‘Something’s Different’: LGBTQ+ Texans Are Organizing in Defense of Immigrants

It’s hard to ignore Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they come crashing into your neighborhood. 

It’s become the topic of conversation in Austin’s North Loop, Reilly, a 42-year-old transgender resident, told The Barbed Wire one February evening from a graffiti-covered picnic table in the grass behind Epoch, the neighborhood’s beloved 24-hour coffee shop. 

“I think when people are confronted with the realities — in their face — of what our immigrant neighbors are facing, there’s no choice but to respond,” Reilly said, adding that it becomes harder to “stay in your home and try to remain ambivalent to it when you’re watching people get yanked out of their cars and thrown into the back of a van and disappeared off to God knows where.”

As reported by KUT’s Greta Díaz González Vázquez, a car chase involving ICE ended on Feb. 2 when the driver agents were pursuing crashed onto the front lawn of an area home. An Austin Police Department spokesperson confirmed the incident to KUT and told the outlet none of the vehicles involved in the chase were marked as law enforcement vehicles. A social media video shows armed men with covered faces pinning another man to the ground.

North Loop is a bustling, popular destination for events as varied as a workshop on “romantic rope restraint” at sex toy shop Forbidden Fruit to history presentations by the Democratic Socialists of America in the backyard of Barrett’s Too, a bar and eatery serving vegan powerbowls and hemp THC-laced seltzer on tap. 

It’s important to recognize, Reilly said, that people who live in neighborhoods like North Loop “are recognizing that it’s about their ability to use (their) privilege to protect their neighbors.”

Reilly asked to use a pseudonym to speak openly with The Barbed Wire about organizing against ICE as a transgender individual. The Barbed Wire has independently confirmed their identity, and the organizing efforts of area residents, but are not naming them due to fears of legal and criminal retaliation.

An Austin resident for 20 years, Reilly said they’ve seen a broader range of people talking about ICE activity and efforts to keep immigrant neighbors safe in recent weeks — beyond groups that typically show up in activist spaces. 

“When you see that happen at a neighborhood association, you realize that it’s not like just the usual, you know, ‘radical Antifa cells,’” Reilly said, “it’s crossed over into the minds of your SUV driving soccer moms.” 

ICE activity is arguably less visible in Austin and other major Texas cities compared to locations like Minneapolis, which have seen surges of thousands of officers in the largest Department of Homeland Security operation in recorded history. Under the banner of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigration efforts, the agency has ballooned in both budget and size. 

Months of intimidation and unlawful detainments — along with the extrajudicial killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota and Keith Porter in Los Angeles — have led Texas lawmakers to demand major reforms to the agency. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who has been monitoring cases like that of a 2-month-old who was deported after being hospitalized with bronchitis, has called for at least one Texas detention center to be shut down.

Yet, incidents like the car crash in North Loop — amid dozens of other local headlines, including the deportation of a 5-year-old U.S. citizen when her mother called 911 for help — remind Austinites that ICE is still very present. As such, Reilly said they’ve driven a surge of organizing, as residents get to know one another better and learn to defend each other against immigration crackdowns they find unjust and inhumane. Modeling their work off the “rapid response” networks formed in Minneapolis and other cities, a rapidly expanding network of interconnected, neighborhood based chats and volunteer groups have formed in Austin, operated primarily off an encrypted messaging app. 

As of publication time, specialized groups cover 23 of Austin’s major neighborhoods, with additional citywide chats, plus others covering surrounding communities like Buda, Dripping Springs, Kyle, and San Marcos. They collectively operate a hotline for reports of ICE activity (512-686-6243) across the whole region. Members follow up on reports or their own sightings, and do their best to help the victims of ICE by sharing information with relatives, helping friends or loved ones retrieve vehicles or possessions, and filing incident reports with organizations that support immigrants, such as Grassroots Leadership. 

Reilly said ICE raids have been a call to action for Austin residents in general, but especially for LGBTQ+ locals, and especially white queer and trans folks who were more easily able to ignore the long history of injustice in the U.S. immigration system. 

“There are queer and trans immigrants, and they’ve been in this fight for a while, you know, through all sorts of different organizations,” Reilly said. “The work that those people have already been doing is really calling out the lack of effort and energy that queer non-people of color have been putting into or paying attention to this work. It feels trite to say it at this point but recognizing that the struggle of all oppressed peoples are linked.”

The idea that “all our struggles are connected” is reinforced by the stark reality of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant violence, and the racist philosophies that inspire both that violence and attempts by the Trump administration to roll back rights for all marginalized groups, according to R.G. Cravens, senior manager of research and analysis with the Intelligence Project at the extremism research nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. 

“My team researches and monitors anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremist groups,” Cravens explained. 

Attacks on both immigrants and LGBTQ+ people connect back to ideas like the “great replacement” theory, that white people are being deliberately and systematically eradicated. 

“Anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant groups, and I would add white nationalist groups too, view LGBTQ+ people and immigrants as threats to what they believe should be the dominant white Christian culture in the United States,” Cravens said. “I think that’s the connection.” 

This can be seen at the street level, in acts of violence against both immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities, according to data provided to The Barbed Wire by the Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker, or ALERT, a project of the LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit GLAAD. Separately, in both 2024 and 2025, researchers found more than 50 hate incidents nationwide simultaneously targeted LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities. The ALERT desk compiles verifiable incidents from news reports and social media, meaning the real number of incidents could be much higher. 

Among the incidents documented by the ALERT project: 

• On March 31, 2025, individuals associated with Blaze TV and Turning Point USA disrupted a Trans Day of Visibility Rally at the University of Texas at Dallas. Trolling comments included both transphobic remarks and threats to call ICE.
• In May 2025, a San Antonio man allegedly made more than a dozen violent threats online, targeting both pro-immigrant protests in Los Angeles and Pride parades in Texas.
• Around Oct. 4, 2025, individuals associated with an extremist group placed anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant stickers along the route for the Pride Parade & Block Party in Corpus Christi, Texas. Stickers included “Don’t Mexico My Texas,” and “Reject the gender cult.”
• On Oct. 18, 2025, extremists protested against a drag performance at the Filipino Street Festival in Sugar Land, Texas. 

“In this moment, we must all speak out and condemn the campaign of violence targeting the most vulnerable among us, from the trans and immigrant communities, to our Black and Brown neighbors and to people of all faiths,” a GLAAD spokesperson told The Barbed Wire in a statement. “The brutal murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti remind us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Good, who was with her wife when she was killed by an ICE agent, immediately became a target of vilification by extremists. The day after she was killed, right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh, posted on X, “This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her.” By contrast, on the left, these highly visible murders by ICE have had the effect of inspiring activists nationwide to stand up to Trump’s forces.

“It seemed like after Keith Porter and Renee Good and then Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE, that folks really felt like it was time to do something,” Reilly said.

According to Cravens and his team, these connections go beyond direct violence, but to the extremists groups who increasingly hold sway in the halls of power: “They’ve been in the same room, both literally and figuratively, for decades now.”

What were once “fringe ideas” are now “fueling public policy,” Cravens explained, adding that these connections are documented in SPLC’s annual hate and extremism report. The Barbed Wire had similar findings in a recent analysis of accounts on a white supremacist dating site, which showed hallmarks of far-right radicalization were prevalent in users’ biographies, self-described political views, “mindsets,” and even in the nature of the submission fields users were prompted to complete.

For Cravens, understanding how anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ ideas are connected through white supremacy is vital to organizing a unified front of resistance against them. “Take that information and use that to expose it, to say this is actually what it is, and then to articulate a set of values that says, ‘You know what? We actually support pluralism. We are a country built on diversity. We value the individual contributions of all of the disparate people in our country.’”

That unified front would look a lot like what’s happening in Austin’s rapid response networks. 

As Trump has deployed ICE and the National Guard to Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis and beyond, community organizers in each city have learned from those who came before, strengthening tactics and simultaneously adapting them to the unique needs of the local landscape. On a recent episode of the podcast “Movement Memos,” Andrew, a 45-year-old Minneapolis community organizer, vividly called that dangerous process “riding on the learning edge of a whirlwind.” 

Reilly said that many in Austin’s rapid response networks were inspired by a zine (a self-published, freely available document) called “Dispatch, Please Advise: Tactics for Fighting the Federal Occupation of Minnesota by ICE” by the anonymous Minnesota-based collective “Red-winged Blackbird.” 

“For our comrades in other states and cities: what we are doing in the Twin Cities works,” the zine reads. “This isn’t to say that we are winning — how can we when so many have already been abducted, murdered, and disappeared? — but internal memos leaking out of DHS tell us that our rapid response networks have shaken ICE’s confidence.”

According to Reilly, Austin residents have less pre-existing knowledge of their neighbors and less support from city and state governments than Minneapolis residents. Texas’ “287(g) task force” program mandates cooperation between police and ICE. That means Austin’s anti-ICE groups are less confrontational, and more focused on documenting incidents while getting to know their neighbors better. 

Although larger ICE raids sometimes occur, many incidents begin when the Texas Department of Public Safety State Troopers pull over a driver and then check their identification. As a result, many encounters with ICE are over quickly and hard to prevent. Even so, the city’s rapid response networks are doing their best. When reports come into the hotline, or directly to the encrypted chats, each potential sighting is described calmly and clearly, using the SALUTE system, which limits reports to easily documented, factual information. Then volunteers will travel to the location to verify the report and look for ways to help. Much like in Minneapolis, organizers are distributing dozens of 3D-printed whistles throughout the city which can be used to warn of ICE activity and discourage their raids if caught in the act. 

Reilly told us they’re inspired by the way these efforts have spread beyond just the usual activists and radical queers who always show up to protests.

“I see a lot of collaboration happening between queer activist groups and immigrant activist groups,” Reilly said, adding they hope that cooperation is sustainable, but suspects it’s largely up to the queer groups to keep showing up for immigrants. 

Whistles — and guides to using them — can be found at Monkeywrench Books, North Loop’s anarchist infoshop, but they’re also being distributed at neighborhood association meetings and in coffee shops. 

“I’ve seen a bunch of folks gathering at the bookstore, dropping off 3D-printed whistles, and making and folding zines, and then (other) folks just sort of like filing in, being like ‘I heard you have whistles’ and grabbing handfuls and taking them to their soccer teams, or giving them to their neighbors,” Reilly said.

However, they feel some of their most important work over the past year has just been trying to get to know each other better. Reilly started by knocking on neighbors doors and shared a letter, in English and Spanish, introducing themselves and informing people about the collaboration between Ring security cameras and police. They then grew these initial connections by inviting neighbors to a barbecue. 

“We got some meat, and we set up the grill, we made pies, and just had kind of a little party to get to know each other more,” they said. “Building community in that way, it doesn’t have to be like this huge deal or big action to get us to start looking out for each other.”

The rapid response networks growing among neighbors in Austin, queer and straight alike, are a sign of both the necessity for leaderless movements and their growing potential as we face off with fascism, both the Texan and Trumpian flavors.

“We need to be building our own power, we need to be self organizing as neighbors to combat this, because it’s very clear that the elected officials will not,” Reilly said. 

“Coming from somebody on the far left, that’s not a surprise to hear me say that, I feel like we’ve been banging that drum for a long time,” Reilly added. “But when I go to a neighborhood association meeting and I see 58-year-olds who’ve been living in Hyde Park talk about helping distribute whistles and zines, something’s different.”