Freedom Trainers

A SAMPLE FIRST National Guard Community Meeting

Here’s a 1-hour meeting to help you ground if the National Guard is about to come. It’s adapted from some of our colleagues in Memphis. This is an example of an open partially-vetted coalition meeting. Adjust the design accordingly.

Goals

Name the threat: What does the National Guard coming mean?
Get on the same page: All share what we know about National Guard coming and what are different groups planning to do
Create some plans: Figure out what we can do across orgs and how we can help each other

Agenda

Welcome and Overview

CORNERS

Invite people to gather in one of the corners of the room that most aligns with the emotion you’re feeling right now. Meet with others in this space to share what it’s like being here.

(Corner 1) Fear/Anxiety
(Corner 2) Anger
(Corner 3) Stoic/Shut-down/No feeling
(Corner 4) Sadness/Confusion
(Middle of Room) Mixed/Other Feelings (Happy, Indifferent, etc)

WELCOMING

Share goals and why this space

Set some expectations for this space:

This is not a reactionary response to the National Guard. We want to be proactive
Be direct about our goal is to figure out how we can work together
Intersectionality
Longer-term vision is required — not just dealing with this one move.

Set agreements — begin with some suggested baseline agreements

Respect people’s time
Make space / take space
We’re here to find alingment for the long haul
Being mindful of who is most directly impacted
Be willing to call in, be willing to be called in — conflict can be generative
Culture of accountability, practicing right relationship

INTRODUCTIONS

Give everyone a chance to introduce themselves, org they are with, and what they are most worried about or what threats they are tracking with the national guard coming.

WHAT DO WE KNOW / NOT KNOW

If comfortable, a facilitator could keep a basic chart on “things we know” and “things we don’t know.” But basically give a chance for people to share updates about what is known, rumored, and unknown.

This is a good time to invite stories from other places, too — potentially presenters from LA, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, elsewhere that has experienced National Guard. A few lessons are written up here: https://freedomtrainers.net/so-the-national-guard-is-or-might-be-coming-to-your-city/

For example:

Many people in this room already have so much clarity about what’s happening and why. And so we want to name some of this context before we dig into what we do about it.
In many ways our city is already an occupied city. The deployment of local, state, and federal police agencies, use of mass surveillance, and deployment of violence has been ongoing. So I don’t want anything I say to be understood as a negation of that reality.
But it needs to be stated that the National Guard is an escalation. First, it’s a huge expansion of the capacity for state violence in the city. In LA and DC, the guard have flanked other law enforcement agencies in carrying out raids, arrests, and kidnappings. They have also freed up the capacity of other agencies to carry out their violence, and comrades from these cities have described how ICE actions went from 10-15 minutes down to 2-3.
Second, it is an opportunity to the administration to normalize military occupation. Many Guard members themselves have described feeling like pawns in a political game. This is not wrong — Trump is normalizing a new level of violent occupation in US cities, particularly majority Black and brown cities like LA, DC, and now Memphis. As the Right cuts social programs, guts environmental regulations, and continues to displace workers, they are setting up the infrastructure of violent control that they believe will allow them to maintain control over people who have lost their jobs, lost their housing, or become refugees.
Finally, the Guard occupations are designed to consolidate fascism and authoritarianism. Specifically, putting troops in cities across the US is designed to attack, intimidate, and silence the most directly impacted communities who have the most at stake and the greatest leadership in the fight against fascism. Particularly, Trump is setting up the infrastructure to steal elections and consolidate the Right’s control over the power of the state.
Okay, with that context out of the way, I want to speak specifically to LA and DC. This information comes from comrades with Union del Barrio, Chirla, and other orgs in LA, Free DC comrades, and comrades from Movement Law Lab:
In LA, 4,000 California National Guard members were “federalized” because of “damage” to federal property. He invoked a separate law to deploy these NG members alongside active duty Marines to patrol streets “in support of routine law enforcement”
Multiple state and local lawsuits successfully demonstrated that the military, by setting up their own perimeters, traffic blocks, and crowd control actions, broke the law, specifically the Posse Comitatus Act which bars the federal armed forces and National Guard troops called iunto Federal service from doing domestic law enforcement.
A really important caveat here — “National Guard troops can engage in civilian law enforcement if: 1) under state law, they are given peace officer status; 2) if there is no state law, they are deputized by state or local law enforcement agencies to enforce state law; or 3) if they are deputized by a federal law enforcement agency, such as the Insurrection Act.”
In DC, the situation is more complicated because the President has taken direct control over the city using the Home Rule Act to demand compliance from the Metro Police and to deploy the National Guard. DC has no protections from the Posse Comitatus Act because it is not a state.
In both LA and DC, the deployments have created the conditions for escalated police activity

HOW TO MEET THIS MOMENT

Explain that today we’re not going to decide on a course of action. It’s an initial meeting and we want to build some alignment. It will take time to surface ideas, to bring these ideas back to our people, and then to reconvene to get into deeper and tighter formation.

We’re giving this caveat so that folks don’t feel like there is a ton of pressure to name a specific action or to try to shoehorn what we’re already working on into this moment.

This moment is urgent. And we know that to meet it, we are going to need to draw on the incredible wisdom and power that is in this room and in this city, and to move with greater purpose and clarity that we have moved together before. So for this section, we want to invite some spaciousness for folks to generate ideas and really imagine what it would look like to meet this moment together.

There could be resources to share, such as:

Some national frameworks might be helpful,, e.g.:

Free DC

Started following inauguration
Drawing on other orgs and the fight of particularly Black organizers in DC for Home Rule
Ward teams and working groups
Absorption of fired Federal workers
Agitating around attacks on Home Rule
Escalated trainings — 1 hour, 1 day, multi-day
Noncooperation tactics to meet the moment

Explain tactically what has been tried out:

Holding signs and bold people doing direct action to slow down the machine, won’t be sufficient. We’ll need a range of tactics available to many people, some that directly challenge the regime and others that help people grow their preparation to resist.

Resistance tactics that have been tried:

Symbolic actions

Nightly banging pots and pans (“cacerolazo”) — a tactic from Latin America to show unity
Flying “Free DC” flags
Supporting signs in business windows (signs of solidarity), getting local businesses to put up signs showing support for noncooperation/refusal of guards/against ICE/etc. Such as Signs of Solidarity or 4th Amendment workplaces
Citywide march

Physical Intervention

Nonviolent direct action to blockade or disrupt illegal ICE operations
Targeting enablers — such as hotels that house ICE
Physical accompaniment at courts or other locations, sometimes with politicians

Noncooperation

Redirecting traffic away from illegal checkpoints: e.g. this NBC report on a protest at a checkpoint that redirected traffic away from the checkpoint (eventually the checkpoint just closed up shop)
Jury nullification: sometimes called “the People’s Pardon” but is a historical tactic of people-led noncooperation by refusing to indict people or endorse immoral acts being perpetuated
Boycotts of capitulating institutions
Refusal of service, such as kicking ICE out of hotels by pressuring the hotel to refuse service

Building Alternatives

Mutual Aid
Organize neighborhood watches
“Day of Joy and Resistance” — block party with neighborhood resourcing, medical care, training in noncooperation, etc.

BREAK-OUTS

Based on what we’ve discussed here, we think there’s going to be some specific needs emerging from this moment. We’re going to invite folks to break-out according to which piece of response infrastructure they want to brainstorm about. In the small groups, please assign a note-taker and someone who can report back from the group.

Training for Noncooperation

Tactics for collective and mass noncooperation

Symbolic protests and NVDA

Marches and visible protests: No Kings? No Trump, No Troops?
Direct actions / guerilla tactics / arrestable strategic actions

Mutual Aid

Supporting ongoing mutual aid efforts
Supporting existing infrastructure
Identifying other structures that need to be built up

Political Advocacy

Moving our elected officials to stand against the Guard

Rapid Response

E.g. ICE/cop watch + rapid response

Communications and Outreach

Ways to gather videos and documentation of crimes
Know your rights
Communicate to broader public

Have each breakout group share back to whole group

Themes/discussions to pull out:

Absorption: organize, not just mobilize
Organizational next steps including readjusting workloads
Safety and security

Recap next steps and get folks commitments

Close

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