The Immigration Working Group is writing today with our first blog post, to tell you about an exciting development in the Baltimore immigration activism space: neighborhood response groups! These groups, or NRGs, are part of our strategy to build long-term power and create networks where community members can care for one another, and we hope you’ll read on to learn more and get involved.

When a group of local progressive activists started the Baltimore Rapid Response Network, their goal was to channel the political energy of the moment into something durable. They called their early mass meetings “For the Long Haul” because they knew that, over time, the horrors of this political moment could become normalized — or fade from public attention the moment Democrats regain institutional power. Normalization and political complacency are part of how systems of violence sustain themselves.

Normalization does not mean the danger has passed. ICE is still actively kidnapping and detaining people — often with less media attention and more quietly than before. Preparing our neighborhoods, building networks of trust, and keeping each other informed remains essential if we want to protect our communities and provide support where we can.

And even in neighborhoods where the immediate risk of an ICE raid may seem low, community-based organizing still matters. The political right — including the conservative Tea Party — understood this long ago. They built power block by block, school by school, workplace by workplace. They invested in hyper-local organizing and treated community infrastructure as political infrastructure. Too often, liberals and leftists have abandoned that terrain. We believe it is time to reclaim it.

Indivisible — a progressive grassroots organization with over 3,000 chapters nationwide — was founded to copy the strategies used by the Tea Party including neighborhood organizing (but minus the violence, racism, and corporate funding). Together, Charm City Indivisible and Baltimore Rapid Response Network are helping Baltimore neighborhoods to build progressive solidarity and political infrastructure through what we call Neighborhood Response Groups, or NRGs.

More than a dozen NRGs have sprung up in Baltimore City. They are all about (1) building a hyper-local capability to respond to fascism, and (2) neighbors helping neighbors. They have been spurred into formation by an uptick in ICE abductions and a felt need to protect New Americans (a.k.a. “immigrants”) who live in their neighborhoods, but their purpose will evolve as they unite around future challenges. Several existing groups are focused on community care, one is focused on protection of students and their families, and nearly all of them incorporate a non-violent ICE Watch component, to alert at-risk neighbors and to document ICE abuses.

Charm City Indivisible and Baltimore Rapid Response Network have formed a Neighborhood Response Coordinating Team. We’re spreading the word about the NRGs, plugging concerned citizens into groups in their neighborhoods, supporting the sharing of best practices learned by individual groups as they grow, and helping individuals work with neighbors to start NRGs in locales that don’t yet have one.

Reach out today to join an NRG in your neighborhood!