SATURDAY, APRIL 18 || PUT ICE ON TRIAL FOR THEIR CRIMES
What is a People’s Tribunal?
After the Vietnam War, public figures organized tribunals to expose the US military’s war crimes, delivering symbolic guilty verdicts for horrific incidents like the My Lai Massacre. People organized more tribunals in the following years, including for violent repression by right-wing dictatorships in Brazil and Chile, for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and more recently on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
These tribunals functioned like a trial, with evidence presented, witnesses providing testimony, and judges or jurors delivering verdicts. They spread outrage and broader awareness of the brutalities of US and European imperialism, against incessant patriotic celebrations of war, occupations, and mass murder.
Why organize a People’s Tribunal against ICE?
We’ve watched ICE shoot, kidnap, beat, and harass people for months without any consequences or retribution. Immigrant families have been forced to live in crippling fear. Protesters have been attacked ruthlessly.
These crimes need to be relentlessly exposed. Every person who has been subjected to this terror deserves justice. As people who are moved to take action against ICE, it’s our responsibility to organize demonstrations of dissent beyond social media and spurts of protest.
What’s the purpose of a symbolic trial?
For a moment during ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, Democrats and district attorneys were pressured to say they would prosecute ICE agents. Yet we know the legal system and politicians will never go far enough to punish ICE agents for their crimes. Their deserved punishment could only come when we hold political power ourselves, which we don’t, for now.
A people’s tribunal, a symbolic exercise of justice, is an opportunity to demonstrate how we would serve justice for crimes against the people if we held power. We draw inspiration from real demonstrations of people’s justice in past revolutions and mass movements. And we gather among people with a conscience, who want to fight for a better society, to show grief for what people have endured, and to channel anger into defiance.
These tribunals aren’t just to be symbolic, either. They’re an opportunity to organize people into targeting ICE and all complicit in their crimes in our cities and towns, and to plan how we can exert pressure to demand Democrats follow through on their promises to prosecute.
How do I organize a People’s Tribunal?
Your best move is to get in touch with us to make a plan together. Our chapters are organizing tribunals for the same day, April 18. We can talk through the specifics of how you can pull one off—how to invite speakers, some theatrical ways to deliver a guilty verdict, and how to organize people into sustained collective action following the event.
Here’s how you can promote it:
- Make videos with speakers and attendees.
- Host a reading discussion. A reading discussion is a good way to bring people together to talk and think critically about issues that may be affecting them or people they know. Check out our MELT ICE reading list for ideas!
- Lead some outings. Flyer at your school, a busy transit area, or a shopping center. Get to know people and talk with them about the People’s Tribunal and why it’s important!
- Tape up flyers in the area you want to host the Tribunal, hitting up local businesses in the process and asking them to put flyers in their windows!
If you want to organize a People’s Tribunal to convict ICE, contact us!
Dare to Struggle 