It has been 5 years since Could 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on the nook of thirty eighth Road and Chicago Avenue. 5 years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood exterior Cup Meals, raised her telephone, and bore witness to 9 minutes and 29 seconds that may provoke a worldwide motion in opposition to racial injustice.
Frazier’s video didn’t simply present what occurred. It insisted the world cease and see.
Right now, that legacy continues within the arms of a special neighborhood, going through completely different threats however wielding the identical instruments. Throughout the US, Latino organizers are elevating their telephones, to not go viral however to go on document. They livestream Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, movie household separations and doc protests exterior detention facilities. Their footage is just not merely content material. It’s proof, warning—and resistance.
Right here in Los Angeles the place I educate journalism, for instance, a number of pictures have seared themselves into public reminiscence. One viral video exhibits a shackled father stepping right into a white, unmarked van as his daughter sobs behind the digicam, pleading with him to not signal any official paperwork. He turns, gestures for her to relax, and blows her a kiss. In one other video, filmed throughout city, Los Angeles Police Division officers on horseback cost into crowds of peaceable protesters, swinging wood batons with chilling precision.
In Spokane, Washington, residents kind a spontaneous human chain round their neighbors mid-raid, their our bodies and cameras erecting a barricade of defiance. In San Diego, a video exhibits white allies yelling “Disgrace!” as they chase a automotive filled with Nationwide Guard troops from their neighborhood.
The affect of smartphone witnessing has been instant and unmistakable—visceral at avenue stage, seismic in statehouses. On the bottom, the movies helped encourage a “No Kings” motion, which organized protests in all 50 states on June 14, 2025.
Lawmakers are intensifying their concentrate on immigration coverage as nicely. Because the Trump administration escalates enforcement, Democratic-led states are increasing legal guidelines that restrict cooperation with federal brokers. On June 12, the Home Oversight Committee questioned Democratic governors about these measures, with Republican lawmakers citing public security issues. The listening to underscored deep divisions between federal and state approaches to immigration enforcement.
BREAKING: ICE raid and neighborhood resistance in entrance of Residence Depot in Paramount, California.
— Jeremy Lindenfeld (@jeremotographs.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T18:27:17.850Z
The legacy of Black witnessing
What’s unfolding now is just not new—it’s newly seen. As my analysis exhibits, Latino organizers are drawing from a playbook that was sharpened in 2020 and rooted in a a lot older lineage of Black media survival methods that had been solid below excessive oppression.
In my 2020 e book Bearing Witness Whereas Black: African Individuals, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism, I doc how Black Individuals have used media—slave narratives, pamphlets, newspapers, radio and now smartphones—to struggle for justice. From Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to Darnella Frazier, Black witnesses have lengthy used journalism as a software for survival and transformation.
Latino cellular journalists are constructing on that blueprint in 2025, filming state energy in moments of overreach, archiving injustice in actual time, and increasing the affect of this radical custom.
Their work additionally echoes the spatial ways of Black resistance. Simply as enslaved Black individuals as soon as mapped escape routes throughout slavery and Jim Crow, Latino communities as we speak are participating in digital cartography to chart ICE-free zones, mutual help hubs and sanctuary areas. The Individuals Over Papers map channels the logic of the Black maroons—communities of self-liberated Africans who escaped plantations to trace patrols, share intelligence and construct networks of survival. Now, the hideouts are digital. The maps are crowdsourced. The hazard stays.
Likewise, the Cease ICE Raids Alerts Community revives a civil rights-era tactic. Within the Sixties, organizers used huge space phone service traces and radio to flow into security updates. Black DJs cloaked dispatches in site visitors and climate stories—“congestion on the south facet” signaled police blockades; “storm warnings” meant violence forward. Right now, the medium is WhatsApp. The sign is encrypted. However the message—defend one another—has not modified.
Layered throughout each programs is the DNA of the “Negro Motorist Inexperienced Ebook,” the information that after helped Black vacationers navigate Jim Crow America by figuring out secure cities, fuel stations, and lodging. Individuals Over Papers and Cease ICE Raids are digital descendants of that legacy. The place the Inexperienced Ebook used printed pages, as we speak’s instruments use digital pins. However the mission stays: survival by means of shared information, safety by means of mapped resistance.
The Individuals Over Papers map is a crowdsourced assortment of stories of ICE exercise throughout the U.S. [Screenshot: The Conversation U.S.]
Harmful necessity
5 years after George Floyd’s loss of life, the ability of visible proof stays plain. Black witnessing laid the groundwork. In 2025, that custom continues by means of the lens of Latino cellular journalists, who draw clear parallels between their very own neighborhood’s experiences and people of Black Individuals. Their footage exposes highly effective echoes: ICE raids and overpolicing, border cages and metropolis jails, a door kicked in at daybreak and a knee on a neck.
Like Black Individuals earlier than them, Latino communities are utilizing smartphones to guard, to doc and to reply. In cities similar to Chicago, Los Angeles, and El Paso, whispers of “ICE is within the neighborhood” now flash throughout Telegram, WhatsApp, and Instagram. For undocumented households, urgent document can imply risking retaliation or arrest. However many hold filming—as a result of what goes unrecorded might be erased.
What they seize usually are not remoted incidents. They’re a part of a broader, shared battle in opposition to state violence. And so long as the cameras hold rolling, the tales hold surfacing—illuminated by the glow of smartphone screens that refuse to look away.
Allissa V. Richardson is an affiliate professor of journalism at USC Annenberg Faculty for Communication and Journalism.
This text is republished from The Dialog below a Artistic Commons license. Learn the unique article.
