Social media has proven a fair-weather friend to leftist political resistance over the past few decades. The 2010s saw pro-democratic uprisings in the Arab world coordinated over Facebook and Twitter on pages like “We Are All Khaled Said.” But the “Facebook Revolutions” couldn’t sustain momentum and the Arab Spring stalled. The Black Lives Matter movement dominated Instagram during the summer of 2020, spreading awareness about the pervasiveness of racism and even encouraging incremental wealth distribution. This virtual engagement didn’t translate to the level of structural reform activists hoped for. And during Trump’s second term, the biggest platforms seem algorithmically inclined towards increasingly authoritarian content. Is there still hope for social media as a tool for dissidents?
To communicate about ICE, Latino communities on the East End are utilizing Whatsapp. As the most popular instant messaging service in Latin America, Whatsapp is an established space for sending and receiving messages, calls, and videochats. Immigrants use it to connect with family members abroad without incurring international fees. Low-income families can access its services free with WiFi, without needing to invest in expensive data plans. And the app’s broad usage leaves it less vulnerable to targeting by the Trump administration, which pressured Apple and Google to remove ICE-monitoring apps like ICEBlock and Red Dot from app stores earlier this year.
The Whatsapp interface itself allows for a swift and direct flow of information. A user might take a photo or video of an immigration agent or masked agent of unknown authority, send it to a group chat to warn friends and family, and then post an informative “status” for all other contacts. A member of that chat might post an alert to a “community” chat to reach an even larger network. It’s simple to forward a relevant message from one location to another. Messages appear in the order they’re received, so timely information doesn’t get buried under the algorithmic slop that weighs down Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X. The service even offers in-platform language translations.
“There’s a lot of [Whatsapp] group chats” dedicated to ICE monitoring, says Jon Lopez, a youth advocate at Organización Latino Americana of Eastern Long Island, broadly known as OLA. “I’m part of one that’s made of like 60 people and based out of Sag Harbor.” Others cover Greenport, Hampton Bays, and communities in between. Messages vibrate across the island through Whatsapp networks, charting out an ever-shifting map of safety and danger.
Sometimes the networks misfire. Lopez remembers a day in early June when a member of a nearly 1,000-person group chat called “Hamptons Happy Hours” posted a supposed ICE sighting in Sag Harbor. It had already been a particularly active week for ICE rumors, and the message spread like wildfire. Photos of officers outfitted in bulletproof vests with assault rifles behind Sag Harbor Cinema flew around Whatsapp. There was talk of a military tank.
It turned out that the photos actually caught village and town police officers conducting a monthly team training. But the misunderstanding added another chip to an eroding sense of security. “The phone was blowing up nonstop at OLA that day,” remembers Lopez. “People were panicking.”
Avoiding that kind of panic is part of why Minerva Perez, director of OLA, created the organization’s own Whatsapp channel.
“The number-one element is that we didn’t want to turn this into a chat. There are enough chats. I’m in a million chats,” says Perez with a laugh. “This needed to be a very efficient way of sending people out to situations quickly, without a lot of back and forth, and also without sharing any kind of personal information.”
The result is a roster of nearly 200 vetted and trained volunteers that OLA activates to investigate and bear witness to suspected ICE activity. When a tip concerning potential immigration enforcement activity comes through OLA’s 24-hour text hotline, staff tells its volunteer channel, “OLA Stand and Protect,” to stand by. If the tip seems credible, staff dispatch a small group of volunteers to gather photos and videos of the situation. If OLA finds convincing evidence of ICE presence, it will send out an alert through various social media platforms, warning people to avoid the area.
But for Perez, the implications of a volunteer monitoring channel go beyond verifying sightings and helping sort rumor from fact. In the tradition of the “legal observers” trained by the National Lawyers Guild in New York City, going back to 1968 — that is, a person (whether a law student or simply a trained volunteer) whose role is to attend demonstrations, marches, or rallies to document interactions between law enforcement and protesters — the volunteers of OLA are there to record and document events. “If there are actions going on that are not legal or ethical, our presence might deter some of these things from happening,” she says. And if deterrence doesn’t work, she wants proof of what has unfolded: “We’re holding on to that information for accountability purposes, as well, and for reality checks,” she says. “When someone says ‘Oh, that never happened out here,’ we want to make sure that we can say, ‘These are the things that are going on.’ ”
Further, in the direct aftermath of an arrest — or, in the eyes of some, an abduction, as some of those removing people from streets and workplaces are not identifying themselves as law enforcement or immigration officers and are operating incognito — the information that volunteers accumulate can help OLA address the needs of family members left behind. “We might be able to pull up a video we’ve got of an uncle being taken by a particular car with a particular license plate, and maybe that will get us to a quicker understanding of where that uncle is,” Perez says. And OLA wants to know what role that person plays in his family. “How do we learn that an elder was left in that household, who was reliant upon that person? How is that elder being cared for right now?” Perez would like to build out the roster of “stand and protect” volunteers to at least 700. “In the event we do need 50 people, 100 people, to show up somewhere, we need those numbers,” she says.
But Perez emphasizes that a Whatsapp channel isn’t enough to keep the community safe: It’s reactive, rather than preventative. “There are many situations that we are not able to anticipate. Where we’re not going to be able to get the word out,” she says. The real issue, as she sees it, is a crisis of policy. “If we don’t have people that are kind of looking out for the interests of our democracy, quite honestly . . . If we shake things up the way they’re getting shaken up, nobody is terribly safe.”