The wave of resistance to federal raids that erupted in Minneapolis and spread to Los Angeles is generating shockwaves of revolt all around the country.¹ As Donald Trump concentrates National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles in an effort to terrorize those who are bravely standing up for their communities, the best form of solidarity is to extend the battle lines far and wide, overstretching the mercenaries who serve him. In the following account, participants in a demonstration in Austin, Texas on June 9 describe how they escaped the control of party organizers who sought to limit the potential of the protest, then evaded police for two hours, escalating the pressure on those who seek to subdue us.

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Melt ICE, Be Water

On the evening of Monday, June 9, over 600 protesters gathered at the Texas Capitol for a march announced by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A revolutionary organization called for a parallel demonstration with a start time set an hour and a half later in front of the JJ Pickle Federal building, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility four blocks from the Capitol.

The PSL rally began marching, tailed by a police motorcycle escort, and reached the ICE facility by 7:45 pm. The group was energetic and angry. A huge crowd chanted outside the building. Drummers beat a rhythm to the sound of breaking windows. Some people dragged scooters into the street; others painted pro-immigration and anti-ICE slogans or threw balloons filled with paint. All the while, red-shirted organizers from PSL were urging the crowd to keep moving. Dozens of people pushed back, chanting “ICE is right here!” Nonetheless, by 8 pm, the PSL organizers had mobilized most of the crowd back towards the capitol, successfully convincing some participants to tell others that moving would keep the group safe. A splinter group of about 100 stayed behind and continued to express their feelings with art and music. The march was effectively split between those who were acting on their own initiative and those who were submitting to the authority of the PSL.

The march surrounds the JJ Pickle Federal Building in Downtown Austin, which ICE uses as a base of operations and temporary detention center.

PSL shepherded the larger group back towards the capitol building, to an intersection with nothing but high fences, mounted cops, and streets blockaded by police. PSL organizers got on the microphone to formally disband the march. They thanked everybody for coming and encouraged them to go home and rest up to do it all again later. The crowd grew uncertain, largely returning to the sidewalk in front of the fenced off capitol and very nearly ceding the street to the police except for a few insistent spirits who remained in the intersection, dancing with banners. Troopers blared their sirens on both sides and commanded them to get onto the sidewalk—but the dancers stayed, leading chants of “Chinga la migra! Chinga la migra!”

Meanwhile, at the Pickle ICE facility, police tear-gassed the remaining revelers and tackled some of them to the ground, pushing the crowd away from the building.

Unaware of this, the cheerleaders at the capitol continued to dance, especially when the walk signal was on, inspiring some of the crowd to flood out across the street. The crowd re-mobilized in waves. This first wave took a sidewalk route back to the Pickle, where it collided with the smaller splinter group that had just been gassed. Together, they created a barrier of scooters across the street behind them and began to square off with the police in front of them.

Protesters stand behind a line of electric scooters dragged into the streets to defend against police incursions.

Back at the capitol, a chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” brought the hundreds still on the sidewalk back into the intersection and returning south on Congress Avenue.

Almost immediately, two motorcycle cops confronted the crowd. People hesitated but pushed on. The chopper cops tried to discourage them by blaring their sirens and driving forward. One motorcycle drove into the crowd at high speed, forcing protestors to jump aside. There were immediate consequences for his aggression: a crowd surrounded his vehicle and forced him off of it and to the ground. Meanwhile, the news arrived that the small group at the Pickle building had been gassed and dispersed with a few arrests made. Although this caused a moment of hesitation, when the crowd rounded 8th Street and came upon the barrier line of lime scooters, people became jubilant.

A state trooper pepper sprays a protester after a confrontation in response to officers driving their motorcycles into the crowd.

Faced with a line of police blocking access to the building, the mostly reassembled crowd turned around. When they reached Congress Avenue again moving west, there was a line of cruisers directly ahead and a line of bike cops to the left. Immediately, the crowd found a gap in the bike line on the sidewalk and flooded through it, embodying the watchword of the Hong Kong uprising of 2019, “Be water”—though many were too young to have heard this saying in the George Floyd rebellion of 2020.

The crowd quickly realized what a victory this evasive maneuver was. Suddenly, there were no flashing lights to be seen. They had broken out of the police cordon. For the next few hours, they were able to move freely through downtown Austin.

“Chinga la migra!” resounded throughout the downtown streets. Rambunctious and playful activity escalated, each gesture building upon the last. Everything that wasn’t nailed down was moved into the street: orange barrels, scooters, event signs. The muses sang to painters from banks and venture capital firms. Some downtown businesses lost windows, some parked Lexuses lost the wind in their sails.

The crowd proceeded south down Congress, reaching the Congress bridge and starting across it. At this point, the front of the march was far ahead of rest of the march. People were uncertain about crossing the bridge out of downtown; some started moving onto the sidewalk. There was a moment of hesitation before the crowd doubled back, heading back to familiar targets like City Hall, the capitol, and downtown in general.

Then they moved west on MLK along the river, stopping at City Hall to hang the Mexican flag over the balcony before traveling north ten long Texas blocks all the way back to the capitol. Fortunately, there, they encountered the remains of the group that had originally remained at the JJ Pickle building until they were tear-gassed and dispersed. There were chants of “LA—lead the way!”

Bolstered back up to two or three hundred people, the crowd finally returned to the Pickle building. More windows were broken. Some trucks showed up and the drivers did burnouts while blasting electrifying music. People emptied water from construction barricades, flooding the street. Everyone loved it. Raucousness, dance party, good cheer.

Protesters overturn construction barricades, emptying them and filling the street with water.

The crowd continued on down to 6th Street, the main drag for nightlife. A scooter shattered the custom neon sign of The Mothership, Joe Rogan’s comedy bar. Though the venue appeared closed with its shutter rolled down, it was later learned from Reddit that there was a show going on inside. After this point, the crowd struggled to decide on a route, which slowed it down. This indecisiveness led the crowd to fall back on habit rather than strategy. Memory carried it against its better interests back towards the capitol and the police.

After not seeing a single cop for nearly two hours, the crowd began to encounter motorcycle units at intersections again. Rather than pushing through these units as people had done at first—which the crowd easily could have done again—the crowd allowed the police to determine their route. This went on for at least twenty minutes. That was a fatal mistake: the crowd was permitting the police to guide them into an ambush. People could have moved farther away and dispersed with no arrests, but instead, they walked directly into a trap.

After marching back up 6th Street, the crowd continued west past Congress, the street leading to the capitol building. Within a few blocks, a line of state troopers on motorcycles confronted the march, blocking the way forward. Once again indecisive, the crowd began to split up into different groups—one going north, one south—before consolidating into a single mass heading south. They barely got halfway down the block before two unmarked white vans in the intersection ahead unloaded squads of APD riot cops armed with pepperball guns. Aware that they were in danger of being cornered, the crowd turned down an alley. Those running ahead quickly turned back as a side by side full of more APD riot cops blocked the intersection. The APD cops dismounted and chased people down the alley, grabbing people at random and shooting pepperballs that gassed protesters and some of their own officers for good measure. This pincer move dispersed much of the crowd and led to a handful of arrests.

Shortly after this, a part of the crowd regrouped in front of the downtown tower that hosts the offices of Indeed, the job search company. There, two LRAD tanks confronted them on a busy street full of cars. The crowd targeted the operators of these tanks, pelting them with projectiles, while some of the trucks that had been following the protest prevented the tanks from moving further. This combination of tactics ultimately led to the tanks backing off.

At this point, the remaining participants dispersed for the evening.

Why did so much time pass during which the police were nowhere to be seen? First, the blockading genuinely interrupted their ability to pursue the march. This was something that the Austin police had not experienced on this scale before. Second, they lacked the numbers to keep up with and corral the protest, and the combativeness of the crowd increased the costs they had to calculate for any engagement. And at the same time, while this crowd was marching, there was still a group surrounding and tagging the federal building and then clashing with cops, so their forces were split between that engagement, defending the capitol, and chasing us.

As a police officer described in response to the 2020 uprising,

We can handle one 10,000-person protest, but ten 1000-person protests throughout the city will overwhelm us.

Perhaps the police were told to stand down, or not to create a confrontation in the neighborhood that the march passed through, or to focus on the capitol and the federal building, but for now, we don’t know. The march didn’t experience significant confrontation with the police until we returned to the capitol, after which they were only trying to keep up with a single crowd. After that point, when the crowd continued marching, the police were likely clearing the streets and coming up with plans to disperse the crowd, leading to the ambush at the end.

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A growing crowd occupies the street in front of the federal building.

We’ll conclude with some conclusions about the events of the evening and about what can come next.

The main takeaway from the evening is that this moment is explosive. A minimum of physical preparation and a bit of boldness sufficed to transform what would have been a predictable, toothless rally at the capitol into the most powerful demonstration against the racist and authoritarian regime that Austin has seen since 2020. The crowd was more tactically equipped than usual, with several individuals having brought gloves, goggles, art supplies, and respirators, but the most important thing is that right now, people feel urgency.

Also: it is important to plan for success. Demonstrators should arrive with an array of possible objectives in mind, in case they easily accomplish their initial goal; but once a march starts to repeat itself, doubling back on the same territory with diminishing returns, it may be time to conclude. In this case, the participants surprised themselves by getting past the police and opening up a new horizon of possibility. Yet after a while, they lost the ability to identify new targets and stay creative, instead becoming trapped in a loop circling the same few blocks of downtown. The crowd should either have dispersed earlier or identified a new target outside the territory they had repeatedly marched through. Once the crowd lost the ability to come up with new targets, move in new directions, or at least keep growing, it was only a matter of time before the police were able to regroup and launch an offensive.

Similarly, just as it is crucial to resist the efforts of self-appointed leaders to dictate what a demonstration can do, whenever possible, people should resist the efforts of police to determine their movements. When the crowd encountered a few chopper cops or a single cruiser in its way, some people would shout “they’re kettling us” and turn around rather than charging through. In fact, this is what enabled the police to herd the crowd directly into a situation in which they almost were kettled. It is important to be aware of efforts to kettle a crowd, but often the best way to avoid this is to move through police lines where they are thin, before they are reinforced.

Finally, it can help to have material reinforcements ready for delivery well after a march gets underway.

State troopers deploy tear gas in an attempt to disperse the protest, with some in the crowd launching the canisters back.

As the wave of resistance that started in Minneapolis and spread to Los Angeles unfolds into a nationwide revolt, we can anticipate more hot demonstrations to come. Now we know that people will turn out to combative mass demonstrations here, if they are invited to. Ahead of the next moment of possibility, there are a few things that crews could do now to prepare:

• Find a minute to rest, heal, get grounded, share food, and reflect on your experiences, so you can be ready to act with all the resources at your disposal when the time comes.
• Identify potential targets and what kinds of actions they could render possible. These could be specific buildings, institutions, neighborhoods, commercial districts. Generate flyers to circulate and build popular consciousness around these targets.
• Decide as a crew what kinds of interventions you could make to help shift dynamics in the favor of the crowd. Could you decisively propose a new target and direct the crowd to it? Do you have a mutual aid project that could distribute gas masks, goggles, umbrellas, and other tools to help people continue to fight? Could you coordinate communications and outreach efforts to draw more people to the streets and reinforce the demonstrations? Can you mobilize simultaneous actions at multiple locations, especially locations at which nothing has happened before? Can you open up new spaces to reinforce and support frontliners? Can you help sustain the demonstration with food, medic support, water, transport, and other material needs?

The window of opportunity is open right now and the possibilities are endless. It is up to all of us to bring those possibilities into existence before the forces that seek to preserve a world of police, borders, and exploitation can slam it shut.

Graffiti on the federal building.