The Parts You Didn't See: A Collective Account of Operation Metro Surge

All of us lived it. No one saw all of it. Operation Metro Surge was too large, too fast, and too deliberately decentralized for any single person to have witnessed the whole thing. But collectively, we did. This session is an attempt to build a collective context, drawing on local and national reporting and firsthand testimony, and to make sense of what it revealed. Because you can't process what you can't wrap your head around.

The community response that emerged wasn't spontaneous. It built upon community and technical infrastructure that was created over months and years, by non-profit groups and local organizers who saw what was coming before most of us were paying attention. By understanding how we got through the previous crisis, we can see where things stand now: what's continued, what's evolved, and how the tools that got us through that can get us through the next.

This session is a community- and organizing-focused counterpart to What tech lessons should we learn from the ICE invasion?.

• All levels
• Community
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