{ "article": { "title" : "Undocumented Rights: 12 Key Points for Rapid Response & Preparedness", "author" : "Yassa Almokhamad-Sarkisian", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/know-your-rights-a-resource-for-undocumented-folx", "date" : "2025-03-21 17:01:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_3_10_ICE_1.png", "excerpt" : "", "content" : " Do Not Open the DoorIf ICE agents knock, do not open the door unless they slide a judicial warrant under it. Stay Silent & Do Not Answer QuestionsYou have the right to remain silent. Do not discuss your birthplace, immigration status, or entry into the U.S. Do Not Sign AnythingNever sign any documents without speaking to a lawyer. Signing could lead to immediate deportation. Ask If You Are Free to LeaveIf stopped outside your home, ask if you are free to go. If they say yes, leave calmly. Carry Safe IdentificationIf undocumented, carry a state ID, municipal ID, or driver’s license that does not reveal your immigration status. Do not carry false documents or any papers showing your country of origin. Carry a Red CardUse a Red Card to assert your rights. Slide it under the door or hand it to officers if approached. Know Your Right to a LawyerYou have the right to a lawyer and a phone call. Do not answer questions without legal counsel. Document & Report ICE ActivityIf safe, record videos, take photos, and note badge numbers. Report ICE raids to 1-844-363-1423 or text 877877. Be Aware of ICE TacticsICE often conducts raids (targeting workplaces and communities) and targeted arrests (seeking specific individuals). They may also arrest others nearby (collateral arrests). Exercise Your Fourth & Fifth Amendment Rights Fourth Amendment: Protects against unlawful searches. ICE cannot enter without a valid warrant. Fifth Amendment: Protects your right to remain silent. Refuse to answer questions. Know Your Rights If Stopped in a Car If stopped by local police, the driver must show their license, registration, and insurance. If stopped by ICE, both drivers and passengers can stay silent and ask if they are free to leave. Prepare for Immigration Proceedings Know your rights: remain silent, refuse to sign anything, and request a lawyer. Understand protections like the Truth Act and CA Values Act (in California). Ensure your family knows how to respond if ICE arrives. " } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Digital Currents, Living Worlds: Ecological Resistance in a Networked Age", "author" : "Taguhi Torosyan", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/digital-currents-living-worlds", "date" : "2026-01-12 12:11:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/W-050-2400x1350.jpg", "excerpt" : "I am writing this from Armenia, a place where ecological vulnerability is not abstract. It is visible in the scarred hillsides of mining towns, in rivers that run cloudy after rain, in the slow anxiety of communities living near tailings and dust. I have stood at the edges of these landscapes and felt the weight of their histories of extraction, dispossession, and the quiet persistence of people who continue to live beside damaged land.", "content" : "I am writing this from Armenia, a place where ecological vulnerability is not abstract. It is visible in the scarred hillsides of mining towns, in rivers that run cloudy after rain, in the slow anxiety of communities living near tailings and dust. I have stood at the edges of these landscapes and felt the weight of their histories of extraction, dispossession, and the quiet persistence of people who continue to live beside damaged land.But most days, my first encounter with ecological crisis does not come from the ground beneath my feet. It arrives through a screen: a satellite image of wildfire smoke drifting across continents, a video from India showing the water level has dropped to the bottom of a well, or footage of logging in the Amazon, shared by someone I will never meet.Living between these two realities, the wounded places I know intimately and the global emergencies I witness digitally, is the tension that brought me to this piece. Because the truth is, digital culture is both a tool for ecological resistance and a force that deepens ecological harm. It has become a “master’s tool,” and reclaiming it is an imperative that doesn’t guarantee, or rather, most probably won’t dismantle the master’s house. But it is worth trying, as humanity’s evolution has gone hand in hand with the technology it has developed.  We cannot choose one side. We live, work, ad fight inside the contradiction.We live in a moment when crises do not occur one after another, but all at once, overlapping and accelerating each other. Climate instability, resource depletion, and the relentless pace of digital technologies merge into a single, planetary weather system. Speaking about the environment today means speaking also about satellites, servers, lithium mines, data centres, as well as about rivers and forests. Nature has entered the circuits; the digital has dissolved into our sense of the living world. And our screens bring these worlds together.They overflow with distress signals: drone footage of disappearing forests, satellite maps of smoke, TikToks documenting water shortages in India or waste-polluted rivers in Armenia. These images shape the emotional terrain in which ecological resistance takes place. They can ignite urgency or, through sheer repetition, dull our senses. They can build solidarity or turn catastrophe into spectacle. Digital culture becomes both a witness and participant in the crisis it reveals.And yet inside these very circuits, resistance is growing. Communities have learned to use digital tools not only to consume information but to document harm, demand accountability, and gather evidence for ecological truth-telling: Indigenous forest defenders in Brazil fly drones over illegally logged territories; Kenyan organizers in the Save Lamu movement use mapping apps and citizen media to track the expansion of destructive megaprojects. In Armenia,  environmental groups monitor toxic runoff, trace water contamination and use digital archives to counter official narratives.  In these moments, technology becomes something else: a way to make visible what would otherwise be hidden. A terrain of ecological witnessing.Artists and researchers contribute their own counter-visions. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s We Survive You (2021) asserts Indigenous futurity in the present tense, refusing narratives of disappearance. Krista Kim’s Mars House (2021) transforms virtual space into an experiment in how we might inhabit the planet with more intention. Forensic Architecture uses open-source digital tools to track environmental violence and state neglect, proving that digital evidence can support public truth rather than state surveillance.But there is another truth: the very infrastructure enabling this resistance are themselves deeply entangled in extraction. The “cloud,” despite its name, is a physical landscape of water, minerals, and energy. The cobalt in our phones comes from mines in the Congo; the lithium in batteries is drawn from Chile’s salt flats; the rare earths enabling our screens are pulled from the soils of Mongolia and China. Data centers in Ireland, Arizona and the Netherlands draw millions of litres of water from fragile ecosystems. As Kate Crawford reminds us in Atlas of AI, every digital gesture, every upload, every click has a material footprint. Ecological resistance cannot treat the digital as immaterial.They are made of land.\They are made of harm.This is the contradiction at the heart of our moment: the digital is both weapon and wound.These works embody what Demos calls “radical futurisms”, counter-imaginaries rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Black radical traditions, abolitionist aesthetics, and multispecies solidarity. They reject the colonial timelines of “progress” and instead imagine futures braided with justice-to-come.Another tension lies in how we experience time. Ecological harm unfolds slowly: soil thins over years, aquifers drop quietly, species vanish without spectacle. These “slow violence,” in Rob Nixon terms, rarely fit the pace of digital media. Platforms reward the urgent, the dramatic, the instantly shareable. Long-term crises, the ones shaping our future, struggle for attention in a world built to forget. T. J. Demos describes this mismatch as chronopolitics: the politics of time and the unequal access to futures shaped by it.In other words, the digital world is built for speed; the ecological world is built for duration. Living inside this gap requires new forms of attention.This is where alternative media and artistic practices matter. When algorithms reward only what is new, they generate opportunities to witness processes that unfold over decades. They also offer a path to imagine ecological futures on platforms designed to erase duration.Indigenous digital cartographies like Native Land Digital disrupt colonial mappings by returning story and memory to place. Citizen-sensing projects measure air and water quality through community-built technologies. Climate archives such as Data Refuge preserve vulnerable environmental datasets at risk of political erasure. Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams reimagines ecological data as a sensory landscape, allowing us to feel patterns we cannot see.These practices cultivate attention, memory, and duration, qualities that ecological survival depends on. They model what Demos describes abolitionist aesthetics: ways of seeing that dismantle extractive habits and replace them with care, kinship, and imagination.Through these entanglements, a new political subject emerges, whose ecological awareness is shaped by both lived experience and digital meditation. We feel climate change through heatwaves and disappearing rivers, but also through satellite maps and algorithmic feeds. We understand extractivism not only through local wounds but through the vast ecological webs we encounter online. This hybrid experience shapes our politics, our emotional life, and our collective imagination. And imagination is where the stakes feel most urgent to me. The future is not only a scientific or environmental problem. It is also a narrative problem, a question of what stories we allow ourselves to believe. Ecological resistance today is not one but many: unfolding across scales: rivers and servers, wetlands and websites, forest guardians and citizen sensors, Indigenous futurisms and open-source archives. These are not separate struggles, but a constellation held together by the desire to keep the world alive.The storms ahead—literal and metaphorical—will demand alliances that cross borders, disciplines, and species. To write about these entanglements now is to insist that another future is still possible, even as the present narrows. It is to claim that the contradictions of the digital age are not reasons for despair, but starting points for deeper forms of responsibility.A future where attention becomes a form of care.\Where data becomes a commons.\Where technology serves stewardship rather than extraction.\Where our stories and our ecosystems learn to breathe together once more—\In the same circuits, under the same sky, on the same fragile planet." } , { "title" : "Scholasticide in Gaza: On the Systematic Destruction of Palestinian Education", "author" : "Jwan Zreiq", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/scholasticide-in-gaza", "date" : "2026-01-07 12:24:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/gaza-children-yahya-ht-jt-241003_1727999853116_hpEmbed_16x9.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "Gaza graduated its students in mid-November. In caps and gowns, students walked through the ruins, holding diplomas for an education they fought with their lives to keep alive. This is what resistance looks like when a society is being targeted for erasure.What Israel’s assault sought to destroy, the more than 97 percent of schools damaged or destroyed and all twelve universities reduced to rubble—Palestinians are rebuilding with their hands, their voices, and their refusal to simply disappear. Human rights experts raised the alarm back in April 2024, warning that Israel’s pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students constitutes the intentional obliteration of the Palestinian education system. The term for this deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure is scholasticide: the systematic annihilation of education, the targeting of knowledge itself, of the capacity for a people to transmit their history and culture, and hence, their future. But Gaza, with one of the highest literacy rates in the world (97.7%), is answering erasure with something Israel cannot destroy with bombs: knowledge.The pursuit of knowledge has always been woven into the fabric of Palestinian identity, a form of resistance in itself, a way of asserting presence and possibility in the face of occupation and siege. Many Palestinians, including us in the diaspora, believe everything in life could be taken from us, all except for our education and knowledge.Teaching Against ErasureEleven-year-old Warda Radwan, who like many children and young folks in Gaza has lost two years of schooling, said simply that she was looking forward to returning to her learning routine. But what is she returning to, and how long can an education system last among ruins? Well, she is not waiting for an answer. Neither are the teachers holding classes in tents, the students organizing study circles in displacement camps, or the educators broadcasting lessons through whatever signal survives. “We built these universities from tents,” Gaza-based academics wrote in a letter last year. “And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.” This is what teaching and learning against erasure looks like, and it is happening now.Teaching against erasure lives in the determined will of people to invent when everything familiar has been taken from them. It lives in Anwar, a university lecturer who goes tent to tent in displacement camps, gathering volunteer teachers, convincing families to offer their shelters on rotation so children have somewhere to learn. It looks like teachers showing up without salaries, printing worksheets at their own expense, because the alternative of doing nothing is unthinkable.Resilience, in this landscape, becomes something almost elemental. It looks like Ikram Talaat Ahmed, the 29-year-old English teacher who lost everything when Israeli forces bombed Bureij camp—her home, her educational center and her job. Four of her colleagues were killed. Still, she turned her family’s displacement tent into a school for 200 children. “My resistance to the occupation is through education,” she says.Community, under genocide, looks different. Displaced families vacating their shelter rooms three times a week so children can sit and learn. Teachers writing lessons on tent walls. One teacher described turning her tent into a space of healing—using drama, storytelling, weaving humanity into the wreckage. “These are acts of resistance,” she wrote. “But for how long?”To learn under these conditions is an act of refusal. A refusal to be erased from both history and the future, a refusal to let the occupation define what is possible.Colonialism Against EducationColonizers have always understood that education is dangerous. And the colonized have always found ways to keep learning anyway.When South Africa’s Bantu Education Act sought to limit Black children to menial labor, communities organized. Parents withdrew their children from government schools in the 1955 boycott, and activists formed “cultural clubs”—informal schools that operated illegally because unregistered education was banned. Buses collected children each morning and took them to learn in open fields, on the veld, taught by volunteers. The clubs were eventually crushed, but the resistance they seeded erupted again in 1976 when Soweto students rose against the system, and again in the 1980s when the People’s Education movement built hundreds of alternative educational organizations, smuggling banned copies of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and training teachers for a post-apartheid future they insisted on creating.Indigenous children in North America, forced into boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” resisted in quieter but no less stubborn ways. Students spoke their languages in secret, giving teachers derogatory nicknames in languages the authorities couldn’t understand, mocking the system while keeping alive the very thing it sought to eradicate. They ran away, repeatedly, even when forcibly returned. They used Plains Sign Talk, a shared sign language, to communicate across tribal lines when English was the only permitted tongue. What the schools meant to sever, students wove back together. The pan-Indian solidarity movements of the twentieth century trace their roots to the intertribal communities built in those very institutions meant to destroy them.The educated Palestinian body has never been safe. To read, to teach, even the smallest act of passing a book from hand to hand has carried severe consequences under Israeli occupation. This has always been an act of defiance in the colonizer’s eyes. Israel has known this since 1948—libraries and archives looted during the Nakba, their pages scattered like the displaced, as if knowledge itself carried contagion.Settler colonialism has always operated through elimination of not only the people, but also of the systems that allow a people to continue. Land and learning are taken together. This is why scholasticide cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. The Genocide Convention speaks of deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy a group’s existence. Leveling every university, killing hundreds of educators, and burning archives and dissertations. Attacking them is a deliberate attack on the infrastructure of erasure.Sumud Made MaterialSumud—steadfastness—has never wavered. In late November 2025, students walked back into the Islamic University of Gaza for the first time in two years. Medical students, nursing students filing into classrooms that only survived because they cleared the debris and said, we start here. Four thousand students graduated through remote learning during the war. Now the university is enrolling new students in person, coordinating a phased return with the Ministry of Education. “Today is a historic day,” the university president, Asaad Yousef Asaad, said. “We are returning to education despite the tragedy and cruelty left behind by the genocide.”Just weeks later, in December 2025, another ceremony unfolded in front of the destroyed facade of al-Shifa Medical Complex. 168 Palestinian doctors, calling themselves the “Humanity Cohort,” graduated and received their Palestinian Board certifications amidst the rubble of what was once Gaza’s largest hospital. These healers were trained during and inside the genocide itself, becoming doctors by treating the very destruction that sought to ensure there would be no doctors left. Israel sought to destroy Palestine’s human capital throughout its attacks on healthcare facilities and means of medical education and training. Yet, the Humanity Cohort graduating even amongst ruins demonstrated what Palestinian Sumud looks like in practice: the active refusal to let genocide determine who gets to exist, learn, or heal.The genocide after October 2023 was not the first attack on the pillars of what makes up Palestinian society, and Palestinians have resisted scholasticide before with schools built in refugee camps, to universities that held their first lectures in tents to literacy rates that defied the 18 years of blockade and siege. Palestinians have rebuilt their schools from nothing before, and will do so again with the stubborn insistence that a future exists because they are still there, because they themselves refuse to disappear." } , { "title" : "Mamdani & The Era of Possibilities", "author" : "Collis Browne, Céline Semaan, EIP Editors", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/mamdani-and-the-era-of-possibilities", "date" : "2026-01-01 12:25:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/zohran-inauguration-1.jpg", "excerpt" : " What wins elections? Laser focus on challenging the brutal economic oppression that defines our global reality.", "content" : " What wins elections? Laser focus on challenging the brutal economic oppression that defines our global reality.There is an air of undeniable hope. No matter how hard the knee-jerk catastrophic thinking might try to override with doubt, the moment is hopeful. This is proof of collective power. No matter what comes of it, we are already in a winning moment, because the people of New York city have toppled a dynasty built on greed and corruption. The entire world was inspired by this moment that was made possible by everyday people rallying together. That is how monopoly gets interrupted by people power. It’s not rocket science or AI, it’s sweat, effort, and in person collaboration.Let’s remember why this landslide engagement across political divides, why this excitement from communities and demographics who have never voted, and why this worldwide inspiration from a local election: it is a direct response to Mamdani’s laser focus on challenging the brutal economic oppression that defines our global reality.That is what wins elections; that is what inspires and unites the majority across age, ethnicity, race, and all other factors. Speaking the truth of the crushing economic reality that we live under.So now, resist the urge to follow the media’s double edge sword to fetishize and make individualized mythologies around Mamdani, his wife, the personal and aesthetic choices they are making. But continue to see them simply as people, continue to join forces with them and to remain educated, informed and most importantly not in silo but in community. Realize that we need thousands more like him who have decided that they can make a better mayor than these corrupt relics of the antiquated self-destructive past, and we need millions to always raise them up against those colluding with oligarchic corruption. And when the inevitable “fall from grace” comes, when the “media darling” moment wants to swing the other way and vilify him, resist the urge to jump on and make him any more important than but one human who wanted to make a difference in a dehumanizing system — focus on the system.Resist the urge to join in a culture war, to focus on religion or lifestyle or taste or how we spend our time as non-billionaires, and remain focused on what we can all be doing daily to gather power away from the centers of wealth and exploitation.Resist the urge to isolate in ideals, instead join the messy moment of change by being an active participant in the political spaces you wish existed.The moment calls for more action. This year, 2026, begins a new cycle filled with possibilities and people power. The moment is you. It is now. Continue to be present, be active, and take your place in making the future possible. Being an active part of your world is the antidote to the overwhelming feeling of disempowerment. The ways in which we rise, is through verbs and action. Excited to build with you all internationally and locally here in New York City. Our city." } ] }