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SMARTPHONES AGAIN SET THE AGENDA FOR JUSTICE  
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Allissa V. Richardson
June 18, 2025
The Conversation

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_ Smartphones are once again setting the agenda for justice as the
Latino community documents ICE actions. On the ground, the videos
helped inspire a “No Kings” movement, which organized protests in
all 50 states on June 14, 2025. _

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It has been five years since May 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped
for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer
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at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. Five years since
17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood outside Cup Foods, raised her phone
and bore witness
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to nine minutes and 29 seconds that would galvanize a global movement
against racial injustice.

Frazier’s video didn’t just show what happened. It insisted the
world stop and see.

Today, that legacy continues in the hands of a different community,
facing different threats but wielding the same tools. Across the
United States, Latino organizers are raising their phones, not to go
viral but to go on record. They livestream Immigration and Customs
Enforcement raids, film family separations and document protests
outside detention centers. Their footage is not merely content. It is
evidence, warning – and resistance.

Here in Los Angeles where I teach journalism
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several images have seared themselves into public memory. One viral
video shows a shackled father
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stepping into a white, unmarked van as his daughter sobs behind the
camera, pleading with him not to sign any official documents. He
turns, gestures for her to calm down, and blows her a kiss. In another
video, filmed across town, Los Angeles Police Department officers on
horseback
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charge into crowds of peaceful protesters, swinging wooden batons with
chilling precision.

In Spokane, Washington, residents form a spontaneous human chain
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around their neighbors mid-raid, their bodies and cameras erecting a
barricade of defiance. In San Diego, a video shows white allies
yelling “Shame
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as they chase a car full of National Guard troops from their
neighborhood.

The impact of smartphone witnessing has been immediate and
unmistakable – visceral at street level
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seismic in statehouses
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On the ground, the videos helped inspire a “No Kings” movement
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organized protests in all 50 states on June 14, 2025.

Lawmakers are intensifying their focus
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on immigration policy as well. As the Trump administration escalates
enforcement, Democratic-led states are expanding laws that limit
cooperation
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with federal agents. On June 12, the House Oversight Committee
questioned Democratic governors about these measures, with Republican
lawmakers citing public safety concerns. The hearing underscored deep
divisions between federal and state approaches to immigration
enforcement.

The legacy of Black witnessing

What’s unfolding now is not new – it is newly visible. As my
research shows, Latino organizers are drawing from a playbook that was
sharpened in 2020 and rooted in a much older lineage of Black media
survival strategies that were forged under extreme oppression.

In my 2020 book “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans,
Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism
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I document how Black Americans have used media – slave narratives,
pamphlets, newspapers, radio and now smartphones – to fight for
justice. From Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to Darnella Frazier,
Black witnesses have long used journalism as a tool for survival and
transformation.

Latino mobile journalists are building on that blueprint in 2025,
filming state power in moments of overreach, archiving injustice in
real time, and expanding the impact of this radical tradition.

Their work also echoes the spatial tactics of Black resistance. Just
as enslaved Black people once mapped escape routes during slavery and
Jim Crow, Latino communities today are engaging in digital cartography
to chart ICE-free zones, mutual aid hubs and sanctuary spaces. The
People Over Papers map
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channels the logic of the Black maroons
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communities of self-liberated Africans who escaped plantations to
track patrols, share intelligence and build networks of survival. Now,
the hideouts are digital. The maps are crowdsourced. The danger
remains.

Likewise, the Stop ICE Raids Alerts Network [[link removed]]
revives a civil rights-era tactic. In the 1960s, organizers used wide
area telephone service lines
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safety updates. Black DJs cloaked dispatches in traffic and weather
reports – “congestion on the south side” signaled police
blockades; “storm warnings” meant violence ahead. Today, the
medium is WhatsApp. The signal is encrypted. But the message –
protect each other – has not changed.

Layered across both systems is the DNA of the “Negro Motorist Green
Book [[link removed]],” the guide that once
helped Black travelers navigate Jim Crow America by identifying safe
towns, gas stations and lodging. People Over Papers and Stop ICE Raids
are digital descendants of that legacy. Where the Green Book used
printed pages, today’s tools use digital pins. But the mission
remains: survival through shared knowledge, protection through mapped
resistance.

[A map of the United States with pins of different colors on dozens of
locations]
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The People Over Papers map is a crowdsourced collection of reports of
ICE activity across the U.S. Screenshot by The Conversation U.S.
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Dangerous necessity

Five years after George Floyd’s death, the power of visual evidence
remains undeniable. Black witnessing laid the groundwork. In 2025,
that tradition continues through the lens of Latino mobile
journalists, who draw clear parallels between their own community’s
experiences and those of Black Americans. Their footage exposes
powerful echoes: ICE raids and overpolicing, border cages and city
jails, a door kicked in at dawn and a knee on a neck.

Like Black Americans before them, Latino communities are using
smartphones to protect, to document and to respond. In cities such as
Chicago, Los Angeles and El Paso, whispers of “ICE is in the
neighborhood” now flash across Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram. For
undocumented families, pressing record can mean risking retaliation or
arrest. But many keep filming – because what goes unrecorded can be
erased.

What they capture are not isolated incidents. They are part of a
broader, shared struggle against state violence. And as long as the
cameras keep rolling, the stories keep surfacing – illuminated by
the glow of smartphone screens that refuse to look away.[The
Conversation]

_Allissa V. Richardson
[[link removed]] ua Associate
Professor of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication and
Journalism
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_This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
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* No Kings Day
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* Black Lives Matter
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* alternative media
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