Overview

In November 2025, Border Patrol announced it would be coming to Charlotte, North Carolina. We only had a few days’ notice. Just like in Chicago and Los Angeles, they weren’t coming to “keep the peace.” They came to make us afraid – to trap immigrants in their homes and send a message to cities Trump can’t control.

Charlotte was the first southern city targeted by ICE. Maybe they thought the South would stay quiet. They were wrong. We organized. Thousands attended safety trainings; hundreds led Safe to Work, Safe to School patrols to warn neighbors about ICE. People delivered groceries to families afraid to leave home. Students walked out. Businesses refused to serve ICE agents.

When Border Patrol expanded from Charlotte to Raleigh, so did we, with thousands more people getting involved in the Triangle. Within a week, they left. But our work hasn’t stopped. We know they might come back – our Speaker of the House has even invited them to – but we know we’re ready. We know our community is ready. And that’s what ICE is most scared of. And that’s what we want to share with all of you, too. This is our toolkit on what we learned, what we did, and what we’re doing now.

Tech note: this Google Doc is best viewed on desktop or in the Google Drive app on mobile; otherwise, some links might not open!

Here’s what’s included in this toolkit:

THIS OVERVIEW SECTION

CPB TACTICS

TRAININGS & GUIDES

GEOGRAPHY & ROLES

LEARNING FROM LA & CHICAGO

HERE’S THE TOPLINES

  • Find people & give them ways to get involved
  • Train people
  • Give people roles & ways to plug in - online and in our communities
  • Celebrate, document, and keep building together

FIND PEOPLE

We had already built a list of people who wanted to get involved and engaged in ICE defense, but this moment catapulted it. We used the following ways to find people:

  • In person conversations and relationships
  • Partner groups, organizations, and allies
  • Business owners and workplaces
  • Social media
  • Emails to our lists
  • Paid ads

When we engaged people, we invited them to sign up to get involved, volunteer their time, and attend trainings.

TRAININGS

We ran many training sessions on how to detect and address CBP, alongside trainings to canvass and support businesses, join remote teams, dispatch and other key roles. Materials & guides for them are in the trainings & guides section. Over 1,350 people signed in at a training (many on-street trainings and nightly pop-up trainings at churches had no sign-in).

MESSAGING

We also created messaging for elected officials, business owners and others, and held briefings to get them “singing from the same choir book”. Some of the best examples are visible in testimonials from volunteers, faith leaders and reports like MSNOW, Maddow, NYT, CNN, Guardian, News & Observer, The Assembly.

We also published daily video updates each day, and analysis after they left, in collaboration with other groups and influencers with large followings, who also helped tell the story of US citizens and others that experienced violence.

FROM ICE WATCH TO SAFE PASSAGE TEAMS

In “normal times” our ICE Watch teams are response-based, waiting on a report to our hotline to dispatch volunteers to verify. But in the past, when ICE has “surged” agents to our state, we’ve switched to an “on patrol” status, stationing volunteers across a wide area. We knew this had to be our posture given CBP’s actions in Chicago and Los Angeles. And we knew in order to sidestep the accusations we would inevitably get – that we were somehow impeding law enforcement by helping people get to school – we had to use framing, training techniques and even uniforms that emphasized our volunteers were “crossing guards to a dignified life”, or legal observer crossing guards. Fortunately, we had designed these vests the week before CBP arrived.  

SAFE PASSAGE SHIFTS  / “Las Brigadas Cuidando el Camino”

Hundreds of people joined safe passage team shifts in Charlotte and Raleigh to make sure thousands could get to work and school safely. We tried some overly complicated things at first, but here’s what we found worked best to train people, get them ready, and get them active. “Safety Teams” or “Safe Passage Teams”, translated as Las Brigadas Cuidando el Camino.

The roles:

  • Shift team leaders: we invited community members with more time to trainings in faith institutions, schools, even movie theatres, where hundreds of people packed the buildings. Our sign-up form and deck gave them a link to Signal groups they could join right away based on their region. These leaders did x y, and z.
  • Patrollers/Verifiers: we asked people to commit to certain shifts based on when and where we were seeing ICE activity where they canvassed with others. All communication happened in Signal groups, where people checked in regularly, and where our leaders and dispatchers could help people move to the next right place to go. These volunteers drove streets or canvassed key neighborhoods, reported activity they saw, and responded based on the training.
  • Local Dispatchers / Zone leads: In some places, we had one person stationed in a key location who would offer live patroller training for people who had not attended an in-person training already. Some teams also offered daily virtual trainings, and nightly debriefs for patrol leads, to learn from what had happened that day.  

The instructions:

  • We created this guide, which outlines the process for Safe to School, Safe to Work team volunteers. We reminded people what to do every day. And then they reminded each other!
  • We also encouraged them to do outreach, canvassing businesses and people near where they were stationed

The tech:

  • We used Action Network for sign-up forms
  • We used Signal groups for correspondence, with broadcast groups for assignments and then new groups that were discussion chats for shifts

The schedule:

  • We had shifts for patrols based on ICE activity - 7 AM - 9 AM; 9 AM - 1 PM; 1 PM - 5 PM
  • We had leaders or volunteers who would manage the Signal groups, check in with folks at the top of the day, and then patrollers would check in on what they were seeing
  • We wrapped up the days when activity stopped
  • We debriefed every evening to figure out what was working and not
  • We iterated a lot - we changed our forms, shift scheduling, who was leading which conversations. Everyone threw in, and it was worth it.

You can learn more about our safe passage teams and some of the roles in this zones & signal groups section.

OTHER ESSENTIAL ROLES

Alongside patrols, we had:

  • A social tracking team, where hundreds of people from all over the country tracked reports of ICE on social media and collated a list of verified reports which we kept live on our website thanks to key volunteer leadership. How we built this group is here, and 1-2 volunteers helped manage it to ensure no false reports were uploaded to the site.
  • A remote digital team that supported creating events, forms, sending emails, and building landing pages, not just for us but also for our partners and allies taking action
  • A powerful communications team, working with media, press, and sharing social content. Our movement grew because we were visible, powerful, and strong.

PRIORITIZING LEADERSHIP PATHWAYS, NOT “VETTING”

We knew that we would need thousands of people in order to get hundreds of thousands safe to school and work, and to deter CBP’s violent tactics. We’ve seen some groups “get small” in moments when they are under attack, requiring a high degree of vetting from people who want to volunteer. Instead, we decided to create dozens of new leadership roles for new people, with leadership tests like – will you come to a short training of trainers and then host a training? Will you lead a 6am shift in a parking lot? Will you be our regional training coordinator and lead a team of trainers? Will you be the “gear captain” for a zone and make sure everyone who needs whistles, vests and canvassing materials can get one? Our threat was CBP agents, not infiltrators, and we have lots of practice giving out leadership roles with backups built in – our existing hotline volunteers and ICE Watch verifiers could be infiltrators, but they would be discovered quickly if they, for instance, weren’t responding with their teammate to verify a report.

ROLES IN THE ECOSYSTEM

We didn’t do this work alone. We worked in community and coalition with others. As a Latino base-building organization, we focused on supporting our base and members.

But through our partner organization Make North Carolina Work, we organized allies who wanted to support their immigrant neighbors. We worked with our labor allies at the Union of Southern Service Workers to hold down the Durham and Raleigh-area patrols. We worked deeply with faith institutions across the state - churches opened their doors to us and so many others.

Other key allies who did things include: student organizers who walked out; parents and schools staff who stationed hundreds of lookouts at pickup and dropoff times; food distributors who did mutual aid; attorneys who provided immediate consultations to families in need; elected officials who used their offices to offer support and push back against the CBP’s talking points.

It was essential to center our work in the impacted communities – members of Siembra NC but also other immigrants and people of color – but to leverage the power of other powerful constituencies and groups, especially allies who weren’t as afraid of being stopped. That’s how we win – when we leverage power together.

We also worked with and learned from our friends in other states. People from Chicago joined us and ran trainings. People in other States drove in and supported patrols. We are in community together. And we are stronger together.

Learn more about our national work at Defend and Recruit.

KEEP BUILDING TOGETHER

All of this work is anchored in and built off of our Siembra NC work, focused on Latino powerbuilding. We are rooted in community, and we know that we need to keep building power in our communities: running trainings, working to identify ICE, but also building organizing infrastructure to shift the landscape into the future.

Today’s ICE fights are about meeting the moment and protecting each other, but we have to continue collaborations to win into the future. We’re grateful to be in this community with you.

CBP tactics

HERE IS WHAT IS IN THIS SECTION:

CBP “TARGETING” = RACIAL PROFILING

CBP agents conducted racial profiling-based “snatch and grabs” targeting anyone walking or standing in public. This included people who happened to step outside of their apartment to throw out trash, someone who had been hired to put up Christmas decorations outside a home, people walking out of grocery stores, people walking on sidewalks. All seem to have appeared from a distance as passing the criteria of “someone who might have been born outside the US”. As in Chicago, although Bovino said they were targeting the “worst of the worst” in North Carolina, almost none of those arrested had an arrest record.

MAJOR IMMIGRANT CORRIDORS

Agents appeared to simply drive up and down the major roads where immigrants most often gather, and sometimes simply along major roads not necessarily associated with immigrants, because by day two in an impacted area, most immigrants were sheltering in place.

They would also enter residential areas near those main roads, appearing to look to catch anyone off guard. They temporarily detained and broke the car windows of several US citizens.

You’ll see at OJO Obrero, if you select only Border Patrol incidents, that the incidents appeared to be patterned after “whoever we could find outside”.

VEHICLES: SUVs WITH NO MARKINGS

All of the vehicles used in North Carolina had been transported from Chicago, and so appeared to be rental cars (2024 models or later), all out of state plates.

Chicago organizers have created this list of vehicles that were used during the two-month “Midway Blitz” operation, and these graphics for recognizing vehicles and helicopters.

AGENTS: FACES COVERED, GREEN UNIFORMS WITH PATCHES

CBP agents under Bovino’s command almost always wear green uniforms with Border Patrol patches, with their faces covered.

TARGETING PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW  

CBP agents arrested at least three people in North Carolina who attempted to follow their vehicles.

Trainings & guides

HERE IS WHAT IS IN THIS SECTION:

This section provides training outlines, guides, and toolkits for reference and for you to adapt in your community:

MASS TRAININGS FOR CBP & ICE DETECTION

We ran many training sessions on how to detect and address CBP. Here’s the materials for them:

We learned in the trainings that:

  • Role plays and practice are essential
  • Assigning next steps and roles in trainings makes the patrols possible
  • Having QR codes and sign ups will translate to the next step easily!
  • It’s helpful to give out whistles and vests, ideally that are the same color so people that have received the same training can find each other and coordinate on tactics to create safety

WORKPLACE RIGHTS & FOURTH AMENDMENT WORKPLACES

Fourth Amendment Workplaces are businesses that know their rights and what to look for if ICE shows up. These workplaces are essential to defend workers and our communities. Grow them:

  • Here’s our 4AW Canvass Script to support businesses to know their rights if ICE shows up
  • More information on Fourth Amendment Workplaces are on our website & in the guide you can download here.

PATROL & INCIDENT TRACKING

Here are other key guides we’ve developed or adapted for tracking social media for ICE presence, building signal groups for canvass teams, and building groups to canvass neighborhoods:

Here’s some trainings we used to take people through roles:

Here’s some maps & other resources as templates to build your teams:

Geography & roles

HERE IS WHAT IS IN THIS SECTION:

This section digs into the details on safe passage teams, zones, and the roles we used in those areas. It’s an example and template you can use to adapt for your own community. It includes:

Our goal was to help immigrants get to school and work safely by creating a structure for thousands of people to station themselves across huge geographies. CBP agents spent the first two days traversing Charlotte, which is over 300 square miles, before driving 160 miles to raid a large swath of Raleigh and then Durham, an area over 2,000 square miles.

We had learned from Protect Rogers Park – whose members held two mass trainings for North Carolinians during the operation – and organizations in Los Angeles that the safest neighborhoods were the ones with tight-knit teams that could take responsibility for vulnerable locations, like specific Home Depot parking lots, and for individual school assignment zones.

To accomplish that, we coordinated by role and by geography.

GEOGRAPHY

Regions – Our teams – from hotline dispatch, to safe passage teams, to school-based teams – coordinated within large regions, like the Charlotte area, the Raleigh area, etc.  

Zones – Prior to CBP’s arrival we had been working on a plan with Charlotte volunteers for a zone-based safe passage team system, given that most early-morning ICE arrests in 2025 occur in East Charlotte. South Charlotte and North Charlotte teams formed quickly as well, and in the Triangle, dispatch leads in three broad regions formed 13 zone teams that held daily in-person trainings, debrief calls, etc. These zones were roughly the size of a zipcode – several neighborhoods together.

Schools – In some neighborhoods in Charlotte and the Triangle hundreds of parents and schools staff coordinated to have a presence at school pickup and dropoff each day, much as neighborhoods in Chicago and Los Angeles have done.

SAFE PASSAGE TEAM ROLES

Regional Dispatch Coordinators

  • Responsible for a region (like the Charlotte area)
  • Recruits and supports Local Dispatchers to lead specific zones and zone shifts
  • Creates zone Signal groups (e.g. ‘East Charlotte’)
  • Manages All-Leads [REGION] Signal chat
  • Confirm verified reports back to hotline/OJO reporting structure
  • Hosts debriefs and trainings for Local Dispatchers

Local Dispatchers

  • Convenes other zone leads to decide where people should be stationed across the geography for fastest response times towards immigrant neighborhoods and commercial areas
  • Responsible for a zone and making sure volunteers are available to patrol, especially early morning hours
  • Ensure there are volunteers on shift for morning and afternoon in your zone.
  • Host in-person orientation if possible at the same time and location each day, add those people to zone dispatch Signal chat
  • Or participate in daily regional virtual training, adding people who attend from your zone
  • Makes sure Hotline reports get verified
  • Checks [Region] Broadcast Signal chat
  • Identifies appropriate sub-region to post reports (e.g., the Guilford or Forsyth chat if in the Triad, or East Charlotte vs. South Charlotte if in Greater Charlotte)
  • Support volunteers to confidently verify reports
  •  Help them walk up to potential law enforcement to ask questions and to use their training to Report, Document, Deter
  • Follow-up with volunteers to confirm the outcome of a dispatch request and communicate verified reports to Verification Result chat
  • Provide support & encouragement
  • Answers questions in the zone signal groups
  • identify new  leads within their region to be trained
  • Builds and protects team culture:
  • Celebrate successes, encourage people trying new things
  • Give feedback to any volunteers using communication channels incorrectly, and take action to limit their access if they cannot respect our protocols  
  • Thinking about the long-term infrastructure that we are building - identifying leaders in your zone and giving them assignments, figuring out when your zone is ready to be split into smaller zones, making sure systems are being set-up to create better coordination and communication, reduce burnout, etc.
  • Preparing your team for the serious task ahead - making sure that your zone is doing consistent orientation throughout the day at one chosen location, making sure your public Signal chat is receiving reminders about the next orientation, making sure that only people who have received orientation are added to the Signal chat for dispatch assignments, making sure that your team understands the risks that they are taking on.
  • Identifying location assignments during slow periods - when there are no specific requests, teams should be in small groups chilling at locations where CBP is more likely to go, and using the canvass handouts.

SIGNAL COMMUNICATION

  • Public zone Signal chat - for admin-only announcements of in-person orientations
  • Regional Dispatch chat – for hotline team to broadcast verification requests to either one small zone or one large region
  • Verification Result chat – for reporting back to hotline team
  • Zone dispatch discussion Signal chat - for volunteer assignments from Zone Leads and Coordinators, for internal communication, for verification reports

Goals of the in-person orientations:

  • Get to know your team members - this will help with security as well leader identification. Find out who has been trained (maybe they lead future orientations), who has deep relationships in the community (maybe they build out the team), who has knowledge of the zone (maybe they help id assignment locations).
  • Make sure your team understands their risk, their role, and has the info needed to do that role sufficiently.
  • Make sure your team is focused on de-escalation, clear about not sharing unverified reports, and understands the negative impact that an undisciplined safety patrol could have on the immigrant community.
  • Consider scheduling a team debrief for the end of the day that you can announce at orientations.

STEP BY STEP PROCESS FROM A NEW VOLUNTEER PERSPECTIVE

Step

Action

Who is responsible for this?

Step 1

A potential volunteer joins a safety patrol zone public signal group

Volunteer

Step 2

Volunteer receives an invitation to an upcoming in-person orientation in the public Signal group

Zone Leads

Step 3

Volunteers attend an in-person orientation and are then added to the zone's dispatch signal group

Zone Leads

Step 4

During slow times, volunteer receives assignments (either over the dispatch group or in-person) to join a group of volunteers to be stationed at a high risk location to provide a grounding presence and sense of safety for immigrant community and to discourage CBP from showing up

Zone Leads

Step 5

Dispatch Coordination team monitors reports coming in from hotlines, Facebook, Signal, and other sources, identifies which zone the report is coming from, and puts the info in the correct dispatch group.

Dispatch Coordinator

Step 6

Volunteers receive assignments in the dispatch group to go verify the report or document the incident. Assignments should note how many people are needed - 4 is a safe number - and remind people that we only need that number to go.

Dispatch Coordinator

Step 7

Volunteer shares details about incidents/verified reports to zone leads and dispatch coordinators in the dispatch group

-- Volunteers also report active CBP/ICE activity to Siembra's hotline

Volunteer

Step 8

Dispatch Coordination shares the details from the volunteer with Siembra staff so they can post verified sightings on ojonc and other communication channels with immigrant community

Dispatch Coordinator

Learning from LA & Chicago

All year we have learned from communities in Massachusetts, California, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois and other states that have experienced more varying types of enforcement – from local and state police to regional ICE offices with dramatically different tactics than those used by agents in North Carolina.

Memo Torres and LA Taco have helped more Californians get to school and work safely by exposing the week-to-week variations in enforcement tactics by ICE and CBP in Los Angeles, principally through the Daily Memo posts and videos.  

In Memo’s recent interview with Chris Hayes, he explains how CBP and ICE agents have evolved their enforcement tactics to respond to the greater effectiveness of activist safety teams and how they played out differently in Chicago’s more narrow residential streets. Here’s an excerpt:

Now the last couple weeks, it's over 100, 105, 110. So are they doing it? Are they doing it more efficiently, but less? Like showily? Yeah, yeah. So you know, where I say where Bovino goes, the show goes, okay, he loves to have the cameras on him.

He loves to create chaos like that. That's his priority over there. That's his job is to create this scene of lawlessness so that Trump can have his talking points and create this mass scene of chaos throwing tear gas, throwing flashbangs, pepper bullets.

That's all Bovino. That's all of that. Now, not to say that agents here in Los Angeles aren't as violent, but the situation is different.

Now, I tell people in Los Angeles, this all happened when Bovino was here for the first month or two. Los Angeles was chaos just like you were seeing in Chicago. Now there's some differences, right? Chicago's communities are a little tighter.

The streets are smaller. They're more like you got a little village while Los Angeles is more spread out. You know, when you raid a Home Depot, they're on a major boulevard by your freeway so they can get in, get out.

You're not really attacking the communities per se. You're attacking these centers where these car washes are. You know, so you got to think of the differences in the geography and why it appears different than Chicago than it does in Los Angeles.

You also got to remember that Los Angeles is a few months ahead of the raids. We were the first ones. We were the testing ground.

So everything Bovino's doing in Chicago, he did here. And so now that he's gone, the strategies have changed. And with the rapid responders who are doing the real work out on the streets, the community watch members and the rapid response groups following Border Patrol, keeping tabs on their locations, warning the community when they are sighted somewhere, like letting the car washes know.

There's been this cat and mouse game of rapid responders alerting people and foiling these raids when Border Patrol shows up. And Border Patrol getting frustrated and just going down the street and taking somebody who's on a bike or whoever because they just need to get somebody. It's like it's almost like they have they can't go back without having a quota.

… And so now what you're seeing is like there's been some back and forth between strategies between Border Patrol and rapid responders. It's cat and mouse game, like a chess match almost.

And so the recent most newest strategy we're seeing from Border Patrol is that now they're instead of going sporadically and raiding different parts of Los Angeles, like they'll be in there'll be 10, 12 sightings and they took maybe 10, 12 people.

Instead of doing that, they're going and focusing all their energy in like one little community, one little hub and just going through the streets and grabbing people off the streets, grabbing the street vendors, the daytime street vendors. So now their numbers are like in a single day we're seeing 20 to 30 people getting taken instead of 10, which is in part because now they know that if you're trying to do the car wash, if they're trying to home depots, that the rapid responders are ahead of them. This way, if they're getting people off the street, there's nobody to warn the people on the street.