By Marine Tucker
When ICE kidnapped 5 people off the street in the morning of Tuesday, June 10th, Philadelphians mobilized quickly to surround the detention center and demand their release.
They were routed 7 PM the same day as as cops charged the crowd, broke limbs, threw bikes, beat people with batons, and put one protester in a neck hold in a viral video described by Philly Mag and Latin Times as reminiscent of George Floyd’s murder.
The protest was “unruly” and aggressive–what else could be called for, when the fascists are snatching people up for tattoos, hiding them in blacksites across the world and cutting off due process with hidden show trials?–but undeniably peaceful. A sign was knocked over and the walls of the detention center were graffittied, but property damage isn’t violence. The cops, for sure, were plenty violent–while the police reported 2 wounded protesters, this only signifies the number of arrested protesters who requested hospital treatment. Many more who successfully fled the scene were also brutalized.
All that for 14 CVN’s (a minor fine with no criminal impact, the equivalent of a traffic ticket) and one assault-of-officer charge that will certainly be dropped by the District Attorney or found bogus in court. In the fray, the cops shouted about prison time at everyone they stepped on; when the charges turn out so light, you know they know they made a mistake.
Protestors assembled at the Federal Detention Center at 700 Arch Street at 4 PM, responding to a viral call to action disseminated by no one in particular. No individual or group took ownership of the protest, even as it went under way. As such, it’s worth analyzing as an experiment in radically democratic mass action. People on bikes protected the perimeter and defined the shape of the crowd, but there were no designated “marshals”, either.
The crowd swelled from around 50 people at 4:15 to around 150 by 5:15, then marched around in a loop before returning to the same detention center, surrounding the doors and occupying the intersection. About seven cops on bikes stood in front of the detention center and filmed; people tried to block their cameras with umbrellas, banners and keffiyehs.
Around 5:30, a megaphone surfaced and people took turns speaking out against ICE repression. Topics included the vital role immigrants play in our communities, the racist and anti-indigenous nature of the deportation program, the importance of community care and security, the weightiness of dying for the people, the absurdity and relative weakness of Trumpian fascism, and the need for direct conflict. One speaker pointed out each cop by name and polled the crowd on whether they were one of the 40% who self-report to beat their wives.
The crowd grew and grew emboldened. A kind of authority was accruing around some repeat users of the megaphone who called for militance and direct action and shepherded us through another awkward loop by Market Street at around 6:30. When the march made it back around the cops had left the doors to the detention center unguarded for some reason and the protest took the chance to fill up against it. Two bike cops jostled in to protect the door but they were pinned entirely by a very angry crowd and clearly terrified.
Within minutes, police vans pulled up and the cops started filling out their ranks, and fear gripped the crowd as people worried the police were “staging” for a mass arrest and looking to create a kettle at the intersection. Some of the not-marshals on bikes urged us to abandon our hold on the detention center, then to start marching to Market Street again, then to disperse. When people pushed back and said the protest should stick together and stay by the doors, they were accused of being agent provocateurs. By this point the megaphone must have run out of battery or something. Insults flew, the crowd dithered and lost all shape and cohesion, and then the cops saw their chance to break our ranks and charged, leading to total pandemonium on 8th & Market.
The crowd eventually reconvened, as people continued to stream in, answering the call in the flyer to “flood the streets all night.” The all-night crowd hovered at around 25 to 50 people and no further arrests were made.
It seems that the experiment in radical democracy was a failure. Fear won the day at the moment when it mattered most. With no authority figure available except the cops, people chose to listen to the cops. Somewhat understandable, as they speak in bullets and prison time, but a truly unified crowd has a history of winning. A headless crowd, or even one momentarily commandeered by a charismatic lefty, is just going to be playtime for the cops.
But this choice of calling a headless protest was not some unforced error, but a rational tactic in light of the circumstances and in some ways a move of desperation. Rallies organized by our leading left-wing orgs tend to be no more than parades across the city which march people away from their targets and collaborate with the police to keep things minimally disruptive, all to make speeches about solidarity and outrage to people who have heard it all already. Anything would be better than that when the state is black-bagging our neighbors.
Socialist organizations often opt for parade-type protests because they see them as ways to recruit and introduce their cause to new people. However, protests are actually terrible at doing this. Not only is a tightly-marshalled top-down protest exhausting to organize, it also doesn’t recruit widely or deeply. Many leftists are terrified of pushing too far too fast and alienating “normal” people, but it seems to scare almost nobody that “normal” people who watch us marching around for popular causes for years with nothing to show for it might conclude that we are either showboating or just plain losing.
It’s true that there’s some circular logic to this–you can’t even start to do the kind of direct action the moment calls for if you don’t have the people to do it–but you can recruit people more honestly and form more articulate connections by tabling, going door to door, or mounting programs like free food distributions or free ESL classes that directly serve your community. As described before in the Partisan, we should think of these types of projects as the proper way to build people power, and mass actions as the way to “cash out” on whatever power has been built to make change in the most direct and literal way.
But this time once again, people aren’t going to wait for the socialists to catch up. It’s hard to say right now whether our city will look anything like Los Angeles in the coming weeks; Los Angeles has more people than Philadelphia, more of a base for migrant rights, and a very militant protesting culture generally. Anti-ICE protests went hot there in 2022 and 2023 (the years most recall as an extreme ebb for the left), and last year’s pro-Palestine encampments at UCLA were some of the most dogged in the country. But it is likely this is just the beginning. Tuesday’s arrests were just the first tremors of a general strategic shift in ICE’s sights to Philadelphia, and ICE’s “tactical response teams” are not even set to arrive until this weekend. Deportations will continue to ramp up here and Philadelphians have shown we won’t take that lying down. And careless police violence like what happened on Tuesday has a tendency to radicalize people.
The fact that the autonomous action wasn’t hijacked by the PSL or the Democrats already shows our city has learned some lessons since 2020. Here’s hoping we learn even more lessons. There’s a world to win for anyone who can drive the masses not just to gather but to break down the prison walls and free our migrant neighbors. Here’s hoping some of us thread the needle.
The Philadelphia Partisan 