Rapid Response Tech – The Role of Tech Infrastructure in the Twin Cities Anti-ICE Resistance
Last December, Trump’s DHS unleashed “Operation Metro Surge” – a full-scale occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul characterized by mass abductions, abuse and murder of abductees, and the high-profile executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents. This operation was met with widespread, decentralized, and highly coordinated grassroots resistance via interconnected hyperlocal rapid response groups, facilitated by metro-wide digital infrastructure and data processing systems.
Networks of local organizers, hackers, and technologists built out extensive technical capacity for widespread occupation resistance, including systems for secure and coordinated rapid response communication, systems for tracking abductees through the highly opaque immigration system, and sophisticated monitoring systems for tracking ICE personnel, drones, and vehicles. This technical capacity has remained critical to the resistance against ICE operations, and organizers in other cities have become increasingly interested in similar infrastructure.
This talk will provide a comprehensive outline of these logistical, communications, and data processing systems; the ways these systems were effective, the ways they fell short, and most importantly, how hackers and technologists can better organize to build new iterations of this infrastructure within their own regions and contexts.
Friday 1700 Grand Ballroom
