A Statement from Migrant Defense Organizers: “FTP” is No One’s Brand

As members of the broader abolitionist movement working towards direct migrant defense on Turtle Island and locally in Lenapehoking, we sign the following statement and assert that there is no room for law enforcement of any kind in our movements, or their enablers and protectors, least of all when opportunity for disciplined conversation has repeatedly been stifled by bullying tactics. We aim to shine light on the fraudulent and manipulative analyses based solely in identity politics, and to truth-tell about the harm that has been and continues to be caused by so-called organizers around the FTP formation with ties to law enforcement and state collaborators.

Background

In January of this year, members of our group who had attended FTP marches as individuals, were informed that the groups leading them organized with a member of law enforcement: Officer Najieb Isaac, member of FTP formation core organizing group Why Accountability / Bronxites for NYPD Accountability (WA), who has worked for the NYC Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) for at least 10 years. This was much to our dismay, especially considering that, despite the repeated insistence by members of WA, Take Back the Bronx (TBBX), Decolonize this Place (DTP) and others, this information was not made transparent: neither to the thousands of people attending and getting arrested and brutalized by Officer Isaac’s coworkers in blue at the FTP actions, nor to individuals who have organized with FTP-contingent groups for years. We do not work with nor share political space with any paid agent of the state; this is especially important to us when the communities we organize with are actively targeted by the state on a daily basis. While others can and obviously do make their own decisions to work with law enforcement officers based on their own political principles and personal relationships, we do not claim these people and they are not our comrades, elders, or leaders, regardless of anyone’s vouch. We also fundamentally question the validity of such a vouch when publicly-outed rapists, sexual abusers, and informants also receive this same co-sign. This vouch becomes even more questionable when any attempts to discuss it or even to disengage from it are met with defensiveness, dismissiveness, and ad hominem attacks; baseless lies about everything from our birthplaces and immigration status to our class backgrounds; gaslighting, intimidation, and bullying; and ultimately, repeated threats and occasions of physical violence, complete with deliberate misgendering, misogynistic and transantagonistic slurs, ableism, and other reactionary cop-like behavior. Not only are we against working with agents of the state and their collaborators, but we also firmly reject affiliation with anyone who resorts to the same tactics as the state to disorganize against and attack our comrades. As several of our comrades have pointed out, misogynists make great informants: and so do transphobes, xenophobes, and self-aggrandizing narcissists.

Similarly to other accounts shared from different individuals and organizations with whom we firmly declare our solidarity, we found that attempts to raise concerns within our own group were dismissed by now-former members of our group who used their personal relationships to protect the harmful behavior of multiple TBBX members — called out both for various abusive behaviors and for their affiliation with Officer Najieb Isaac — and to misdirect the conversation at hand for months. Rather than question the need to bring law enforcement into spaces that would endanger those we claim to be accountable to, these supposedly “anti-state communists” questioned if working with church congregations was the same contradiction as being an officer of the law. Clearly if they had to ask that question, then basic levels of security in our organization needed to be urgently readdressed. And we did. Multiple times.

We ask members of the NYC chapter of Unity & Struggle (U&S) who were formerly working with us and continue to associate themselves both personally and politically with members of TBBX affiliated with Officer Najieb Isaac to acknowledge and be accountable to their role in disorganizing and dismissing requests for internal conversation, rather than essentially shrugging, in typical cis white feminine feigned helplessness, while their friends outed our legal names, threatened us on social media, and physically attacked us in public. Despite the fact that our group has never organized or affiliated with WA, TBBX, or the FTP formation, these U&S individuals played their role within our group to insulate and protect their cop-apologist friends against any accountability or divergence from their continuing attempts at total domination of the organizing scene in the Bronx and in the overall abolitionist movement in this city. After months of painstaking internal discussions, we as a collective finally came to a consensus that we would not organize in proximity to a law enforcement officer, and that xenophobic and nativist attacks equating immigrants to gentrifiers, in spite of our experiences of forcible displacement from native lands due to US empire and relocation to Lenape territory in search of refuge, would not stand. We take particular aim at efforts by US citizens of all colors to pit colonized peoples against each other in ways that undermine international solidarity. This divide and conquer tactic is typical of the global ruling class and its lackeys, one consistently and successfully employed throughout our known histories to prevent revolution. So much for decolonizing this place.

Indigenous Kinship Collective

After reaching consensus in our group about our decision to refuse working with law enforcement, we began the process of reaching out to other organizations with whom we had previously worked, and/or hoped to work. We needed to understand their own positions on working with LEOs (law enforcement officers), so we could decide whether to have a relationship with them or not. We could not, in good conscience, bring the same people into our spaces that constantly harass and work with immigration to hand our people over to another tentacle of the imperial carceral state. We understand that proximity to LEOs never serves our communities and only endangers migrants and refugees, despite the race or gender of said law enforcement paid agent. We know that members of our racial and ethnic groups have signed the dotted line to serve imperial interests, and we question where their allegiances stand. We have in the past and continue to call out members of our own communities who have served for papers and we will never be intimidated by their neoliberal weaponization of identities, because we know all too well that not all skin is kin.

Naturally, we thought the best way to start this vetting process was to approach groups whose outwardly-expressed politics were prison abolitionist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist. One of the groups we reached out to was the Indigenous Kinship Collective (IKC). Members of our group approached IKC on this subject twice: once in April 2020, after we first found out about Officer Najieb Isaac’s participation in the core organizing of the FTP formation, and again in May 2020, as the global pandemic was raging. The first time one of our members spoke to an IKC member, L, they informed us their group was unaware of the PO in the FTP formation, which IKC has publicly participated in and endorsed since #FTP1. The second time another one of our members approached another IKC member, C, to ask them about their group’s position on organizing with members of law enforcement, we were again informed that IKC as a group was unaware of the PO in the FTP formation. Despite that obvious contradiction of events we know to have taken place, we asked C to please communicate this information to the rest of IKC and to let us know their position as a group. Our member made clear during this second conversation that our goal in approaching IKC was in the hopes of connecting with another queer femme Indigenous-led organization, and building a working relationship where we could collaborate together against the empire to which we both were ostensibly opposed.

What resulted from that second conversation shocked, dismayed, and deeply disappointed us: we were made aware that an IKC member, R, who is friends with S, the TBBX member who to this day continues to attack our comrades on behalf of, and share information with, Officer Najieb Isaac of WA, revealed our conversation with IKC and also revealed the legal names of some of our group members and comrades. In so doing, this IKC member informed on a queer undocumented Indigenous person, as well as other QTBIPOC organizers (some of whom are not even members of our group), to a person who is very publicly a collaborator with a member of law enforcement, who has participated in raiding our abolitionist comrades’ meetings — attacking young Black queer femmes, intentionally misgendering and otherwise antagonizing trans people, making misinformed and patently false generalizations of younger QTBIPOC abolitionist organizers as “not from New York,” as “hipsters” and “gentrifiers,” and dipping generously into the ever-flowing stream of neoliberal identity politics to discredit our praxis of remaining determined to build a society without police, prisons, or borders. IKC as a group, and several of their members — including and especially the one who informed on us to collaborators with state agents — have spent painstaking years building their online personas as activists, organizers, “agitators,” educators, and artists who are anti-police, anti-imperialist, pro-Black, and pro-Indigenous. These publicly-declared political alignments are dangerously out of sync with their actions.

We call on IKC to respond to, and take accountability for, the actions and inactions of their group, and actions performed in their name as endorsers and promoters of the FTP formation and the #FTP1, #FTP2, #FTP3, and #FTP4 marches. Claiming that IKC is “peripheral” or that “this is not our drama” is both belittling to us and all the other QTBIPOC who have been sharing their experiences of harm, as well as avoidant and derailing. Your group repeatedly promoted and endorsed all #FTP branded actions on your social media, encouraging young Indigenous and Black youth to join the actions without disclosing that they are organized by an active law enforcement officer. And when IKC was formally approached on at least two separate occasions by other QTBIPOC organizers about this, your organization not only refused to engage with us, but watched and co-signed when R retaliated against us by giving whatever information they had available about us to S, knowing full well that S is posting our legal names, our immigration status, our places of origin, and our affiliation with migrant justice activities on social media. R even asked to share our members’ phone numbers with S and with WA, thereby sharing our information directly with Officer Najieb Issac. Where we come from, that is called snitching. Repeated attempts to publicly deny that any of this happened, and to claim that “IKC does not work with cops,” when you still to this very day affiliate with a cop-led organization, and debate internally whether or not to meet with them in person to give them additional information about us, is absolutely a continuation of the harm IKC has caused, and it is gaslighting and manipulative. We have had to shut down all operations due to R’s deliberate informing, as well as the targeted activity and physical attacks against our undocumented members perpetuated by Officer Najieb Issac and her associates, with whom R still maintains a close personal and political relationship, and still shares information.

Why would we make this up? What would we possibly have to gain from our names being given to law enforcement as members of a migrant justice direct action organization? What do we have to gain from the fractured relationships and community rifts that R and IKC’s behavior have caused? You can claim over and over that you “don’t know us” and that we “are not in community,” but that is sadly untrue. We share among us friends, lovers, organizing and working relationships. We live in the same neighborhoods. We attend the same events. We are, for better or worse, tied to the same social and organizing circles through personal and political relationships. And so this harm needs to be addressed through community accountability. We call on the IKC member, R, who informed on our comrades to take accountability for their xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, colorist, and transantagonistic behavior and disorganizing, and begin steps to personally repair the harm they have caused to our members. We call on IKC to take this moment to reflect on their role as participants and promoters of the FTP formation, to reflect on the lack of transparency within their own organization toward their own members about their and R’s roles in the FTP formation and their collaborative intimidation of dissenting QTBIPOC organizers, and to reflect on how R was enabled and tacitly supported in their actions by the entire group. We call on other abolitionist organizations and formations who engage and do work with IKC and its members to account for their harm, particularly to the brown-skinned undocumented Indigenous comrades they have thrown under the proverbial corrections bus for the sake of their light-skinned and white-passing kin.

Take Back the Bronx

This is unfortunately not the first time our group members have come into conflict with members of TBBX over their political praxis. Years ago, one of our members was part of a group of women, femmes, and trans people of color who confronted and called out a cis male TBBX member, C (who is currently also a member of U&S NYC — this is a different person than Albert Saint Jean), for moving through our shared organizing spaces without disclosing that he has been called out for what we consider to be sexual assault, if not outright rape. The responses of TBBX members at that time followed a pattern that has now become characteristic: they refused to accept a call-out of their member, responded to requests for community accountability as if we were attacking them personally, and twice sent a woman of color to physically confront and attempt to publicly fight our member and their co-organizers in this activity. To this day, our member has not received any communication from TBBX accounting for the group’s behavior, or even an apology from C the rapist for sending people to attack them, and for pushing them out of shared organizing and event spaces. We again recall the references from our comrades’ statements to Courtney Desiree Morris’ essential 2010 essay, “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements”:

“And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements.”

Whether members of TBBX are paid agents or not, their actions follow a pattern of self-important bullying that demands absolute loyalty and responds to dissent and critique with threats, physical violence, and intimidation. The member that most exemplifies this cop-like behavior is the one we have referenced previously in this statement, who we will continue to refer to as S.

S has a Wikipedia page and often posts long rants and threats on social media using her full legal name / initials, making this information easily available to anyone who wants to know who’s bullying them. S is an established visual artist with an MFA, who has shown work at and collaborated with such prestigious private institutions as the Whitney, MoMA, and NYU. In spite of these academic and professional credentials, S makes a nasty habit of attacking organizers she doesn’t like with generalized, politically empty, and often factually incorrect insults such as “art school,” “trust fund,” “gentrifier,” “hipster,” etc. S not only organizes with TBBX, but also collaborates with and has close personal and political affiliations with DTP and, of course, WA and Officer Najieb Isaac. S is an enthusiastic organizer and promoter of the #FTP branded formation and its four increasingly poorly-organized and ill-fated marches.

S is also a 43-year old light-skinned Black cis woman who gets off on rolling up to the Christopher St. piers with her squad of karens and white-tinas to harrass, deliberately and knowingly misgender, and physically attack visibly brown- and black-skinned, visibly gender-non-conforming, queer and trans organizers 10 to 20 years younger than her. S calls this “hood justice.” S is very concerned with knowing where everyone who disagrees with her are “from,” to determine whether they rightfully belong in NYC or not (though of course she does not apply this same standard to those who pledge her their allegiance). S has exhibited particular ire toward immigrants and others who grew up across the Hudson, in spite of the fact that most of the state of New Jersey is still entirely within the traditional boundaries of Lenapehoking, as is all of NYC. S has been quoted repeatedly saying the following to our friends and comrades who are brown-skinned Indigenous immigrants:

“You people come here and take our jobs. You take our homes. And then you wonder why our babies have to become cops. Go back to where you came from.”

S has also targeted Boricuas for living in NYC, including those whose families are from NYC, when her publicly-stated politics claim NYC as a Boricua city. NYC is a city of migrants, both of native and non-native peoples. People have come to this very site in Lenapehoking from all over Turtle Island and the rest of the world, for many hundreds of years, before Europeans even knew it existed. Imagine attacking individual immigrants seeking refuge, rather than attacking the system of violent settler colonialism and imperialism that forces displacement globally. Reactionaries show themselves when they act on emotion and not on principle.

As our comrades’ statements attest in painful detail, S has repeatedly threatened, intimidated, and attacked our friends and comrades, and collaborated with Officer Najieb Isaac and other older cis Black women to conduct a raid on a group of younger queer and trans Black organizers who made public the fact that Officer Isaac is an active law enforcement officer leading a series of self-professed anti-police marches that have resulted in thousands of young Black and brown people’s biodata being handed over to the government. In an era where being an anti-fascist and expressing that Black people deserve to live without fear of armed execution by the state is considered tantamount to terrorism, glibly encouraging thousands of young, often new-to-the-movement activists to needlessly throw their bodies into the jaws of the police state, without even organizing meaningful jail support or bail funds, is beyond irresponsible. To furthermore “organize” these debacles with an officer of the law and not make that information available on every single promotional flyer and social media post is downright disgusting, and a very basic violation of consent and trust.

How is S able to continue acting in such obviously toxic and harmful ways and still remain an organizer? S tends to gather white and white-passing people around her, weaponizing her identity as a Black woman from the Bronx and skillfully navigating their white and light-skinned guilt to compel these people to follow her every narcissistic whim, and to fiercely and venomously support her — regardless of how harmful her behavior is to the young queer abolitionists of color she targets, or how empty her political praxis has proven itself to be when she’s not in front of her computer screen. S wants people to consider her a “movement elder.” Well, S is not our elder: S is someone our elders would smack in the mouth.

#FTP Branded Actions Organized by the “Formation”

As the scathing and accurate review of the latest failed FTP action details, the performative militancy this formation bases their entire politics on is truly just a cooptation of organic Black youth-led revolutionary street actions. A full week after NYPD cars were set ablaze, the best these “seasoned activists” could muster was a questionable flyer hyping another street protest. For what purpose exactly — to continue agitating and politicizing the youth? The streets already were fuck the police, just not your state-sanctioned brand of #FTP. Perhaps that was the problem? For a formation that calls itself leaderless and horizontal and encouraging of autonomous actions, it sure seems like independent thought scares them. The FTP actions we saw and aligned with were undertaken by the young Black and brown people that have always been the target of this state, fighting back and getting cop cars to retreat in fear — not the branded actions that never actually challenged the police state but in fact cooperate with its agents and hand thousands of those very same Black and brown youth to the state in poorly-planned and traumatizing marches, with no material gains to speak of. We question the credibility of TBBX and the entire FTP formation’s claims of non-hierarchical structurelessness, and call out its clear practice of authoritarian vanguardism. We also see their politically feeble attempts to conflate parole officers, housing authority agents, child protective agents, and any other agent of the state (particularly if this agent is a Black woman) as “working class.” Any of the heroes they post quotes from on their social media, from Fred Hampton to Assata Shakur, would set them straight: the role of law enforcement is to serve and protect the interests of the genocidal ruling class, and to ensure the continued subjugation of the working class, particularly and especially Black people. Keep our elders’ work out your mouths if you’re going to rep law enforcement.

Glaringly absent from this finally-public and growing conversation around the FTP formation, its cop-apologists and state collaborators, and its misogynists, transphobes, and abusers, are the voices of Officer Najieb Isaac’s parolees. Any just consideration of her continued participation in these self-described “abolitionist” formations would require that Officer Isaac be accountable to those whose continued incarceration she has ensured. When defenders of Officer Isaac’s participation in the #FTP formation decry the supposed “disposability” with which we and our comrades are treating Black law enforcement officers and their friends, we ask: what about the disposability of those human beings Officer Isaac has surveilled, controlled, and condemned to cages? Has anyone asked them how they feel about their PO making them pee in a cup by day, and saying “fuck the police” by night? We certainly know how we feel, as people with incarcerated kin and family members on parole, as people who grew up knowing “chinga la migra” was not a trendy hashtag, but a way of life upon which our entire family’s survival depended. When we say “fuck the pigs,” we mean all of them: fuck all agents of settler colonial empire, from Turtle Island to Palestine, who choose to take a job torturing human beings — whether they’re in uniform or in plain clothes, on the streets or at a desk, persecuting our people inside the jails or outside of them. We really didn’t think this would be such a controversial point to self-professed prison abolitionists, but apparently it is.

En Fin

It has not escaped us that this “aesthetics over principle” form of so-called organizing leads to the very authoritarianism these groups and people claim to despise. Others have spoken on this at length for decades, and as we approach the death of neoliberal capitalism, we know that the state will continue to sharpen old tools. Repeated claims that these groups and individuals have been consistently transparent, while also threatening groups from having internal discussions with their trusted co-organizers, literally does not make sense. And it shouldn’t. Doublespeak from law enforcement and their apologists should be recognized as such: pigs gonna pig.

What has also not escaped us is the way that identity has been weaponized and wielded in such a way that allows only a handful of older cis Black women to antagonize, bully, and verbally and physically attack us as queers, trans people, and immigrants; post our legal names on the internet; raid our meetings; silence and erase the voices of the Black women, femmes, trans and working class people who have been harmed; and shut down our actually abolitionist organizing — regardless of whether we were born and raised on Lenape land, or elsewhere in the world. Again we point out the obvious attempts to pit oppressed peoples with shared histories of resistance against each other, supposedly under the banner of “defending Black women.” We ask, what about the Black women whose lives and families are torn apart by Officer Najieb Isaac’s decade of work for the police state — can she and her supporters at least be accountable to them? Or did you not mean those Black women? Cause they’re not yours, right?

We encourage readers of this statement moved by the urgency of our words to contact these organizations and ask them why they participate in supposedly abolitionist actions that are organized by a law enforcement officer in WA; why they tacitly approve of the harassment, intimidation, and persecution of young queer, trans, Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant abolitionists by that same law enforcement officer and her friends, and why they harbor and remain absolutely silent about the allegations of sexual abuse by cis men against women, femmes, and trans people in their groups and formations:

Take Back the Bronx

Indigenous Kinship Collective

Decolonize This Place

Unity & Struggle NYC

NYC Shut It Down

BYP100 NYC

Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC)

We end with this quote from an actual revolutionary elder, from whom we learn and draw constant inspiration and guidance:

“If we want an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way. The trans community has taught us to challenge that which is perceived to be normal. If we can challenge the gender binary, we can challenge prisons.”

– Dr. Angela Davis, Dream Defenders Sunday School, 6/14/2020