The mass resistance in the Twin Cities has been inspirational for all of us. Like Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles before them, the people came together en masse, organized across political and social barriers, and fought back an invading fascist army. For those of us watching from afar, looking desperately for some way to actually fight this growing fascist force, there is so much to respect in these examples, and so much to learn from.

However, it’s also easy to fetishize the specific tools of resistance that have been effective in other places and in different contexts. Rapid response teams, hyper-local ICE watch, and 3D printed whistles have been crucial tools in Minneapolis’ fight against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but our context is not the same. We can’t simply carbon copy these tools and expect them to work as well here in Thurston County.

Conflating two different strategies

Part of the issue is that what we see on the news and on social media mostly reflects what happens during a “surge.” It’s easy to miss that this represents just one of two completely different strategies that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are employing. For all of the horror and destruction “surges” cause, they are actually a pretty weak strategy.

While the numbers are hard to pin down, it seems Minnesota’s “Metro Surge” only produced about 4,000 arrests over 3 months using 3,000 agents, according to Reuters. This a scary number of arrests, especially in one place, but surprisingly few compared to the approximately 40,000 monthly arrests across the US since October, according to The Guardian.

A surge is a spectacle, built by throwing countless bloodthirsty ICE and CBP agents into one place to wreak havoc and terror for cellphone cameras to capture. It is a project of building political legitimacy through fear to create the image of a great, unstoppable boot, ready and willing to stomp out any dissent.

It is weak because it puts so much of their strength in one place, where they can be seen, monitored, and tracked. You can have watchers on every street corner of the city connected to a rapid response dispatch, and you can set up block parties or “filter blockades” to slow traffic and check for state agents. It is a strategy that allows us to build super effective tools to stop them.

ICE’s primary strategy, though, is a much more dispersed snatch-and-grab approach that focuses on successful abductions with little visibility. Because it’s incredibly difficult for us to be ready and vigilant everywhere, this strategy is much more effective. It’s telling that during the current “draw-down” of forces in the Twin Cities, the remaining agents have largely moved to the surrounding suburbs.

This isn’t to diminish any of the horror of what has happened in the Twin Cities, Chicago, Washington D.C., or Los Angeles. The point is that despite the terror, people were able to come together and run ICE out of town in part because these surges actually make them super vulnerable. However, for those of us living outside these large invasions, and outside of dense cities, we can’t expect the tools used in cities like Minneapolis to work the same way.

What does resistance look like here?

Lacey and Olympia aren’t Minneapolis or Chicago. We are facing an enemy that is dispersed, infrequent, and much harder to locate. So how do we organize to respond here?

There probably is not one single correct answer, but a good place to start is that we need to focus less on the point of contact: the moment when ICE agents gets out of their cars and grab somebody. They will always have the advantage of surprise. Instead we need to find ways to impede their ability to move and operate in the first place. We need to gum up their system, so each life they destroy costs them more and more.

One way to do this is to focus on their points of operations: field offices and detention centers where they have to go to and from. These are mostly known locations where they can be potentially tracked, ID’ed, and slowed down. Hotels that house ICE agents can be pressured, as happened in Los Angeles. Local surveillance infrastructure, like Flock cameras, can be opposed and dismantled (as we’ve done here in Olympia). We can pressure companies that support DHS to drop their contracts. On the other side, we can materially support families that are potential targets, lessening the insecurities that ICE agents take advantage of. This also means supporting and organizing directly with people that have been taken, as La Resistencia has for done years at the Northwest Detention Center. Every one of these things make it harder for ICE to work and move easily.

Above all though, we need to stop thinking in terms of finding the right tactics, and instead think in terms of what Black Rose/Rosa Negra calls deep organizing — the kind of committed, long-term relationship and support building that turns neighborhoods and workplaces into powerful communities that are able to defend and fight for themselves. This means building deep and reciprocal solidarity, for which there are no blueprints or short-cuts. This kind of organizing will allow us to work with different tactics over time, while defending against the more common day-to-day threats to targeted communities, like government neglect and police harassment. For those of us that are not part of part of a targeted population, it means building real, living relationships with those that are, so that we can work together from a place of care and real awareness. Minneapolis was able to jump to action so effectively, in part, by activating already existing structures that had been built up over years, like union/church alliances, tenants unions, and signal networks from the George Floyd rebellion.

Taking on the specific neighborhood level tactics made famous in the Twin Cities is not necessarily wrong. In immigrant neighborhoods or a large apartment complexes, it might actually be exactly the right thing to resist ICE kidnappings. Still, we need to work with a clear head about what we are actually confronting, and recognize that organizing might look totally different at different times and places. We need to think seriously, and collectively, about what the terrain really looks like where we are, and then pick, adapt, and invent from there. We need to do this so that we can all get in the fight for real.

by: V Lane Hoy

A few weeks ago, I built a diorama in response to a call for artistic proposals ruminating on the theme of “the space between.” I took a somewhat literal interpretation and focused on the space between buildings, drawing inspiration from the title of Danish urbanist Jan Gehl’s 1971 book, Life Between Buildings, and let my hands be guided by whimsy and vagary. Halfway through the process, I was struck by doubt: Am I doing anything more than child’s play: building a fairy theme park using a variety of adhesives, popsicle sticks, and fake mosses? Is that art? The issue — I felt in the moment — had partly to do with the popular appeal of the cuteness of miniature scenes and objects. I wondered: Is cuteness a shortcut, and proof that the project lacked conceptual rigor?

Eventually, I got over this, both because I was running out of time to be delayed by doubt, and also because I was ostensibly taking a vacation to pull this off and wanted to have a little fun. I was finding that working with my hands allowed me to slip effortlessly into the unparalleled pleasure of “flow state.” Compared to that feeling, who cares about conceptual rigor? Not me!

Plus, beneath the doubt, I was curious about cuteness as potentially fruitful intellectual terrain. I wanted to create an opportunity for my imagined viewer to experience the feeling of opening the plastic oyster shell of the mermaid Polly Pocket, which, as a kid in the 90s, I recall evoked both kinds of wonder: the awe and the aww kind.

This makes me wonder if part of why these kinds of toys are so effective at captivating the attention of children, in particular, might have to do with the already out-of-scale-ness of their experience, in which most everything, materially speaking, is just out of their reach. For a kid with a Polly Pocket in palm, suddenly, mercifully, they have one thing in their control. Their little kid fingers, typically offering insufficient grip on the average door handle, become powerful and imposing in that small palm-sized world. And might that serve as a way to attenuate the frustration of the otherwise reignless period of young life when one is blown around by the whims of adults like a reed in the wind?

Along with age, I sense sex and disability are at play — the world is also made just a little out of scale for the small body, the slow body, the body on wheels or crutches. Feminist architects and urbanists have been sounding this alarm for ages, though the message is still largely tuned out. We can’t seem to get out from under the influence of the man most identified with the Modernist movement in architecture, Le Corbusier, who envisioned the “Modulor” as a tool to incorporate the human scale into design. A worthwhile aspiration, I’d say, except that he based this human scale on “the good-looking men, such as policemen” in detective novels, who, he claimed, were “always 6 feet tall!” Unfortunately for the rest of us, his Modulor standard was taken up across Europe, the United States, and other places where Modernist influences are articulated in the built environment.

So perhaps alienation is relative to the extent of the out-of-scale-ness one feels with the surrounding structures. Even so, the wonder of the miniature seems to work on just about anyone. For me, cityscape miniatures hold a particular fascination. My working theory has to do with the perceived irreproachability of the built world. The average person is rarely afforded the kind of agentic rush of leaning over to pick up a building and move it here and there or experimenting with being the decider of what gets affixed where with the power of the hot glue gun.

Part of the intrigue of the urban diorama stems from a general sense that the built world is something that happens to you rather than something you have a relationship with. You might walk downtown and suddenly find that a building you’ve come to have some relationship with was leveled and the grade beams have been laid for the foundation of a new development, and it’s not clear why and it’s not clear who decided and it’s not clear if anyone — any regular person — was consulted. All of this can lend itself to a sense of alienation from the urban process and the built environment. Making a diorama creates a fantastical opportunity to step into the role of decider, but it also creates the space to re-enchant the process and expand the realm of possibility.

While reflecting on the catharsis afforded by my week of diorama-ing, I developed a fantasy of renting a small warehouse downtown, perhaps in the building along the west side of Capitol Way between Olympia and Thurston Avenues that housed the Procession of the Species studio circa 2011. I recall admiring its vaulted skylights and taking refuge in the lofted area that had a secret-crawl-space feel while I built a stegosaurus costume in anticipation of that year’s parade, with somewhat unfortunate results, the back portion looking more like a giant weed leaf than the regal spines I was trying for.

In this imagined warehouse, people could stop by to drop off unusual household items and interesting garbage, anything that could possibly come in handy for model-making. To picture this grand diorama, look at The Panorama of the City of New York on display at the Queens Museum, a 1:1200-scale replica of the city first created for the World’s Fair in 1964, which continues to aspire to keep pace with the city’s developments and serve as an honest representation of every one of its evolving structures.

Yet rather than a representation of what already is, this collaborative model-making scheme would be a fantastical manifestation of the dream city, of what could be. Perhaps a child wants to make a playground for their paper dolls. The neighbors living along the north block of Legion Street who, while taking my evening sit in Sylvester Park, I see lugging their groceries from the bus stop on route 14, might enjoy a zip line installed along the park’s perimeter to ferry their bags along their route. For my part, I wouldn’t mind a public soft serve ice cream machine installed by the Artesian Well, whose contested perimeter gate, in this telling of the tale, has been removed once and for all. Any of these ideas and more could go into the dream city model.

The word diorama comes from two roots: dia, the Greek word for “through,” and orama, from “panorama,” a compound which means “a complete view.” This Works in Progress column is an iterative space to elaborate this diorama-esque work on the page, in service of seeing as clearly as possible what is, in order to courageously and playfully envision what isn’t yet. The wager: Making sense of the built forms around us is the first step in articulating what we’d like them to be and what we’d like to preserve, what we might want to demand and what we might need to make for ourselves.

Note: “Five fingers on the total plan” is a lyric from the song “Ode to Hanky” written by Lucien Spect with the band Scrivener.

V Lane Hoy is an interdisciplinary writer drawing on observation, cultural criticism, architecture, and psychogeography.

Trumpism is waging a war against the people of U.S. and the rest of the world. It is an authoritarian, bullying playbook that violently oppresses, exploits, and dehumanizes immigrants and poor people at home and abroad. The U.S. takes resources from the Global South through resource imperialism and demands total geopolitical dominance. The U.S. has no right or authority to intervene in other countries. Not surprisingly, this authority is seldom questioned by either of the two major political parties or the mainstream media. The following four cases demonstrate a bipartisan project of U.S. intervention that is both immoral and illegal. With blatant and murderous U.S. imperialism on the rise, we need a popular movement to build the power to stop it.

Palestine/Israel

The U.S. has given Israel $300 billion in aid since its founding in 1948, which Israel has used for its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the annexation of Jerusalem, and many wars against Gaza dating back to well before October 2023. This has led to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The U.S. also supports Israel’s intense bombing of Lebanon which has killed more than 1100 people, displaced one million, and has led to Israel is occupying southern Lebanon again.

Israel has consistently violated the October 2025 ceasefire accords with Hamas by blocking food and medical aid from entering Gaza. The Israeli military has killed 700 residents since the ceasefire was announced in October, 2025. Our movements must oppose the illegal occupation and genocide by demanding the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the West Bank as well as the opening of all the borders to Gaza. Palestinians deserve dignity and equality, which means ending the occupation of Palestine, establishing right of return for Palestinians, and equality for all people living in Palestine/Israel. Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaigns such as the Boycott Chevron campaign and the successful campaign to get the City of Olympia to divest from companies involved with Israel show that we can have a material impact if we organize collectively. However, our most important demand remains unmet: the demand for the U.S. to end all aid to Israel.

Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, the U.S. blatantly violated both international law and its own laws when it invaded Venezuela, killing 130 people and kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Since then, the US has threatened to invade Venezuela again if it sends oil to Cuba or does not bend to the Trump administration by opening its economy to be exploited by U.S. corporations. We demand ending to U.S. terrorism, including the killing of more than 160 Venezuelans and others on small boats off the Venezuelan coast. In addition, we demand the withdrawal of the U.S. military from the Caribbean and the immediate release of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores.

Cuba

The U.S. has conducted a covert war against Cuba since the revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959. In the eyes of the U.S., Cuba's crime has been its independence. The Cuban revolution brought many advances for the Cuban people: free, high quality health care and education, as well as cultural sovereignty and the dignity of its people. Economic problems such as a lack of consumer goods are partially caused by the US blockade, which severely cuts Cuba's ability to import goods. The Trump administration's position, led by Marco Rubio, is starving the Cuban people by stopping all oil shipments. This is murder and economic war. Trump claims Cuba is next on their hit list after Iran. We demand no to war on Cuba, the end of the U.S. blockade, and reparations to Cuba for a 64 year old embargo.

Iran

In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratic Iranian Government led by Mohammed Mossadegh and replaced him with the repressive, pro-Israeli Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1979, a popular uprising overthrew him, bringing Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei to power. However, recent popular opposition has responded to their conservative interpretation of Islam and repressive political leadership.

The United States and Israel are committed to overthrowing the Iranian government. They both want to dominate the Middle East militarily, economically, and politically. Iran is an impediment to this imperialist aim, which compelled the U.S. and Israel to launch this unprovoked war on February 28, 2026. 2,000 Iranian civilians and counting have been killed, including 168 school children and 14 teachers in a single U.S. missile attack. Iran is justifiably defending itself by raising the social cost to the U.S. and Israel by attacking U.S. military bases in the region, attacking Israel, bombing Gulf oil facilities, and blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Prices of oil, natural gas, and fertilizer are rising rapidly. At home, inflation is increasing and the standard of living of working-class Americans is declining further.

Building an Anti-War Movement

There has never been a war that has been as unpopular from the start as this U.S.-Israeli War on Iran. This tension creates an opportunity to convince the U.S. to withdraw and end its attacks on Iran. The No Kings rallies locally and nationally are important actions towards stopping these wars and the Trump agenda but they alone are not enough. Voting matters but it alone is not enough. Many levels of protest and resistance are needed: people in the streets, direct actions against institutions complicit with this war machine, non-compliant non-cooperation, and more.

Currently, there is no mass anti-war movement in the United States. Moving beyond one-off mobilizations and building an infrastructure for ongoing organization that actively involves people is necessary. So is a movement focused on all lives lost, not just the lives of U.S. citizens. It is important to reach out to those already involved, to do political education, and to make it easier to get plugged in. Building this infrastructure will create the conditions that help form a mass anti-war movement, expand its effectiveness, and increase its longevity. Why this hasn’t happened yet is not entirely clear.

One reason might be that there wasn’t a buildup of U.S. propaganda to influence public opinion before the U.S. attacks on Iran. This is a partial explanation of the low support for the war. On the other hand, there wasn’t time to build an anti-war movement either. There was a broad Palestine solidarity movement in 2023 and 2024 against the U.S. backed Israeli genocide against Palestine, but this movement has weakened despite the U.S. continuing to fund Israel’s murderous attacks on Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran. Repression and fear are a cause for the weakening of the Palestine solidarity movement. Fear should not stop us. There is a lack of anti-war organizations that can effectively mobilize or involve large numbers to oppose U.S. aggression abroad in the way that various organizations existed in the 1960s, for example.

Sending soldiers into Iran causing mass U.S. casualties shouldn’t be necessary for bringing people into the streets, but it would likely have this effect. That is why it is important to focus on all casualties, not just the ones from the United States. It is also important to connect the war to the increasing hardship for working class people in the U.S., as inflation increases faster than wages as the war continues.

In the anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, and in the Palestine solidarity movement, especially the encampments in Spring 2024, students have played a major role. Spring is the season when student movements are usually the most active. There is a good possibility a student movement will rise up this spring in support of anti-war, immigrant solidarity, and climate justice. Additionally students can help resist the increased control of university curricula, admissions, and hiring of faculty and staff by the Trump administration, which is part of their racist agenda. Student movements are the strongest when issues of national and global importance are connected to campus complicity such as college portfolios supporting the war in Iran, involvement with Israel, or collaborating with ICE.

In the Olympia and Thurston County area, there is a need for a strong anti-war organization that continues to include Palestine solidarity as a focus while making room for other causes. As mentioned, stopping U.S. wars against Iran and Cuba should be integral to local organizing as well. Including anti-nuclear weapons and building an ongoing structure against the next war would be a powerful stance and draw in more participants.

Another option would be to form an organization that explicitly connects economic and social justice at home and U.S. aggression abroad. An example was the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace (OMJP), a group that was active in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its focus was anti-imperialism and also support of the homeless, solidarity with farmworkers, universal healthcare, and organized many events including forums, conferences, and demonstrations. Domestic oppression and exploitation of the working class are intrinsically linked. Immigration is a clear example of this.

Let us take initiative to organize ourselves and form groups that go beyond single issues, and that respect and cooperate with existing progressive organizations in the area. We need to go beyond only organizing and mobilizing to return to the pre-Trump status quo unless we want another Trump in 2032.

Speaking out and organizing against attacks on democracy and defending social programs while simultaneously winning non-reformist reforms are a necessary and desirable strategy. Non-reformist reforms are ones that build our power, our political consciousness, and our capacity so that we can fight harder with more resources. Reforms are important stepping stones for our movements, but in the long run capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. Examples of non-reformist reforms include reigning in U.S. imperialism, quality health care and housing for all, a universal basic income, free child care, free higher education and cancelling student debt, climate justice, and an end to deportations. These reforms will allow us to fight more ardently for reproductive, trans, and racial justice, as well as labor issues such as meaningful work and a shorter work week.

The need to connect this program of meaningful reforms to an anti-capitalist perspective that develops participatory socialist alternatives is necessary in expanding the imagination of the public in seeing a world beyond the current order. “Our alternatives,” as Rosa Luxemburg said more than 100 years ago, “are barbarism or socialism.”

As a political-cultural geographer who has long been an anti-war organizer and studied the history of U.S. military interventions, it’s clear that the war on Iran could set into motion a regional conflagration, the violent break-up of Iran into ethnic enclaves, and a toll that would make the Iraq War look like a warm-up exercise.

The U.S. role in the Middle East began with the 1953 CIA coup that toppled democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose government had nationalized the oil industry for the benefit of its people. The U.S. replaced him with the dictatorial monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the U.S. backed with both weapons and nuclear technology. It’s in Iran that the U.S. regional domination in the Middle East began, and where it might confront the hardest obstacles, at home and abroad.

Most Americans concur with the country singer Alan Jackson, who sang in 2002, “I’m not a real political man \ I’m not sure I can tell you \ The difference in Iraq and Iran.” But Iran has always been more geographically pivotal than Iraq, in land area, population, and economics. It was one of the few countries that retained independence through the colonial era, and one of the only Third World societies to keep control of its own resources.

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has sought to topple the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran. That moment was when the demonization of Muslims replaced anti-communism as the main selling point for military interventions. I remember seeing U.S. sailors in the Philippines 40 years ago sporting t-shirts that read “I Got My Tan off the Coast of Iran,” and a string of U.S. bases with 40,000 troops has encircled Iran since then, now in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Oman. U.S. bases in all these countries have come under Iranian retaliation.

The U.S. has already been at war with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian boats and oil rigs, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. The currently unfolding war with Iran is continuation of a long-simmering conflict. [7] U.S. and Israeli threats have also encouraged a siege mentality among Iranian leaders, who, in turn, repeatedly used them as a rationale for cracking down on internal dissent. The heads of state in Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran reinforce and feed off of each other, and to create fear to build their own internal power and legitimacy.

Trump and Netanyahu may have thought the Sunni Gulf States, which have long been at odds with Iran, and the Iranian people would side with their current drive toward regime change. The 12-Day War last year had the exact opposite effect, causing stronger Muslim solidarity and rallying Iranians around the flag, even many who had protested and been imprisoned by the ayatollahs but don’t want a new Shah or other foreign puppet ruler. Much the same happened in Germany in World War II, when Allied fire-bombings that targeted civilian neighborhoods may have prevented internal dissent from growing.

Escalation Beyond Air War

Both the Iraq and Iran wars were justified with lies about weapons of mass destruction told by the nuclear-armed states of the U.S. and Israel. Attacking Iran is far more disastrous than attacking Iraq. It will scuttle any chance of political reforms in Iran or regional agreement around Palestine. Iranian forces have blocked global oil lanes in the narrow Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint. In the future, they could clash [9] with U.S. naval forces in the Gulf or melt into an insurgency far deeper and longer than in Iraq. Trump’s War will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it could stimulate the terrorism and weapons programs it claims to oppose.

Yet in four decades of conflict, Iran has never sponsored an attack within the U.S., even as the U.S. has attacked its allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and directly attacked its own forces in the Gulf. Only Sunni forces (also opposed by Iran) have attacked targets in the U.S.

All recent U.S. wars, such as in Iraq, began as bombing campaigns, but as they met resistance or retaliation, led to boots on the ground. Unlike Iraq, the U.S. has limited options to invade Iran. Iraq has largely flat terrain, and so has been repeatedly invaded by foreign armies. Iran has natural defensive barriers in its mountain ranges, and a political advantage in having complex neighbors that may not be willing to host invading forces.

Part of the neoconservative agenda for occupying Iraq was to have a staging area for regime change in Iran, but that is no longer possible. Ground forces invading Iran from Kuwait would have to pass through a slice of Iraqi Shi’a territory. An invasion from Pakistan or Turkey would be politically untenable.

These limited options means that a U.S. ground invasion of Iran is very unlikely, so there would not be a repeat of the 2003 Iraq invasion, followed by an occupation of the entire country. That’s why it may be dangerous for the anti-war movement to warn that an Iran War would be a repeat of the Iraq War, with massive U.S. casualties and a legacy of combat injuries and PTSD. During the Vietnam War, facing huge protests because of bodybags coming home, President Nixon switched from a ground war to an air war, reducing U.S. troop casualties, but vastly increasing civilian casualties. Evidence already shows a U.S. strike [10] on a girls’ school has claimed at least 165 lives, mostly children.

President Bush employed a similar strategy in the 1991 Gulf War, sanitizing air strikes on Iraq as a detached video game. Clinton’s 1999 air war on Serbia and Obama’s 2011 air war on Libya were the first time in human history that a one side in a major war had zero deaths by enemy fire. Trump has inherited these technological tactics of imperial impunity. If the anti-war movement mainly emphasizes the possibilities of U.S. military casualties, it only plays into the Pentagon’s hands and reinforces high-tech warfare that claims even more civilian lives.

Ethnic Divisions for an Oil Grab

There is one scenario that could lead to boots on the ground in Iran. The U.S. and Israel again may try to stoke ethnic divisions in the diverse country, where ethnic minorities form more than 40 percent of the population. Azeris and Kurds in the northwest, Baluchis in the southeast, and Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, have been oppressed by both the Shah and Ayatollahs. The most dangerous sign would be encouraging a rebellion in the province of Khuzestan, called “Al Ahwaz” by its Arab inhabitants.

On the first day of this war, Netanyahu exclaimed, “The time has come for all segments of the Iranian people — the Persians, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and the Ahwazis — to throw off the yoke of tyranny and bring about a free and peaceful Iran.” Yet at the same time, Israel backs the Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi as a future ruler, who would not be welcome by the ethnic minorities that his father severely repressed, nor by most Persians living in Iran.

Two decades ago I wrote about the possibility that the U.S. would use an uprising as an excuse to occupy Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province (next to southern Iraq), with a so-called “humanitarian” rationale of protecting its ethnic Arab population from “ethnic cleansing.” Instead of occupying all of Iran, U.S.-allied forces could take control of the plains of western Khuzestan, where about 85% of Iran’s crude oil deposits are present, and hold the oil industry hostage for its demands.

The Arab Shi’as living on the plains of western Khuzestan share both their ethnicity and faith with the Arab Shi’as across the strategic Shatt al-Arab waterway in Iraq. Arabs make up only 3% of Iran’s population, but a plurality of about 3 million in Khuzestan. In 1897, the British Empire backed Ahwazi Arab rulers to secede from Persia and become the de facto British protectorate of “Arabistan” (much as the British did in neighboring Kuwait). The southern zone of Persia was declared a British “sphere of influence” in 1907, and the following year a British adventurer discovered oil at Masjed Soleyman in “Arabistan.” The discovery created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum (BP). In 1925, Reza Shah’s forces retook “Arabistan,” and renamed it Khuzestan, as he renamed “Persia” as Iran a decade later.

British troops occupied Khuzestan during World War II, but after the war Iranians grew more concerned that Westerners had a stranglehold on their oil wealth. In 1951, the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry based mainly in Khuzestan (including Anglo-Iranian’s holdings), resulting in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah.

In 1978, Arab oil workers in Khuzestan went on strike against the Shah, and played a central role in the Iranian Revolution that toppled him the following year. The workers supported the revolution in its early months, when it included leftist and other secular parties, which were later crushed by the Islamic Republic. Encouraged by counterrevolutionary Western powers, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal invasion of Khuzestan in 1980, and occupied its western Arab oil region. He tried to engineer the secession of the province from Iran, and backed an Arab separatist rebel group that also briefly seized the Iranian Embassy in London.

Yet in the Iran-Iraq War, most Iranian Arab Shi’as fought on the side of Persian-ruled Iran, just as Iraqi Arab Shi’as fought on the side of Saddam’s Sunni-ruled Iraq. State territoriality trumped both ethnic and religious territoriality, in a massive slaughter. Iranian forces pushed the Iraqis out of Khuzestan in 1982, but the province’s cities and oil refineries were the most heavily damaged in the war, that finally ended in 1988.

My color map makes it clear that Khuzestan contains Iran’s largest oil reserves. In a 2008 New Yorker article, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed CIA assistance to Ahwazi Arab and other ethnic insurgents, later advocated by John Bolton, and a CIA analysis declassified in 2013 referred to Khuzestan as “Iran’s Achilles Tendon.” Tehran’s repression of Ahwazi Arab rights protests and separatist attacks stepped up in 2005, 2011, and 2018, and have recently been increasing again, so the possibility again exists of the U.S. exploiting their legitimate grievances for its own interests. The ethnic break-up of Iran would make the 1990s shattering of Yugoslavia into seven countries look like a cake walk, and would unleash regional violence that would reverberate for decades.

Even if ethnic minority grievances against Persian rule are legitimate, the timing of western interest in their grievances coincides too neatly with the larger desire to pressure and isolate Iran. Washington has a long history of championing the rights of ethnic minorities against its enemies (such as in Montagnards in Vietnam, Hmong in Laos, Miskitus in Nicaragua, and most recently Kurds in Syria), then abandoning or selling out the minority when it is no longer strategically useful. We love ‘em, we use ‘em, and then we dump ‘em.

Stopping This War

On one hand, Netanyahu pressured Trump on the timing of this particular attack. Netanyahu needs to avoid prosecution and feared the stability of an Iran nuclear deal, just as Trump needs this war to divert attention from the Epstein files. But on the other hand, Israel has always served as a U.S. aircraft carrier carrying out U.S. aims of controlling the economy of the oil-rich Middle East, doing our dirty work of preventing and crushing revolt.

The American public has developed a healthy “Iraq Syndrome” that abhors endless wars, much as the “Vietnam Syndrome” temporarily scaled back U.S. military interventions. Even though Iran is very different from Iraq, that strong public sentiment previously prevented both Obama and Trump from attacking Iran. This war is less popular than even the 12-day war last year (between Israel—with U.S. support—and Iran), across the political spectrum.

This time, a clear majority of American voters felt we should have stayed out of this war, so we start with far stronger support than in any war in living memory. At the same time, a clear majority opposes sending ICE and soldiers into our cities. We have a responsibility to support veterans in groups such as About Face and Veterans for Peace, who are telling the truth to military personnel and their families, and support military personnel on their inevitable grievances, and when they refuse illegal orders or quietly frustrate the expansion of wars at home and abroad.

To be effective, the movement has to focus on the horrendous effects of such a war on Iranian civilians, and not only on U.S. troops. We should understand that this war may unfold in unpredictable ways that differ from previous conflicts. Just as “generals always fight the last war,” anti-war movements will lose if we merely fight against the last war.

Just as the Iranian people have a long, proud history of fighting against monarchy and theocracy, Americans are now facing a new monarchy and new theocracy at the same time. We should understand that tyrants like Trump always turn to war abroad to crush internal dissent at home. He is joining with messianic fascist allies like Netanyahu and Putin to stoke a religious nationalist crusade that will bring only suffering to civilians abroad and repression at home. It’s not just the future of the Middle East that’s at stake, but our own future as a democracy.

The old saying is that Truth is the First Casualty of War. Now we can turn that around to say that war should become a casualty of the truths that we tell about our country. At long last we need to pull back from dominating other peoples to take care of all people in our own country.

Dr. Zoltán Grossman is faculty in Geography and Indigenous Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, studying and teaching the intersections of ethnic nationhood, natural resources, and militarism, and a longtime community organizer.

His website is at https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan

On March 13, 2026, Timberland Regional Library (TRL) announced its plans to lay off 61 front-line library workers in response to its budget shortfall. The shortfall, which is currently estimated to be about $3.8 million according to The Aberdeen Daily World, was announced in late January 2026.

Current and former librarians, board members, patrons, and advocates say that this story has deep roots of contention in the library system. The budget shortfall doesn’t come as a surprise, librarians say, and perhaps even more importantly, the cost-cutting response falls in line with a long history of the administration’s priorities opposing front-line staff and the communities they serve.

To better understand what shapes the 2026 budget shortfall, some librarians pointed to the year 2018, when the administration released its Capital Facilities Proposal (CFP), which included rural branch closures, layoffs, and shifts to alternative library models like Expanded Access. Community response, and the ultimate failure of the CFP, reveals a deep disconnect between the TRL administration’s vision for its libraries, and the libraries that front-line staff and patrons are struggling to create and keep alive. While the administration’s policies move towards efficient, streamlined branches and concentrate most services in densely populated areas, many librarians and patrons within the TRL system are calling for increased access to physical library space that fosters community as well as information access.

2018 Capital Facilities Proposal

In September of 2018, the TRL Administrative and Public Services teams released the 98-page Capital Facilities Proposal. The proposal analyzed data of TRL’s expenditures and community engagement. The introduction proposes new changes for the library system to “adapt to changes, to invest in new opportunities, and seek out new possibilities.”

To understand how the CFP connects to the 2026 budget shortfall and staff layoffs, former TRL library manager Mary Prophit says there’s an important story beginning in the Mountain View Library, located in the small town of Randle in eastern Lewis County.

Prophit, who worked as a manager and assistant at the Mountain View Library, started there in December 1992, at a time when “we didn’t even have the Internet or anything. We had books.” She described her approach to library work as almost entirely centered around patrons. “When a patron walks through the door, you stop everything, you take care of the patron,” she said. “We used to have a saying: ‘people are the heart of the library. Quality service begins with me.’” Seeing people at the heart of the library, Prophit said, meant focusing on listening to patrons and adapting the library’s programming and priorities to fit the needs of the community it serves. For the Mountain View Library, this meant outreach at local schools, opportunity to make remote Senate testimony, veteran service programming, and Teen Night events that helped local high schoolers find a stronger sense of community.

“I used to wake up excited to go to work,” Prophit said. This changed around the year 2018, when administrative priorities began shifting, in part exemplified by the introduction of the CFP. In August 2018, a month before the CFP was publicly released, Prophit received a call from her supervisor and boss at the time. The supervisor informed Prophit that TRL was choosing not to renew the lease for the Mountain View Library’s building. “It came completely out of the blue,” she Prophit said. “I started crying. I was like, ‘I don’t understand, why my library?’ and [the supervisor] said, ‘you have to understand that your library is just one piece of the bigger picture.’”

Section V of the Capital Facilities Proposal analyzes each of TRL’s branches using data like projected population growth, number of items borrowed, and daily operating cost. Using this data, the CFP proposes a new library service model for each branch. The proposals, overall, aimed to close or consolidate rural library branches and concentrate library staff and programs into a few “full-service hub locations” in higher-population areas. Only these libraries would provide “the full spectrum of library services to the public,” services like meeting rooms, technology stations, more extensive book collections, and regular programming. Most rural branch buildings, meanwhile, were proposed to be replaced with mobile services (library vans that drive around a large geographic area and offer Internet connection, book check-outs, and programming), remote lockers (pickup and dropoff points where patrons with a library card can access books they check out), LibraryExpress stands (“coffee-stand style service points” staffed by 2 librarians, where patrons can check out books or “park and take advantage of 24/7 WiFi”) or expanded access buildings (unstaffed building that patrons with a library card can enter).

In Grays Harbor County, for example, the CFP proposed to renovate and “further develop” the Aberdeen branch while closing the Hoquiam, Amanda Park, Montesano, and Elma branches, consolidating those into one physical building in Elma and the others into mobile services based in Aberdeen.

The Mountain View Library too, was suggested for consolidation with Salkum and Packwood, and replacement with mobile services and LibraryExpress stands.

While the CFP describes these changes as future-looking and cost-saving, TRL librarians, especially those working at the rural branches proposed for drastic cuts or closure, saw things differently. “How does a van replace a building?” Prophit asked. She explained that the administration called these proposals “reimagined libraries,” but the reason why this reimagining required changing staffing and cutting costs so drastically, librarians didn’t know. “They were kind of implying ‘something’s gotta give’,” said Prophit. “We were confused -- was it because of a budget, or because of ‘reimagined’?”

The CFP’s “Revenues and Expenditures” section does not provide explicit numbers, but it reads: “TRL has reached the point where revenues are not keeping up with expenditures.” The proposal continues to state, “It is more cost-effective to provide services in areas with higher populations, yet much of the library district remains rural with a lower population density.” Indeed, when describing the new service models it proposes for reaching rural patrons, the plan most often uses language related to cost-cutting. The proposal describes the LibraryExpress model as “convenient, fast, and low-cost,” and, when describing why full-service hub locations will be established in higher-population areas, writes, “these locations take advantage of the economies of scale.”

In Randle and the other rural communities where libraries were proposed for closure, patrons were devastated. “My whole mission in life was to make my library an indispensable part of my community,” Prophit said. “That’s what I thought my job was, and I did it well.”

Public comment at the September 26, 2018 TRL Board of Trustees meeting shows the degree to which proposed closures impacted patrons and librarians.

Hundreds of library patrons shared, angrily, emotionally, and sometimes with humor, about how important the physical space of a library was to them. “You can’t uproot a library, move it to a new location, and expect the same success,” one Randle resident shared. “The community needs the library, and you can tell how hard they are willing to fight for it.”

“It would give quite a financial burden to me to have to pick up all the subscriptions of the magazines that I get. The gas — I could not come to a library,” shared one patron from Ocean Park, whose branch was slated for closure.

As the comments continued, patrons shared personal stories and how the space of the library, and its very existence in their town, went deeper than just the building itself. As one patron said: “Randle has lost mills, schools, logging, senior services, access to forest lands, jobs, and more. We have only one public community service building. And now they want to take that away from us too. This really hurts.”

Prophit describes the meetings about the Mountain View Library’s closure as some of the most painful yet also rewarding moments of her whole career. It showed her how integral and important the Mountain View Library had become to her community, yet only because that library’s very existence was on the line.

All of Works in Progress Issue 1 was published directly to our website, read all articles here.

Fallout and the 2026 Budget Shortfall

In 2018, faced with pressure from patrons and communities across the TRL system, the Board of Trustees ended up voting down the CFP. But eight years later, public comment in board meetings and concerns from TRL librarians sounds similar. “The fact that you are allowing the administration to destroy our sacred place is abhorrent,” said one public commenter in the March 18 board meeting. “It’s where I bring my child to learn to love books, to learn to love knowledge, and to learn to be part of the community.”

Another shared -- “I learned to read, I learned to enjoy books, because the Timberland Regional Library was so successful in their outreach ... And you have completely failed us. You have completely failed the children in the rural places.”

Former and current TRL librarians say that since the stop to the CFP, the TRL administration has continued to implement policies that diverge further and further from the wants and needs that front-line staff and patrons express.

“This administration is very out of touch with what happens at a building,” said a current TRL librarian, who preferred to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation. They are referred to here as Librarian A. “They’re ... treating us like, I don’t know, robots. Like things that accomplish their work that don’t have means.”

Brooke Pederson, former manager of the Amanda Park Library and current Grays Harbor library substitute, wrote to the TRL administration in March 2026 with concerns about the workplace culture. “The message I’m receiving from TRL’s current decisions, and from the pattern of toxic employment practices I’ve witnessed over the past 2 years, is that rural library service is expendable; librarians are expendable; front-line service is expendable; access is expendable. Rather, backline administration and automation are the future of libraries,” she wrote.

Over the past few years, TRL has introduced Expanded Access (EA) hours to some library branches. Similar to some of the formats laid out in the CFP, an Expanded Access library has no staff, and patrons apply for library cards that allow them to access the building and use the library’s services themselves. While some libraries originally started EA to expand upon the library’s normal staffed hours, new TRL policy has pushed some branches to replace staffed hours with EA hours. Currently, 12 of TRL’s branches offer EA hours, and the Naselle branch uses entirely EA hours with no staff. After the administration’s announcement of layoffs and cost-cutting measures on March 13, three more libraries — Amanda Park, Hoodsport, and McCleary — will transition to the full EA model.

Patrons and librarians say that EA limits access to the library. In order to get a card, patrons need a verifiable address, must be over fourteen years old, and must travel to another physical library to pick up the card. This limits and in many cases cuts off library access for many people, including unhoused patrons, young patrons, and patrons without easy access to transportation. “You have to have a lot of privilege to be able to get those [EA] cards,” said Kylie McQuarrie, an organizer with the Patrons Coalition for Local Libraries. And even if a patron is able to get an EA card, their ability to use library resources decreases without librarians to help. “If you don’t know how to use the library resources already, you won’t be able to use them,” she said. Susan Leite, former manager of the Amanda Park library, said that most importantly EA means libraries will lose most of their programming. “Taking the staff away means that the kids can’t come down for story time,” she said, describing how the Amanda Park library, which will now transition to entirely EA, is located close to the local school. “A huge part of getting kids to be lifelong learners is having them come down for story times ... it’s a huge decrease in the way libraries can serve their communities, at a time where really people need library services more than ever,” she said. Librarian A described that the administration’s decisions about changes and new policies in branches often feel bizarrely out of touch with the community’s actual needs. Money is spent on things like new trash cans and rearranging the book drop locations inside the library, not staffing to keep programs running or materials that patrons show their community needs.

These decisions also typically don’t include input from librarians or patrons, Librarian A said. “A lot of times we’re told we have to sit with a change they have made for a few months before we’re allowed to say anything about it.”

Pederson’s list of observations of the current TRL workplace includes “staff expecting policy changes to further restrict their work and patron services,” “staff being expected to pay more attention to their work processes than the patrons standing in front of them,” and “staff feeling their feedback is not welcome and that there will be retaliation against them for speaking out about anything.”

In an October 2018 Board of Trustees meeting about the CFP, a Packwood resident spoke to a similar disconnect. He described feeling like the TRL administration measured a library’s success by the number of books checked out there. “Metrics like internet use, and intangible things, like being the hub of your community, should be some of the metrics,” he said.

McQuarrie shared similar thoughts. “The library is about books. It is also about 10 billion other things, and one of them is community,” she said. “There are so many things you can do that you gain access to at the library, that you need a librarian there to point you towards ... And in fact, what they’ve done, is they’re going to close these branches, they’re going to fire these people, and they are going to decimate quality of life in these rural places.”

But just like in 2018, patrons have not given up in fighting for the libraries they want. Breaking developments are still occurring as patrons and front-line staff continue shaping the library’s story. On the afternoon of March 25, 2026, Executive Director Cheryl Heywood submitted a letter of resignation. She was not present at the Board meeting that evening, but the Trustees announced the update. In the public comment that followed, patrons sounded relieved and elated, and encouraged the Trustees to accept Heywood’s resignation and hold the rest of the administration accountable. Patrons proposed new ideas for re-envisioning the library system to better reflect patron and librarian priorities. “TRL needs a fresh, honest approach to this mess that was created by Cheryl and her cohort,” one patron commented.

Budgetary Mystery

The mystery behind all of these changes, many librarians and advocates say, is that these changes to the library system don’t appear to actually cut its costs.

In December 2018, The Daily World reported that the CFP proposals would have introduced new costs roughly equal to the money they would have saved — while staffing cuts and information technology changes would have saved TRL about $800,000 to $900,000 total, documents obtained by the paper’s open records requests showed that the implementation of the new services outlined in the CFP would have totaled “just more than $1 million.”

The 2018 TRL Board of Trustees expressed concern over these discrepancies and the lack of communication surrounding it. The Board’s 2018 Performance Evaluation reads: “[It] is of great concern that there were no budget committee meetings called to discuss the ‘financial cliff’ facing this organization […] Committee members were alarmed to hear that significant reductions in facilities and/or staffing would be necessary to close the gap between revenues and expenditures. The plan presented to the Board on Sept. 22 [2018] did not provide sufficient evidence of financial impacts of proposed changes, while indeed, many proposed changes would result in additional expenditures for TRL.”

Prophit, Hirschi, and Leite all say they think the administration may have concealed the current budgetary shortfall and then revealed it in order to push through more elements of the rejected CFP.

“I honestly think it was purposeful,” said Leite. “I think they purposely spent more money than they knew they had, and I think this is their way to get the CFP, by reverse engineering it.”

In the years since 2018, TRL’s finances have not improved. The Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) used by the Washington State Auditor’s office shows TRL’s financial status reaching “concerning” status in the year 2022. FIT is designed to show whether the organization’s funds are being spent in line with the revenue they receive.

In 2020, former TRL Board Member Brenda Hirschi resigned over her concerns about the budget and the administration’s lack of action to address it.

“Using my past nearly three decades of financial management education and experience, I have studied the TRL budgets, financial reports, and trends of patron core services from 2012 to present,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “The people in this five county region are not getting their money’s worth. The taxpayer’s property tax contribution to TRL is mainly used to support the bureaucracy at the Administrative Service Center with little or no oversight from the trustees. Neighborhood libraries struggle to meet the core services patrons would like to see.”

Hirschi wrote that her primary budgetary concern was the portion of funds used by top TRL administrator’s salaries, including Heywood’s 2020 approval to increase one top administrator’s salary from $84,975 to $104,508 in one year.

Heywood did not respond to request for comment.

“You’ve only got so much revenue that’s coming in, so you’ve got restraints you’ve got to work within,” said Hirschi in an interview with Works in Progress. “I kept on saying, there’s something going on here with these salaries ... And that is why I said, ‘this is what is coming.’ I tried to tell those county commissioners, ‘this is what is coming.’”

According to Chris Chrzan, Public Information Officer for TRL, 68% of TRL’s yearly expenditures go towards salaries and benefits. “Over the years, TRL has pursued a variety of strategies to maintain library access with fewer staff in an attempt to minimize the impact on the public and preserve access to services ... Although we have been working to find ways to adjust over the years, we have now reached a point where gradual changes are no longer sufficient, and staffing costs must be reduced in order to find a sustainable path forward,” he wrote in a statement to Works in Progress. The TRL employee union and other advocates question why administrators’ salaries are not also being reduced, as they compromise part of the 68%, too. When a Trustee asked this question in the March 18th, 2026 board meeting, HR administrator Kandy Seldin responded that salaries are not the cause of the budget shortfall as they have stayed within their allotted 68% of the budget over the last few years.

Chrzan stated that TRL has been aware of the potential budget crisis since 2022, and chose to make incremental changes over time. “Essentially, major service reductions, and especially layoffs, are a last resort,” he wrote. “While the costs versus revenue trend lines were converging, the preferred strategy of library leadership and the Board has been to pursue conservative, incremental change that is minimally disruptive, whenever possible.”

Librarian A said that it’s more important to look at the library’s actions over their statements. “This administration can say they love this library, they can say they love this staff,” they said, “but their actions are not showing it.”

Caelen McQuilkin is a reporter from the high desert of eastern California who has loved the green of Olympia since moving here in August. They love reporting as a way to build connections while reflecting a place's complex picture.

All of Works in Progress Issue 1 was published directly to our website, read the rest here.

Cycling advocacy is about safety, so it makes sense that cycling advocates are mostly concerned with the roads where they live. However, following this logic politically has reduced cycling to an entirely local issue.

The idea is that you fix your own local problems first then spread those fixes to other places. In theory, all the “bike friendly” towns will keep teaming up until there’s enough bike infrastructure to go around. The problem with this strategy is that if the vision is only ever defined from a local perspective, it won’t be useful when it rolls into a new town or a different part of the world.

Of course, since things do have to start somewhere, arguing about localism can seem like the chicken or the egg, but it doesn’t matter where the movement begins if the politics only make sense locally and big corporations are presenting the only international alternative.

The cycling industry, like the auto and oil industries, isn’t organized around local relationships. It’s shaped from the top down by money and political power. This means the objectives of international capital have way more influence on infrastructure and culture than a coalition of townies trying to get more of their neighbors on bikes. That’s why safety is sold to us as products to buy or road barriers to build.

Since the politics behind car culture are already pervasive, any effort at change will have to reach beyond the city limits at some point. This means that without an expanding political perspective, localism is a trap. It’s based on the assumption that the most influence an individual can have is at the local level, despite the fact that mass movements clearly build more social force than individuals. Political strategies are most effective when they maximize the impact of movements, not of individuals.

Cyclists shouldn’t wait until some city council or chamber of commerce decides to jump on the bandwagon and spread the word. The cycling movement should aim to already be an undeniable force anywhere and everywhere the politicians and businessmen try to go.

We should determine our own needs and articulate our own demands, including a variety of proposals coming from different local communities. The goal should be to articulate cycling politics that can be recognized and understood at the national and international levels. This is the only way to really influence policy and significantly change society.

Historically, the cycling movement has had legitimate national sway. Back before most people had cars, it wasn’t enough to only improve the roads around town if you wanted to go places by bike, and it wasn’t enough to participate in the movement as an individual. That’s why they formed large cycling associations where they could debate their collective politics.

Doing this effectively today will require a movement that’s independent from the capitalist and bureaucratic classes, a movement capable of bringing smaller groups together into a mass organization with a coherent and consistent set of values. This means recognizing our needs and forcing our demands, building popular power as cyclists, rather than relying on opportunistic politicians or big construction firms aiming to get rich making cycling infrastructure on our behalf.

Even setting aside the debate about localism, the struggles inside the cycling movement are hard to ignore, especially since the elephant in the room is cycling’s pro-consumerism. Nevertheless, other tendencies do exist, and they don’t all just fit under the reactionary banner of anti-consumerism. Think of cyclists with or without cars, parents and kids, retired people, teens, working people, the unemployed, the homeless. If these cyclists can organize themselves and present a clear direction that speaks to others, they could start to influence society on their own terms, exercising their potential to force change.

It doesn’t take an economist to recognize that supply chains aren’t local, and it doesn’t take an environmentalist to recognize that bikes use less gas than cars. So, as the world enters a potential economic crisis driven by the price of oil, it’s more important than ever for the cycling movement to become a singular force, reaching into every sector of society, across the country and around the world.

To have an impact, even on something as plain and obvious as not getting hit by cars, we have to become more than hobbyists, more than localists, more than advocates. We have to encourage organizing and coalition building in the cycling movement, and we have to concern ourselves with roads that go out of town too.

On Sunday, February 22, 2026, Mexican security forces raided El Mencho's compound in Tapalpa, Jalisco, killing him and seven other members of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). El Mencho was the founder and boss of the CJNG, one of the most powerful international criminal organizations in the world. At the time of the early morning attack, the U.S. government had an active $15 million bounty on his head. For many people across Mexico, going out on el 22 de Febrero would become very treacherous.

The full fury of the CJNG was immediately unleashed after the killing, which launched a series of retaliatory strikes across Mexico. Fire consumed the streets of many cities, especially those in the State of Jalisco. The Mexican Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch, stated that on February 22nd that Jalisco was the state with the highest number of attacks against state and federal forces. Authorities in Jalisco also reported the greatest number of roadblocks, arson, and vehicle thefts. In the neighboring state of Michoacán, there were multiple shootouts between the CJNG and Mexican National Guard members, as well as blockades in 33 different municipalities.

Throughout Mexico on that day, an estimated 600 cars, 200 semi-trucks, and at least 35 buses were stolen and set on fire to be used as street and highway blockades, shutting down key transit routes and bringing traffic to a standstill. The cities of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco saw the most concentrated instances of arson. Oxxo, the corporate convenience store chain owned by the same conglomerate that controls Coca-Cola, had many stores destroyed and set ablaze, forcing 6000 Oxxos across Mexico to close. Banks were lit up. A large vehicle crashed into the Ixtapa prison, part of a prison break that killed one guard and freed 23 prisoners.

The CJNG response was fiery and deadly. Three Mexican soldiers were killed in the initial raid on El Mencho’s compound. 25 more Mexican National Guard forces, the guard at Ixtapa prison, and a state prosecutor official were killed in 27 separate attacks in Jalisco. 250 roadblocks across 20 states had been set ablaze. Almost immediately, U.S. officials began boasting about their role in the day’s chaotic events.

Shortly after the initial raid, a U.S. defense official told Reuters media that a U.S.-military-led task force played a significant role in the raid on El Mencho’s compound. “The Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel,” consisting of multiple U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, compiled intel on El Mencho and provided it to the Mexican government to execute the attack. In the same Reuters article, former DEA agent Jack Riley said that President Trump’s designation of Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations last year began a new era of increased military involvement in Mexico. Regarding intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance resources, the former DEA agent added that “our surveillance capabilities are going to be probably unlimited.” Even before the 22nd of February, the U.S. has had a long history of interfering in Mexican sovereignty.

U.S./Mexico Divide

The U.S. has long interfered in Mexican affairs. In 1848, the U.S. military occupied Mexico City under the guise of Manifest Destiny, the imperialist justification stating that American settlers had a divine right to expand westward. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was brokered under duress as part of a deal to end the U.S. military invasion. Through this treaty, the U.S. effectively stole 55% of Mexican territory, half a million square miles, in what became known as the Southwestern United States.

Since then, the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. has been tumultuous. To bolster the economy during World War 2, the U.S. implemented the Bracero Program bringing in an estimated 4.5 million Mexican guest workers to the U.S. from 1942-1964. Agricultural workers under contract to U.S. growers were subject to exploitative and harsh working conditions. To this day, family members of Braceros continue to seek unpaid wages.

Mexican people, in what is now the United States are a frequent target of nationalist and selective repression labeled as immigration enforcement. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration appointed army general Joseph Swing as the head of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), launching a brutal campaign called “Operation Wetback” that paved the way for U.S. agents to lay siege to the Mexican population within U.S. borders. In 1954, INS and Border Patrol tactics included descending on Mexican neighborhoods, demanding ID from anyone on the street who appeared Mexican, invading homes in the middle of the night, and raiding Mexican businesses. By 1955, after just over a year since the operation’s inception, an estimated 300,000 to 1 million people, including Braceros and Chicanos, had been detained and deported. These tactics are all too familiar in the present day.

La CIA en Mexico

In February 2026, a senior U.S. official said that the “CIA was instrumental in removing El Mencho.” This is yet another chapter in a series of CIA activities in Mexico that dates back to the 1960s.

A CIA document from 1965 outlines the mission directive for the CIA in Mexico, describing a focus on leftist activities. A specific directive was outlined to infiltrate youth groups in Mexico and combat “ultra-nationalistic and anti-U.S. activities in Mexico.” This surveillance was described by the CIA as “one of the most extensive and expensive unilateral technical collection programs conducted by the Agency.”

Programs were designed to monitor leftist ideology, including the CIA operation known as LIANCHOR. Under the guise of a leftist press service, the CIA’s Mexico station secretly managed the recruitment of writers to author political articles, which would then be distributed to several Latin American countries so that the agency could keep track of regional opinions about communism. The well-known Mexican magazine Diálogos was infiltrated by the CIA through an undercover agent working as one of the magazine’s publishers, who would inform on the country’s left-leaning base to U.S. intelligence agency.

During this time, the Mexican government would clamp down on social movements by collaborating and utilizing the CIA’s surveillance apparatus to spy on elements of the resistance, targeting intellectuals, student and labor organizers, and political opposition members.

War on Drugs

The intervention from the U.S. in Mexico continued into the 1970’s and beyond, with the supposed justification shifting from fighting communism to combating drugs. Since Richard Nixon first declared drugs “Public enemy No. 1” in 1971, the U.S. has spent over $1 trillion on the so-called “drug war.” DEA operations include criminalization and draconian sentences in the U.S., as well as counter-insurgency and mass surveillance in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

The drug trade, and the organizations that control it in Mexico, represents an industry that brings in billions of dollars annually into an economy where the minimum wage is a fraction of what is on the other side of the northern border, el otro lado. This underworld offers people a chance at resources otherwise unattainable, and brings in collaboration from nearly every facet of society, including some of the same Mexican government forces tasked with fighting drug organizations.

While the U.S. often operates with impunity on foreign lands, there are exceptions where the U.S. takes losses. On February 7, 1985, American DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was captured by members of a drug organization in Guadalajara, a major center of drug operations in the 1980s. His dead body was found 4 weeks later in La Angostura, Michoacán.

Just as Manifest Destiny was used as cover for the imperial conquest of over half of Mexico’s land, and immigration enforcement is the supposed justification for the trillion dollar detention and deportation system, the “War on Drugs” has been used as cover for mass incarceration, border militarization, and the infiltration and destabilization of Mexico and other sovereign lands.

Violence in Mexico is also fueled by the immense drug demand from people within the U.S. Illicit drug use is over 7 times higher in the U.S. than it is in Mexico. According to a 2023 World Population Review study, approximately 3,815 people per 100,000 use drugs in the US, compared to 523 per 100,000 in Mexico. This leads to clashes for territory, drug routes, and influence. Wars between various criminal organizations, and government forces throughout Mexico are commonplace.

Gun violence across Mexico is carried out almost exclusively with American made weapons. An estimated 135,000 firearms are trafficked from the United States to Mexico annually. Studies show that over 80% of the arms seized in Mexico originate in the United States. Arizona has become the main source and corridor for arms trafficking to Mexico. Mexican authorities have confiscated more firearms in Sonora, just across the border from Arizona, than in any other Mexican state.

Al Otro Lado

People are forced to flee from the violence and instability caused by armed conflicts like the events of February 22. Relocating al otro lado, to the U.S., the wealthiest nation in the world, is often the only viable option for survival. Once in the United States, many refugees and immigrants face the reality of living without access to social programs and under constant threat from an erratic and violent immigration police force. Terrorized by a brutal and belligerent Department of Homeland Security (DHS), immigrants and non-immigrants alike have taken to various forms of resistance to drive these occupying forces out of their communities. Solidarity approaches have included neighborhood organizing, documenting government agents and vehicles, alerting community members through whistles, group chats and social media, as well as more direct, confrontational approaches such as disabling vehicles, de-arrests, and physically engaging with agents.

Many indigenous groups of the western hemisphere speak of the ancient prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor. These two birds who once flew in the same skies until the early 1500’s when the eagle, representing the northern land’s emphasis on power and expansionism, split away from the condor, which represented the southern region’s focus on culture and tradition. U.S. dominance of the region comes in the form of surveillance and violent intervention, presented as noble assistance. As the U.S. continues to export destruction and inequitable economic policies onto Mexico and the rest of the world, people will continue to exercise their freedom of movement in search of a better life.

Sources

1. https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/car-thefts-el-mencho-operation/

2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/200-commercial-trucks-went-up-in-flames-after-capture-of-el-mencho/ar-AA1XdBsR

3. https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2026/02/25/economia/cerraron-6-mil-tiendas-oxxo-el-domingo-tras-operativo-contra-el-mencho

4. https://www.latintimes.com/tens-inmates-escaped-puerto-vallarta-prison-following-el-menchos-killing-595030

5. https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2026/02/22/estados/michoacan-enfrentamiento-en-la-piedad-deja-tres-presuntos-delincuentes-fallecidos-y-tres-policias-heridos

6. https://apnews.com/article/mexico-jalisco-cartel-mencho-sheinbaum-trump-226e50edc33f981d5d6509acc7021ae5

7. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/new-us-military-led-group-aided-mexicos-hunt-el-mencho-cartel-boss-2026-02-22/

8. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/23/us-intel-backed-operation-that-led-to-killing-of-mexican-drug-lord-00794540

9. https://nacla.org/modern-surveillance-state-mexico-and-cia-during-cold-war/

10. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10071-10324.pdf

11. https://fortune.com/2026/02/23/us-trillion-dollar-drug-war-rising-use/

12. https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-02-11/nearly-80-of-weapons-seized-by-mexicos-current-administration-come-from-the-us.html

Blessings,

As y’all know, on September 25, 2025 Assata Shakure ascended to be with our ancestors, but we will never forget who she was, what she represented and how she lived.

She exhibited the genetic imprint of our ancestors; her spirit is that of the warrior Queen lineage of Candace. She fought for our freedom with courage and valor, teaching unity and self determination, awaiting the day we open our minds to recognize our true purpose, in order to live in Harmony with the natural order of life.

On a personal note when I was at trial, mentally struggling, fighting against this corrupted judicial system, it was Assata that gave, and continues to give, me strength.

Reading her autobiography, I cheered when she won back to back cases representing herself. I was disgusted at how they tried to break her: framing her for murder, kidnapping her, cuffing her to the hospital bed, squeezing the leg chains so tight her legs swelled up, poking, probing, punching, assaulting, tutoring her, how the New Jersey police killed her lawyer and stole legal documents that would have exonerated her.

I related to her plight when I learned the judge was acting in concert with the corrupt prosecutor to wrongfully convict her, and I was tearfully motivated and amazed how she remained defiant even then she spoke to us, saying:

“for all those that have been locked by the lawless, handcuffed by the haters, caged by the greedy... a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all, it can be broken down.”

Assata did just that. Escaping those plantation walls, she found safe refuge in Cuba, where she worked diligently as a U.N. representative, documenting human rights violations against Black people in the U.S.

While we’ve looked to false prophets and hollow promises that have produced epic failures, stagnating our movement for justice and equality, Assata reminded us the answer has always resided in us. Hoping we unify, she implored us to fight for freedom, stating:

“It is our duty to fight for freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

As we see the rise of fascism, let’s continue to heed her words. In her honor let’s unify, continue the work, win the small challenges, then the bigger battles, and ultimately we will build a more harmonious society, one that she would be proud of..

1 L.U.V. (Loyalty + Unity = Victory)

Tomas S. Afeworki is a Pan-Afriqan illustrator and human rights activist focused on the social and political protection of the diaspora. Through grass roots organizations, community celebrations and legislative summits, he aims to unify a coalition for freedom and is inspired by Nelson Mandela’s quote, “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.”

Afeworki maintains that he has been wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and is actively fighting for his freedom.

Following in the steps of leaders that inspire his purpose like Nelson Mandela, George Jackson, and Assata Shakur, he seeks justice for himself and his fellow bothers and sisters that have been victimized by a corrupt judicial system.

To learn more about Tomas S. Afeworki and support his exoneration please visit: www.FreeTomas.com

The Timberland Regional Library’s (TRL) Board of Trustees meeting on February 25th revealed the scale of mismanagement which has plagued the library system for years, but has only recently become widely known. At that meeting, the Board announced a substantial budget shortfall for 2026, and gave library administration unrestricted authority to conduct layoffs of front-line employees. The Aberdeen Daily world reported the budget shortfall at $3.8 million.

This crisis displays a situation very different from what TRL administration presented during the last round of contract bargaining with the union representing library workers, AFSCME Local 3758B. Bargaining took place last summer and fall for a contract which went into effect this January. According to union members, TRL admin only mentioned the possibility of a budget shortfall toward the end of the bargaining process, and stated repeatedly that there were no projected layoffs.

Official announcements from TRL about the number of layoffs have been vague, but the total is known to be 61, in a system with about 200 public-facing workers. That total is split between 44 who have received compulsory layoff notices and 17 who have taken a “voluntary” layoff, according to the union. Impact bargaining over the effects of the cuts is still underway between the union and TRL administration.

Many former TRL workers spoke publicly, both before and during the February board meeting, regarding a pervasive culture of intimidation and retaliation against those who raise concerns about workplace issues or management decisions. Former employees also emphasized long-running micromanagement and heavy spending on projects and purchases of questionable utility. Current employees are extremely reluctant to be quoted by name on record regarding issues at TRL, for fear of retaliation.

Impacts will also be severe for library patrons, especially at rural branches. According to workers we spoke to, TRL administration has proposed the expansion of so-called “expanded access” libraries as a solution. There is no librarian regularly on duty at these locations, and instead patrons must apply for a card that will allow them to key into the building. This poses several challenges for patrons, the workers said. They stated that applying for a card requires a verifiable address, and travel to another branch to pick up the card if approved. Minors cannot enter the building unsupervised, and there would be no one to assist patrons with using technology or getting hard-to-reach items off shelves once inside.

At public meetings, workers and members of the public have argued that this effectively makes these branches no longer public libraries. There are also concerns about the cost of installing electronic access and surveillance systems. Current contract language also allows for some solo-staffed libraries, with only one librarian on duty at a given time, again mostly rural branches. Management has proposed expanding solo-staffing, but Local 3758 have rejected the change to their contract that would allow wider use of the practice, according to workers that spoke to Works in Progress.

With impact bargaining still ongoing between the union and administration, and with the culture of retaliation against workers within TRL administration, workers are feeling uncertain about what actions they can take right now. In this situation, the burden falls on the public to keep the pressure on for transparency and accountability. A newly formed Patron Coalition for Local Libraries has raised demands from the public side, and is a good way for supporters of the library and its workers to get involved.

There are calls for a thorough independent review of TRL’s finances to explain the seemingly unforeseen appearance of a major budget shortfall which has led to these layoffs and service cuts. Residents Thurston, Lewis, Mason, Greys Harbor, and Pacific Counties (TRL service area) are also contacting their County Commissioners, who appoint TRL’s Board of Trustees, to demand a change in leadership. In the long term, many believe changes will be required concerning how libraries are governed and funded. Washington State law could be changed to make library boards directly elected. The law capping levy lid lifts at one percent per year (which limits localities ability to raise taxes to fund libraries) could also be repealed, and alternative revenue sources for libraries found.

But as of right now, library workers and patrons alike are still waiting to see the full damage caused by years of unaccountable, out-of-touch leadership at TRL. Whatever the exact impacts ultimately are, it is increasingly clear that change is needed to save a valuable community resource.

Isaac Wagnitz is a longtime Olympia resident and proud union member.

The latest escalation between the United States/Israel and Iran has sent shockwaves through global energy markets. For many outside the conflict area, the first impact is increased gas prices. However, the real economic consequences run far deeper than the price of fuel.

Wars reverberate throughout global markets, reshape domestic political priorities, and redistribute economic power. The costs Americans, and most people around the globe, will face are likely to extend far beyond higher prices at the pump: increased corporate profiteering, worsened inequality, expanding military spending, and strengthening the institutions of domestic security.

Energy markets are the most visible point of transmission. The Persian Gulf remains one of the most strategically critical regions in the global oil economy. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, roughly a quarter of the world’s oil supply moves through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow maritime corridor connecting the Gulf to international markets. In February, an average of approximately 129 vessels passed through the strait each day. Following the escalation of hostilities, maritime traffic reportedly collapsed by 95 percent.

The disruption of shipping routes, combined with attacks on regional oil infrastructure, has forced several Gulf producers to reduce output. Global oil prices responded quickly. Brent crude — the price benchmark for two-thirds of the world’s traded oil — surged over $116 per barrel. Gasoline prices increased 16 percent in Washington State from the previous month, and in some places like California, surpassed $5.25 per gallon.

The sudden spike caught markets off guard. The International Energy Agency coordinated with several national governments to perform a historically large emergency release of strategic oil reserves in an attempt to temper prices. Even so, oil prices remain significantly elevated.

Because oil sits at the center of modern production systems, the effects extend well beyond fuel. Energy and petroleum products costs are embedded throughout agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and global logistics networks. When oil prices rise, the result is inflationary pressure across the economy, with cascading effects on household budgets and financial markets.

At first glance, the United States might appear relatively insulated. Domestic production now satisfies roughly 70 percent of American oil demand, a transformation driven largely by the shale boom of the past two decades. Imports account for the remainder. Only about 9 percent of those imports originate in the Persian Gulf. Canada supplies 60 percent of U.S. oil imports.

Yet oil remains a globally priced commodity. Even limited disruptions in a critical transit corridor like the Strait of Hormuz can send shockwaves through international benchmark prices, which in turn shape energy costs across the American economy.

Many analysts therefore expect the conflict in Iran to contribute to inflation. Nevertheless this expectation often assumes that prices respond primarily to straightforward supply-and-demand dynamics. However, crises frequently open the door to something else.

Periods of geopolitical shock can create opportunities for large firms to expand profit margins. Political economists Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner describe how “seller’s inflation” emerges when dominant firms use moments of crisis to raise prices beyond what underlying cost increases would justify. In highly concentrated industries — such as energy — companies can take advantage of widespread uncertainty to implement price hikes that might otherwise face resistance.

Recent energy crises illustrate the pattern clearly. Research by Gregor Semieniuk and colleagues shows that supply disruptions have repeatedly coincided with record profits among major fossil-fuel corporations. Under such conditions, inflation becomes not merely a macroeconomic phenomenon but a distributive one. Rising living costs for households appear first as higher gasoline and transportation costs alongside extraordinary gains for corporate actors.

However, the deeper effects will emerge elsewhere in the economy. Economic crises rarely distribute their burdens evenly. Moments of disruption often become opportunities through which wealth and power are reorganized, as corporations expand profit margins while governments redirect public resources toward stabilizing the political economic system. In this sense, geopolitical crises do not simply raise prices, they reshape the distribution of income and wealth, accelerating structural changes already underway within the political economy.

Energy shocks also tend to reshape political agendas. Calls to expand fossil-fuel extraction quickly return to the forefront of policy debates, often framed as matters of national and fuel security. Demands for increased drilling, both domestically and abroad, are already gaining traction as policymakers search for ways to stabilize energy markets.

Yet even if new extraction projects were rapidly approved, they would do little to address the immediate disruptions caused by war. Large-scale energy infrastructure takes years to develop. In the meantime, the environmental costs of conflict — from damaged oil facilities to expanded fossil-fuel production — may deepen the global economy’s dependence on carbon-intensive energy systems.

At the same time, geopolitical crises frequently accelerate another process: militarization. Escalating conflict in the Middle East is likely to intensify pressure for increased military spending. In the United States, proposals are already circulating to expand the defense budget to roughly $1.5 trillion annually, an extraordinary reallocation of public resources and deepening national debt.

Such spending priorities carry significant social consequences. Every dollar directed toward military expansion is a dollar not invested in housing, healthcare, education, or social infrastructure. For working-class households already facing rising living costs, the result can be deepening economic insecurity.

Militarization also has political implications. Periods of international conflict have historically coincided with the expansion of domestic security institutions and the strengthening of the state’s coercive capacity. Governments confronting external threats frequently consolidate authority internally, building surveillance systems and security infrastructures in the name of national stability.

The United States provides a clear example. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the institutionalization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) dramatically enlarged the country’s national security apparatus. Critics, mainly anti-war and immigrant rights organizations, warned at the time that institutions constructed under the justification of counterterrorism could eventually be deployed in broader contexts of domestic political control.

Recent violations of constitutional rights, civil rights, and killings by ICE agents have demonstrated those concerns were not misplaced. Moments of economic crisis and social unrest have often been met with expanded state repression directed toward labor movements and political dissent. When inequality deepens, wages stagnate, and living costs rise, the potential for social conflict increases.

Increased militarization and a greater willingness to use force against a country’s own people become necessary recourse for the beneficiaries of capital directly involved in the destructive expansion of the system — who in the case of the United States, and most Western countries, tend to be white men. As this group struggles to maintain its dominant role in the domestic and global political economy, they wield influential power through aligned corporate news, social media influencers, and conservative talk-show hosts that manipulate disenfranchised people that identify with them ethnically and religiously. Fomenting polarization and othering fiercely reinforce the interests of a small minority of the population in ways that justify increased authoritarianism and domestic militarization.

Some analysts warn that this increasing polarization and institutional instability could push the U.S. toward what political scientists call an “anocratic” condition: an unstable political system situated between democracy and autocracy, a precursor of civil war.

In this sense, international war and domestic political economy are closely intertwined. External conflict can justify the expansion of military and security institutions that later become tools for managing internal instability.

These dynamics unfold against a broader shift in the global order. The international system that emerged after the Second World War rested on the economic dominance of the United States. That dominance enabled Washington to function as a central organizer of global trade, finance, and security arrangements.

Today that order is coming to an end. The emergence of a more multipolar world has intensified geopolitical competition over resources, markets, and strategic influence. As global economic leadership becomes less stable, states often turn more heavily toward military power in order to secure their position. Declarations of increased militarization and spending have resounded across the globe as states prepare themselves to face a fragmented international political economic order.

The first effects of war may appear in the price of oil, but the deeper consequences unfold in the structure of the political economy itself. Crises triggered by conflict often redistribute wealth upward while expanding the institutions of military and domestic security.

For working people, the real cost of war is therefore not only paid at the gas pump. It is paid in rising inequality, shrinking social investment, and the steady expansion of a state increasingly oriented toward managing instability rather than resolving it — all as response to a declining system requiring renewed structures to ensure capital accumulation. For the U.S. in particular, it is also an attempt to save the social structure of white supremacy that was foundational to the development of now failing U.S. capital. As history repeatedly shows, the burdens of this economic reconfiguration rarely fall on those who benefit from it.

All of Works in Progress Issue 1 was published directly to our website, read the rest here.

Perhaps you’ve recently noticed a few sleek black cameras, paired with black solar panels, popping up on traffic light poles around your city. These cameras and panels seemed to appear out of nowhere, their lenses pointing down busy streets, toward freeway on-ramps, and at major intersections. The police department website called them “automated license plate readers” (ALPRs) and alluded to them being for crime prevention, so it was easy to assume they were another traffic enforcement measure aimed at catching speeders, red-light runners, and other dangerous drivers. You may have told yourself that this would probably be a good thing, and soon the cameras became another piece of visual clutter to filter out automatically as you drove around.

However, these cameras don’t catch speeders. Or red-light runners. They don’t report crimes in progress. What they do is track every vehicle that passes them by using artificial intelligence to capture the license plate number, color, model, and even your “Coexist” or “Support Your Local Co-op!” bumper sticker. These data points, along with the location, the time, and your travel direction, get filed away on privately owned servers administered by tech companies such as Flock Safety to be searched by police departments and other public agencies. This system flagrantly goes against the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well as court decisions against warrantless surveillance. Big Brother is indeed watching you, and he knows exactly where you’ve been.

And this information is not only searchable by local agencies. In the October 2025, a study by the University of Washington (UW)’s Center for Human Rights showed that federal agencies have repeatedly accessed Flock data, including revealing evidence that:

• Flock data from Washington has been searched thousands of times by federal immigration enforcement agencies.

• At least eight Washington law enforcement agencies have settings that allow full data sharing with federal immigration enforcement agencies.

• At least 10 Washington law enforcement agencies have had their data accessed by federal immigration enforcement agencies without permission.

Proponents of ALPRs claim that data can only be shared with explicit permission from the recording agency. Flock Safety supplies “accountability portals” for each local agency who contracts with them that list prohibited uses. In Washington, the prohibited uses nearly always include “immigration enforcement” in order to comply with state laws such as the Keep Washington Working Act, which restricts state and local agencies from assisting federal agencies with immigration enforcement by sharing data. We also have legislation (SB 6002 and HB 2332) making its way to the governor’s desk that claims to make privately contracted ALPRs “safe” to use by putting a 21-day retention limit on data storage, reiterating that they cannot be explicitly used for immigration enforcement or suppression of free speech, and requiring records of system use to be kept and audited.

However, will these bills actually increase the safety of ALPRs? According to the UW study, much of the data that was accessed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies was provided as a favor by a local agency with permission to search the database (referred to as “side door” access”). Other evidence shows that ICE used “back door” access through the vendor to search camera data. This all occurred while the Keep Washington Working Act was in place, which does not inspire confidence that additional future regulatory legislation on ALPRs will prevent it from occurring again.

The legislation also says very little about regulating the security of vendors like Flock Safety, aside from vague language about requiring “security measures” from them. For all practical purposes, we have no way to stop ALPR vendors like Flock from handing this data to whomever they choose, whether that is ICE, the FBI, or some advertising company trying to figure out when you are most likely to drive by a fast food restaurant during your week.

Members of law enforcement in other states have abused access to ALPR databases, with multiple cases of officers using data to stalk former or current romantic partners. Agencies in states where abortion is illegal have also used database access to try to prosecute people seeking reproductive care in other states that allow it. We have no idea how many abductions of undocumented immigrants ALPR data has made possible so far; there are over 500 cameras are in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, for example.

We must ask ourselves:

• Are these abuses enough to disincline us from trusting further use of these systems?

• What would happen if these systems were in the hands of an even worse government that had outlawed free speech, assembly, or made certain currently protected classes of people “illegal”?

• With federal cases such as those related to Prairieland or Stop Cop City in Atlanta setting precedent for anti-fascist organizing to be charged as terrorism, and with the continued efforts to link Palestine solidarity movements to terror charges, how could blanket, warrantless surveillance of activists be misused?

• Are the supposed benefits to law enforcement worth these risks?

Last fall in Olympia, a group of residents concerned about the city’s contract with Flock Safety held an information night to tell the community about ALPRs and discuss what to do. The group, called DeFlock Olympia, advertised via poster and social media and had meeting space donated by a local cafe after hours. The event was heavily attended, with community members lining up outside the door, unable to get in. Meeting attendees decided to coordinate a Signal messaging group, set a date to submit public comment to Olympia City Council, and demonstrate outside an upcoming “closed study session” between the Olympia Police Department (OPD) and City Council. Community members also met with City Council members one-on-one and circulated an open letter that was signed by nearly a dozen local organizations and over 100 individuals.

This pressure had an effect. At the end of the study session, which had to be moved further into City Hall chambers to get away from the noise of the demonstrations outside, OPD recommended that the city suspend use of its ALPRs due to public outcry. The cameras were covered and then later taken down.

Multiple other cities in Washington and across the United States have suspended their use of ALPRs or canceled contracts after similar activity. The American Civil Liberties Union is filing multiple lawsuits against other municipalities over their contracts with Flock.

However, even with these successes, there are still ALPRs in use all over Western Washington. The cities of Tacoma, Shelton, and Yelm have active cameras up, and Tenino, Bucoda, and Rainier are working to get contracts.

Derek Sanders, the Thurston County sheriff, is campaigning to try to build goodwill for his effort to pursue a Flock contract, and the Thurston County Auditor’s Office is planning to install federally funded AI-powered facial recognition cameras in election and voting facilities. This last development is especially concerning given the federal government repeatedly telegraphing their intent to “watch for fraud” in the next election, combined with their willingness to outright lie about facts or fabricate images, such as the AI-generated footage of the murder of Renee Good that was posted on social media.

What can we do to fight this, you may ask?

To start, research if there are any ALPRs are near you, and determine who owns the contract for them. You can use the DeFlock website, which provides a map of ALPRs using open-source tools and community reporting. The map and reporting tool are also available in a smartphone app. The organizers of DeFlock have created tangible resources, such as zines, flyers, and stickers you can print out to raise awareness among your neighbors and community.

In the end, do you feel safer with Big Brother watching? Or are you ready to do something about it?

On November 30, 2025 the former editors of Works in Progress, Esther Kronenberg and Charlotte Persons, published an article entitled “A Call to Save Works in Progress.” Excerpts from the article read:

Two years ago, Works in Progress almost came to an end after its former volunteer staff, who for years put in long hours and a lot of effort, decided to bow out. Not wanting to lose such a valuable community asset, a small group of us stepped in, led by our now deceased dear friend and ally, Glen Anderson, to take over management and publication...

Now, we need the community to step up and take action to keep WIP going. We need writers, editors, tech savvy social media people, and people willing to take over WIP’s management.

Just as the previous group of hard working Works in Progress volunteers had done, a few of us stepped in to relaunch the paper after a five month hiatus. Our newly assembled team of talented writers and editors will continue the tradition of reporting on key issues affecting the South Sound community. We are very proud to take on the work and legacy of this respected and beloved local resource that has existed with little interruption since 1990.

Our first release will be published online on Friday April 3, 2026. We are so proud of all of the hard work that was put into this new issue, and we are excited to continue reinvigorating Works in Progress as a local outlet for sharing important stories, ideas, and debates. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did creating it.

Thank you,
Maria Bressler
Editor-in-Chief

***

We would also greatly appreciate it if you made a small monthly donation so that we can successfully continue to run our online publication and work towards restarting distribution of a printed edition. You can make a donation by subscribing to our Substack or through our donation page here. Works in Progress is fiscally sponsored by the YWCA of Olympia, a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Your donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.