By A.N.
The murder of Renee Good by the fascist US Immigration and Customs Enforcement pig known as Jonathan Ross, along with the murder of Keith Porter in Los Angeles and dozens more unexplained deaths in ICE custody, has been the breaking point for many. All progressive people are rightly furious that racist goons, who assault and murder the working class, particularly its immigrant, Black, and brown members, are daily spiriting away our neighbors to concentration camps. On January 8, 2026, a vigil was held for Renee Good by No Ice Philly, Juntos, Asian Americans United, and the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, among other organizations. By our estimate, 3,000 Philadelphians poured into the streets on a cold January night, angry and ready to directly resist fascism.
The nonprofits running the “In Grief and In Anger” vigil had different ideas. They had no intention to meaningfully resist ICE or anyone else. Most speakers decried ICE’s excesses and commemorated the victims of ICE’s brutality, including the dozens we know about who have died at ICE’s hands or in their custody, and correctly emphasized ICE and Customs and Border Patrol’s particular brutality and ongoing occupations in Minneapolis and elsewhere. However, no speaker went further than denouncing these excesses. They provided no analysis of why ICE’s reign of terror exists in the first place and very little aboutwhat to do about it.
On the former, only one speaker directly connected ICE to policing in general, even though Philadelphia Police spent the summer brutalizing and arresting anti-ICE activists and facilitating ICE raids (the Philadelphia sheriff’s recent empty rhetoric notwithstanding, Sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s office facilitates ICE raids at the court nearly every day, and ICE makes daily kidnappings throughout the city of Philadelphia). Not once did any speaker connect ICE to its main purpose, the defense of American imperialism, even though the vigil was held mere days following the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump and his peers have frequently directly connected Maduro with a so-called need for border control, saying “[Maduro’s government] allowed millions of people to come into our country from their prisons, from gangs, from drug dealers, and from mental institutions,” and characterizing migrants fleeing years of brutal and inhumane sanctions as “narco-terrorists.” Trump, unlike the rally organizers, also has been transparent about the actual reason for attacks on migrants and Venezuela, saying “America…will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets…” When the Trump administration is more straightforward about the connections between ICE, border patrol, and imperialist oil grabs than the organizers of a local rally and vigil, we know that our leadership has gone awry. Organizers missed a key opportunity to make the connection between the immiseration caused by imperialism and the large numbers of people migrating away from their homelands, reaching for a secure life for themselves and their children, only to meet with borders largely closed to even legal forms of migration. This forces migrants into the underground economy, where domestic capitalists can exploit them more effectively by invoking the spectre of La Migra, fascist goons who will torture and murder them with a single call from the boss.
On the latter, we should say that speakers did call for people to organize, but to what end? The speakers used the vigil to solicit donations (to fund their organizations’ legal and lobbying efforts) and volunteers (for non-confrontational noise demonstrations and court watches). While these are certainly not worthless efforts, they are far from sufficient to combat an armed terrorist paramilitary force occupying our cities and kidnapping and murdering our neighbors. The evidence shows that, from LA to Chicago to Minneapolis, officially sanctioned forms of protest will never successfully combat pig terror. Permitted protests that stay on designated routes (for example, the many parades run by 50501) never stop ICE raids. The brave people throwing bricks at police cars and besieging detention centers in LA, blocking vans in New York, and physically stopping kidnappings in their Chicago neighborhoods point the way to tactics and strategies that could actually turn the tide.
In contrast, the best challenge to the authority of those responsible for these horrific crimes the nonprofit speakers could muster was a chant of “do better” directed at the elected officials grotesquely granted the place of honor on the stage, as if begging could make politicians whose party aids and abets ICE or the police magically change their minds. Rage rippled through the crowd during that chant. The people there were waiting for someone to direct their righteous anger. The leaders of the vigil failed to do so, instead diffusing that rage and advising attendees to disperse. Ultimately, the vigil for Renee Good was designed (whether intentionally or not) to pacify the righteous anger of the people, not to meaningfully challenge those in the halls of power.
We must ask ourselves: why didn’t the cosponsors of this “In Grief and In Anger” vigil actually push people to express their grief and rage, to challenge the violence and oppression we witness everyday? Our answer: Nonprofits have a material, structural incentive to avoid any real threats to the status quo. Nonprofits have paid staff funded by grants from wealthy individuals, other nonprofits and charities (often set up by mega-corporations), and even the government itself. Their leadership’s livelihoods are tied to the forces of oppression, so even if individual members of them hold revolutionary attitudes, nonprofits are structurally incentivized to prevent change.
We saw this in practice in 2020, when nonprofits turned abolishing the police into defunding the police into reforming the police, which in turn became a codeword for increasing police funding for sham trainings and gadgets. Such political backpeddling makes perfect sense, considering how many nonprofit staff audition for salaried jobs either in better-funded nonprofits (more funding, of course, meaning more strings attached) or for a spot in the “progressive” wing of the ruling class as a political operative or appointee (see how many Democratic appointees begin in “activist” nonprofits).
To register as a nonprofit corporation, a board of trustees must register legal names and addresses with the state. This self-surveillance provides another layer of self-interest for opposing revolutionary action. The proceedings of the vigil underscored the politics of its sponsors; for example, when the crowd spilled out into the street, the speakers requested (we suspect at the pigs’ request) that people stop disrupting traffic. Even the blocking of JFK Boulevard for one block after business hours was too much for those leading the rally. Of course, some nonprofits do make people’s lives materially better with their programs, but with these obvious weaknesses tied to the very nature of their existence, should we trust them to be at the forefront of a liberation movement that requires going above and beyond the letter of the law and smashing the institutions that fund them?
Despite the nonprofits’ best efforts, we saw a glimmer of what could have been after the “officially sanctioned” protest concluded. Attendees of the vigil were too fired up to be quickly dismissed and spontaneously burst into militant slogans. An incensed attendee burned a flag, and another began leading the chants. A third attendee offered a megaphone, and eventually, the remaining attendees organized into a march that was evidently much more threatening to the PPD, who descended in far greater numbers on a march of 100 than had been present for a rally of 3,000. No cushy paid jobs, nonprofit boards, or tax incentives were needed. What drew the people in this march together was a united recognition that the system as it is cannot be reformed.
Though there were ideological differences between the communists, black nationalists, anarchists, and unaligned workers who made up this march, the crowd had what one participant called a “fighting unity” to oppose ICE and the repressive forces of the state that support them, chanting slogans connecting the struggle against ICE terror to the struggle against imperialism – from Gaza to Venezuela to the Phillippines. We marched on the detention facility used by ICE in Center City, but were limited by our size. If we’d had the full mass of thousands who showed up for the vigil instead of the small group who stuck around, we could have made real demands to improve conditions of the victims of ICE and PPD (Glendale, CA, cancelled its detention center contract with ICE after militant protests last June). We would have shown those detained that thousands were fighting for them. We also would have had the strength in numbers to successfully control and sideline a fascist heckler who almost caused arrests and succeeded in taking a significant amount of footage as the march concluded. When he showed up to the January 10 DSA Day of Action for Venezuela, a protest more than twice the size, he was quickly contained and removed from action in an encounter that ended with him macing himself. The more of us there are, the bolder we can be.
When nonprofits told everyone to go home, new leadership emerged. We need to break with these organizations if we are to build a movement accountable to the masses of exploited and oppressed, not “progressive” donors. They do not stand for real change, and they will oppose any movement that truly threatens the capitalist system because those movements threaten their paychecks. If you, the reader, earnestly believe in revolution, you must seek out revolutionary leadership guided by revolutionary theory. You must demand revolutionary leadership. You must rise to the occasion and become revolutionary leadership!
UNITE AND SMASH ICE!
DARE TO STRUGGLE!
DARE TO WIN!
The Philadelphia Partisan 