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Florida is ramping up its anti-immigration efforts, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) proudly proclaiming his intention to make the state the “tip of the spear” when it comes to detaining and deporting migrants. Notices offering Florida-based positions for Customs and Border Protection Officers are popping up on job sites like Indeed. Meanwhile, deep in the Everglades, “Alligator Alcatraz” is well underway, with 2,000 detainees suffering in grim conditions with little food or water or bedding or bathing facilities. 

Metaphorically, Florida right now truly is a swamp. And the governor and his team are trying to ram through another detention center, just an hour from where I live, with very little attention from the national media. So the majority of my small things this week have to do with preventing this inhumane overreach. 

Below you’ll find seven bolded bullet points that add up to a kind of blueprint for how to give your activism a greater and more lasting impact. And under each bullet point, there’s a paragraph showing how I followed this blueprint in working with other activists to derail DeSantis’s plan to build another cruel immigrant detention center in Florida.

       1. Continue to hone your skills.

In order to more effectively contribute my services to the League of Women Voters (LWV), the group I’ve chosen to work with on a regular basis, I needed to understand the backend machinery of their website.

I finished my second intense training last week and feel confident I can now update the site’s home page and other anchor pages with events, action items, voter initiatives, articles, and more. I’m getting a handle on images, slideshows, and the specific set of rules for each category. After this session, I should be up and running in my new role.

At this point in the resistance, if you haven’t found a group to contribute your skills to regularly, you should definitely start looking for one to volunteer with. You’ll see that it makes doing small things easier, too.

       2. Give your voice in community support.

As word began to spread about a second immigration detention camp to be located near the small city of Starke, FL, less than an hour from my home, the advocacy group North Central Florida Indivisible and several Jacksonville organizations sprang into action. 

Their first step was to garner support from the community. I filled out this Google form in opposition to the camp. It took very little effort on my part, but for the organizers, more people and groups signing on allowed them to report higher numbers to the media. And, as we’re learning, activism works better the more media coverage it attracts.

The letter starts like this: “We, the undersigned community members, organizations, and advocates, write to express our firm and unequivocal objection to the construction of an immigrant internment center at Camp Blanding, Starke, Florida.”

Of course, there’s no way one person alone can take on the entire ICE machine nationwide. But I can absolutely show up over and over against Camp Blanding and try to stop that one concentration camp from existing. And if all of us do something similar where we live, then together we can fight this tragedy in its entirety. That’s the very essence of the “one small thing” approach.

       3. Create avenues for others to help.

Throughout the summer and beyond, the gun safety committee and the voter rights committee at the League of Women Voters are working together to set up information tables at various events in the county. I updated the LWV website to alert people about several of these events. We let them know when and where volunteers are needed. 

By publicizing the dates, times, and locations weeks in advance, it’s a lot easier for interested folks to make room for this vital resistance work in their busy schedules. And each person who volunteers to staff a table can influence many more people. 

       4. Use your skills to further specific causes.

After my last press release writing debacle, you might assume I’d put down my pen, but you would be wrong. When we make a mistake, we correct it and we keep going. If you recall, I met with the leaders involved and we straightened everything out, so that this time, when they needed a press release, they came to me officially to help craft one.

They had made a good start, and I punched up the language and got rid of the activist stuff that I knew the media wouldn’t care about. When releasing messages like this, it’s very important to keep the focus on why the event will make a good story. There’s no place for proselytizing in a press release. That’s not its function. The media and the general public are very different audiences.

Headlined “Rally on Saturday to stop ICE prison at Camp Blanding,” the release gave the location and expected attendance up top, then used the info gathered from the Google form we’d all filled out — more than 500 community members and 74 faith organizations — to show this was truly a community-wide initiative, not just a few loud people. With the Jacksonville Immigrant Alliance and other aligned groups working in solidarity, the rally pulled hundreds of people to the streets, and media from both Gainesville and Jacksonville covered it.

       5. Use your groups to amplify that message.

Because of my volunteer work with the League of Women Voters, I could get that message out to even more people. We hit the media, the activists hit the groups they’re in touch with, and I had a canvas to spread the word to every resident who has signed up for the LWV newsletter and website news during the many, many years the League has been a solid presence in our community. 

I updated the website with an action alert about the Camp Blanding protest, giving the salient details in a brief paragraph that readers could digest over breakfast if they wanted. Interestingly, the League’s whole ethos depends on nonpartisan politics. After all, human rights is a nonpartisan issue.

       6. Attend organizer trainings.

As we come together to fight, we must be mindful of the shared (and not necessarily good) history we bring to the table. As a straight, white woman, it’s important for me to stand up for those who have reason to fear for their lives, to try to understand the harsh conditions of living in a fascist state they face every day. But in amplifying their voices and working to protect them, I must not center my voice. So many times, people of privilege, like myself, do this without even realizing it. To work against that instinct, I look to educate myself, particularly when it comes to organizing.

I attended a Zoom conference led by women of color put on by the Catalyst Project. They work to dismantle white supremacy through intersectionality. This conference was an opportunity to learn from Black organizers. Below are my notes:

COVID: According to Cat Brooks, the co-founder and executive director of Anti-Police Terror Project, COVID-19 impacted the left’s ability to organize by keeping everyone home. Not only did we stop meeting together, but we also became accustomed to using social media for our activism, which so often leads to performative gestures or slacktivism. However, she noted that the right did not stop meeting in person, and, in fact, took advantage of the COVID-19 restrictions that they were flouting to better solidify their game plans. And that’s what we are up against now. We’ve got to catch up. We’ve got to bridge to anyone who might be able to hear our message.

“We need to meet people where they are at, and not where our college degrees say that they should be,” Brooks said.

Media Resources: Ash-Lee Henderson was the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director at Highlander Research & Education Center. She recommended Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast and Bradley W. Hart’s Star-Spangled Fascism.

Recent History: Khury Petersen-Smith is the co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. He connected what we are dealing with now back to 9/11 and the so-called “global war on terror.” He explained that the slogan “United We Stand” was not just about standing against foreign terrorism but about quashing growing Black liberation movements in the ’90s. And that the administration now is using techniques and facilities that were created for the war on terror.

Strengths: There is not one thing that is going to save us. We all have to work together. No more in-fighting. “We don’t have to concede this moment to going back to some status quo, some normalcy, which is literally impossible,” Henderson said. “We can’t go back to neo-liberalism. … The US as we know it, is dead.”

“We have to inhale what this moment is, and we have to give ourselves permission to take ourselves as seriously as they take us,” Brooks said.

We need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the country to stop this. So let’s do it.

        7. Show up and hit the streets.

Back at Camp Blanding: It was 103 F when we all began parking our cars along a stretch of county highway. Miles and miles of vehicles all pulled off onto the wild Florida grasses, and folks of all ages, races, and beliefs tramped forward from their cars to the edge of the street, waving their signs and shouting at the gates of Camp Blanding, while a couple of guards stared at us through the bars.

The organizers had parking guides to help people get as close as possible to the site and not get run over, shuttles for those who had to park farther away, ample water and first aid, and many shade tents. Despite the brutal sun, no one got sick or injured. An array of speakers said their piece about detention camps in general and Camp Blanding in particular, including a woman veteran who had spent time at the facility for military training. For hours, hundreds of people stood and marched and sang and chanted.

Because of the efforts beforehand, dozens of news stories ran in the state — not just Gainesville and Jacksonville — but all the way to Tampa. I wish I could tell you that our protest action stopped the construction of an immigrant detention center at Camp Blanding in its tracks. But the Florida authorities continue to move forward with this atrocity. Of course, we can’t expect a single protest to turn the tide. We must be prepared not for one or two battles but for a sustained campaign against the forces of oppression

Now that you know about Camp Blanding, my hope is that you contact your own legislators and demand an end to that grim construction.

One thing is clear: We will not give up. Nations have come back from darker days than this. To stem the tide of fascism, we have to start at the level of the individual. Working together, we have to be ready to help any and all persons being persecuted. It’s going to be a long haul before this gets better. We can do it.

Past weeks of “One Small Thing” can be found here.