As ICE Protests Ramp Up, Organizers and Thinkers Share Lessons from the 2020 Uprising for Black Lives

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This summer marks five years since the 2020 uprising for Black lives — an anniversary that feels even more resonant right now, as protesters in cities like Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was murdered by police, stand up against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the Trump administration's deportation spree.
For days now, protesters in Los Angeles, California have fought back against the mass deportation efforts while Trump sent in the National Guard (just like he did in 2020) and 700 Marines. The fight, and the backlash, have spread to cities across America: footage of a protester with cops kneeling on their neck in Philly; arrests in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta; and thousands upon thousands taking to the streets. ICE is reportedly sending tactical agents to five Democratic-run cities.
As we noted in our running series launched last year, United States of Suppression, the mass protests of 2020 also marked the start of an era of increasing criminalization of protesters. Throughout 2024, as police swarmed college campuses and deployed tear gas against students demonstrating against the war in Gaza, I thought of 2020.
Yet amid the darkness of that pivotal summer, there were so many things I saw for the first time, made possible because so many people were unified by the structural abandonment of marginalized communities under COVID. People were outside in masks, setting up tents, painting buildings and hosting concerts and handing out supplies. There were tuition strikes to get cops off campuses. Protesters brought down statues of Confederate generals. What officials always told us was demanding too much — was 'impossible' — suddenly became demands they couldn't ignore. It was born of painful necessity, but the possibilities for solidarity that it created seems in part a byproduct of, as author and activist Arundhati Roy put it, the pandemic as portal.
How the Backlash to the George Floyd Protests Set the Stage for Another Trump Administration
*This op-ed argues that our collective actions are a part of an ongoing struggle and resistance, not a final resting place.*
Contributor Olayemi Olurin recently memorialized that time, and the ensuing backlash that brought us to our current moment, for Teen Vogue, writing, 'It's important to reflect, not just on our collective actions, but the state's violent response to them — the consequences and the backlash that always follow.'
For this piece, we wanted to remember the lessons of that time that seemed so unprecedented, to practice what Olurin called for: To remember our history, and that we've been here before — so we can learn from the past and keep building towards a different future. So we asked organizers, thinkers, activists, and writers: What lessons do you hold from the 2020 uprising? And how can we learn from it now to make it through the current crisis wrought by the Trump administration?
I often think of the title of the first novel by Sarah Thankam Mathews, a founding organizer behind the mutual aid group Bed-Stuy Strong, formed in 2020: All This Could Be Different. The suffering caused by police brutality, white supremacy, transphobia, and infinite losses – Breonna Taylor, Oluwatoyin Salau, Dominique 'Rem'mie' Fells, Tony McDade, and so many others — is a stain on this nation forever. How can we think of ways to make a different world together?
I've come away with a renewed sense of appreciation for long term strategic thinking, and for the kinds of organizations that can pursue long term strategies. Among the reasons that even large scale, attention-grabbing protests can fail to move the needle in the protestors' direction is that the powers that be can wait them out — not only for people to leave the streets, but for ongoing news cycles and the regular business of life to move attention away from where the protestors have briefly been able to concentrate it. There's really no substitute for being able to mount a long term political struggle and that means there's no substitute for the kind of organizations that can do this.
Alongside that long term thinking is not just the ability to continue to advocate or express political discontent over the long haul — philanthropies and non-profits can manage that just by not rocking the funding boat, after all. But opportunity comes when we pair that with the kinds of organizations that can speak to the powerful on terms they understand: organizations that can withhold labor, rent, utility payments, or any other kind of cooperation the powerful need to get their way. When these kinds of organizations make long term plans, they aren't only planning messaging campaigns — they're planning the full scale of political contest and conflict.
One to mention in particular is the resistance from the Service Employees International Union. SEIU California President David Huerta was just attacked and detained by ICE while participating as a community observer as ICE attacked immigrant workers, and plenty of other Angelenos were lined up against ICE on the streets. From the mass layoffs of federal workers, to the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board, to the attacks on higher education and the regulation of food and water, I think it's fairly clear that the present administration poses a threat to the 99% that we can't combat with awareness. They won't stop unless and until we stop them, and we will need to support the kind of organizing that can do that. Supporting SEIU, federal workers, and other organized centers of popular power is a step in the right direction.
When we look at the state of the country and the world right now, it can seem pretty grim. Authoritarianism is rising and making it more dangerous and difficult to protest and resist. Yet when you understand that the 2020 unrest did not exist in a bubble, that it wasn't just an anomaly but instead a continuation of the fight for Black liberation and anti-capitalism in the face of police violence, we realize there can be hope that another mass movement can happen again.
The importance of looking back is to be honest about where there can be growth. For hope to be more than just foolish optimism we must learn the lessons from the waves that came before us: resistance will be followed with harsh repression; and opportunistic interests will try to co-opt the movement and energy. Specifically discussing the former, there were many prosecutions of protesters and rioters whose stories were mostly ignored, as well as anti-protest laws passed in state legislatures that remain understudied. And when it comes to co-optation, the usurping of energy by the Democratic Party, the non-profit industrial complex, corporations and the media turned out to be devastating. All of this was predictable for me, because I experienced and witnessed it happening in previous waves. This is why it's important for people to learn about the Green Scare, Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Ferguson and other anti-police protests that led up to 2020, as state tactics being used now were built upon by the repression of these movements.
Trump's presidency is in part a response to the year 2020, both the protest and the pandemic. There was a naivete that riots had resulted in a cultural revolution, but what we see now is the changes of that moment were fleeting. This is why movement gains must go beyond individual benefits under capitalism like diversity initiatives, which have come and gone since the protests. There needs to be an understanding when these spontaneous uprisings happen that the sense of power that people feel will not last forever.
Once the riots began to settle later in summer 2020 and people were still engaged, it would have been a great opportunity to build assemblies either based on locality and/or affinity. This would have created entry points for newcomers and opportunities to build power outside the current political system and away from the Democratic Party. This model would allow broader segments of our communities to be building actual political opposition against Trump and the oligarchy that enables him.
When I look back at 2020, some of the most urgent lessons for this moment are about protecting and defending one another. I think about how the Chicago Freedom School sheltered young protesters who had been brutalized and gassed by police, and protected those young people when cops showed up to raid the building. I think about the safety teams led by young Black activists in Chicago, distributing masks, treating wounds, and doing everything they could to keep people safe in the streets. I think about the connection between a mass uprising and a mass mobilization of mutual aid, and what that tells us about what it takes to sustain collective action.
There was a time in 2020 when people were deeply invested in one another's well-being. There was so much mutual concern, care work, a growing interest in the lessons of disability justice, and a storm of empathy that cracked something open in us, and in the world around us. The same impulses that led to an explosion of mutual aid propelled a lot of people into the streets. In many ways, we've drifted from that level of connection. But we'll need to find our way back to it. Empathy is essential in any fight against fascist, dehumanizing politics.
This moment is about holding onto our humanity, and to do that, we need to reach for and hold onto each other. We need to anchor ourselves to each other. That means remembering how to care, commit, and throw down together, even when we don't like each other. We need to recover the sense of solidarity that a lot of people felt in the early days of the pandemic. There was a lot of fear and panic in that moment, but also a lot of potential. We still have that potential, but we are going to have to bring it back to the surface.
I think the lessons are many. One lesson is that cultural work is irresistible — the art, music, dancing and bombastic energy of those uprisings still thrum through my system.
Another lesson is that when we let ourselves feel into our hurt and anger, we can harness those righteous emotions into powerful action, even when we have to adapt to conditions like a global pandemic.
Our task as movement workers is to support organic moments of popular unrest and uprising, recognizing we can shape these moments but we are not meant to control them. And we have to remember that we are not the beginning or the end of this fight, and we are not always the center of focus — a lot of people showed up in solidarity with us, and I see so many of us showing up in solidarity with other communities.
There are way more people than we expect who are frustrated and angry about the brutality and greed of the current systems, who will join in bold, even risky collective action when they see others in the streets. After 2020, the militancy of our movements increased — more people willing to take risks and break rules to stop business as usual. This is visible in the student uprising against genocide in Palestine, and the disruptions of weapons manufacturers, as well as in mobilizations against ecocide [or the destruction of the environment by dangerous human activity]. We need this kind of rule-breaking, bold militancy more than ever now.
2020 saw the mainstreaming of the idea of police abolition — suddenly the concept of defunding the police was being discussed across the country and many city councils made big promises about cutting police budgets that had been steadily rising for decades. However, we weren't able to hold them to it. The dedicated work that people did to keep the pressure on ended up showing us that our city governments really are owned by cops and Chambers of Commerce, and elected officials backpedal to keep their jobs, or they get replaced.
This is an important lesson — that their systems don't work for dismantling what they are designed to build, expand and preserve. This is important, too, because we saw that trying to direct and focus the upsurge into electoral and government-centered reform projects not only doesn't work, but it reifies the widespread liberal misunderstanding that resistance should focus on changing the hearts and minds of elected officials, which is, ultimately, a dead end.
Under this administration, this is particularly clear — that direct action and mutual aid are what is needed, not more efforts to convince elites to stop wars, policing, ecocide. It's not about convincing them, it's about stopping them.
[Trump's] desires and plans for the current moment are terrifying, but we defeated the Alt-Right and Trump in the streets once and we can do it again. From the Airport Shutdowns to OccupyICE to #MeToo, from the successful no-platforming campaigns, mass marches and education to punching [white supremacist] Richard Spencer (twice!) to vigilantly combating them wherever they appeared, we successfully stymied their ambitions and shattered their movement. Our many anti-fascist victories, which came at great cost, culminated in the historic defeat of Trump at the ballot box in 2020: Biden was the only presidential campaign since the '60s to outnumber the traditional most popular option among eligible voters — abstention.
The US working class has gone through over a decade of intense radicalization, organization, street movement and political awakening since 2010, and the state has offered us little more than table scraps. Contra those who see this as evidence that our movements have lost, that we've been unsuccessful, it seems just as likely that the failure to buy us off means that earlier period, dramatic though it was, was merely the prelude to a social and political revolution that utterly transforms this continent and the world.
It is up to us to change everything. But, against the doomers, I believe in this moment we may be uniquely poised to do so.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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