This Month in Criminalization: August-September 2026

Written By Tiffany Wang

September 2, 2026


Welcome to the August/September 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 point people to calls to action and relevant resources. You can find previous editions of this newsletter on our website here. If you prefer reading the email version of this newsletter, you can view it here.

You can find the full text of the 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:

Action Items:

Additionally, this month we’d like to share some additional resources and readings to help us and our organizing spaces/groups and communities build, prepare, and fortify ourselves for fall and everything that is headed our way.

You can find the full list in the “Fortifying Ourselves for Fall” section below — or if you prefer, you can check out the individual section action items here:

  • ✅  Revisit IC’s Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care toolkit and check out the mapping tool created by Kelly Hayes based on the toolkit. Stay tuned for an update to the toolkit in early 2027!

    ✅  Find and build your overground railroads!

  • ✅  Check out these tips for safer Signal use (also shared on our Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn)

    ✅  Understand that even the tightest digital security doesn’t protect us from subpoenas, search warrants, and discovery.

    ✅  Read Shaping Reality, our report on building informational power.

    ✅  Save the date to join us for our informational power skill share on October 10th!

  • Both are inevitable in any organizing effort, particularly when external pressures ramp up. Without structures, skills, and relationships rooted in trust to address them, they are not only likely to create greater harm and potentially stop organizing in its tracks, but they also create significant security risks.

    ✅  Revisit In It Together, our toolkit for conflict transformation In movement-building groups.

    ✅  Listen to this two-part Movement Memos series on conflict (part 1, part 2).

    ✅  Check out this Accountability Beyond Punishment ‘zine.

  • We don’t know exactly what will happen, but it is clear that coming months are likely to bring increased pressure on us as individuals, collectives, and ecosystems, and require us to show up as our best, most effective, creative, and impactful selves, even as many of us are feeling depleted and burned out from the past 18 months (or 18 years).

    As we navigate feelings of powerlessness, burnout, rage, and grief, we need to create and hold spaces to come together, care for each other, experience joy, and rededicate ourselves to our shared values and practices, counter disinformation, and dream and practice the liberatory futures we are fighting for.

    ✅  Check out this new toolkit from Kelly Hayes and Tanuja Jagernauth, on creating spaces of reflection, belonging, and collective care.

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 through the end of September, 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 and (re)visit our Block & Build: But Make it Abolitionist tool for analytic and strategic frameworks to guide organizing against rising authoritarianism and fascism! If you would like a Block & Build training for your group or organization, please reach out to info@interruptingcriminalization.org.

 
 

🍂 Fortifying Ourselves for Fall 🍂

As we head back to school and into the fall, federal enforcement surges, occupations, and repression are expected to intensify and expand leading up to, during, and following midterm elections, amid ongoing and escalating targeting of migrants, trans people, and reproductive care, as well as deep cuts to health care and social programs. 

As things heat up and mainstream focus shifts to electoral races, it is essential that we continue to build, fortify, and expand our community defense, rapid response, and mutual aid networks and ecosystems of resistance — particularly in light of threats to flood our communities and deploy federal enforcement agents at the polls.

As we do so, it is important that we:

 

✅  Map and build our ecosystems of community defense and collective care:

✅  Streamline, coordinate, and amplify secure communications within and across local ecosystems:

  • Check out these tips for safer Signal use (also shared on our Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn)

  • Understand that even the tightest digital security doesn’t protect us from subpoenas, search warrants, and discovery.

  • Read Shaping Reality, our report on building informational power.

  • Save the date to join us for our informational power skill share on October 10th!

✅  Prepare for and navigate conflict and harm — both are inevitable in any organizing effort, particularly when external pressures ramp up. Without structures, skills, and relationships rooted in trust to address them, they are not only likely to create greater harm and potentially stop organizing in its tracks, but they also create significant security risks.

✅  Create collective spaces of sensemaking, connection, and fortification — we don’t know exactly what will happen, but it is clear that coming months are likely to bring increased pressure on us as individuals, collectives, and ecosystems, and require us to show up as our best, most effective, creative, and impactful selves, even as many of us are feeling depleted and burned out from the past 18 months (or 18 years).

As we navigate feelings of powerlessness, burnout, rage, and grief, we need to create and hold spaces to come together, care for each other, experience joy, and rededicate ourselves to our shared values and practices, counter disinformation, and dream and practice the liberatory futures we are fighting for.

  • Check out this new toolkit from Kelly Hayes and Tanuja Jagernauth, on creating spaces of reflection, belonging, and collective care.  

 
 

Mass De-documentation of 300,000 Haitian, 170,000 Salvadorean, 6,300 Syrian, and Tens of Thousands of Somali, Sudanese, and Ethiopian Migrants

➡️  In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that courts can’t intervene in federal immigration enforcement, 350,000 Haitians were stripped of temporary protected immigration status (TPS) overnight, immediately making them targets for detention and deportation.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared, "We're going after them right now," as Haitians are ordered to report to immigration offices around the country to turn in their passports, wear ankle monitors to more easily track them, and check-in regularly with authorities, and two deportation flights have already taken place. Immigrant justice advocates in Ohio warn that ICE is setting up conditions for mass round-ups, detentions, and deportations of Haitians as soon as they build the necessary logistical capacity.

➡️  ICE’s use of ankle monitors has tripled since June 2025. Whether used on migrants or other criminalized groups, ankle and wrist monitors are simply an "alternative form of detention."

➡️  TPS has now also been terminated for Salvadorean, Syrian, Somali, South Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Burmese people, despite ongoing genocide, war, violence, and dire economic and social conditions in their home countries perpetrated and facilitated by U.S. foreign policy, and judicial recognition of racial animus motivating the regime’s decisions.

 

Stealth Surge: DHS Reports Highest Monthly Number of Abductions Ever in July

➡️  The Department of Homeland Security reported the highest number of ICE kidnappings since its founding in July, confirming that at least 51,000 people were arrested and detained by ICE last month, up almost 10,000 from 43,000 people in June.

➡️  An increasing number of migrants — including people with pending asylum cases, visa extension requests, and scheduled court appointments — are being snatched at airports, during traffic stops, and at traffic checkpoints (and in one case, a checkpoint within a National Forest). In other words, ICE is stepping up “quiet” enforcement in contexts and places with a regular flow of people through controlled/regulated infrastructure, requiring fewer ICE agents, and offering lower visibility than surges of large numbers of officers into communities.

  • In mid-July, two plainclothes ICE agents attempted to arrest one person at Harry Reid airport outside Las Vegas but were stopped by bystanders who took immediate action to intervene in the arrest. Unfortunately, according to ICE's LA field office, the person was later arrested by ICE agents when they arrived at Los Angeles' LAX airport.

  • Over 30 ICE arrests were reported at airports in July.

  • DHS reported that they arrested 51 truck drivers in the Midwest over two days in late July in "Operation Highway Shield."

  • A mother and daughter were kidnapped by ICE, tipped off by local law enforcement, from an emergency room where they were receiving treatment after a near fatal car accident.

 

Federal Infiltration of Minnesota ICE Resistance

➡️  On January 28th, four days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE) sent undercover agents to infiltrate online and on-the-ground resistance in Minneapolis, citing the White House’s NSPM-7 memorandum.

Information regarding the secret investigation was revealed in responses to discovery requests filed by attorneys defending the "Minneapolis 15" — fifteen organizers arrested and charged with conspiracy in connection with resistance to the ICE surge and occupation of Minneapolis earlier this year.

  • For months, ICE agents involved in “Operation Puppet Master" and "Operation Whipple Shield," secretly obtained financial records of national labor unions and social justice nonprofits without their knowledge; attended public demonstrations and in-person, closed door meetings; attempted to entrap organizers into committing criminal offenses during protests; infiltrated and became active in Signal chats; captured and used license plate numbers from organizing meetings to identify attendees; and attempted to link 18 organizations, ranging from immigrant justice nonprofits, to labor unions, to citywide ICE watch groups, to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), into a conspiracy to obstruct federal enforcement agents.

  • Though the official HSI investigation began in late January, federal agents began infiltrating groups seemingly as soon as the ICE surge began in December. 

✅  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 or limit the subpoena! Don’t keep it if you don’t want them to read it!

 
 
 

Watching the Watchers: Anti-Surveillance Resistance

➡️  Organizers in 20 towns and cities in the U.S. — including Los Angeles and, most recently, two Massachusetts towns — have successfully organized to cancel or end Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) contracts, or deactivate cameras just in the last month, up from 5 the previous month!

➡️  The struggle continues:

 

ICE Leverages Unprecedented Funding Levels to Buy Existing and New Surveillance Technologies

➡️  ICE will spend $20 million on 6,000 pairs of “shock gloves” that deliver an electric shock when applied to bare skin as part of a “deescalation” strategy. Electroshock gloves are not a new phenomenon — they are already being used in schools and jails and against disabled people by cops and other agents of control across the country, illuminating the continuum of violence that connects ICE to everyday systems of policing and punishment.

➡️  The agency also recently announced it will spend millions to buy “robot dogs,” which are also already being used by cops across the country.

➡️  ICE will pay over $6 million to LexisNexis for continued and expanded access to sweeping amounts of data to plug into its applications, including those created and operated by Palantir.

➡️  ICE has contracted Koniag Services to operate a new 287(g) National Coordination Center near Nashville, Tennessee, scheduled to open at the end of September. The Center will operate 24/7 to support kidnapping operations for over a thousand local law enforcement partners by creating "enforcement packages" (targets for local police to detain), running immigration checks for local police across national databases, and directly advising police when apprehending non-citizens.

➡️  The contract call originally placed by DHS also instructs the contractor use 287(g) resources to locate unaccompanied children ("UACs") and create "targeting packages" of "missing children" to provide to local police, under the pretext that undocumented unaccompanied minors are at risk of exploitation. Yet the administration:

  • is trafficking people who came to the U.S. as minors to third countries, where they are highly vulnerable to exploitation;

  • hired a defense contractor accused of torture to hunt migrant children;

  • is working with organizations like Our Rescue, whose leader has been accused of sexual violence and trafficking; and

  • is incarcerating children in camps where they are subject to extreme violence, deprivation, torture, exploitation, and denial of effective representation.

 

Resist Empire on Native Land

➡️  The Tohono O’odham Nation have said they will not let anyone onto their lands who is not a tribal member in response to a court order permitting border wall construction on Tohono O’odham ancestral homelands.

➡️  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a key permit for the construction of a pipeline to cross Michigan waterways crucial to the livelihoods of tribes in the state. Several days later a truck accident led to a significant gas leak.

➡️  Indigenous communities remain a particular target of the AI data center construction boom: Over 100 hyper-scale data centers are currently proposed on Native land where construction would not only take over land, but drive up the price of electricity and consume large quantities of water.

 

U.S. Military Continues to Expand Operations

➡️  The U.S. killed two more people when it resumed lethal boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific this month.

➡️  The U.S. has been reopening previously defunct bases across Latin America and the Caribbean — including in Puerto Rico — possibly in preparation for a war on Cuba, a country struggling through blackouts, medical supplies shortages, and a lack of drinking water amid a continuous U.S. blockade of oil shipments to the island.

 

Right Continues Pushing for a National Abortion Ban

➡️  Anti-abortion advocates inside and outside the administration continue their push to outlaw the mailing of abortion medication. The major anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, amongst others, released a letter endorsing the use of the 19th century Comstock Act, originally intended to criminalize the mailing of “obscene” materials, to ban the mailing of not just abortion medication but all supplies used in abortions.

If this strategy is taken up by the regime, it could threaten the distribution of standard medical supplies to clinics all over the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.

➡️  The administration has nominated Heidi Overton to become head of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency overseeing a review of the “safety” of medication abortion. Overton is a virulent opponent of abortion, including medication abortion.

 

Attacks on Trans Health Care Continue

➡️  On August 11th, HHS finalized a new rule barring the use of federal Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) funding for gender-affirming care for minors. The rule goes into effect October 13th. Advocates are working to ensure that state Medicaid funds are available to fill the funding gap in the short term.

➡️  Connecticut Children's Medical Center became the third hospital to agree to end gender-affirming care for youth in a settlement with the DOJ. The hospital already began “winding down” gender-affirming care for trans youth under the age of 19 last July, citing an “increasingly complex and evolving landscape.”

➡️  On the same day, Bossier Parish, Louisiana advanced a bill that could send trans people to prison for up to six months for using a public restroom — a trans couple in Bossier Parish were violently assaulted by a mob for using a public restroom. Despite the fact that the couple was hospitalized for their injuries, they were arrested by police and charged as if they were agitators in the assault.

➡️  Five ballot measures targeting trans youth's access to health care, education, and public space are up this fall in Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, and Missouri (where a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth is bundled with a repeal on the state's abortion rights amendment).

 

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 through the end of September, 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: July 2026