Boomerangs of Empire: Latin America as Colonial Laboratory

By Romina Green Rioja, Sergio Beltrán-García 

March 21, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Isolation by byronv2 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 /Flickr

Masked federal agents kidnap a father as he waits to pick up his child from school. An ice cream cart is abandoned on the sidewalk, its vendor disappeared. A young man is arrested at his job and secretly transported to a terrorism confinement prison in another country. These stories are not from Cold War Latin America, but shared by immigrants—undocumented, asylum seekers, green card holders—living in the United States since President Donald J. Trump assumed office in January 2025.

The kidnapped father was Juan José Martínez Cortes, taken while waiting in his car outside of Linda Vista Elementary School in San Diego. The paletero, Ambrocio Lozano, known to his beloved community as Enrique, became the subject of protests demanding his release. Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan gay makeup artist, was arrested in South Carolina and sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, where he was held for 125 days until his release as part of a prisoner swap between the United States and Venezuelan governments.

Mirroring the many accounts of state violence throughout 20th-century Latin America, similar events are now surfacing in the United States. As we witness these horrors in person and online, Aimé Césaire’s words in Discourse on Colonialism(1950) reverberate: “[O]ne fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” What Césaire once diagnosed as a colonial return now shapes the everyday, the imperial boomerang of our lived histories, our identities, of the stories and histories we wish to tell. It is this returning and disseminating violence, including its architectures, justifications, and resistances, that guides this issue’s analytical and historical content.

“Boomerangs of Empire and the Technofascist Turn” takes Césaire’s insight not as a metaphor but as a method. The imperial boomerang functions as a historical circuit in which tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. By emphasizing process over parallel examples, we push contributors and readers to consider why these systems of state repression have become models for replication. Our concern is not simply that U.S. policies echo past empires, but that repression itself has become a transferable technology: an experiment refined in the colonial laboratories of the Americas and now redeployed within the borders of the United States.

We asked contributors to probe what makes this moment distinct. Their collective responses converged on two themes. First, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and Military Industrial Complex (MIC)—braided through racialized logistics, infrastructures, industries, and algorithmic computing—now operate as a single apparatus that manages dissent, migration, and everyday life. Second, popular resistance, the response to methods of repression, emerges to protect those being targeted and reaffirm social rights. The essays that follow trace this machinery across borders and centuries, from border militarization and migrant criminalization to algorithmic surveillance and ecological extraction.

Césaire foresaw “the American hour” as an age of “violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” Our time demands that we meet it analytically and through activism. Naming this machine is a condition for interrupting it. In keeping with NACLA’s tradition, our editorial stance is double: to expose the architectures of technofascism and to foreground the counter‑methods that boomerang back as resistance.

Thingification
Césaire’s stark equation that “colonization = ‘thingification’” clarifies how colonization reduces life—person, culture, and ecology—into a nonentity to be sorted, priced, moved, and extracted. The colonial apparatus operates through administrative bureaucracies that strip singularity from the beings they process. What feels particular to this moment is not the process of thingification itself but its interoperability, where sonic thresholds, hydraulic schedules, and colonial urban geometries now plug into one another through infrastructures and logistics that bind extraction—human and nonhuman alike—to markets and security workflows.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana shows how a small fishing border town is reframed by space-industry routines—launch corridors, shock-wave tolerances, and debris-recovery pathways—that rearticulate the lives of its fishermen and marine species in service of space colonialism. Further up the Río Grande, Federico Pérez Villoro tracks how dam-release timetables recalibrate the river’s dangers, reducing migrant lives to actuarial risk variables. And in Tovaangar/Los Angeles, Daniel P. Gámez reads the Castilian imposition of the urban grid as a mechanism that both exposes and contains dissidence, a mechanism still activated today through police kettling. As Mike Davis warned, the dystopian future is not ahead of us but built into the infrastructural present and its architectures, where life is parsed into parameters—decibels, flow rates, lines of sight—so it can be priced, routed, or neutralized.

Read together, the border pieces do more than illustrate thingification; they render its architectures visible. Reyes-Retana maps how aerospace regulation reconfigures a coastal commons into a mere service corridor; Pérez Villoro details how engineered water surges reprogram a river into a weapon; and Gámez reminds us how the colonial grid persists as a sorting machine for contemporary policing and repression. Together, these texts insist that architecture is not a backdrop but an instrument—spaceports, dams, and grids— that makes the routines of thingification interoperable.

The Law of Progressive Dehumanization
The rise of the U.S. empire turned the Americas into a continuous field of experimentation. From the Cold War’s “development” projects to the 21st century’s migration and surveillance regimes, the United States perfected a technocratic colonialism that organizes difference rather than erases it. In this landscape, deportation files, visa categories, and media representations perform the work once carried out by armies. Césaire’s warning that “there is a law of progressive dehumanization” names precisely this transformation: the conversion of life into data, labor into numbers, and citizenship into a conditional privilege measured by productivity and obedience. Dehumanization no longer requires ideology; it requires logistics.

In Jennifer Martínez-Medina’s “The Hidden Agrarian Transformation Behind Mass Deportation,” the Cold War’s counterinsurgency wars return as immigration policy. Martínez-Medina reveals how the racial hierarchies that once justified hemispheric “development” now govern U.S. agricultural fields, where the H-2A visa program updates mid-century tactics of control for a 21st century economy. The deported worker replaces the disappeared guerrillero, both rendered expendable in the name of national security and agricultural “efficiency.” In her reading, the farm becomes the new frontier of dehumanization—the plantation reborn through data and deportation.

Turning to Brazil, Omawu Diane Enobabor and Karina Quintanilha’s “Contesting Border Violence from São Paulo to New York” traces the afterlives of U.S. border enforcement in the detention camps and refugee airports of the Global South, where Black and African migrants navigate a transnational regime of racial profiling wrapped in humanitarian language. They show that the border, once a territorial line, has become a network—an algorithmic infrastructure stretching from Brooklyn’s migrant shelters to São Paulo’s immigration terminals—where mutual aid and community organizing fill the voids left by deliberate state neglect.

Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva turns Césaire’s phrase back onto its most contemporary surface: visibility itself. In “Anti-Racism as Spectacle: Visuality, Social Media, and the Afterlives of Mestizaje,” she argues that Mexico’s digital campaigns against racism reproduce the very “violence, corruption, and barbarism” Césaire identified, this time through the market of representation. What began as mestizaje—the 20th century Mexican state project to whiten and unify—returns in the 21st as a politics of inclusion that leaves racial capitalism intact. The colonial wound becomes a marketing category; dehumanization becomes an aesthetic.

Lastly, Chris Durán’s “Imprisoning Nations: Incarceration and Imperialism in Chile and the United States” traces how struggles against dehumanization—from the 1960s to today—provoke its renewal yet also generate the possibility of liberation. Focusing on the experience of political prisoners, Durán links the U.S. Black freedom movement and the Mapuche struggle for land against the Chilean state, showing how imprisonment becomes both a tool of repression and a crucible of resistance. In his reading, captivity does not extinguish resistance but refines it, transforming the site of containment into a school of revolution where the fight to reclaim life continues.

The Age of Tyrants
Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” in the age of tyrants captures the long life of domination in the Americas, where empire’s administrators and neoliberal strongmen have continually borrowed from one another’s repertoires of control. From the 1930s onward, tyranny evolved through alliance: colonial paternalism merged with the spectacle of mass politics, and the vocabulary of development disguised dispossession as progress. Across the hemisphere, authoritarian projects drew legitimacy from the same sources as democracy—modernization, order, and the promise of national rebirth.Sam Markwell’s moving essay, “Submerged Pluralist Possibilities in the Pueblo Indian Homelands,”opens in this historical moment. Writing through the history of the Pueblo Indian homelands in the 1930s and 1940s, Markwell shows how Indigenous communities sought to build a genuinely plural society that took up the mantle against fascism while defending their sovereignty. Pueblo leaders and their allies envisioned a model of governance rooted in reciprocity and coexistence, a proto-plurinational order that countered both the racial hierarchies of settler democracy and the authoritarian unity of fascism abroad. Yet the U.S. state’s developmental agenda—its dams, bureaucracies, and modernization schemes—proceeded without them. Markwell’s conclusion lingers as both an indictment and a warning: the infrastructures that promised progress drowned the alternatives to tyranny that once flourished along the Rio Grande.

Cristina Awadalla’s “Authoritarian Aesthetics: Ortega, Bukele, and the Bodies that Sustain Power” brings Césaire’s circuit into the present. Across Central America, she traces how Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele inherit and reinvent the visual and affective technologies of Cold War rule. Ortega’s revolutionary nostalgia and Bukele’s social-media populism converge in a politics of spectacle where incarceration, obedience, and digital charisma become indistinguishable. The old tyrant’s charisma and the new influencer’s algorithm meet in mutual service: each governs by staging the body as proof of order and legitimacy. Awadalla exposes this alliance, both regional and global, as an aesthetic of domination that travels easily across regimes.

In this same register, Simón Rodríguez shows how the Dominican Republic’s regime, once cast as a regional pariah, has become a proving ground whose techniques of retroactive denationalization, racialized raids, and mass deportation quotas are now openly courted by the U.S. far right. The traffic is bidirectional: Trumpism’s legal fictions and carceral spectacle find in Santo Domingo not merely a model but a partner that furnishes ready-made instruments and a veneer of legitimacy. Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” is thus made contemporary: old and new tyrannies exchange methods, narratives, and even markets, until apartheid governance becomes common sense across the hemisphere. By closing the loop between Caribbean laboratories and North Atlantic power, Rodríguez reveals that the age of tyrants is less a genealogy of leaders than a shared infrastructure of rule—one that can only be interrupted by circuits of solidarity as agile as those of domination.

Mechanization
In his final reflections, Césaire evokes the “prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve” in modern life. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the Mexican anthropologist Rossana Reguillo names this the necromáquina, “a death device that advances by swallowing territories, bodies and futures.” The danger, as Césaire warned, is immense. In the same passages he cautions that “American domination [is] the only domination from which one never recovers… unscarred.”

In this light, Trumpism appears less as an aberration than as an intensification of “conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” It recodes punitive governance and infrastructural chauvinism as common sense, aestheticizes humiliation as order, and licenses off—to federal agents or private tech—a managerial contempt for the inconvenient particularities of life. The boomerang is visible not only in policy but in style: the swaggering promise of this new American hour is to accelerate extraction, to police and militarize all space—physical, digital, discursive, and extraterrestrial—and to collapse all possibilities of political imagination into a repertoire of violent heuristics where cruelty is misrecognized as efficiency. Mechanization thrives on this confusion, turning collective resentments and cultural grudges into manipulable user interfaces at the disposal of colonial power.

Lost in this confusion is original thinking. The current rush toward large language models (LLMs)—misnamed “artificial intelligence”—invites the mass renunciation of judgment in favor of predictive mimicry, outsourcing observation, embodied knowledge, and even ethical reasoning to systems trained on past colonial normalities. Troublingly, we editors received multiple proposals—and even drafts—that leaned heavily on AI-generated content. The irony was not lost on us that the very technologies of imperial governance this issue critiques are being uncritically employed in the production of writing itself.

This raises uncomfortable questions about Audre Lorde’s famous assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Can these algorithms and LLMs, trained on imperial archives and corporate datasets, confront the imperial boomerang? Césaire’s many warnings resonate that we are at risk of transforming radical thought into mere throughput—another task to be checked off, another data point to be processed, predicted, neutralized.  As our contributing poet, césar montero, writes from Los Angeles, California, reflecting on the imperial return:

Oh Great Smoking Mirror

Tezcatlipoca

Give me guidance

Allow me to see

Through the smoke and mirrors

The other side of your obsidian dreams

 

The Women Leading The Farmworker Movement Won’t Let It Be Defined By Cesar Chavez

The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.

By Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra , Marissa Martinez 

March 22, 2026

Source: The 19th

Dolores Huerta (left) and Magaly Licolli are among farmworker leaders grappling with allegations that Cesar Chavez sexually abused women and girls, prompting a broader reckoning across the movement. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP; Courtesy of Magaly Licolli)

Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon. 

Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades. 

The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded. 

“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.

“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said. 

Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.

Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12. 

In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse. 

“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”

Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others. 

She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.

In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”

She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward. 

“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”

Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.

Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.

Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.

“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.” 

Licolli felt that echoed this week.

“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.” 

A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.

A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.

“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said. 

A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment. 

None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers. 

But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences. 

Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager. 

“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”

California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims. 

Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women. 

“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”

Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people. 

Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said. 

And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.

Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs. 

Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said. 

Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.

On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.

Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.

“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”

When We Fight For Public Schools, We Fight For Democracy

A “non-permission slip” is the first step in a new nationwide campaign training thousands of local organizers to defend public education.

By Kumar Rao

March 22, 2026

Source: Waging Nonviolence

A multifaith action in Washington, D.C. calls on U.S. senators to vote against school vouchers replacing public education. (Instagram/Reclaim Our Schools)

Every morning, across the nation, in red states and blue states, in urban and rural communities, we watch children walk through the doors of our neighborhood public schools, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lunch bags in hand. These are ordinary moments that contain an extraordinary promise: that education belongs to every child. But that promise — simple, powerful and profoundly democratic — is now under attack in ways we haven’t seen in generations. 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward,  Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice — now with Project 2025 architect, the Heritage Foundation — told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” 

Public schools, like so many pieces of our social fabric, have emerged from the last year battered. The Trump administration, in close partnership with state and local allies, and billionaire co-conspirators, is enacting, play by play, Project 2025’s education provisions and broader authoritarian agenda under the three pillars: vouchers, patriotism and prayer. And schools across the country — in blue states and red states alike — are facing existential threats we have never seen before.

These attacks on public schools are attacks on democracy itself. The classroom is where kids learn to listen to different perspectives, to collaborate, to understand that rules apply to everyone. These aren’t abstract lessons — they’re the daily work of becoming people who can sustain a democratic society. 

Schools are also perhaps the strongest example of public policy and public dollars being deployed to build our shared commitment to one another, regardless of wealth or creed. They’re the core of a social compact in which we each have a stake in the success of families and communities everywhere.

That’s why education and democracy advocates like myself have launched a mass base-building campaign with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools in order to unite people across political party and geographical lines in defense of public education. Called “Free the Future,” the campaign is organizing parents, educators and other community members to explicitly refuse consent to policies that undermine our children’s education and our democratic values. The key idea: Create channels for people to speak out, attend trainings and then flow into escalating resistance, starting with a simple statement of refusal and building toward coordinated public action.

Building the appetite for “no”

The entry point to the Free the Future campaign is simple but powerful: a non-permission slip.

We’re all familiar with permission slips — those forms schools send home asking us to consent to field trips or activities. This is the opposite. It’s a public declaration that we do NOT grant permission for our children to be educated in ways that betray the promise of public schools. 

The non-permission slip, an online fillable form, is a low-bar, low-risk first step — something any parent or community member can do: Read, click through, sign your name and hit submit. But it opens doors to deeper engagement. People who sign are invited to share the non-permission slip with their networks and to attend a leadership training. Over the last few months, thousands of participants — parents and grandparents, young people and educators — have joined our trainings. Some attended action calls to learn about the dangerous and chaotic maneuvering of the Trump administration and its congressional allies, and find out how to take steps to voice their opposition, both online and offline. Others joined workshops about the links between authoritarianism, billionaires and the current attacks on schools, or took a four-week module on understanding power and basic organizing skills. 

The leaders being recruited are everyday people: parents, educators, public school alumni and concerned community members. Participants can also receive one-on-one coaching from experienced organizers and support for escalating actions in their local communities — learning how to recruit other families, push elected officials to fight for public schools, and use fun and humor to resist attacks on schools and protect families from government repression.

Initial small refusals — signing a non-permission slip, meeting with your superintendent, posting dissent on social media and in online forums, organizing rallies with fellow parents or visiting a representative’s office — create the foundation for larger ones like participation in mass mobilizations, civil disobedience and even general strikes. When people see their neighbors taking action, it becomes easier to join. When isolated frustration transforms into organized resistance, it becomes harder for politicians to ignore us.

We are also pushing local officials — superintendents, school board members and other elected officials — to make public their nonpartisan opposition to the administration’s attacks on public schools and act on it. We’re asking them to adopt policies to keep students safe from ICE, share the impact of federal grant losses and budget cuts, and urge their states to reject federal vouchers. When courageous people in positions of power defect from the authoritarian agenda — and do so publicly, and make clear the source of the harm — it makes it easier for others to do the same and harder for the administration to carry out its policies. 

The goal for our campaign is ambitious, but achievable: train thousands of leaders, draw out vocal support from officials and public figures who champion public education, and propel them to take public action in national mobilization events, including the upcoming No Kings Day marches on March 28, May Day Strong and Labor Day. We intend to cultivate what history shows is essential to resisting authoritarianism: the public’s appetite and courage for saying “NO.”

A movement building in classroom corners and sidewalks

Across the country, parents are already resisting — often in creative, unexpected ways that reveal how deeply people care about their schools, young people and the future of the nation.

In Idaho last year, in solidarity with a teacher who stood firm when administrators told her to take down an “Everyone is Welcome Here” sign, parents staged a “Chalk the Walk” event, painting the sidewalks outside schools with more welcoming words. 

In Long Island, New York, community members held a $1,000-a-cup lemonade stand to draw attention to the Trump regime’s proposed $12 billion budget cut to public schools. 

In Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, Minneapolis and Chicago, parents and community members have organized “walking school buses” and neighborhood patrols to protect students and their families from ICE operations. 

In a school district in Minnesota, parents, students and educators banded together to fight a book ban policy organized by right wing extremist groups — and won. 

In Oldham County, Kentucky, the school board unanimously rejected efforts to create off-campus Bible classes during the school day for elementary school kids. 

And parents in Oklahoma re-purposed the law allowing parents to opt out of so-called “woke” curriculum to instead opt their children out of the new requirements for Bible lessons in social studies class.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re sparks of something larger and represent how parents and concerned communities are organically resisting in this political moment. 

That shared commitment creates potential to fracture the billionaire-fueled anti-democratic coalition currently threatening our institutions. When parents in conservative communities see their rural schools devastated by federal cuts, when they watch special education services disappear while the obscenely wealthy get tax credits for private schools, the contradictions become impossible to ignore.

Public education is one of the few issues that can unite people across the deep divisions of our current moment. Polling shows that parents across the political and geographic spectrum want their children to have well-resourced classrooms, trained teachers, safe buildings and real opportunities to learn and grow. That the $12 billion in proposed federal cuts to public education, initially passed in the House in 2025, was restored through a bicameral and bipartisan negotiation earlier this year, is proof that education transcends partisan fractures and that grassroots organizing can still have significant impact on federal policy.

Right now, wealthy interests and authoritarian politicians are hell bent on defunding, privatizing and ultimately destroying public schools. They’re betting that if they can divide parents over curriculum debates or convince us that “parental choice” means abandoning the public system, they can dismantle an institution that’s been central to American democracy for two centuries.

We can’t let that happen. And individual acts of resistance, as inspiring as they are, won’t be enough.

History teaches us that authoritarian movements succeed when people comply in isolation and fail when communities organize collective refusal. Education resistance has shown it can challenge authoritarianism and fascism. Norwegian teachers prevented Nazi curriculum takeovers in 1942, Argentine educators undermined and subverted mandatory lesson plans under Juan Domingo Perón, Chilean teachers mobilized against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and most recently, Hungary’s Tanítanék movement has opposed Viktor Orbán’s attacks on schools.

The dismantling of democratic institutions requires public acquiescence — the quiet acceptance that “this is just how things are now.” Resistance requires the opposite: visible, coordinated action that says, “We do not consent.”

The truth is that the nature and scale of our current strategies aren’t sufficient to stop what’s coming. We need channels for public school parents and supporters to flow into sustained resistance. We need to move from individual frustration to organized collective action. We need to cultivate the courage for public refusal.

That’s what Free the Future is building: a movement that opens doors for every parent, educator, student and community member to take escalating action to refuse consent, join with others and defend an institution that, while imperfect, still holds democracy’s promise. Email

Kumar Rao

Kumar Rao is a social justice lawyer and democracy advocate, and an organizer with the Free the Future campaign.