Where to start with this week? Jarring photographs and audio of immigrant children separated from their parents, rounded up, and held in custody behind chain fences by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have dominated the news cycle. The Trump administration’s response to this self-made fascist nightmare scenario has been, to put it as fairly as morally possible, a fucking disaster. Alleged sexual predator and Trump crony Corey Lewandowski openly mocked a child with Down’s syndrome on national television. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—for days—appeared both confused and willfully in denial of what was happening on the border. And Stephen Miller, architect of so much of this beshitted national spectacle and tragedy, doubled down on it to the point of mustache-twirling villainy. He fully deserves to be doxxed. There is even, almost as a footnote to the rest of this metric fuckton of bullshit, now a task force within ICE actively working to track down naturalized citizens and denaturalize them.
The world is bad—and ICE is indeed Very Bad—but here’s one thing that’s good. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Brooklyn Defender Series (BDS) has created an incredibly informative animated video series that answers a simple question: What are your rights when it comes to ICE?
The video series, called “We Have Rights,” walks through what targets of ICE should do if the federal agency comes knocking at your door, tries to corner you in public or in your community, and once you’ve already been arrested. You can watch the entire video series on the ACLU’s website. The scenarios the series sets up are presented in several different languages, are beautifully animated by animation studio FLUORfilms, and offer practical advice at a time when many American communities need it most.
Mass-distributed cartoons have long been major forces for the public good, from the healthcare-focused shorts of Chuck Jones to documentary films based on long-form journalism like The Tower. As awful as this episode of American history is, hopefully “We Have Rights” can offer a glimmer of hope to targeted individuals who need it.
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