From Intention to Impact: Takeaways from CT DSA’s Abolish ICE Emergency Meeting a Week Out
An opportunity to sharpen our collective practice
On Saturday, February 7, the Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (CT-DSA) held an emergency “Fight to Abolish ICE” meeting in Hartford. The gathering fortuitously coincided with the national organization’s announcement that membership had crossed a historic threshold of 100,000.
This milestone, evidence of a growing collective aspiration for an abolitionist, socialist future, should have translated into decisive planning at the state level. As a dues-paying member and invited panelist for Danbury Unites for Immigrants attending virtually, I left the meeting appreciating the earnest effort while recognizing some missed opportunities. What follows is offered in a spirit of comradely critique, with the aim of strengthening our shared work.
Opening remarks: framing versus focus
The meeting opened with important context from two CT-DSA elected leaders, the Chapter Co-Chair and Steering Committee Member. The former shared expressions of solidarity with the immigrant working class that helped establish shared values, and the latter provided useful historical background on ICE’s post-9/11 origins and its recent escalation of enforcement activity.
But for an “emergency” meeting called to respond to active ICE terror, the extensive preamble consumed time that might have been better spent on actionable planning. The Steering Committee Member made a critical observation: “immigrant-led organizations must take the lead in this fight,” but it arrived late in his remarks. This principle should have been the meeting’s central organizing theme, introduced early and repeated often. Instead, it took on the quality of a forgettable leitmotif, stated and then largely set aside only.
Abolitionist visioning: worthwhile but misplaced
The Political Education Co-Chair then took the mic to lead us in an imaginative exercise, and invited attendees to envision a world without police, prisons, or borders—in short, a crash course in abolitionist politics. But when asked if they felt cops made them feel safe, many in the audience responded in the negative, suggesting a general abolitionist tendency that made this reporter question the use of limited emergency meeting time.
Speaking with the Co-Chair, he revealed the intent was to use the exercise to invite some of the newer members, many of whom might have been unfamiliar with abolitionist frameworks, to step out of their ideological comfort zones. (At least one person loudly exclaimed that they believe police do keep us safe, indicating that our base is not as uniformly aligned as it may have seemed or we had hoped.)
Obviously we have more work to do on the political education front. That said, an emergency meeting may still not be the optimal setting. To balance accessibility with urgency, future sessions could frontload a condensed visioning segment before pivoting sharply to strategy, or move extended visioning to separate, focused political education sessions.
The panel: the meeting’s strongest section, too quickly passed over
The panel discussion brought together leaders and activists across the immigrant defense network: Make the Road CT, the Muslim Justice Center, Stamford/Norwalk United for Immigrants (SNUI), Danbury Unites for Immigrants (DUFI), and organized labor. This was the most substantive portion of the meeting, and it merited more time and prominence.
The comrade from Make the Road CT urged DSA members to approach immigrant-led organizations directly and ask what support is actually needed, not to arrive with predetermined plans. This echoed principle shared in the opening speeches and grounded it in a practical direction. The representative from the Muslim Justice Center emphasized ideological preparation and the necessity of readying ourselves for escalating counterinsurgency. The comrade from SNUI and I from DUFI called for expanded Know Your Rights trainings and increased on-the-ground presence during ICE activity. Another panelist, who attended as an eye-witness to Minnesota’s valiant uprising, noted what our midwestern comrades get right: everyone knows their role and executes it with consistency.
The comrade from Make the Road CT and the Chapter Co-Chair both separately paraphrased Malcolm X, emphasizing that we are not outnumbered but outorganized, and prompted useful reflection. Their suggestions that hyper-local network building and the cultivation of “nodular groupings” could help counter this dynamic offered a concrete proposition.
The panel was rich with experience and counsel. It was also rushed. Future emergency meetings might consider expanding this segment or even restructuring the entire session around direct connection-building between DSA members and established immigrant-led organizations.
Breakouts: uneven but earnest
Following a brief recess, attendees divided into breakout groups to discuss potential actions and themes including abolition and rapid response. In the online breakout I joined, the conversation tilted toward contemplation and abstract ideation rather than building concrete connections between volunteers and existing organizing structures.
This reflected an understandable challenge: members were eager to act but uncertain how to plug in. The discussion questions posed by facilitators, while well-intentioned, did not always resonate or elicit robust responses. What members wanted, palpably, was to learn what actions could be taken now and who to connect with.
The brainstorming of local campaigns, while somewhat premature given gaps in shared analysis of current organizing terrain, nonetheless demonstrated genuine enthusiasm. With more foundational context provided upfront, perhaps by the panelists themselves, such exercises could become genuinely productive. Without it, members were asked to generate ideas in a vacuum, only hopefully connected to the needs of targeted communities and the work already in motion.
Reports from organizers shed light on the in-person experience breakout groups, and, in comparison with the virtual one, appeared to have anticipated some of the criticisms mentioned above. Those featured active training sessions led in partnership with immigrant-led organizations on know your rights, bystander training, and marshal training. A few honed in on specific organizing questions, like how to organize against ICE within workplaces and unions, what legislative campaigns to target in this moment, and how to organize within our communities.
Post-meeting survey responses from in-person as well as other virtual attendees bore this out. Some in-person breakouts, particularly those anchored by experienced organizers, generated focused discussion and genuine momentum. But this was not universal. Across both formats, a recurring frustration emerged: attendees had expected practical information about existing immigrant-led organizations, who they are, where they operate, how to contact them, how to receive rapid response alerts, and found that such resources were not provided. Several noted they had spent considerable personal time attempting to gather this information independently.
Other virtual participants described their breakouts as particularly diffuse. Though a hybrid (and inclusive) option was certainly welcome, late arrivals, meandering discussion, and a prevailing tone of abstraction hampered productivity. Even among respondents who appreciated the meeting overall, the dominant sentiment was a desire for less framing and more concrete next steps. Members left energized but unsure what to do on Monday morning; more than a few scrambled to exchange contact information before the Zoom room closed.
Closing: clarifying our purpose
The Chapter Co-Chair returned at the end to synthesize key takeaways: commit to one or two specific goals, assess material conditions, identify duplicated efforts, establish metrics for success. “The stakes are too high to not act with intentionality.”
This framing surfaced a question the meeting never fully resolved: What was the primary intention of this emergency meeting?
Three distinct purposes emerged across the session: supporting immigrant-led organizations, going on the offensive against ICE and the carceral state, and connecting that work to stop ICE into an abolitionist future reality. Each is legitimate. The difficulty is that a single, time-limited meeting cannot fulfill all three equally well. Of these, supporting immigrant-led organizations offers the clearest, most tangible anchor for future emergency meetings.
I was left with two unanswered questions: Was this meeting duplicating work already underway? And had the organizers thoroughly assessed the current organizing landscape before structuring the agenda?
These are not accusations. They are diagnostic questions any clear-minded organizing body should ask itself after (and before) a major convening.
Conclusion: cavalry or command?
The Co-Chair’s closing observation, that “nothing worth doing is worth doing alone,” rightly emphasizes the necessity of collective action. The question is not whether DSA should be involved in the fight to abolish ICE. It is how we can be most usefully involved.
There is a clear and valuable role for DSA members in this work: showing up when called upon, deploying resources in support of immigrant-led priorities, and building long-term relationships of accountability. This may mean serving as reliable reinforcements rather than setting strategy independently. That is not a diminished role; it is a respectful and necessary one. Over time, as trust deepens and coalitional muscle strengthens, DSA may naturally become part of strategic conversations.
The February 7 meeting represented a sincere effort to mobilize members around urgent work. With clearer focus, tighter integration of immigrant-led voices, and more structured pathways to action, future emergency meetings can more fully realize their potential. Our shared project depends on exactly this kind of iterative, good-faith practice. The stakes demand nothing less.