Video from Hands Off NYC: Sunita Viswanath on Minneapolis, ICE, and Non-Cooperation

This post was recorded at a Manhattan Borough Wide Traning of Hands Off NYC training and includes both an on-camera interview with our Executive Director, Sunita Viswanath, and the speech she delivered to the room.

In the interview and remarks, Sunita reflects on joining a 1,000-person interfaith convergence in Minneapolis, where faith leaders were oriented by local organizers and then asked to step into real-time community defense: protesting at ICE headquarters, supporting dispatch, and joining patrols meant to observe, record, and report ICE activity. Sunita describes hearing three abductions reported over dispatch during a single three-hour patrol shift—naming the experience as an occupation, and drawing a visceral connection to what they have witnessed in the West Bank.

But the heart of Sunita’s message is not despair—it’s instruction. Minneapolis, they emphasize, is showing what collective care looks like under pressure: neighbors donating money or offering space, mutual-aid deliveries, rides and school drop-offs for families afraid to leave home, and people in the streets using their presence to protect each other. Just as importantly, they describe a kind of solidarity that refuses ideological gatekeeping—people holding hands without interrogating each other first, because the crisis is already here.

Sunita closes with a call to action rooted in liberatory faith: take prayers of love, rage, and resistance into public life; learn from histories of resistance; and practice peaceful, nonviolent non-cooperation that actually interrupts harm.

If you want to plug in, connect with Hands Off NYC to find upcoming trainings and ways to get involved—whether that’s getting trained, supporting mutual aid, or joining community-based rapid response and documentation efforts.

During just a three-hour patrol shift, Sunita heard three abductions reported on dispatch and watched ICE activity unfold block by block—an experience they described as an occupation, with a visceral echo of what they’ve witnessed in the West Bank. The point wasn’t metaphor. It was recognition: a landscape organized to intimidate, disappear, and exhaust a community into silence—and a community refusing silence anyway.

What stood out most was how Minneapolis residents are surviving and resisting together. People donated money when they could, offered space when they couldn’t, drove kids to school when parents were too afraid to leave home, ran groceries through mutual-aid networks, and kept watch in the streets—without demanding ideological agreement first. In an emergency, purity politics collapses. What remains is the question: Will you hold the line with your neighbors?

In the speech, Sunita honored lives named in the tradition of “say their names,” grounding the moment in grief and accountability—and reminding us that the machinery that brutalized Black communities and criminalized dissent is inseparable from what ICE is doing now. The message from Minneapolis was blunt: act before it arrives at your door, because authoritarian power doesn’t wait for you to feel ready.

If you want to plug in, connect with Hands Off NYC to find upcoming trainings and ways to get involved—whether that’s getting trained, supporting mutual aid, or joining community-based rapid response and documentation efforts.