
Hosted by Sarah Towle · EN

Resistance Strategy #1: Remain Focused.There’s nothing like a “war” abroad to divert public attention from the atrocities taking place right now in our own backyards. The Trump kakistocracy* is now waging a bombing campaign against Iran on behalf of International Criminal Court defendant, Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, whose arrest warrant was issued on 21 November 2024 for starving and directly attacking civilians as a method of warfare; for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. Soon, it will be Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio’s turn. In the meantime, while everyone’s eyes are trained on Trump & Co’s illegal actions in the Middle East, the build-up of the ICE detention-to-deportation Gulag continues unabated. New concentration camps are coming to a distribution warehouse near you — even as Congress debates whether the ICE Gestapo should wear masks. These are concentration camps, paid for by us, the US taxpayer, thanks to a $45 billion allocation from the MAGA Murder Mandate (aka, the Biggest, Ugliest Bill), which is destined to go down in the history books as the payment system for Trump & Co’s genocide against the stateless.Kakistocracy: v. derived from Greek for “worst rule,” or “rule by idiots,” a government not by the people for the people, but by the least qualified, most unscrupulous, sycophantic bullies for the billionaire (and now trillionaire) class. Rule by the Worst of the Worst.Resistance Strategy #2: Don’t Look Away.As I reported on February 21, 2026, ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland “Security” (DHS), has earmarked $38 Billion to buy 24 empty shipping depots to scale up its for-profit prison Gulag to 92,000 beds or more by the end of FY 2026. These warehouses will each cost roughly $100 million to purchase, then another $150 million to retrofit with toileting facilities, dorms, mess halls, plumbing, electrical wiring, sally ports, and double “no-man’s-land” styled fortifications, as well as coils and coils of razor wire. They are not a pretty sight. And until now, DHS has kept its Gulag well away from public view, in the deserts of Texas, Arizona, and California, and the rural countryside of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Now, the build-up of Trump & Co’s human trafficking network, fashioned on Amazon’s shipping model, is happening right in front of our faces, in empty warehouses located near population centers and large flight hubs. Case in point: the concentration camp currently underway near Williamsport, Maryland, equidistant from the Dulles and Baltimore-Washington International Airports. Plans show that it will imprison 1,500 people on any given day, and cycle thousands through each year.But to expel people, ICE must fill its Gulag first. And according to Project Salt Box, the goon-squad is about to move on Baltimore, which only fuels my already boiling anger because that is my OG hometown. Resistance Strategy #3: Get In the Way! Like the former civil servant in Hagerstown, Maryland, who was DOGEd and is now filling her days by filing petitions against the regime for violating the National Environmental Policy Act, thus slowing down development of the Williamsport Concentration Camp, it is time to get hyperlocal and get in the way!And who better to teach us how than the original Rio Grande Valley resisters, whose work to mitigate the worst of humanity’s impulses under the first Trump regime, I spotlight in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.We held a hybrid reunion on January 26, 2026, to check in with one another, offer mutual comfort, and prepare hearts and hands for another year of standing up to injustice and jamming the machinery of misery. In this podcast, you will learn how to join the frontlines while remaining resilient, with strategies of resistance that include:* Resistance Strategy #4: Think Hyperlocally.* Resistance Strategy #5: Know Your Rights and Your Allies. * Resistance Strategy #6: Know When and to Whom to Pass the Baton.CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON ABOVE TO HEAR FROM THE OG RGV RESISTERS THEMSELVES ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼. There is incredible talent in all of our states, localities, communities, neighborhoods, and blocks. So, get to know your local allies. Find out what is needed and join, or put together, teams to meet those needs, from experts in water management to folks with a driver’s license willing to ferry the kids of impacted families to school. Most importantly…Resistance Strategy #7: Get Mad and Get Going.Write this message on your bathroom mirror, as Mark McDonald has:“Hope is presence, instead of paralysis; action instead of despair; and saying I will not let cruelty be the loudest voice.”Never forget that we are the hope. And the Cruelty is NOT Okay.Stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is…Together, ✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼 SarahFeatured Voices from Crossing the Line:* Cindy Candia, Joyce Hamilton, Jennifer Harbury & Madeleine Sandefur: Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley* Kathy Harrington & Andrea Rudnik: Madrinas de Justicia and former members of Team Brownsville* Cindy Andrade Johnson, Deaconess, United Methodist Women in Faith and La Posada Providencia Board Member* Jodi Godwin, Esq.* Helen Perry & Mark McDonald, formerly of Global Response Medicine* Gaby Zavala, Asylum Seeker Network of Support, and former Director of Resource Center MatamorosAdditional Contributors:* Karen Sturnick, Green Valley Samaritans* Maree McHugh, Silver City, New Mexico* Rev. Ali Lopez-Valcarcel, United Church of Christ, Rio Grande Valley* Pastor Mark Redwine, RGV* Esmeralda Lozano, City Commissioner, La Feria, TX[Full list of Strategies of Resistance to follow.]SAVE THE DATE: March 8, 2026The next meetup of the Hope Knows No Borders NetworkTales of Humanity is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Tales of Humanity at sarahtowle.substack.com/subscribe

Finally, everyone sees it, and everyone is talking about it, whether to decry it or to justify it. But it is not hiding in plain sight any longer…I speak of the lawless impunity of the entire, rotten Department of Homeland so-called “Security” apparatus and its paramilitary Gestapo forces posing as law-enforcement agencies: ICE and CBP, Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol — an early 20th-century rebranding of the pre-Civil War era Slave Patrols and the Ku Klux Klan.I speak of the racism and deliberate cruelty that were baked into the US immigration system from its earliest incarnation and allowed to take root and fester even before 9/11 gave legislators an excuse to shift the Cold War-era iron-triangle funding obsession that brought us the Military-Industrial Complex armageddon machine to building up the now global Border Industrial Complex, instead.Today, the Border Industrial Complex encircles the globe like a second equator, cleaving the wealthy, predominantly white world from the less-wealthy, less-white one, creating a global apartheid where borders are becoming deeper, taller, angrier, more militarized, and more violent all the time. Built on the theory that if we make crossing borders as painful and perilous and as dangerous and potentially deadly as possible, the Border Industrial Complex is inherently cruel. And for the last 40-plus years, US Border Industrial Complex adherents have chosen to crank the cruelty, year upon year, rather than seek humane responses to the fact that it is our forever wars, the environment-destroying practices of our transnational extraction corporations, and the climate change fallout from our fossil-fuel addictions that cause the very human displacement and migration the Border Industrial Complex aims to thwart.Unable to stop the largest human migration in recorded history, the world’s wealthiest nations have spent the last 40-plus years determined to lock up and expel it instead, keeping it out of our sight and therefore out of our minds. I chart the evolution of this detention-to-deportation pipeline in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. And nowhere is the cruelty of deterrence applied more ruthlessly and more visciously than within its opaque and now rapidly expanding concentration camp-styled prisons and the transportation network of charter airlines, buses, and armored jails on wheels that connect them, especially in Trump’s USA.Human rights abuses have gone unchecked inside this abomination of modern enslavement since well before he and his evil minions invaded US groupthink and the White House the first time. But under Trump’s white supremacist cabal, the steadily deteriorating conditions resulting from institutionalized cruelty and misery forced upon folks who’ve largely committed no crime have been unmasked.Today, February 18, 2026, we mark the seventh recorded death of an imprisoned immigrant just this year, and it could be the eighth as the fate of ICE’s youngest prisoner, 2-month-old Juan Nicolás, remains unknown. It is nearly the 40th death since the Trump regime’s second inauguration. And while I mourn for each life lost, and for every person whose human rights to freedom, safety, and a dignified life have been denied them by this wretched system, it is imperative that we unmask the crimes against humanity committed in our name and with our money by our detention-to- deportation pipeline so that we might abolish it — the sooner the better.The atrocities taking place inside the 200+ US detention gulag are hard to uncover. The atrocities taking place under Trump & Co’s mass deportation campaign, however, are even harder to perceive and document. On ICE Air’s Boxcars in the Sky, evidence of Department of Homeland “Security” impunity is whisked away with the individuals its agency operators shackle and return to harm. Indeed, it was purely by accident that I managed to track down and interview nearly five-dozen passengers refouled during Trump & Co’s first mass deportation campaign — the one few people knew about; the one they attempted as practice for the genocide unfolding in our name and with our money.From Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, Chapter 32, “Locked In,” this is what mass deportation looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. And with stakes like these, nobody wins. Please listen and share. Click the playbutton above ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼because we all need to know what happens on an ICE Air mass deportation flight, on an in-air Abu Ghraib, on today’s boxcars, though in the sky. Trump and his evil minions have weaponized immigration to drive democracy into crisis. They have harnessed that weapon to drive the US toward genocide against the stateless. Though they have corrupted the US Department of Homeland so-called “Security” apparatus to unleash the worst of humanity’s worst impulses again, we must understand that the cruelty of the system did not begin with them. We must, therefore, never go back to a previous era in immigration policies and practices, for that will only bring us back to this wretched place again. The only answer is abolition. But first, we must unseat Trump, Miller, Bondi, Noem, Homan, Bovino, Vought, et al., then build a more humane system and world from their ashes.Stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is…Together.✊🏼 SarahPS: Mark your calendars! I’ll be LIVE on Substack this Saturday, February 21, with a new feature: This Week in Immigration. Notification to follow…PPS: If you haven’t called your Members of Congress yet, do so today. Tell them, no more money for Trump & Co’s Gestapo:NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR FOR ICE. NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR FOR CBP.Tales of Humanity is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Tales of Humanity at sarahtowle.substack.com/subscribe

EMERGENCY FACT SHEET* PASTOR STEVEN TENDO, Applicant for Political Asylum * Originally from Uganda* Date of birth: November 24, 1984* A-number: 201-520-012* Kidnapped by ICE, Wednesday, February 4, 2026, Burlington, VT* Imprisoned at Stafford County Detention Center, Dover, NHSUMMARY:Steven Tendo is a respected Pastor from Uganda who suffered grave political persecution and repeated torture at the hands of government officials of his birth nation. In 2018, he presented himself legally at the United States Port of Entry in Brownsville, Texas, to request political asylum. As set forth below, he then suffered more than two years in an ICE detention facility without adequate medical care, resulting in grave harm to his health. (For details, listen to the audio of Crossing the Line, Chapter 29, Locked Up.)Steven was released in 2021 and moved to Vermont, where he resumed his work as a pastor. Despite substantial errors by the Immigration Judge, his initial petition for asylum was denied, and his appeal was unsuccessful. In November 2025, he filed a Motion to Reopen, now pending before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), based on the grim changes of circumstances in Uganda and his own continuing activism. He has attended all required hearings and appearances since his release. He was nevertheless apprehended by ICE at his place of work and detained on February 4, 2026.Returning Pastor Steven to Uganda shocks the conscience and violates the Convention Against Torture. We ask that Pastor Steven Tendo not be deported until the BIA has ruled upon his Motion to Reopen. We also ask that he be released from detention to guarantee his medical well-being.BACKGROUND:Pastor Stephen Tendo was born to a powerful family in Uganda and raised with the belief that he must serve his people. He received an excellent education and became a pastor, founding the very popular Eternal Life Organization International Ministries church. Steven organized community support projects, providing food, health services, and educational assistance to the needy. As the government repression and corruption grew in his homeland, he began a human rights campaign as well, assisting political prisoners and leading a voting rights effort. His work intersected with reform efforts by presidential candidate Bobi Wine, who has also been subjected to extreme persecution by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Museveni has ruled the country with an increasingly iron fist for 40 years.The first time Museveni’s goons apprehended Pastor Steven, they tortured him, severing two of his fingers. He was arrested, beaten, and tortured as many as twelve more times. He was also repeatedly subjected to false charges of fraud, but was acquitted by the Ugandan courts of each and every claim. After attacks on him and his relatives intensified, he was forced to flee Uganda in 2018.Upon arrival in the United States, Pastor Tendo was promptly detained at ICE’s notoriously brutal Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC) in Los Fresnos, Texas. Like so many single African men, he was denied bail despite being a lifelong sufferer of diabetes, having no criminal record, and enjoying many offers of support. His medications and glucometer were immediately taken away, and he went without adequate checks or treatment throughout his two years incarcerated at PIDC. This led to dangerously high blood sugar levels and blindness in one eye from diabetic related cataracts. He also became extremely dizzy and ill and began to suffer from very high blood pressure and repeated and painful boils across his body. Even when COVID broke out and swiftly spread to the detention facility, he was denied release despite his medical vulnerability. At this point, there was a strong outcry from the human rights community, and Amnesty International initiated a campaign for his release. On August 18, 2020, some 44 members of Congress signed a letter to the Director of DHS protesting his mistreatment and continued confinement.In 2020, ICE sought to deport Pastor Tendo regardless of his pending appeal to the Fifth Circuit of the denial of asylum. Although former ICE Director Pham agreed in September 2020 to stay the removal of Pastor Steven until such an appellate ruling, efforts were made to deport him in the middle of the night nonetheless. He was finally released from detention in 2021 and was able to move to Vermont. With the help of friends and supporters there, he began to heal and resumed work as a chaplain. He attended nursing classes, becoming a Licensed Nursing Assistant, and was working toward a Registered Nurse qualification when abducted by ICE. He has also worked with local youth to help them combat substance abuse and addiction. He is a genuinely fine human being and should be celebrated as an asset to any nation. He enjoys a network of very close community ties in Burlington. Yet, he has not forgotten his homeland. He remains outspoken about the situation in Uganda, and recently gave testimony to attorneys working on a case before the International Criminal Court.We are gravely concerned that, given the current turbulent political situation in the US, Pastor Steven Tendo could be whisked back to Uganda with little or no notice if he remains detained by ICE. A Ugandan official has made it clear that if this happens, he will be seized as he leaves the plane and killed. He will never arrive at customs.CALL TO ACTION:* Please contact your members of Congress today. The Congressional Switchboard operator, (202) 224-3121, will connect you to your Senate and House Representatives.* Tell them that Pastor Steven Tendo is at great risk of torture and extrajudicial execution if he is returned to Uganda. This is a violation of his human rights and an international crime known as refoulement. * Tell them he is also at great risk of medical harm and improper processing while in ICE detention. And that we urgently seek their assistance to demand his release.FOR ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND INFORMATION:Listen to Steven and my story collaboration. Click the play button above ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼.FOR ADDITIONAL LEGAL INFORMATION:Contact: Brett Stokes, Center for Justice Reform Clinic, Vermont Law and Graduate School, 802-831-1104; Chrispher Worth, Center for Justice Reform Clinic, Vermont Law and Graduate School, 802-831-1104; Elizabeth Velez, Orr & Reno, 603-223-9171; Christina Thomas, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton,404-815-6531; Fatma Marouf, Texas A&M Legal Clinic, 817-212-4123Tales of Humanity is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Tales of Humanity at sarahtowle.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Subscribers, I’m writing this to you as I watch Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. “We are all America,” reads the football he carries throughout a performance that pulses with the best of the country and culture I grew up in, the place my heart will always call home. His final statement — naming all the countries that comprise America, from Argentina to Canada, as he dances back and forth across the Levi’s Stadium 50th yard line, accompanied by flagbearers from each nation — resonated deeply with me. This is precisely why I never refer to the United States as “America.” Even my book’s subtitle defies expectation, for it uses America not refer to a place, but to express a double-entendre: It is code for the mentality that allows this linguistic legacy of Manifest Destiny, of the era of enslavement and genocide and stolen lands, to still linger unconsciously in our speech; it is also a celebration of the rich diversity encountered in borderlands, where Americans from throughout the Western hemisphere meet and mingle in creative exchange. Referring to one country by the name of two continents, an isthmus, and numerous island nations perpetuates the US’s original white supremacy project, helping to keep it alive in the age of Trumpism. I urge you to call the place by its rightfulname: the United States of America, easily shortened to the USA, the US, or the States. Words matter because they form thought, which is apropos of this week’s podcast episode about the power of art and activism, like Bad Bunny’s, to tear down the walls that oppress and divide us…On December 7, 2025, I hosted a virtual book launch for two new must-read books poised to bring a potent, first-hand view of the walling-off of the US Southwest borderlands to audiences nationwide: Borderlings, a book of poetry and pictures by nature advocate Russ McSpadden, juxtaposes the extraordinary natural beauty and unique biodiversity of the US borderlands against the ecological devastation being caused by Trump & Co’s boondoggle and ecocidal border wall. Bearing witness from the front lines of border militarization in Southern Arizona, Russ pays homage to the resilience and interdependence of human and wildlife habitats, while revealing how walls serve only to fracture, divide, and destroy. ORDER BORDERLINGS HERE.Yo’Oko Roars, an art and storybook for children and youth by Kate Scott (author) and Virginia Maria Romero (illustrator), joins Borderlings as well as Crossing the Line in sounding the alarm that the act of erecting “an immense metal fence that makes no sense” cuts nations and cultures off from on another, making it impossible for people and wildlife to find their ways “home” again. Walls create loss, longing, exile, danger, and endangerment. The story of young Iris putting her body in front of the “monsters of metal” illustrates how we should be addressing our collective problems: by building bridges, privileging friendships, and acting in solidarity through mutual aid so that we may all roar again. ORDER YO’OKO ROARS HERE.So, why the delay in getting this important podcast episode to you? Mauerkrankheit.The book launch event coincided with one of my sisters, her daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren passing through London, where I currently live with my daughter, husband, and our dear canine companion, Gryffindog. They were traveling in celebration of my sister’s birthday, just as we were about to ring in my daughter’s milestone 30th year of life. Living abroad as we do, it’s a rare treat for us to get quality time with close relatives. We were thrilled, therefore, to extend an invitation to host them. We were looking forward to introducing them to our London, to breaking bread with them, to clinking glasses of bubbly at our home or pints of craft brew at our local Pub, and to showering our two birthday girls in song. But they refused to see us, erecting an emotional wall. They ghosted us, adding a secondary communications wall that left us in a state of unknowing for weeks. When they did reach out, they did so by proxy and through text messaging, hiding behind a technological wall and fracturing our family ties even further with a lie: The children had a bucket list of “touristy things” they wanted to do in London, evidently (FYI: The kids are 4, 6, and 8 🤷🏼♀️).None of these fences made any bloody sense. We are not above “touristy things.” And besides, who wouldn’t want to party with this guy? A wall of dishonesty wove, like concertina wire, into the double fortification of emotional and communications walls erected using a technology wall, leaving a “no-man’s land” of cold silence and conjecture between us. We could only conclude that they are Trump supporters. And knowing that we are most definitely not, choose to hold up the political wall he has weaponized to tear families, literally and (in our case) figuratively, apart.My heart exploded into a billion tiny pieces. I fell into a deep, dark malaise, which I’ve come to understand is a kind of Wall Disease, aka Mauerkrankheit: A psychological condition first identified in Cold War Berlin, which had particularly devastating effects on the residents of the walled-off Eastern Zone of the city, and is characterized by a combination of depression, rage, anxiety, and apathy caused by the oppressive presence of divisive and deadly fortifications. Then, coarse salt was rubbed into open wounds, with Trump & Co’s December putsch as their paramilitary goons marched into Minnesota’s Twin Cities, from which the Towle family hails. With “Operation Metro Surge,” the 2025-26 holiday season was turned upside-down by the very ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) walls of impunity we experienced in the summer of 2020, now on steroids. These were the walls of masked agents bearing armaments, rather than judicial warrants, that I warned in Crossing the Line could become an oppressive social reality if Trump & Co were allowed to invade the White House once more. The walls of militarized Department of Homeland “Security” (DHS) agents occupy Minneapolis to this day. Their walls of clubs and harassment tactics and tear gas canisters and rubber bullets and flash bangs and automatic weapons and belief in their immunity from legal accountability (they are not) have resulted in the execution-style deaths of two US citizens, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti (may they rest in peace), as well as the kidnapping, incarceration, and expulsion of thousands of decent people just living their lives. The Reign of Terror unleashed by a “mad” (in the British sense) wanna-be king has rained economic devastation on the lives, futures, and businesses of Twin Cities inhabitants, who are still reeling from the unexpected erection of physical, militaristic, and extrajudicial walls. “The b******s are everywhere, patrolling in their SUVs with the blacked out windows, even in my very white neighborhood,” states one of my Minneapolis-based family members. “I live blocks away from the murders by DHS, and have been very involved in protests, observing and providing community support,” reports another who, untilthe rise in Trump fascism, had never been touched by ICE or Border Patrol impunity before. They are new to protesting, which illustrates yet another result of Wall Disease, the very thing that drove everyday Berliners to grab pick axes and tear the Cold War monstrosity down with their bare hands: activism fueled by anger at oppression that seeks to divide us and take away our right to roar…History shows us that in the face of state-led violence, some will succumb — like my sister, her daughter, and son-in-law, potentially (I can’t be sure, since they won’t talk to us) — choosing to turn away from the truth, much like the “good Germans” who allowed the Holocaust to happen. They will take others along with them, as my sister and her progeny did, when they walled off their hearts to me, and I crashed, overcome by Mauerkrankheit. Which is my way of explaining to you, Dear Subscribers, why it has taken me two whole months to produce and publish this important podcast episode. But thanks to Russ, Kate, Virginia, and the hundreds of thousands of heroic Minnesotans who are taking to the streets every day, I have found hope and my voice again. I am back and ready to ROAR once more!With the border now everywhere, we are all suffering from Mauerkrankheit. In this conversation with Kate, Virginia, and Russ, we discuss how we can and must overcome it. I hope you’ll draw inspiration and energy from our discussion, as I have Just click the play button in the image above to get started ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼Then, be sure to buy and review these beautiful books. Help us to get them into the hands and hearts of those who, if they only knew, would be outraged too and compelled to say “no!” to Wall Disease and tear down all the barriers that divide us!CLICK HERE TO ORDER<stro...