I’ll be honest, I was a little skeptical when I first heard about the effort to achieve universal health care in Maine through a statewide citizen initiative.

Not because we shouldn’t try this by referendum (I’m a “by any means necessary” kind of guy on good policy), but because this initiative is a “Resolve.” Resolves are mostly non-binding short term expressions of opinion, not actual enforceable law. A directive to send a strongly-worded letter of disdain, offer praise for an achievement, or maybe to create a temporary task force to do a study that will end up on a shelf.

In short, they are mostly just to make a point.

Not that I am opposed to making a point. Indeed, in 2003, as a state senator, one of my proudest moments was sponsoring a resolve opposing the pending war in Iraq. The Maine Senate became the first state senate in the nation to go on record opposing that senseless attack, which certainly made a statement in the form of national headlines. But that was all it did. Pres. George W. Bush went through with his attack (in case you missed it).

So, when I saw this initiative I thought, why spend all the time and money collecting signatures – and then additional time and money to win a campaign – just to make a statement? In truth, we already know Mainers want universal health care, as poll after poll has shown.

But then I read the initiative.

While it is indeed a resolve, it is crafted in such a way that might just actually work. Instead of crafting the details of a complex universal single-payer health care law that the industry can tear apart in a well-funded misinformation campaign, the resolve simply, but very specifically, directs the legislature to come up with and pass said legislation. 

While a resolve directing the legislature to come up with legislation certainly leaves some concern for what that legislation might ultimately look like, the initiative is pretty precise at making clear what it must include and achieve.

Here’s how the resolve appears to work. It directs the legislature to come up with legislation to create a universal health care plan that will reduce costs, preserve choice, and pay providers expeditiously. It’s very specific in terms of these values.

But what it also says is that said legislation must, “Ensure that all residents of the State possess comprehensive, publicly funded health care coverage.” [emphasis added]

Whoa. 

That is not simply directing the legislature to nibble around the edges with ineffective market-based solutions. That gets right at the heart of the best solution possible – a single payer health care system like Medicare for All that the people have been clamoring for.

This kind of reminds me how Barack Obama gave the reins of creating ObamaCare to Nancy Pelosi and the Congress. Instead of drafting his own plan, he asked them to do it, as long as it met certain criteria to earn his signature.

Now, to be clear, as we learned under former Gov. Paul LePage – who refused to implement the voter approved elimination of the tipped wage, or the expansion of Medicaid that voters approved – the legislature/governor can always try to ignore the will of this vote. And, as mentioned earlier, since the legislature has the leeway to craft the bill, that does give corporate health care lobbyists a shot at trying to influence what the final legislation looks like.

But that is a battle we will have to fight either way, resolve or law.

In the meantime, getting this initiative on the ballot for 2027 is an important step toward getting a publicly funded single-payer health care system in Maine enacted. I’m looking forward to signing the petition on Election Day. You should too.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Why I am excited to sign the petition to pass Health Care for All Mainers appeared first on Pine & Roses.

Welcome to the new website of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group. Many thanks to Devon Bussell, Ian Hyzy, Matthew Carroll, Ron Hogan, and content editors Maxine Phillips and Russell Fox, who have worked many volunteer hours to bring all of our activities and resources together. This site is a work in progress, and we hope you’ll give us feedback and ideas for what you want to see and potential writers and topics. Look at our categories and let us know if you want to write something for us. Query us at religioussocialism@dsacommittees.org first. —Ed.

Today, as the Religious Right threatens the rights and lives of so many in this country and uses religion as an excuse to wage endless war, we’re heartened by the renewed spirit of progressive religious folk.  They may not all be socialists, but they know in which direction their moral compass points. This article from the Guardian describes some of what’s going on.

The post Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

And beginning the feminist conversation with myself

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.

Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.

But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.

It won’t be reported.

And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion. 

Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.

So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.

It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.

But

I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.

So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.

I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter. 

No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter. 

That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.

In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering. 

The post An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

The author of "Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993" discusses how her theory of an “Inside/Outside” strategy applies to the Mamdani era.

The post Let the Record Show: Democratic Left Interviews Sarah Schulman appeared first on Democratic Left.

The Ithaca Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America along with Mayor of the City of Ithaca Robert Cantelmo condemn the silence of New York Congressman Josh Riley from District19 during the national horror that Americans were subjected to on April 7th, 2026. While New Yorkers lived through a modern day Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if President Trump's threats of a nuclear Holocaust in Iran were genuine or merely an insane and unforgivable bargaining strategy, Congressman Josh Riley was silent. He did not issue a statement condemning the President’s declaration that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” - a clear and explicit threat of a nuclear strike or similar catastrophic event. Nor did Congressman Riley condemn Trump’s promises on Easter Sunday to destroy civilian infrastructure, a war crime in and of itself under international law.

A leader in this moment should have spoken out. A leader should have condemned the fear that the Trump administration was wielding as a weapon against all people of conscience, and communicated the steps that were necessary to keep the country and the world safe. Nothing short of a call to impeach or to invoke the 25th amendment will do. Congressman Riley would not have had to stand alone. As of writing, 50 house Democrats, led by DSA allies Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are meeting the moment and speaking out against war, showing this country what being a true opposition party looks like. Even Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Representatives Kevin Kiley of California and Nathanial Moran of Texas, and far-right commentator Tucker Carlson condemned Trump's threats while Josh Riley stayed silent.

Ithaca Mayor and member of the Ithaca DSA, Robert Cantelmo, had this to say about the events of April 7th: “Authority to declare war is clearly vested with Congress under Article I. The president’s operation in Iran is illegal and risks destabilizing the region. Worse still, his behavior threatens international norms, risks escalation, and is putting our service members and the innocent people of Iran in harm’s way. I know Congressman Riley shares my deep respect for the Constitution and I urge him to speak out against this war of choice."

Perhaps Congressman Riley’s reluctance to take a stand against MAGA fascism and our illegal war in Iran is rooted in the fact that as of February 17th, 2026, Track Aipac has found that Josh Riley has taken $882,674 from Pro-Israel Lobby groups and their donors. The breakdown of this money being $119,061 through their PACs and $763,613 through their lobby donors. While 78% of Israelis are currently in favor of this illegal war of choice by the Trump administration, Congressman Riley would do well to note more than 61% of Americans are against this war, and most relevant to a Democratic congressman, 88% of Democrats believe striking Iran in the first place was the wrong decision.

This is a moment of utter moral clarity. There are those who understand the President must be removed immediately, and there are those who are afraid to uphold their sworn oath to the Constitution. The Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America are prepared to meet this moment. If Congressman Riley will not - either due to his campaign contributions, or to calculated pandering to Trump’s MAGA base - then in NY-19, the Democratic Socialists of America must become the opposition party that our country deserves. Join us and help take back our democracy, with the Congressman’s help, or without it.

Read more at Memphis-Midsouth

This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Migrant Rights Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.

“I feel sometimes that we are beating on [the problem] with a wrench instead of understanding where it is vulnerable and how we can break it down more easily than we do.” -Craig Gilmore

In our previous entry in this ongoing series explaining our opposition to the deportation regime in the United States, we focused on the proposed establishment of an ICE “mega-center” for immigration detention here in Salt Lake City. Since that time, while that particular sale was cancelled, ICE has instead closed on another, comparable property within the logistics hub near Salt Lake City International Airport. It’s no accident that the infrastructure of just-in-time manufacturing, warehousing, and rapid transportation demands of late capitalism have proven an instructive model for the deportation machine. Indeed, our particular flavor of contemporary fascism¹ draws heavily from its lessons. As we expose the machinery of deportation, we need to take a look at the various corporate inputs that service that machinery, and take measure of complicity with them, in order to further develop our program of opposition.

The comparison to corporate shipping logistics is not mere metaphor; indeed, ICE itself takes inspiration from these corporate behemoths in furtherance of its white supremecist vision. Speaking at the 2025 Border Security Expo, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons asserted that ICE “[needs] to get better at treating this like a business,” like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” While Lyons conceives of the use of rapid, large-scale immigrant round-ups filling vans and flights out of the country, ‘border czar’ Tom Homan expounds upon the business strategy, shedding light on the project’s incentives. At the same event, he clarified that they should “let the badge and guns do the badge-and-gun stuff. Everything else, let’s contract out.” The implications of this strategy, that is, a high degree of intentional dependence on private business to construct, maintain, and otherwise support the US deportation machine, must not be overlooked. 

The dependence of DHS on private enterprise, married with its monopoly on violence, illustrates the symbiotic relationship between capital and governance. As wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the direction of the state becomes twinned, if not subservient, to the direction desired by capital: namely, defending that capital and its reserve of power. In our current moment, this means an organized and well-funded campaign to villainize and eradicate (non-white) immigrants, an essential subsection of the US working class. 

The monolithic leviathan formed by that incestuous synthesis of state power and capital, however, is not invulnerable. It is comprised of an entire ecosystem of contractors, subcontractors, lobbyists, and public officials, each, at every level, fulfilling their small part in the victimization of the immigrant community. As a whole, the deportation machine is virtually unassailable. But in comparison, each individual aspect is weak. The analysis by Easterling (2014) shows how systems are typified by the ‘switches’ and ‘wiring’ that compose them, that redirect, restrict, or encourage the flow of material to suit their desired political disposition. When these systems are opaque or purposely difficult to understand, this in turn may reinforce that disposition. If we look at the network of local police, federalized immigration authorities, the administrative state, and the network of private contractors and subcontractors that support their activities, these nodes and vectors come into clear. Money moves from the public coffers into private industry via the same system that migrants are either restricted or welcomed to suit the needs of capital. At each switch and wire, each node and vector, we can illustrate another part of this system. 

The contemporary, gold-standard analysis of this machinery was conducted by Hiemstra and Conlon in their work Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants (2025). Therein, the authors examine three areas of outsourcing by DHS within the corrections industry: the management of food and commissary services, management of medical care, and the regulatory ouroboros of accountability and certification. It is no surprise that the bids for these contracts that carry the day are often won by the same repeated players that are incentived—and to be frank, functionally required—to cut these services to the bone. Under the provision of ‘effective public service,’ contracting officers must award contracts to those that can provide the service as cheaply as possible. 

In one example in their research, Hiemstra and Conlon were able to review bids that resulted in Aramark winning the largesse to feed the Bergen County, NJ detainees at the rate of just $1.35 per meal. In addition, the provision of bare-bones medical services create further opportunities for abuse in the name of profit; while medical services are nominally provided on-site, these services are mediated, and sometimes even provided, by security staff. While on site, medical providers are pressured and heavily incentivized to deny or reduce services. The result is a tiered system within the detention center in which precarious contract workers, under pressure to perform or lose their employment, are beholden to firms intent on scraping every last cent from ICE. What chance do migrant detainees have under such a system of receiving humane care or any semblance of justice? 

Contractors for ICE also include businesses providing services beyond the scope of on-site operations as well, several of which call Utah their home. Among them are Global Miracle Solutions, a consulting and administrative services contractor; HealthEquity, a flexible spending account administrator; Management and Training Corporation, which operates five private, for-profit immigration detention facilities in California, New Mexico, and Texas; and Action Target, which designs and manufactures shooting ranges and equipment for law enforcement agencies. Which companies, both within and without Utah, that ICE ultimately contracts to support its newly purchased facility in Salt Lake City remains to be seen. Though details remain scant, so far information on at least one contract for the SLC facility has come to light: a contract with GEO Transport Inc. (a subsidiary of the international detention facility operator GEO Group) to provide ground “transportation” of detainees.

We cannot look to our governments for relief, even at the local level. In a world of diminishing public services where the budgets of cities and counties are stretched to the breaking point, the appeal of a steady, consistent addition to the public coffers is clear, and also by design. Decades of neoliberalism and the decline of the public sector have left many municipalities hollowed out and in dire need of a broader tax base. When ICE comes calling, offering to drop a thousand-bed prison into the county and all the associated jobs and infrastructure that comes with it, they are really only given the option to submit. Once that dependency is established, it is extremely rare that a governmental body will accept cutting off such a stable and lucrative flow of capital—one that, in the current moment, is poised to only expand. Even in those vanishingly rare cases where cities or counties have voted to terminate agreements with ICE to house detainees, they were then overruled by courts or state legislature to subvert that decision. Utah’s legislature, for its part, is far too eager to countermand local legislation for much smaller concerns. When their interests—and investment portfolios—are under threat, the party of small government is ready to bring the hammer down on any smaller government. ICE is too far entrenched to allow something as mere as local political power to rein in its excess. 

Here, however, is where an opportunity presents itself. While ICE and its deportation machine has the political cover and the inexhaustible funds and political capital to present itself as inevitable, it is reliant on the same logistical and staffing structures that power the economy writ large, built on exploitation, precarity, and the division of the working class. Nesting dolls of subcontractors to provide deniability and anonymity are well-practiced in this field, and with each level, new nodes are presented as opportunities for pressure. To date, this has been rarely attempted; a rare exception is the successful campaign to boycott Avelo Airlines, applying sufficient public pressure to force the low-cost airline to abandon its contract flying deportees on behalf of ICE. Additionally, the public shame campaign aimed at the Ritchie Group for the attempted sale to ICE may have been a deciding factor in cancelling the first sale. While recognizing the victories in these two examples, however, it is imperative that we remain open to a diversity of tactics; while boycotts and rhetorical admonitions can be useful, sometimes more direct forms of action become necessary in order to exercise a sufficient measure of disincentivization. 

Notwithstanding the tactics used to impose DHS contractors’ capitulation, we must accept as self-evident that we cannot rely on state or local governments for relief. Although state and local governments exert their power further away from the deportation machine’s center of gravity than federal agencies, each remains a component of that hegemonic leviathan formed from the synergism of state and capital. Even when individual politicians ostensibly wish to push back against ICE’s presence in the communities they represent, the conventional avenues available to them are limited. For example, unable to use the oft-relied-upon lever of updating zoning ordinances, due to federal preemption of state and local law, SLC’s politicians are left grasping at straws, like their ineffectual decision to place new water limits on the SLC facility. Despite Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s pledge to “use every tool at the City’s disposal to stop” the ICE facility, Salt Lake City Police have acted to protect the facility and ICE officers. Given the Mayor’s role in appointing SLCPD’s police chief and her power to remove them, a sincere expression of her opposition would entail demanding that SLCPD provide ICE with no protection or assistance. If, as the Supreme Court has determined, police have no obligation to protect ordinary people, why should they attend to the protection of DHS’s property and its federal agents terrorizing our communities?

Mendenhall’s ineffective and cynical “opposition” to ICE’s encroachment into Salt Lake City puts on display one instance of a larger pattern: politicians are unwilling to opt for unconventional tactics that could bring uncomfortable legal challenges or risk damaging their political credibility. They will not do what is necessary to resist the abuses of the federal immigration enforcement system. 

We must internalize the fact of our central position in the struggle to compel the retrenchment of the deportation machine. Any victories seemingly found in the actions of politicians are in reality attributable to the pressure we exert against them. So we’re confronted with a question: What tactics are available to us to further actualize that retrenchment, and ultimately, ICE’s abolition? 

If, as stated by Neel (2018), “[t]he true center of the world economy is not to be found in the ‘creative,’ financialized, or high-tech downtown cores of its global cities, but instead in the complex mesh of material infrastructure that links them together,” then our analysis and tactics must change accordingly. And if, as we have established, ICE depends on the same systems, practices, and structures of power that enable your Amazon Prime delivery, then opportunities to gain leverage present themselves. There is a soft underbelly waiting to be punctured. Or, to picture the structure more accurately: nodes that recapture money and migrants, and the vectors by which capital benefits in directing and restricting flow, any of which can be a target for action. 

In usual fashion, we can find one such tactical opportunity in the plight of workers. Globalized shipping and logistics companies are built on a foundation of exploitation, which is seen primarily in their working conditions—from the original site of production; to factory refinement; to shipping, loading, and warehousing; down to the last mile of delivery. As Chua writes (2026), the workers in this broad industry are in a uniquely precarious position due to any number of marginalizing factors including barriers to education, immigration status, racism and geography. “Often they work multiple jobs with unpredictable shifts. Whatever the supply chain demands. Precarity and underemployment are not mere byproducts of industrial blight; they are intentional strategies that bear the imprint of urban racism.” It is here that ICE hopes to staff and power their international deportation machine. These are the potential points of agitation for the workers that provide the labor necessary for federal immigration enforcement.

As this deportation machine continues to try to crystallize, to make its presence more fixed and permanent in our society, we will continue to analyze its shape, structure and motion. We will fight it every step of the way, and as we do so, we will learn exactly what we are grappling with, and we will remember that this fight is ongoing in a global context—our allies are not merely the comrades and neighbors here in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, but also those hammering at any node of the deportation machine, striking at any vector. We are doing ourselves no favors if we struggle as one, without linking to broader struggles against borders, logistical exploitation networks, and the capital class that uses the connectivity of markets and societies to shift blame, costs, and consequences. Solidarity, from down the street to across the oceans, is the only way out. We will build it block by block until we have broken this machine. 

Footnotes

¹ Too often, the discussion of “is this fascism?” devolves into a discussion of how and whether and to what degree something compares to Italian or German or Spanish or whatever derivative fascism. These are beside the point. The synthesis of state and corporate power threatens us all while we quibble over the trappings, and to quote George Jackson, “[t]he final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” Let’s spend our time organizing and refining ourselves instead of spending time trying to hit a moving target.

Works Cited

Chua, C. “The Warehouse, in Plain Sight,” Places Journal, April 2026. Accessed 19 Apr 2026. <https://placesjournal.org/article/the-warehouse-in-plain-sight-a-disappearing-machine/>&nbsp;

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. United Kingdom: Verso. 

Graziosi, G. (2025, April 9). ICE chief thinks deportation system should be run like Amazon Prime ‘but with human beings.’ The Independent. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-deportations-amazon-p rime-b2730464.html> 

Hoque, U., Hunter, D., & Britney. (2026, January 14). Here’s how we pressured an airline to end its contract with ICE. Truthout. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from 

https://truthout.org/articles/heres-how-we-pressured-an-airline-to-end-its-contract-with-ice/ Jackson, G. (1972). Blood in My Eye. United Kingdom: Random House. 

Hiemstra, N., Conlon, D. (2025). Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants. United Kingdom: Pluto Press. 

Jones, A., Thornblad, J., & Aerts, L. (2026, January 24). Owners and investors of warehouse rumored to be used as ICE facility say they have ‘no plans to sell’ to the federal government. abc4.com. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from 

<https://www.abc4.com/news/wasatch-front/owners-of-warehouse-rumored-to-be-used-as-ice -facility-say-they-have-no-plans-to-sell/> 

Neel, P. A. (2018). Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. United Kingdom: Reaktion Books.

Semerad, T. (2023a, March 4). Moab, Park City cry foul as Utah lawmakers target rules for vacation homes. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from <https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/03/03/moab-park-city-cry-foul-utah/>&nbsp;

Stern, E. (2025, June 26). As Utah sees immigration raid protests, 4 local companies make money from ICE — and one is lobbying for more. The Salt Lake Tribune. Retrieved April 23, 2026, from 

<https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/06/26/these-utah-companies-profit-off/&gt;

The post Nodes and Vectors: On Analyzing and Destroying the Deportation Machine  first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.