Brown students have formed a neighborhood organizing group that uses courthouse patrols, rapid-response alerts, and mass mobilization to disrupt ICE’s Rhode Island operations.
A student holds a “know your rights” flyer.
(Leyad Zavriyev)
The Star Wars franchise is fertile ground for political allegory. While the internet has compared Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Galactic Empire, Brown University sophomore Dakota Pippins would like to draw another parallel.
Pippins is a volunteer with the Rhode Island Deportation Defense Network (DDN), a collection of six neighborhood groups across the state that organize ICE-watches and mass mobilizations with a bilingual deportation defense hotline. The DDN is sprawling and somewhat amorphous. It has also been greatly successful in deterring ICE from making detainments in certain parts of the state.
Pippins explained how the decentralized nature of the movement can be understood by looking at the depiction of the Rebel Alliance in Andor—one of several Disney series prequelling the 1977 film. In the original Star Wars , you’re introduced to the rebellion as a centralized group of dissidents, but grass-roots opposition doesn’t materialize out of nowhere. Andor shows “how you build up to a rebellion,” he said. “You have a bunch of different groups and people who all share a distaste or hatred for the empire.”
The unit of the DDN that draws volunteers from Brown is called the College Hill Organizing Group (CHOG); they patrol at the Garrahy courthouse—a uniquely ugly building—in Downtown Providence. What over the past year has unfolded outside of the courthouse has also occurred at courthouses across the country: “Court hearings are public record, so [ICE] knows when certain people are going to be there,” said Etta Robb, a volunteer with the DDN and a recent Brown University graduate. “They wait outside their court hearings, and take them as soon as they leave the building.”
During shifts at the courthouse (some call them “outreach,” some “ICE-watch,” others “patrol”), volunteers stop passersby to discuss the hotline and the DDN’s legislative efforts, all while on the lookout for ICE. When federal agents appear, a message is relayed to a deportation defense hotline which makes an announcement to over five thousand people in Providence through WhatsApp and Telegram channels. “We go down there and we do outreach, and we talk to people, and we protest, and we get really loud, and we let people know ICE is in the area, and then they leave without taking anyone,” Robb said.
“[The ICE agents] will troll a little bit,” said Diego Castillo, a volunteer with the DDN and a junior at Brown. “But when we we’re willing to be out there, even for hours with them, I think it really just shows how much we care, and for the most part they leave.”
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The CHOG was born following Brown community members’ mounting fear of ICE after the detainments of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk from Columbia and Tufts respectively. Robb recalled that over 300 people showed up to the first meeting in late spring of 2025. “We were trying to figure out what it would mean to mass mobilize in a little bit of time,” Robb said. “We’ve seen how all of these institutions just roll right over when ICE actually comes, and so we’re like, we need to take it into our own hands,” she added. “There’s a lot of focus on institutions like Brown as [the buffer] between Trump and students. But, the truth is it’s students, us, the ones on the ground, who can actually protect each other.”
Robb pulled out the call log of the hotline: “So today, so far there’s been, I think, only one. Yesterday there were six,” she said. “There are days when there’s definitely like,” Robb counted off her phone screen, “12.”
Over the past year, the DDN has refined its operation. While the deportation defense hotline is active 5 am to 9 pm daily, the CHOG has narrowed in on exactly when ICE is likely to appear at the Garrahy courthouse, limiting its patrols to 9 am to noon Monday through Friday. “We’ve gotten good at it, like I think we’re at a point where we’re kind of better than the ICE agents,” said Raya Gupta, a volunteer with the DDN and a sophomore at Brown. “I mean, it flip flops, because we all have to adjust our tactics, but in the past couple mobilizations, there were a bunch of them, and none of the times were they able to take people,” she continued. “We’re very persistent and tactical.”
As the network has grown, volunteers have become more confident in their procedures. “I know what to do when ICE shows up to the courthouse. I’m not scared to knock on windows anymore and ask people if they’re law enforcement to confirm if it’s ICE or not,” Gupta said.
Tracking ICE vehicles’ license plate numbers helps the DDN identify agents and quickly summon community members to the courthouse to protest. “They always use American made cars and always have tinted windows,” Pippins said. “The quicker we can re…
Read the full article at The Nation →📄Source document: Federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon→8 reports
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