u/DadBodDorian

Small rant about my experience in the activism scene in Colorado over the last year.

A little over a month ago I stepped down from actively organizing actions for no concentration camps in Colorado. Not because I have lost faith in our mission, not because I don’t think we’re doing good work as a coalition, not because I’ve left noccc for some reason, but because despite my best efforts to make it clear I have no desire to lead anyone, I keep being treated as and often referred to as the leader of noccc.

I’m still running our socials day to day but outside of that, I’m trying to remain distant from any decision made by the coalition.

Please believe me when I say I am not the one. I have a full time job and a part time job and a relationship and a life and we don’t get paid for this nor do we accept any form of donation outside of labor.

I’m burnt out and so is everyone else. Almost every criticism I hear about NoCCC is a criticism of my “leadership” which isn’t something I have ever wanted.

We can’t center movements around egos, especially not the egos of masc presenting white people like me. All it’s going to do is tear the movement apart, create power vacuums, and encourage grifters.

We need to become better at collaborating with each other. We need to become better at working together and taking collective ownership of the movement, not waiting for someone to tell us when and where to engage.

We need people to guide eachother and take initiative, not a figurehead to lead.

It’s a team effort friends, it’s not about you or me or anyone other than your most vulnerable neighbor.

Every single Friday for over a year now, Speak Up Southern Colorado protests in Walsenburg. They have been calling for the city, the state, our federal representatives, and anyone with the power to do so, to stop the reactivation of a defunct and abandoned private prison into an ICE detention center. They’ve dealt with more contemporary violence than any other protest group I know of in Colorado. There have been attacks by violent counterprotesters, there have been arrests, there have been hospitalizations, and there has been a blame placed on the protesters by the city.

They have been organizing steadily outside of just protesting and have been collecting signatures for an incredibly novel municipal ballot initiative. This initiative would, upon successful vote; define in their zoning ordinances that private land zoned for prisons, jails, correctional facilities, detention facilities etc. can only be used for the detention of people charged with or convicted of a crime recognized by the city.

What this would do is require CoreCivic to apply for and obtain a conditional use permit from the zoning committee to detain noncriminals. This requires a public hearing and can be denied. The more red tape we can throw in the road, the longer we are holding back a legitimate siege.

The town of Walsenburg doesn’t have enough water and hasn’t for a long time. It certainly doesn’t for an extra 1200 people, and CoreCivic does not care, they get their check.

The mayor last year had to be reminded that neither he, nor the city can benefit monetarily from the facility when he bragged about how much money they would get “per head”.

They were hassled by police while collecting signatures but were successful. The city then attempted to throw the petition out claiming the actions of the protesters made the signatures invalid.

Im really glad to tell you guys that today that attempt was overruled, the ballot measure has been initiated, and now the town of Walsenburg gets to vote on whether or not prisons are for people who commit crimes, or for people who don’t commit crimes.

Hey friends. Some of you might be familiar with the deportation data project, a FOIA litigation project by faculty of UCB Law School and UCLA; and/or of coldCounter, a database built by the No Concentration Camps in CO coalition off of what has been acquired by that project.

We are in the process of expanding the types of analysis we can produce via GIS. By geocoding the addresses of all the individual facilities represented in the deportation data project's detention schema, we can produce geospacial visualizations like this map.

Legend:

• Symbols on the map represent facilities encountered in the data
  • clicking on a symbol will show you statistics for that facility from coldCounter's analysis.
• The transparency and bloom of the symbol is weighted by average daily population.
  • this allows you to visually see detention population density.
• Symbols representing local and state carceral facilities only show detainee data from ICE's detention records, not local or state law enforcement. From ICE's perspective they are treating them as their detainee.

Are there other visualizations like this that you or your org would like us to produce?

disclaimer: I'm aware that the lat/lon geocoding is not as precise as it could be for the addresses if you zoom in far enough, im 1 week into a 3 week bootcamp, i swear ill fix them. I'm also not 100% confident in the co springs address but it does correlate with other FOIA documentation.

Something we often see in various forms parroted in comment sections is how either all protest must remain safe, inclusive, and accessible; and in contrast, how protests with costumes and on overpasses is pointless liberal cope. That the only action is direct action.

This is not how NOCCC views activism in action. We recognize that this effort is great, the threat is real, and it’s already here. It requires all of us moving together in incredibly diverse ways.

Yesterday, visibility protesters from the Bridge Trolls in bright costumes grabbed the attention of vehicles urging them to take the next exit, where our coalition had identified to be the location of the FRDHOLD ICE hold room. A secret prison that has frequently violated numerous detention standards.

Meanwhile at the facility, activists engaged in direct action taunted the ICE employees working inside with megaphones and hung banners to draw further visibility to the site.

Both groups reported that the collaboration made the action stronger, with a number of individuals who work nearby relaying that they didn’t even know about the facility until the protests started happening and one local business telling the FRDHOLD hecklers “don’t stop until they’re out of here”

In the evening, we caravanned to Hudson to raise awareness of ICE and GEO’s plan to reopen the Hudson Correctional Facility as a for profit concentration camp.

Marshals and medics from PULSE kept the protest safe at every location.

Today IPT is speaking at the Centennial City Council to urge them to take the same steps Glenwood Springs has taken to enforce their zoning laws against ICE’s illegal use of their hold rooms.

Everyone has a part they can play. Things are happening, and it takes everyone.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk