There is a machine humming away in Vermont, and it is not some harmless little contraption buried in a government basement. It is the bureaucratic nervous system of the deportation regime: tips collected on immigrant neighbors, civilian social media accounts watched and catalogued, names fed into databases until human beings become targets on a list.
The offices may look ordinary. Fluorescent lights. Parking lots. Government signage. People carrying coffee into work.
But what happens inside is anything but ordinary.
These sites, along with more than a dozen offices scattered around Chittenden County, help provide the surveillance, intelligence and administrative machinery ICE needs to find people, track them, seize them and push them into the deportation system. Vermont may be where the machinery sits, but the reach of that machinery extends far beyond the state line.
That is precisely why we are going there.
Too much resistance is forced into the miserable rhythm of reaction: somebody gets taken, somebody disappears into detention, somebody sounds the alarm, and everyone scrambles to stop the machine after it is already moving.
We want to change the terms of the fight.
If ICE requires surveillance offices, databases, contractors and administrative infrastructure to generate deportations, then those systems are not background scenery. They are part of the deportation machine itself. And concentrating our numbers and energy on that infrastructure gives us a chance to seize the initiative rather than waiting for the next raid.
This is not merely a Vermont problem.
If you are living under threat from the deportation machine, this is your struggle.
If you have stood outside an apartment building trying to keep ICE from taking a friend or neighbor, this is your struggle.
If you have watched corporations build enormous surveillance systems and data centers while federal agencies acquire ever more sophisticated tools for tracking human beings, this is your struggle too.
So come to Vermont.
Bring your friends. Bring your organizations. Bring whatever experience you have from the fights happening where you live.
And if you cannot come, organize where you are. Hold a solidarity action. Target the infrastructure. Make noise. Build connections.
There is plenty of work to go around.
Because the deportation machine survives by convincing everyone that it is too large, too technical and too deeply embedded in the machinery of government to confront directly.
That is nonsense.
Machines are built out of parts.
Parts can be identified.
Infrastructure can be challenged.
And people who have spent years fighting ICE have accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about how to do it.
This mobilization is about bringing those people together, sharing what has worked, building relationships across cities and states, and laying stronger foundations for proactive resistance to ICE nationwide.
Come build community with us and learn from communities that have already been actively and consistently resisting the deportation machine.
The machinery is already running.
Our job is to shut it down.
