anti-Americanism" to extremist violence, and the more recent Trump "Counterterrorism Memo" reorienting national security strategy against "anarchists" and “antifascists,” and targeting opposition to "authoritarianism, colonialism, imperialism," and "immigration enforcement.”

  • The FBI notes that AVEs may "self-identify as anti-fascist, or 'Antifa,'" or align with the goals of 'antifa' "but not explicitly use that moniker." The FBI has described Prairieland defendants, immigrant advocates whose Signal group chat the FBI infiltrated in spring of last year, and broadly the activities of Minneapolis community members during this year's ICE surge, as part of “antifa."

  • This internal report is being distributed to local and state law enforcement through 80 "fusion centers” created after 9/11 for the purposes of information sharing. Described as the "local arm” of the Department of Homeland Security, fusion centers are a central mechanism through which the FBI operationalizes political repression through targeted local surveillance of people and groups and data-sharing across local and national agencies. Fusion centers have been used to surveil students organizing for Palestine, communities organizing against AI data centers, participants in movements for Black lives, and more.

➡️  In late June, FBI and DHS agents raided the home of a local activist in Texas as part of a federal investigation into an alleged bomb plot against the White House's UFC event in mid-June. Days after the raid, the local activist reported that federal agents returned to their home to offer them $200,000 to become an FBI informant. This is just one instance of a potent repression strategy that the FBI and other federal enforcement agencies have been making quick use of to surveil and criminalize movements. For instance, FBI agents were reported to be tracking down recent ICE detention camp hunger strike solidarity protestors and attempting to recruit them as informants; a paid informant and undercover FBI agent were also critical to the prosecution of the "Turtle Island Liberation Front" case.

➡️  Recent court documents confirm that ICE used information obtained from Medicaid data to track migrants.

  • ✅  Remember, Signal is safer, not safe — check out these tips to reduce your risk.

  • ✅  Support campaigns in your area to end local fusion centers, like Get the BRIC Out of Boston.

    ✅  See what fusion centers exist in your state or area here.

    ✅  Listen to Fatema Ahmed, Executive Director of Muslim Justice League, explain the dangers of fusion centers and MJL's work to disrupt the counterterrorism machine.

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

    ✅  Share information about the National Lawyers Guild Federal Repression Hotline far and wide in your community, and check out the Center for Constitutional Rights If An Agent Knocks resource!

 

DOJ Makes it Easier to Forcibly Institutionalize Disabled People

➡️  In late June, the DOJ released a memo that advocates fear will make it easier for states to forcibly institutionalize disabled people. The memo states that states are not required to provide in-home or community-based care to disabled people, allowing states to return to the common practice of separating disabled people from their family, friends, and community and incarcerating them in nursing homes and large institutions.

  • ✅  Support Crip Justice's campaigns to free disabled people from jails, hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and other institutions: Disabled and Punished Defense Campaigns.

    ✅  Learn more about the central role of eugenic targeting of disabled people in authoritarianism and fascism from the Transgender Law Center’s Disability Project.

    ✅  If you are a health care provider or advocate committed to interrupting the criminalization of disabled people join the Beyond Do No Harm Network!

 

Summer Surge of Dangerous, Traumatic Encampment Sweeps

➡️  Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has signed the most extreme law criminalizing the unhoused in the country, making it a crime to sleep on the street. Now, unhoused people — or anyone said to be found sleeping on the street — in Louisiana can be arrested, charged with a fine of up to $500, sentenced to six months in jail, or both. People with repeated convictions could be sentenced to up to two years of prison and hard labor.

➡️  St. Paul, Minnesota announced that it would clear three encampments of unhoused people beginning August 5th. Close to 300 people live across the three encampments, many of whom have lived in them for multiple years.

➡️  In West Oakland, unhoused community members and their allies are concerned about the possibility of sweeps in East Oakland after the city lifted restrictions on them earlier this spring.

 

Defend Trans People Against Ongoing Attacks

➡️  The Supreme Court recently ruled that states can ban trans women from sports by arguing that Title IX's prohibition of sex-based discrimination applies only to "biological sex."

➡️  Two ballot initiatives to ban trans girls from competing in school sports and mandate outing transgender youth to their parents/guardians will be voted on in Washington state in November. If passed, the former law requires that all girls who want to play sports present a medical certificate and possibly be subject to visual genital examinations.

➡️  As the Trump regime's attempt to end gender-affirming medical care for trans people incarcerated in federal prisons remains blocked in court as of mid-June, Missouri passed a law banning gender-affirming medical care, HRT, and surgery for trans people incarcerated in Missouri prisons — essentially forcing detransition (and possible medical crises) on incarcerated trans people immediately.

🎊  WIN: Illinois passed a law removing testosterone (designated as a controlled substance under federal law) from the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), limiting the state’s ability to track and criminalize patients and prescribers.

 

Supreme Court Further Erodes Migrant Protections, Subjecting More to Deportation

➡️  In the same month that the Supreme Court rebuffed (for now) the Trump regime's attempts to revoke birthright citizenship for those who were born to non-citizens in the U.S., the Supreme Court also weakened protections for permanent residents, making it easier for federal agents to arrest, detain, and deport “green card” holders.

  • The Court stated that Border Patrol agents at ports of entry no longer have to provide "clear and convincing" evidence that a permanent resident committed a crime, only reason to believe that they did, in order to refuse entry at the border, to strip them of permanent resident status, and to subject more people to violent detention and deportation.

➡️  The federal government is also legally allowed to stop those seeking asylum from physically entering the country, therefore preventing them from applying for asylum and remaining in the country until their asylum case is decided.

 

These legal cases are part of a "whole of government" strategy to facilitate the regime's "mass deportation" goal by eroding and revoking legal status and protections for migrants, reshaping administrative and legal structures to increase and accelerate deportation orders, and beefing up DHS funding and infrastructure for arrests, detentions, and deportations.

The strategy is endorsed by far right-wing Trump ally the Mass Deportation Coalition, which outlines recommendations for the government to complete 1 millions deportations in a year — recommendations primarily consisting of strategies to strip people of legal immigration status; capture data on people with vulnerable immigration statuses; and make use of federal, state, and local administrative power to target migrants for arrest. Here are some examples of this strategy at work this month:

 

➡️  In the wake of the regime's loss in the Supreme Court over birthright citizenship, the DOJ has directed prosecutors to go after "birth tourism" as part of a broader strategy to criminalize migrants through "visa fraud" and a variety of other criminal charges.

➡️  DHS is building out a network of independent contractors to track unaccompanied migrant youth:

  • The Unaccompanied Alien Verification Initiative (SVI) was launched by DHS in November ostensibly to "protect" unaccompanied children from abuse through welfare checks — but leaked internal ICE documents show that the program is actually meant to serve as a vehicle towards deporting the youth or pursuing criminal charges against them or their adult sponsors; what one person referred to as "backdoor family separation."

  • ✅ Read more in Project Saltbox's report describing the program as "an enforcement-adjacent pipeline around ostensibly protective programs, tying trafficking-related claims and child-focused services into a larger data and investigations architecture."

 

The Crimmigration Industrial Complex Continues to Expand

➡️  In a shift from a failed strategy of buying warehouses to convert them to migrant detention camps, DHS has begun buying up facilities owned by private prison corporations GEO Group and CoreCivic — using the $45 billion Congress appropriated specifically for the expansion of detention camps over four years. This includes converting previously closed prison sites into immigration detention camps as CoreCivic spearheads several of these openings across several states. This month in California, the federal government purchased two detention camps from CoreCivic for $1.1 billion while signing a contract with the company for continued daily operations.

🎊  WIN: "Alligator Alcatraz," the detention camp built by the Trump regime and the state of Florida in the Everglades, will be permanently shut down after a year of political pressure by immigrant justice organizers, Indigenous communities, and environmental organizations. Inhumane living conditions, including maggot-ridden food, lights left on for 24 hours, lack of water, and inadequate medical care, along with regular beatings and attacks with pepper spray by guards, were regularly reported at the facility during the year it was in operation. People imprisoned at the camp were also punished by being put into a small, stiflingly hot cage where they were forced into in stress positions for hours. Detainees were not released, however, and instead were transferred to other detention camps or deported to third countries.

 

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:

 
 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Resisting Criminalization Help Desk — The Resisting Criminalization Help Desk is on a temporary break for the rest of the summer, 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.

  • 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: June 2026