This is What DC’s Black-led Resistance is Teaching the Nation

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FEATURING NEENEE TAYLOR - President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to create specialized military style police for domestic deployment whose goals include “quelling civil disturbances.” The news comes as Trump ordered the National Guards he had deployed to Washington D.C. to begin carrying arms, even as he openly mulled sending National Guards to other cities, such as Chicago and Baltimore. 

Those deployments come alongside a massive expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump has claimed the deployments are necessary to civil law and order in the face of documented evidence of falling crime rates and border crossings. 

But, in Washington D.C. and around the country, people are fighting back enthusiastically, organizing spirited protests against Trump’s expanding policing and militarization. Among the organizations leading such resistance is a Black-women-led abolitionist community defense hub called Harriet’s Wildest Dreams.

Neenee Taylor is a native Washingtonian, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black-led abolitionist community defense hub. She is also the Co-Founder and Organizing Director of the Free DC Project. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what people can learn from the D.C. resistance.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Can you tell us how Harriet's Wildest Dreams, your organization, and the Free DC project are resisting and responding to Trump's militarization? What does it look like on the ground for those of us outside DC because you know, we are just getting the news headlines and they're not accurately capturing the spiritedness, the sounds and the sights of the resistance. What is it like?

NeeNee Taylor: So, we have a problem with, you know, as we know, white supremacy owned media. And so, the stories that's been told and shown doesn't really show what's going on in DC as well as the steps and how people are resisting the takeover of Washington DC. 

On the ground, we have at FreeDC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams, we have like rapid response teams that actually go out. We have cop watch w teams that are actually resisting and actually moving ICE, FBI, you know, standing up against them trying to kidnap our neighbors, our migrant neighbors who ICE are just snatching up. We have people that just try to push out ICE, who are United States citizens and like, you know, tell, get out of off our streets.