The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) developed the Adopt a Day Labor Corner initiative to provide trainings and guidance for community groups to launch their own worker-protection initiatives. The program continues a tradition of communities rallying to protect day laborers. In Los Angeles and other areas in the 1990s and 2000s, for example, local activists partnered with day laborers to provide legal aid, film enforcement actions, and organize to defend their right to seek work in public spaces. Some of the first worker centers—community groups focused on advocating for and providing stable employment to low-wage workers—emerged from these campaigns.

Today, with ICE raids tearing apart families across the country, “people are just outraged and want to do something,” said Nadia Marin-Molina, co–executive director of NDLON, “And unfortunately, people sometimes get the feeling that anything is futile, like there’s nothing I can do.… People have said they’re realizing, like, calling congressional representatives doesn’t seem to be changing anything. And so this is something concrete in the neighborhood that they can do.”

In addition to training local activists to keep watch over day labor sites, NDLON also encourages people to consider hiring day laborers if they can provide short-term work. Enabling them to earn some income in a relatively safe setting is, after all, one way of reducing their risk of exposure to ICE. It’s harder for them to find work these days, Marin-Molina said, as many people who might normally hire a day laborer are reluctant to employ a worker who might get them entangled with immigration authorities.

Just as worker centers evolved as an institutional response to immigrant struggles a generation ago, NDLON sees this emerging network of day-laborer defenders as an opportunity to engage volunteers in efforts to make communities more secure for immigrant workers in the long term. Marin-Molina explained, “The volunteers are reaching corners where maybe there is no day laborer center nearby, or maybe there is a center nearby, but they haven’t had the capacity or the time to be able to reach out to the workers consistently. Then there’s an opportunity to see what, in the long term, can we build together with them.… Maybe some more centers will come out of it in the long term.”

Whether rallying at a local Home Depot parking lot or escorting children of immigrants to school, this grassroots defense generally takes a multilayered approach, blending actions like community monitoring, legal advocacy, and community education.

In Chicago, the advocacy group Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD), runs a rapid-response network and hotline, training volunteers on how to track and document ICE actions through video. Like UCAN, OCAD says the presence of neighborhood patrols can deter ICE aggression. The video monitoring is also part of OCAD’s legal mission.

In recent years, the documentation of enforcement actions has helped yield evidence for legal challenges to the detention regime. A 2022 class-action lawsuit led to a consent decree that sharply restricted DHS’s authority to arrest people without a warrant or probable cause. For arrests and stops that occurred within the region covered by the settlement—Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas—victims of violations of the consent decree are entitled to immediate release and cannot be subject to bond requirements.

After more than 20 individuals sued the administration claiming that they had been unlawfully arrested last spring—backed with visual accounts by activists—a federal judge in November ordered the release of potentially about 600 people ICE had arrested in the Chicago area between June 11 and October 7, requiring that they be released on bond or under community-based electronic monitoring as their cases were pending. Though the order has been stalled following an appeal by the administration, similar legal challenges across the country have led to the release of many individuals through habeas corpus petitions filed after being arrested without a warrant.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has given immigration authorities a green light to racially profile people suspected of immigration violations, opening the door to systematic discrimination and further criminalization of ethnic and racial others.

As tensions grow between the lower courts upholding the civil rights of noncitizens and the Supreme Court’s approval of ICE’s ferocious crackdowns, Antonio Gutierrez, OCAD’s strategic coordinator, said that last year’s legal wins “wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the documentation that shows—through videos, through pictures—that people were detained or were stopped by ICE and CBP while driving their car, while walking down the street, while waiting for the bus, while selling stuff as a street vendor, and that ICE used racial profiling as the only tool to identify individuals, as they all are Latino immigrants.”

But these legal campaigns are also racing against time. More and more people are deciding simply to leave the country as the conditions in detention become increasingly unbearable. As of last November, according to the administration’s records, approximately 1,100 of the more than 1,800 people estimated to have been arrested in violation of the consent decree appeared to have already left the country, suggesting that many had “voluntarily” departed, likely compelled by the uncertainty and inhumane treatment of indefinite imprisonment under ICE. As of late 2025, roughly 66,000 individuals nationwide languished in immigration detention, the vast majority with no criminal convictions.

Under the second Trump administration, Gutierrez said, “there is a complete lack of law and order in regards to immigration enforcement and immigration court procedures at this time…. If they can take the rights of people, due process, for immigrants going to immigration court or detain them when they’re just following the same legal process that has been set up for decades, if not centuries, in this country, what else are they going to be able to do tomorrow?”

In the face of such legal precarity, OCAD’s system of rapid-response monitoring has emerged as a model of nonviolent resistance. The group has extended its framework through training workshops with other community organizations in Georgia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC.

When asked about the community patrols organized in response to the immigration crackdown, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson commented via e-mail: “ICE tracking apps and certain ‘watch’ programs put the lives of the men and women of law enforcement in danger as they go after terrorists, vicious gangs and violent criminal rings,” citing an alleged dramatic increase in assaults and death threats against officers. ICE-tracking apps, which use crowdsourced information to map agents’ moves in an area, have been restricted in recent months after federal officials pressured tech platforms to stop offering the apps.

One act of everyday nonviolent resistance that Juan Orozco proudly recalled is turning an afternoon appointment with a plumber last October into a standoff between Border Patrol and a crowd of vigilant neighbors. The agents had been trailing the plumber as he drove to his next job, and after he entered the house, they approached the client, according to Orozco, an activist with the immigrant-rights group Unión del Barrio (UDB). But a team of UDB volunteers was trailing them, and upon realizing that the agents were closing in on the plumber, the volunteers told the homeowner not to let the Border Patrol in. After about an hour and a half of confrontation, during which the activists “started referencing the law, the state, the city policies” that prevent officers from unilaterally grabbing someone off private property, Orozco said, the agents drove off.

“The only reason the homeowner was able to push back…was because we were there,” Orozco said. “We were there, as an organization, to guide them through the process. Border Patrol—they didn’t like that. They don’t like that we’re informing people [of their] rights.”

Orozco is one of hundreds of volunteers with UDB’s network, which has been combining know-your-rights trainings and community education with patrols and direct actions to protect neighborhoods from immigration enforcement.

UDB volunteers usually meet around 5:45 in the morning and drive around areas where immigration agents might gather to stage an enforcement action. Each unit has a driver and a bullhorn for blasting out warnings to neighbors.

In recent months, they have ramped up their trainings with local public school administrators and educators. Though schools were once considered off-limits by ICE for most routine enforcement actions, agents have reportedly arrested people near their children’s schools and harassed students going to and from school. Another group Orozco is part of, the Association of Raza Educators (ARE), a decades-old grassroots organization representing educators from the Latino community, has held trainings to prepare teachers for encounters with immigration enforcement or cases of family separation. The group encourages schools to work with families to make a plan to cover childcare and basic needs if a parent is abducted, ensure families have access to social services, and build a relationship of trust between families and one of the only state institutions they interact with daily. Even something as basic as letting parents wait inside the school building when picking up students could shield them from an ICE arrest.

Marysol Duran, an educator and activist with ARE, recalled being part of a team tracking an ICE vehicle that was surveilling a neighborhood. They went through the streets warning residents that ICE was in the area, so people could avoid going outside where agents might intercept them. She remembers spotting a mother and young child crossing the street at that moment. “I think to myself, like, here’s a mother going to work, dropping off their child—who will see them being kidnapped? Who will see who will report them missing…. And so that moment, it was that calling, that this is why we do what we do,” she said. “Because who knows, if we weren’t there and ICE just wanted to pick [someone up] up or see who was vulnerable, the mom and the child would have been the victim.”

As a political organization that has been working for the global liberation of “Nuestra America” since the early 1980s, UDB sees its organizing under Trump as a way to raise awareness about state oppression, systemic racism, and the legacy of imperialism across the Latin American diaspora communities. The broader goal of their community education programs, Orozco said, is to “bring consciousness to people and help them understand the colonial conditions that we’re all facing,” including the racialized state violence that undergirds Trump’s deportation drive.

The consciousness-raising programs in school communities, he added, can also counter ICE’s efforts to recruit local young people into their ranks, often touting hefty financial incentives.

“What do we have to offer in comparison to the state apparatus that’s offering up to [$50,000] bonuses to be an ICE agent? Well, the only thing we offer is empowerment, dignity, and humanity. And if we can win that struggle of the consciousness in the hearts of our people to really engage in this, then it will get us further.”