s most of you know, it’s tough to run a publication, now more than ever. People want to be well informed but they don’t necessarily want to pay for it, and good writing does cost money, as does editing, design, and all the other tasks that go into assembling a publication. Or, as is often the case, people are willing to pay for good writing and journalism, but there are so many outlets that keep so much of their work behind paywalls that we have to make budget-minded decisions about where we spend money on newspapers and magazines. I get it. You get it.

That said, I want to make a pitch for supporting Hammer & Hope, a magazine rooted in Black politics and culture that is in its early(ish) days and needs our help. As we look at the world burning around us, feeling helpless, publications like Hammer & Hope matter more than ever. It’s not that excellent, rigorously conceived and edited writing will save the world (though it might). The pen is not always mightier than the sword (though sometimes it is). BUT. The kind of writing Hammer & Hope publishes does offer us insight into how we got here, what might lie ahead, and how we can fight the rapidly encroaching fascism, segregation, and white Christian supremacy a great many of our elected leaders are welcoming with open arms.

In their most recent issue, there is 

 about how we need to do much more than vote to create change. Lorgia García Peña 

 of the “Latino vote.” There’s also a great essay about the work 

 in North Carolina to support immigrant communities as they move forward from Hurricane Helene. Braxton Brewington argues that 

, not vaguely defined agendas that won’t really serve Black men’s interests. And, of course, there is much more.
Each issue is full of nuanced, elegant writing and thought leadership that is well edited. The work is unapologetically activist-oriented and committed to liberation for Black people, for Latino people, for other POCs, for women, for the trans community, for immigrant communities, for all of us. Hammer & Hope is a real gem, and it is also a necessity. The coming months and years are precarious, particularly for publications like Hammer & Hope, as philanthropic funders tread the new lines being drawn by the Trump regime. These funders don’t really take risks, and anything that challenges the status quo, which is Hammer & Hope’s bread and butter, is seen as a risk.

So. If you can 

, please do so. Any amount helps. The future of Hammer & Hope is in our (broadly speaking) hands. Let’s do what we can to support their bold risk-taking.

— Roxane Gay


P.S. Any time I mention something to which you may want to contribute, do know that I am contributing, too. I support Hammer & Hope with a monthly contribution.

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay: A Great Magazine Could Use Some Financial Support

 have been deeply moved by the existence of Hammer & Hope. It’s one of the few magazines focused on what’s actually happening in the world right now. We’re in the midst of a lot of horrific things — right-wing escalations here at home and around the world. But whenever I turn to Hammer & Hope, I start feeling like people are doing something about these crises.

Hammer & Hope is a place for an expansive Black conversation that can hold our academic, intellectual, political, and cultural concerns. But it’s also a space that makes you feel like more things are possible. As you finish each issue, you know more about how to move forward with integrity and connection, and that’s a great way to show solidarity.

Social media does so much damage to our brains’ capacity to think. It gives the impression that you can think only one thing, or else someone is going to come yell at you. We can forget that we’re meant to have a lot of different positions. We’re meant to have respectful, brilliant, informed conversations, and to struggle and tussle with one another. Hammer & Hope holds room for our differences at a time when very few spaces are trying to do that. It’s a breath of fresh air to slow down and read these issues — it’s actually good for our brains to take the time to read this way.

It felt so important to me to have a Black magazine dedicate 

 to Palestine. This past year and a half has taught me that solidarity looks a lot of different ways. Where do we put our attention and where do we ask our community to put their attention? With so many crises at home, I could imagine it’s very easy to keep our attention here. But Hammer & Hope has a deep commitment to internationalism. Our crises are in relation to all the other crises unfolding around the world. The same people creating crises for us are creating them in so many other places. I want to say thank you publicly to the magazine for that dedication to international perspectives.

I want every single person who’s reading this to join me in 

becoming a paying member of Hammer & Hope

, even if you can make only a small contribution, because I’m so moved by its reporting and storytelling. It’s so important that people understand: We — the readers and the community — decide whether these outlets actually get to keep going. Our support determines whether or not these places survive. And as much as possible right now, we must invest in building the things we want to exist.

So many of the problems we’re dealing with are massive. It’s overwhelming. We’re talking about the entire globe, entire species; we’re talking about every system. We have to remember that everything massive starts small and is made up of small acts of support, weaving bravery and consistency. The small projects we are able to get off the ground can ripple out to have a really massive impact. We are all fertile soil, and then these seed packets come along. Hammer & Hope is one of these seed packets. Let’s put it into the soil and see what takes root.

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown on Hammer & Hope: It’s Stunning, It’s In-Depth, It’s Black, It’s Cool

Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Carrie Mae Weems

Ashley M. Jones

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, N.Y.

Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery

Issue 1

Come In 

ow do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike. We need to accept what an activist involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta calls 

 rather than demand political, strategic, or tactical purism. We have to allow for different people to show up in various ways in terms of ideology and struggle; in our protests and movements, we need the widest participation possible to win.

The uprisings of 2020 showed serious cracks in the system’s legitimacy. By some estimates as much as 

 participated in the protests in some form, a figure without precedent in U.S. history. Around the world, people held protests in at least 

, embodying the globalized nature of our emerging struggles. Mass social upheavals unsettle the status quo; disruption proves to everyone that “normal” is a product of circumstance and not inevitability, that things might not have to stay the same after all. That revolt sent a flare into the sky: 

Don’t mistake the status quo for daily acquiescence. 

. We’re neither happy nor content with things as they are.

But we need more than protests and temporary uprisings. We must further develop our organizations into social institutions capable of creating new relations in every domain of our lives here and now. Previous generations of struggle led to the 

 to one of the worst epidemics in modern history. This fact is not lost on today’s ruling class, which is hard at work making sure today’s young students don’t know how or even whether these past victories happened — 

At work, let’s fight for strong workers’ movements — not only unions — that recognize and build upon the shared interests of a multiracial working class. At schools, let’s struggle against censorship like the opposition to 

 and Black history in the state of Florida while also fighting for 

 like Planting Justice’s in California, and for expanding access to and resources for public schools 

the way the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil

 does. Let’s push for state accountability by planning and constructing the missing infrastructure of our neighborhoods like the socialist shack dwellers movement 

 in South Africa. Their struggle shows how the democratic input of everyday people shapes the built environment of their community, while also recalling the mutual-aid efforts of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

In Atlanta, several formations came together to build independent grassroots power to fight Cop City. They have targeted formal legal and political processes but also organized protests, occupied the forest where the city intends to build the police training facility, held a week of actions, and put on music festivals. In response, they have been targeted with sustained and virulent police violence and repression, tarred as terrorists by the state government.

These examples reveal the strategic importance of stable organizations pursuing long-term projects and programs. Uprisings are not enough — constructing an equal and democratic society requires the sustained participation of the people. They are the legitimate creators of the institutions and defenders of rights central to communal life. Beyond the 

 of direct democracy in protests, assemblies, and occupations, we need people power in practice and not just in slogans.

Hammer & Hope

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times, David Paul Morris/Bloomberg, Andri Tambunan/AFP, George Rose, and Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs via Getty Images.

Issue 2

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

he state of the country is dismal. The decline of the United States into a more open form of authoritarianism continues. Donald Trump has escalated a potentially 

 the chief civil servant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on baseless charges that its economic data was “rigged.” The developments of the Jeffrey Epstein story provoke 

 from the president and his administration officials equal parts farcical and chilling. The Voting Rights Act and other major victories of the civil rights movement are “hanging by a thread,” according to 

. And the administration’s assaults on climate protections threaten 

 of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the privatization of public services in the aftermath. Trump’s big, ugly bill, passed into law on July 4, gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional $75 billion, enabling mass deportation and violent control over migrant workers and 

The damage here is connected to damage elsewhere. The Trump administration’s massive cuts to 

 have contributed to food insecurity and famine in several places, including 

; in the last, aid distribution sites run by a 

 where Israeli soldiers have shot to death dozens of Palestinians seeking food as part of a Trump-backed plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump’s illegal use of El Salvador’s inhumane carceral system has strengthened its far-right president, Nayib Bukele, whose party just approved constitutional changes allowing unlimited presidential terms. The Trump administration is threatening a trade war with Brazil and sanctioning one of its judges in order to prevent the country from protecting its democracy from the 

 former president and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

But cracks in the right-wing offensive are also starting to emerge. Although chiefly symbolic, promises of recognition of a Palestinian state by 

’s conditional threats to do the same, indicate growing momentum in favor of the global movement for justice in Palestine. Students have endured arrests, expulsions, and systematic persecution in order to denounce Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, which is gaining recognition from new sectors of society, including 

, who cynically denied it for more than a year. Norway’s 

 to begin divesting from some Israeli companies may signal that more material costs for the state of Israel are on the way.

More hopeful is the global movement of workers in solidarity with Palestine, which includes trade unions mounting direct actions against 

 and other shipping companies accused of assisting Israel’s genocide. The Trump regime’s attempt to use the military to intimidate Los Angeles was met by an equally militant response by Angelenos, led in part by 

, and other organizations. In Nevada, the Culinary Workers Union made history by 

 of the entire Las Vegas Strip for the first time in the city’s history. In Ohio, community and church leaders are 

 to protect their Haitian neighbors from the growing mass deportation machine. Meanwhile, the growing electoral momentum of the mayoral candidates 

 within the Democratic Party that could lead to a 

Thank you for reading our work. Please donate generously to these grassroots mutual-aid projects that provide crucial work on the front lines:

 is a binational project created in 2023 to provide food, supplies, and medical care to Sudanese refugees in Adré in eastern Chad fleeing genocidal violence in Darfur, as well as displaced people within Sudan.

 is a donations-based aid initiative led by Palestinians who work to provide emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza.

 is a rural association based in Haiti aimed at promoting cultural and equitable economic development through cooperatives and popular education.

The Workers’ Center of Central New York

 is a grassroots organization focused on political training and labor rights for low-wage workers, including undocumented people.

Issue 7

It Feels Like Hell on Earth, but Another World Is Possible

n Minneapolis this winter, families went into hiding. Federal agents stalked the streets, the drugstores, the bus stops for their next catch. They brought hell.

But Minnesotans have shown us what you do in hell.

You carry a whistle. You patrol your block for ICE, or walk kids to school, or deliver groceries to those who are trapped. Every neighborhood is on a local Signal chat, and upwards of 20,000 people have been trained as legal observers. Volunteers brew tea for the observers, drive home families released from lockup in the middle of the night.

Civil society formed a front, a rapid-response army on the streets and a supportive underground. People who had never organized or demonstrated before took up constructive forms of resistance. Previous waves of protest over the years sometimes felt like marches to nowhere, with no clear entry point for activism. Minnesota has modeled a movement that anyone — everyone — can join.

No movement ever appears from nowhere. It has been seeded by earlier campaigns and by painstaking organizing work. In Minnesota, it was preceded by years of 

multiracial, interfaith coalition building

 and was supported by a robust institutional left that had already developed muscles coordinating among one another and with the grassroots. And it was inextricable from the movement for Black lives.

A decade ago, in 2015, activists held an occupation outside Minneapolis’ Fourth Precinct for more than two weeks after cops killed a 24-year-old Black man named Jamar Clark. The next year, school cafeteria worker Philando Castile was shot point-blank by police during a traffic stop with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter in the car. When the officer was acquitted, thousands took to the streets, and protesters blocked the interstate. Then, in 2020, Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. The Twin Cities came out first, in force, taking tear gas and rubber bullets; the rest of the country followed.

People faced these atrocities, according to Marcia Howard, president of the teacher chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59, “by actually sitting down and talking to each other — the connections forged from organizations, communities, church homes, neighbors, sitting together and having conversations about how we got to the place we were in.”

“And those conversations, though they were difficult, actually tilled the ground and gave us the opportunity to plant the seed of coalitions that we are now seeing, the tendrils, the growth that has led to the resistance movement,” she told the journalist Luis Feliz Leon in an interview for Hammer & Hope.

Darnella Frazier, who filmed Floyd’s murder, had been one of Howard’s students. The protests pulled Howard into organizing. She ended up spending years at George Floyd Square.

“People do not understand that the current regime has picked the wrong city and the wrong state to fuck with,” she said.

“Operation Metro Surge” was pitched as a horror story starring Somali immigrants, a pornographic right-wing welfare-fraud revenge fantasy against people Trump in December referred to as “garbage.”

But to the country looking on, Trump’s bullshit was completely eclipsed by what happened on the ground. Neighbors wanted to protect neighbors. The lawlessness and violence of the federal agents compelled the participation of tens of thousands of people, including many who do not consider themselves to be activists. Trump officials impugned as terrorists those killed defending their city. In defiance, opposition to ICE continued to grow. In this way, the response in Minneapolis broke through our shared pervasive fear and pierced the veil of invincibility that has emboldened the Trump regime over the catastrophic first year of its return.

The left surely needs to reckon for real with all the ways we’ve truly lost. All the rights and the programs repealed already, all the demands that haven’t amounted to much, the utter fecklessness of Democratic leadership.

But we look to the multiracial Minnesota movement demonstrating a better way to be in this country. People are brave; they will stand up; they want to be a part of it, given the chance. And courage is a magnet. When anyone joins, it draws in others who might have stayed on the sidelines.

“If there’s one big thing every big city could be doing, plant the seed of getting to know your neighbors,” Minneapolis organizer Doran Schrantz told this magazine. “The thing that stops an authoritarian creep is civil society.”

She estimates that a vast majority of the city has gotten involved in some way. “All these people in your mind who you thought were the ones, governor, mayor, philanthropists, elites,” she said. “They literally cannot do it. Only civil society can do it.”

Our thanks to the people and organizations who made it possible for us to publish Issue No. 10:

Ena Alvarado, Billy Brennan, Dana Castillo, Ana Valeria Castillos, Erin Crum, Vicky Fontenelle, Jaime Fuller, Chuck Gonzales, Sandy Byers Harvin, Lameesa Mallic, Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa, Akiba Solomon, Will Tavlin, Eamon Whalen, Allyson Winburn, Critical Minded, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Darnella Frazier, who filmed Floyd’s murder, had been one of Howard’s students. The protests pulled the English teacher into organizing. She ended up spending years at George Floyd Square.

“Operation Metro Surge” was pitched as a horror story for Somali immigrants, a pornographic right-wing welfare-fraud revenge fantasy against people Trump in December referred to as “garbage.”

But to the country looking on, Trump’s bullshit was completely eclipsed by what happened on the ground. Neighbors wanted to protect neighbors. The lawlessness and violence of the federal agents compelled the participation of tens of thousands of people, including many who do not consider themselves to be activists. Trump officials impugned those killed defending their city against the federal incursion as terrorists. In defiance, opposition to ICE continued to grow. In this way, the response in Minneapolis broke through our shared pervasive fear and pierced the veil of invincibility that has emboldened the Trump regime over the catastrophic first year of its return.

Our thanks to the people who made it possible for us to publish Issue No. 10:

Issue 10

Minnesota Is the Movement We’ve Been Waiting For

he immigrant catchers, faces covered, chase the workers down the street in broad daylight. They are armed and dressed in camo, like soldiers. This is a war involving only one army. The enemy is the landscaper, the day laborer, the high school student born in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela.

In this special issue, Hammer & Hope commissioned the photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson to show us the Trump administration’s arrest and deportation campaign. He followed federal immigration agents in Chicago, New Orleans, and New York City as they cased parking lots and tree-lined streets and occupied court buildings, rounding people up.

Gilbertson has photographed conflict and migration around the world. In Chicago, two agents said that they recognized him from war zones in West Africa and Iraq. He recognized them, too — not as individuals, but as soldiers treating a city as a battlefield.

In these pictures, a familiar dynamic: Here is law enforcement, armed and faceless, and here is a young man with a rose on his sweatshirt and a furrowed brow. Here is the self-assured state actor who is empowered to destroy lives, and beside him, the civilian who must decide, breath to breath, what to do in response. In the masks and guns of the federal agents, we also see the riot gear of the Ferguson cops, the helmets and billy clubs of the Alabama state troopers, the Klansman’s hood. People hide as the troops come, stores lock up, fearsome quiet. Children run for home. Neighbors blow whistles, film, yell.

Wherever the agents appear, even when they lean idly, chatting, we see the cold threat of violence and the fragility of freedom. And in the brave crowds who gather to confront them, scrambling their illusion of total control, we see the power of solidarity, shining with human warmth.

Federal agents transfer a man to a detention vehicle near their patrol area in Niles, a suburb outside Chicago, Oct. 31, 2025.

n Chicago, in an otherwise empty parking lot in an industrial area not far outside the city limits, an innocuous-looking van was tucked out of sight. A driver sat up front, straw hat on the dash, not looking much different from the half-dozen Latino men sitting motionless behind him. As I got closer, I saw that he wore a mask and sunglasses. Everyone behind him was zip-tied.

In Iraq or Afghanistan, the military would call this a “detainee collection point.” Like many moments I observed during Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations, it reminded me of other times in combat zones. In fact, a lot of the agents’ tactics appear to come from military training: aggressive tactical driving on city streets to block roads and create a bubble of space around their caravan, often leading to accidents; shooting so-called less lethal projectiles such as pepper balls; grabbing people off the street; creating perimeters and pointing weapons at crowds.

When police officers escort a suspect, they tend to hold the handcuffs or the suspect’s arm; I regularly saw federal immigration agents grab their suspects by their coats near their necks, providing a little more control and a lot more humiliation. While some believe these agents are poorly prepared, I saw behavior that suggested combat experience — a hunch confirmed when I was approached by two agents who said they recognized me from war zones in West Africa and Iraq, where at least one of them said he had spent time with Joint Special Operations Command.

On Oct. 28, I watched as a caravan of federal agents driving through Chicago stopped at a parking lot. Armed men in fatigues leaped out and ran toward two landscapers. The masked men scaled a fence and grabbed one of the landscapers, zip-cuffed him, put him into a vehicle, and — with barely a word spoken — drove away.

During the two weeks I spent in Chicago observing ICE operations, I witnessed many detentions like this one.

On another day, on the city’s South Side, I watched as government immigration vehicles slowed as they passed an older Latino man, only to speed up again when they spotted two other Latino men a block away. The two — a father and son, it would turn out — were conducting maintenance on a building, and the father made a run for it before surrendering to the agents. He was searched and arrested as his son stood watching, slumped and silent.

After the ICE agents put the father in a vehicle, one agent walked over to the son and handed him a set of car keys taken from his father’s pocket.

“Hope you have a good day,” the agent said. Through the mask, I couldn’t tell if he was smiling.

The man above was being processed in a parking lot after he was detained by federal agents. After he was fingerprinted, agents took photographs of his face. Like the detentions, this feels similar to what I witnessed in Iraq and other combat zones, where civilians and suspects were forced to submit to biometric scans.

Gregory Bovino (center) and other federal agents stop in a gas station in Niles, Ill., Oct. 31, 2025.

Senior U.S. Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino is a rising star in MAGA circles. In charge of immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina, and now New Orleans, he calls himself a “sanctuary buster.”

“There are no sanctuaries,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “There will be no sanctuaries.”

The first sign that federal forces are active in an area is businesses closed during normal hours. Supermarkets lock their doors, beauty salons draw their shutters, empanada stalls on street corners stand abandoned. Anyone at risk runs for cover.

One supermarket that I visited after a raid nearby had locked its doors shut, and a producer I was traveling with asked to use the bathroom. After identifying ourselves with press IDs, we were allowed entry, and back in the storeroom, the producer saw a staff member up in the rafters, hiding on top of a huge pile of empty pallets. Of course that doesn’t mean he was undocumented. The fear that ICE has stoked in immigrant communities goes beyond immigration status — from what I saw, anyone who’s brown could be a target.

An hour later, we arrived at another supermarket that had closed, asking customers on social media not to visit. According to customers, agents had tried to grab a man selling chips outside but let him go.

Everything appears random. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen, a legal resident, or undocumented. I watched one afternoon as a child around 10 years old walked home from school. When a Border Patrol vehicle, packed with armed men in masks, drove by, he sprinted toward his home, where his mother held the door open for him, slamming it closed after he crossed the threshold.

Community members protest federal immigration agents in Cicero, Ill., Nov. 8, 2025.

Watching a war play out in innocuous, everyday places is jarring. The new battlefields are places like a Sam’s Club parking lot in Cicero, a majority Latino town just over the city line, where community members, at enormous risk to themselves, protested as heavily armed ICE agents pointed weapons at the crowds.

The community responded with tremendous courage in the face of a deadly threat. During their Chicago operation, federal agents shot two people. One man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Silverio Villegas González, was killed; Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, was shot five times and somehow survived.

Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum, who shot Martinez, later bragged on text, “I’m up for another round of fuck around and find out.” Exum wrote to agents on Signal: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” according to court records.

In Park City, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago, I saw the aftermath of a collision between an ICE vehicle and another belonging to rapid responders. The two men in the car fled, chased by agents, who eventually emerged from an alleyway with a Latino man trying desperately to break free from their grip. It was unclear if he was connected to the accident.

As they zip-cuffed his hands behind his back, a crowd formed, shouting for the man to be released between insults directed at the officers. Again and again, I saw similar reactions to ICE in communities like this — absolute fury from the residents who would emerge from their homes to defend their neighbors and berate ICE agents.

An anti-ICE protest on an I-94 overpass north of Chicago, Nov. 7, 2025.

One afternoon, as I followed a caravan of federal agents conducting raids, we drove under a protest on a freeway overpass, where residents had affixed posters opposing ICE’s invasion.

As members of the press, we were tasked with finding ICE agents and holding them accountable with our photographs. Chasing ICE is difficult, and we would spend days on end trying to find them. We’d monitor community chat groups on social media and messaging apps; we’d drive around looking for particular models of SUVs — Denalis and Wagoneers were popular — and we’d look for telltale signs like heavily tinted windows and out-of-state plates. “Chasing ghosts” is what my colleagues called it, because we would hear a report, get there quickly, and the agents would be gone. When we did manage to find them, we’d have about 30 seconds to work before they drove away.

In conflict, armed agents generally don’t want the media around. These agents recognize that the work we produce is evidence, a testimony to their actions, a historical record. Chicago felt reminiscent of the war zones I’ve worked in, where photographers arrive wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests, and the armed agents do their best to prevent us from making photographs.

Women on this tree-lined street in suburban Skokie protest as agents attempted to question landscapers in the yard on the right, Oct. 31, 2025.

Whistles are the soundtrack to ICE’s operation in Chicago and the tool carried by rapid responders. They are worn as necklaces, stuffed into purses and pockets, kept in cars — a symbol of resistance. The whistles are distributed door to door by activists and available for free at many small businesses throughout a city under siege; they often come with a pamphlet that reads “Form a crowd, stay loud.” The pamphlet provides simple instructions: “CODE 1: ICE NEARBY / BLOW IN A BROKEN RHYTHM. / CODE 2: CODE RED / BLOW IN A CONTINUOUS, STEADY RHYTHM / ICE IS DETAINING SOMEONE.”

Everywhere I went in Chicago, there were community members patrolling streets, following government agents, warning victims, and pushing back any way they could — and always, the whistles around their necks, the sign you’re around allies.

Federal agents question Krzysztof Klim, whom they came across working on a home in Niles, Oct. 31, 2025. Klim was released after proving he was a citizen, though agents took away a co-worker who said he has been a legal resident since 1986.

“That was my neighbor!” the woman screamed through tears at federal agents. “He’s just my neighbor!”

I tried to talk to the woman pictured above. She gave me permission to use her photograph, but she didn’t want to provide her name. Like so many people around ICE, she’s scared. Usually the stories I work on are filled with quotes, but the feds won’t talk to the press, and neither will anyone else.

n December, Trump launched a major new immigration operation named Catahoula Crunch, with the aim of rounding up 5,000 people in Louisiana and Mississippi for deportation. For the first two weeks of December, I chased federal agents around New Orleans and surrounding areas.

I didn’t see the kind of community response that had been a hallmark of my time in Chicago; maybe that’s because reports of ICE sightings were rare. When I did come across officers, they were often sitting in vehicles for long stretches or walking through the streets of Kenner, a nearby city with a growing Latino population.

Bovino regularly rolled through the streets with his caravan, as I saw agents photograph vehicle license plates. Members of the press who had traveled from around the country to cover the operation, including me, photographed Bovino talking to people who claimed to support the immigration crackdown. It felt like a public relations operation, so I stopped photographing.

The federal presence did cause a distinct sense of fear. Some restaurants shut down altogether, while others struggled to find staff to cover for workers who didn’t come in.

On my final day, rapid responders appeared to be finding their feet. I joined a protest in Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, as a caravan snaked its way through the streets. Responders patrolled trailer parks and supermarkets. I came across agents on Pine Street, where I heard, for the first time since I’d arrived, the sound of a whistle warning that ICE was present.

By the time I left, on Dec. 11, DHS had announced 111 arrests, compared with 400 in the first week of operations in Charlotte, N.C.

Federal agents detain two men in Kenner, La., west of New Orleans, Dec. 4, 2025. The agents had pulled over a vehicle with two occupants and demanded that they lower the windows or open the doors. The men attempted to show an ID through the windshield; the agents responded by smashing the driver’s side window and detaining the men.

arlier in the year, 26 Federal Plaza, a 41-story building in downtown Manhattan, became a focal point of the ICE story. Inside, dozens of ICE agents were detaining migrants after they appeared at mandatory court hearings. Outside, protesters gathered and attempted to stop immigration officials leaving with detainees in transport vans at night. Police shut down the demonstrations, and after a couple of weeks, the protests fell off. Detentions, however, continued unaffected.

Anti-ICE protesters march in New York City, June 10, 2025. Demonstrators took to the streets nationwide after the National Guard and Marines were sent into Los Angeles in June.

Every morning outside this building, hundreds of asylum seekers and immigrants wait in line, knowing that masked, armed ICE agents with a list of targets are lying in wait upstairs, in waiting rooms and corridors. Usually we see them on the 12th and 14th floors, peering into courtrooms.

No one seems to know the rules of the list, if there are any. For everyone in line, there’s no choice but to turn up for their court appointment where federal immigration agents roam the corridors. The place feels like a trap, a game that immigrants are forced to play to have the possibility of a future here. Over the course of only three months last year, ICE grabbed thousands of people coming in for hearings and routine check-ins in hallways like these, according to one analysis of federal data.

The woman above arrived with her family from Venezuela three years ago. At New York City’s immigration court, ICE agents detained her son, a 20-year-old high school student. He was eventually released after community outcry and the help of legal volunteers. But the shock lingered. “They didn’t explain anything,” his mother told me later. “They just grabbed my son and took him away.”

Ashley Gilbertson

Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David Kim runs down an alleyway after a caravan of federal agents pulled up on people in southwest Chicago, Nov. 6, 2025. Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson/VII for Hammer & Hope.

Issue 9

War at Home

t’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison, ignoring the judges who demand due process. Head Start, federal science research, and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. Hospitals turn away trans teens. Retirement accounts go up in smoke. The regulatory state unravels while corporate polluters are empowered to spew toxins far and wide. Powerful corporations and institutions abandon their meager commitments to diversity. Milquetoast Democrats barely object, fantasizing that they can win by 

. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. Across the world, the right wing is blowing up everything and incinerating the planet. White supremacy is apocalyptic for everyone.

Regular people are stepping into the fray, providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need. A thousand people gathered outside the upstate New York home of President Donald Trump's border czar to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abduction of a local family, leading to their release. Street protests and demonstrations at Tesla showrooms, part of a worldwide economic boycott of Elon Musk’s company, have resulted in a whopping 71 percent drop in its profits in the first quarter of the year. 

 took place from late January to late March 2025, compared with the same period during the first Trump administration. The demonstrations are smaller than earlier iterations, having to rebuild after the demobilizations of the Biden presidency. While this era of resistance may lack the iconic novelty of the 2017 Women’s March, a more capacious and potentially unruly coalition is being forged — one more attuned to the problem of oligarchy, less inclined to exceptionalize Trump, and potentially more capable of nimble responses to cascading crises.

It’s no surprise that people are fighting back. An April poll of 2,300 registered voters found that 

 of the Democrats surveyed support politicians “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder.’” Instead, Democratic lawmakers are “

” about such pressure from the people they represent. Constituents in deep red areas have so opposed proposed cuts to social services like Medicaid and SNAP that the National Republican Congressional Committee chair 

 to stop hosting town halls to avoid incensed audiences.

For 18 months, the mainstream media and leading Democrats refused to distinguish anti-genocide protests from antisemitism. Now international students who dared to criticize Israel’s death-dealing in Gaza face detention and deportation. We interview the Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal about his decision to leave the country under the threat of political abduction. These shocking acts of state repression are alerting more people to the ways Palestine has been used as a wedge issue by people for whom Jewish safety has been a useful pretext for a power grab.

Power grabs have come fast and furious in recent months and in multiple forms, from Musk’s chainsaw to the public sector known as DOGE to the rolling back of already inadequate renewable energy commitments and the cross-sector witch hunt against antiracism efforts. This issue details some of the ways people are resisting. We profile newly organized federal workers and learn from filmmakers, artists, and Afro-Brazilian Beyoncé fans who understand that culture, to quote contributor Maddy Clifford, is “essential to building the power to defeat fascism.” And let’s not forget that Los Angeles, a global center of cultural power, was literally ablaze earlier this year. Robin D. G. Kelley writes about recovery efforts in Altadena and the community’s vision for regeneration and new beginnings.

To effectively combat fascism, we need to understand it as an international phenomenon. The British writer Gary Younge considers how Trump and his brethren in England and across Europe fuel movements where “a belligerent sense of whiteness and national identity, beset by economic insecurity, is winning elections.” In South Africa, one such movement has gained steam after Trump condemned a new land reform law as racist against Afrikaners. We talk to Zandile Nsibande, a leader of a shack-dweller movement there, who explains why working-class Black people also oppose the law.

Here in the United States, we can understand the latest government and corporate attempts to roll back civil rights, antiracism, renewed labor militancy, and climate progress as part of a counterrevolution without a revolution, a reactionary response to the promise of the 2020 uprisings. Five years after the George Floyd rebellion, our abolitionist dreams threatened the status quo. Now the right — assisted, as ever, by some liberals — is on a deadly rampage to quash those dreams at any cost. Conservative extremists intend to burn down Washington, abolishing the Department of Education, dissolving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and waging a scorched-earth war on antiracism efforts. Poor Black and brown people are already suffering the most, but the consequences will be devastating for almost everyone except the supremely wealthy.

How can we make sense of this onslaught? We asked Black organizers, writers, and academics to consider the state of Black politics and what has changed since the breakthrough in 2020, when millions of people hoped for reparations and racial justice. What happened to the largest and most significant Black movement in two generations? What went wrong in the Black Lives Matter era? Only by answering those questions can we move forward. And we must.

Illustration by Stephanie Santana. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, via Library of Congress.

Issue 6

White Supremacy Is Apocalyptic for Everyone

ow do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.

In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.

Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.

But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have 

This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.

Hammer&Hope

NO. 2

Summer 2023

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

Black Class Matters

Our Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind

New College of Florida’s Black Student Union vs. Ron DeSantis

The Soul-Sucking Reality of Touring

A Mass Movement for Land and Housing in South Africa

If “Woke” Dies, Our Nation’s Truths Die With It

How We’ll Know if Stop Cop City Won

“We Are People of Resistance”

The Movement and the Mayor

“We Stopped Him From Going to Prison!”

You Can Win Bold Climate Laws in Your State

The Supreme Court Shouldn’t Get the Last Word

The Queer, Black, and Sexy Album We Deserve

a Black body is somebody

How the Black Misleadership Class Provides Cover to Cop City

A Thank You Letter

Archive

Spring 2026

Winter 2025

Fall 2025

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NO. 2

Summer 2023

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

Black Class Matters

Our Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind

New College of Florida’s Black Student Union vs. Ron DeSantis

The Soul-Sucking Reality of Touring

A Mass Movement for Land and Housing in South Africa

If “Woke” Dies, Our Nation’s Truths Die With It

How We’ll Know if Stop Cop City Won

“We Are People of Resistance”

The Movement and the Mayor

“We Stopped Him From Going to Prison!”

You Can Win Bold Climate Laws in Your State

The Supreme Court Shouldn’t Get the Last Word

The Queer, Black, and Sexy Album We Deserve

a Black body is somebody

How the Black Misleadership Class Provides Cover to Cop City

A Thank You Letter

Archive

Spring 2026

Winter 2025

Fall 2025

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY