<\/p>\n
Sakura Saunders is a co-facilitator of the MaxPod in East Oakland, which has roughly 40 members and has been doing neighborhood-level activism since President Donald Trump\u2019s return to office in January 2025.<\/p>\n
Jessica Christian\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
On a Saturday in June, Sakura Saunders and her neighbors met outside a dingy office building in San Francisco\u2019s South of Market and dared it to open.<\/p>\n
A day prior, immigrant families in the area had received unusual text messages summoning them to 478 Tehama St.<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the headquarters for Cypress Private Security, which reportedly<\/a> works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and whose parent company<\/a> has booked billions<\/a> in security contracts<\/a> with ICE\u2019s parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n Suspecting an ICE trap, progressive coalition Bay Resistance called on a network that has ballooned with volunteers since President Donald Trump\u2019s reelection. Around 7 a.m., hours before that day\u2019s No Kings protests<\/a>, about 200 people picketed the building<\/a> and made legal referrals to the roughly two dozen immigrants who answered the texts. The office didn\u2019t open.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWe basically shut it down,\u201d said Saunders, an Oakland mother of two and veteran activist who belongs to one of a growing number of neighborhood watch-style groups aimed directly at the Trump administration.<\/p>\n Or, as Bay Resistance organizing director Jane Martin put it, \u201cYou can\u2019t implement fascism when everyone comes out and watches.\u201d<\/p>\n Bay Resistance, an umbrella organization for some 190 neighborhood-level resistance groups around the Bay Area, called on its network to disrupt a feared immigration enforcement operation in June 2025, when immigrant families received unusual text messages to show up to an office building in San Francisco.<\/p>\n Manuel Orbegozo\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n Rapid response teams. Community defense networks. Neighborhood action pods. Whatever they call themselves, these friendly neighborhood resistance cells have grown in number and confidence since the winter, when they drove out the federal platoons that outnumbered and outgunned them in Minneapolis. With whistles and smartphones, ordinary residents disrupted enforcement operations and documented the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, turning public sentiment and spurring the dismissals of Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.<\/p>\n San Francisco Chronicle Logo<\/p>\n Make us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n While the Trump administration has paused high-profile raids in blue cities, community defense organizers say they are under no illusions that they\u2019ve won.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n In recent online training sessions, organizers urged volunteers across the U.S. to remain on high alert for immigration enforcement incursions, and recommended using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover proposed detention expansions<\/a>, law enforcement agreements and contracts with private surveillance companies. Despite the lopsided odds\u00a0\u2014 the federal government\u2019s largest police force<\/a> vs. part-time activists and multitasking parents\u00a0\u2014 a cautious optimism has taken hold.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can win this fight,\u201d Jill Garvey, the Chicago-based co-director of States at the Core, which trains front-line groups, said at an April 15 webinar. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have said that a year and a half ago.\u201d<\/p>\n The first year of Trump 2.0 was dominated by a narrative of institutional capitulation\u00a0\u2014 by Congress<\/a>, Big Tech<\/a>, big law firms<\/a>, elite<\/a> universities<\/a> and media conglomerates. Grassroots resistance, manifested in record-size protests<\/a>, was often dismissed as symbolic. On the eve of the \u201cWorkers Over Billionaires\u201d protest<\/a> on Friday, May 1, when organizers hope a wide swath of Americans participate in a nationwide strike and boycott, the narrative is shifting.<\/p>\n Since the November 2024 election, STAC has trained more than 40,000 people across the U.S., Garvey said; 190 neighborhood action pods have formed in six Bay Area counties, Martin said: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. Twenty-five came online in just the past month. While Martin can\u2019t confirm the number of members, she said 8,000 people signed up to join the pods through Bay Resistance and estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 are active.<\/p>\n Movement leaders say they are building something they expect to outlast the current tempest. They describe it as a block-by-block public power infrastructure informed by labor organizing tactics, committed to nonviolence, animated by local priorities and sustained by in-person relationships.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cThey have an authoritarian playbook,\u201d Martin said, referring to the Trump administration\u2019s embrace of Project 2025<\/a>, \u201cbut the movement has a playbook, too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Power in cooperation\u2019<\/p>\n In some ways, it began with a prayer.<\/p>\n On Nov. 16, 2024, progressive coalitions Bay Resistance, California Calls and the Million Voters Project held an open strategy meeting inside a\u00a0100-year-old Oakland church<\/a> with a busted boiler. Hundreds of people attended, including Saunders, whose family had recently moved back after more than a dozen years in Canada.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw a bunch of people that I knew,\u201d Saunders said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Those who wanted to do more than commiserate about the election were organized into neighborhood-level teams. Saunders joined MaxPod, named for the hilly Maxwell Park neighborhood in East Oakland. She quickly noticed that many members had prior activism experience, like her.<\/p>\n In 2007, Saunders was working for the elbow-swinging Oakland muckraker CorpWatch when a\u00a0report she wrote about Barrick Gold<\/a>, the Canadian mining giant, blossomed into \u201ca big passion project of mine,\u201d she said. Saunders traveled to Toronto to organize against Barrick<\/a>, quit her job, took one in Philadelphia \u201cjust so that I could be close enough to Canada to bother\u201d\u00a0Barrick\u00a0and eventually made the move with her family up north, where Saunders organized campaigns in countries pitted by Barrick\u2019s open mining operations.<\/p>\n Following stints in Ontario and Nova Scotia, the family returned to Oakland in August 2024. When one of MaxPod\u2019s leaders had to step back, Saunders, whose husband is a labor organizer, became a co-facilitator.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not one of those people at a protest saying I would be at brunch if Kamala (Harris) was elected,\u201d she said. \u201cI definitely see a need beyond the immediate need for these networks to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n At MaxPod\u2019s first meeting in January 2025, members united around a goal of fighting fascism, then spent the next few months deciding what forms that fight should take.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Building consensus and setting clear goals are good strategies, say movement organizers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t compete with the state\u2019s force,\u201d Gabe Gonzalez, who founded the Chicago-area Protect Rogers Park<\/a> neighborhood defense group<\/a> in\u00a02017<\/a>, said in a March 18 training webinar. \u201cWe have power in cooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n After the gradual start, MaxPod members have conducted ICE patrols at local schools and sites frequented by day laborers, supported<\/a> local<\/a> resolutions<\/a> opposing the Trump administration\u2019s rumored plan<\/a> to turn the Dublin Federal Correctional\u00a0Institution into an immigrant detention center and raised donations for various mutual aid funds as well as a family in Gaza.<\/p>\n When ICE started arresting people from immigration courthouses last year, MaxPod\u2019s members joined an effort at the Concord Immigration Court, accompanying immigrants to their hearings, documenting what happened<\/a> and rallying outside. More recently, on Feb. 7, Saunders said about 400 people attended MaxPod\u2019s \u201cLove Your Neighbor\u201d party at Allendale Park, an effort to train more Oakland residents to report ICE sightings.<\/p>\n \u201cIt can be incredibly awkward to knock on someone\u2019s door and want to start a political conversation,\u201d Saunders said. \u201cBut it\u2019s a lot easier to knock on someone\u2019s door and invite them to a party.\u201d<\/p>\n MaxPod officially has 43 members, though eight to 15 attend most meetings, Saunders said. When interest has swelled beyond the pod\u2019s ability to accommodate it, like when the U.S. Coast Guard base in Alameda saw an influx of federal troops<\/a> in October or amid conflicting<\/a> reports<\/a> of a Super Bowl ICE surge around Santa Clara, Saunders and her co-facilitator have helped establish new pods.<\/p>\n Meetings occur at members\u2019 homes, typically over potluck dishes and with children running about. There are formal agendas and informal bonding, another best-practice hallmark of the suburban activist model under Trump 2.0, leaders say.<\/p>\n Around the region, resistance groups have been involved in other campaigns, lobbying leaders in Alameda County<\/a>, San Francisco and Oakland<\/a> to prohibit ICE from using local government property; opposing ICE detention takeovers of Alcatraz Island<\/a> and Travis Air Force Base<\/a>; organizing boycotts of Target and Home Depot; pressuring PG&E to end its contract with surveillance giant Palantir; and pushing Santa Cruz<\/a> and other California cities<\/a> to cancel contracts with Flock, the Atlanta-based surveillance company whose license-plate scanning technology is used by more than 5,000 policing agencies<\/a> and stored in databases accessible by federal authorities<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cICE can\u2019t function without contractors,\u201d Martin said, echoing a sentiment shared by other advocates.<\/p>\n Jane Martin, organizing director for Bay Resistance, speaks about mass resistance during an October training event at Oakland Technical High School.<\/p>\n Bryan Banducci\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n A number of groups also run regular street patrols at their kids\u2019 schools and areas where immigrant residents might feel scared to walk alone. Maria Moreno, campaign director for workers rights group Jobs with Justice SF, has been involved in training<\/a>\u00a0hundreds of Bay Area residents to do this work.<\/p>\n \u201cThings haven\u2019t been super horrible so far. We\u2019ve been lucky,\u201d she said. \u201cHaving shifts that are quiet is what we want. We don\u2019t want ICE in our communities abducting people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018After the storms\u2019<\/p>\n There aren\u2019t many precedents for this strain of civil resistance, say scholars on authoritarianism.<\/p>\n According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute at Sweden\u2019s University of Gothenburg, the United States in 2025 experienced its biggest democratic backslide in the country\u2019s history, dating all the way back to 1789. The authoritative tilt was so pronounced, V-Dem concluded in its annual assessment<\/a>, that the U.S. almost single-handedly dragged the global democracy score to 1978 levels.<\/p>\n Freedom House, another organization that measures global democratic trends, also found<\/a> the U.S. to be in decline, due to<\/a> \u201cincreasingly extreme assertions of executive authority,\u201d weakening anti-corruption safeguards, and eroding legal protections for immigrants and minorities.<\/p>\n Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of UC Berkeley\u2019s Center for Right-Wing Studies, warned that the U.S. is walking a similar road as pre-Nazi Germany, with some important caveats. He stressed that Germany had only 15 years of representative democracy before the Weimar Republic gave way to Adolf Hitler. And once that happened, there was essentially no internal resistance.<\/p>\n Here, Rosenthal said, Trump can\u2019t even keep Jimmy Kimmel off the air.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. for all its blemishes and shortcomings has had 250 years of liberal democracy,\u201d he said. \u201cThe climb to undo that is much more steep.\u201d<\/p>\n Counterintuitively, the increasing willingness of everyday Americans to gather in one another\u2019s homes and plot against the government may embolden institutions with far more resources to do the same. During the March 24 session of \u201cThe Breakdown,\u201d a webinar series they co-host, Harvard Kennedy School professor Erica Chenoweth said that Congress and courts take their cues from the public.<\/p>\n \u201cLarge-scale shows of discontent and resistance are very important during backsliding episodes,\u201d said Chenoweth, a scholar of political violence and civil resistance. \u201cThe movement is the foundation of the other two institutional domains in which\u00a0pro-democracy gains can be made.\u201d<\/p>\n In an era of increasing economic inequality and resurgent inflation, the work-life-resistance balance isn\u2019t a light lift, Moreno acknowledged.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just doing my best. If there\u2019s a time for me to throw myself at my work, that time is now,\u201d she said. \u201cOh, and I got a pet\u201d: a 7-month-old kitten named Melocoton, Spanish for \u201cpeach.\u201d<\/p>\n Saunders doesn\u2019t expect her pod\u2019s neighborhood patrols to stay uneventful. She talks about a time \u201cafter the storms have passed,\u201d but thinks the real storm is still approaching.<\/p>\n \u201cThe attitude of a lot of people is that it hasn\u2019t hit as hard as it\u2019s going to hit, and we\u2019re prepared for it,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd between now and then, we\u2019re building stronger communities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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