How to Stop ICE from Killing People

What is the one thing every social movement must do before anything else? In this episode of The Justice Briefing, Dr. Jemar Tisby argues that it is not fundraising, filing for nonprofit status, or even getting out the vote. It's something much more foundational.

Drawing on his training as a historian of race, religion, and social movements, Dr. Tisby traces the pattern across four eras of American history. In every case, the injustice that moved people to act was violent, visible, and visceral.

Dr. Tisby then turns to the present. ICE keeps killing people, and he makes the case that under this administration, immigration is the tip of the spear: the most public, most violent, most visceral campaign of them all.

In This Episode

• Why every social movement must find the injustice that evokes the most moral outrage and press on it until progress comes
• The "violent, visible, visceral" test for what actually mobilizes people to act
• How abolitionists, Ida B. Wells, civil rights activists, and the Black Panther Party each pressed on their era's defining injustice
• The recent ICE killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araújo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán in Maine
• The 2,000-arrests-per-day quota, masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and the lack of accountability fueling reckless violence
• Why immigration is the tip of the spear for this administration, and why attacks on voting rights struggle to spark the same outrage
• The story behind Tisby Studios' first film, Jesus Was a Migrant, and why it is distributed through group screenings
• Concrete action steps: booking a screening, abolishing ICE, taking off the masks, demanding accountability, and emphasizing the ethics of the kingdom

Resources Referenced

• Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, on nonviolent coercion and the healthy tension that forces a society to confront its prejudice
• The Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program
• The Color of Compromise by Dr. Jemar Tisby, and its closing chapter, "The Fierce Urgency of Now," which introduces the ARC of Racial Justice
• Jesus Was a Migrant (JesusWasAMigrant.com)
• Last week's episode, "What Mainstream Media Keep Getting Wrong about Douglas Wilson"

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