civil disobedience, 2025

It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case. (Civil Disobedience, 1849)

This Labor Day weekend, I got arrested outside of an ICE processing facility in Broadview, Illinois.¹ I was sitting in the street in front of the facility, blocking a van full of my detained neighbors bound for deportation. I documented the experience of this action on social media, and will be back to protest (sans van-sitting, as my charges are pending²) again tomorrow, September 5, from 7 to 9 A.M. outside of the facility.

This act of civil disobedience made me reflect extensively on what keeps us from action. It’s perhaps the question I get most often from people outside of the legal industry or outside of the United States while discussing the Trump administration’s takeover. Why aren’t people doing more?³

Photo credit: Paul Goyette

If you ask most outraged Americans why they aren’t doing more, I suspect they will answer your question with another question: What am I supposed to do? Hannah Arendt⁴ wrote of tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself; when people do not know how to make their voices heard, they understandably are less likely to use them. But many people who think they don’t know what to do are not finishing the question. They are really asking what they are supposed to do to fix things.

The answer to what we are supposed to do is obvious: we should sacrifice as much as we reasonably can to stop the government from disappearing people. I am able to sacrifice a lot more than the average person; I don’t think most people can quit a job or risk arrest. Yes, most of us can be doing more. And most of us would be willing to do more—if we knew for certain that doing more would fix things. What stops action is a fear that the action is the wrong one.

We should absolutely be measured in how we act, and think seriously about whether our actions are right or wrong. But our definition of the “right” action cannot be one that fixes things. There is no one action done by one person that fixes things. No one person is coming to save us. Either a lot of people are coming to save each other, or we are fucked.

The night before I was arrested, I couldn’t sleep. I was more afraid than I’d been in months. This despite being an incredibly well-connected, able-bodied white attorney with sources of income unlikely to care about a civil disobedience arrest. And, more importantly, this despite being absolutely certain that I was doing the right thing. I lay awake thinking about my own self-conception. If I worked through this decision as a hypothetical—as I had when I first started considering it, before things felt real—my answer would be certain.

I believe I am the kind of person who, if presented with an obviously racist and fascist government disappearing people to uncertain fates abroad, would do everything reasonably in their power to halt it. When I began considering civil disobedience, I reasoned through it very thoroughly. It felt like an opportunity to move other people to action—even if only a few!—on behalf of those being disappeared by the government through behavior that would inconvenience me and be uncomfortable but put neither my life nor my ability to make a living at serious risk. Very few people are similarly situated, especially people with a similar platform. I didn’t have to think about it very hard; I knew blocking the van was right. But still, I was awake until three in the morning, afraid.

In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde gives a frank piece of advice that has never left me: You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. The fear I felt the night before made me realize I was not actually as brave as I expected to be. And the only way for me to become braver is by doing the things I need to be brave for. The fear made me more certain that I needed to do this action, because the days to come are likely to demand far more bravery. There’s only one way to get there.

Being afraid to sacrifice is not shameful, but the fear does not go away magically when things suddenly get bad enough for sacrifice to feel worth it.⁵ While fear of sacrifice is not shameful, refusal to sacrifice as your neighbors are disappeared is, which is why you have to practice. Waiting to practice bravery will make you weak. You become brave by doing the things you need to be brave for.

In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder’s final lesson is to be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. Timothy Snyder also recently fled the United States. It is quite common for people with a lot of educational privilege and access to view issue-spotting as their contribution to the cause. Issue-spotting is an important contribution; we desperately need to avoid reinventing the wheel. But pointing things out and voicing our fear is not action. The purpose of understanding things is to apply those understandings.

I understand that the Trump administration is speed-running a white nationalist, authoritarian playbook in a country already far too comfortable blaming minorities for all the ills created by a system they have no control over. He is shipping my neighbors to overseas concentration camps, often without process, demanding my neighbors’ health records to force them into gender conformity, ramping up militarized violence at home and abroad. I understand that he claims to be doing this for the safety of people that look like and live like me.

In criminal law, courts have sometimes allowed a defendant’s silence to be used as evidence against them. The Ninth Circuit, for example, allows juries to be instructed that if the defendant actually was present and heard and understood [certain] statements, and that they were made under such circumstances that the statements would have been denied if they were not true, then you may consider whether the defendant’s silence was an admission of the truth of the statements.⁶

Donald Trump claims he is acting in my name. Unless I am willing to risk my own comfort to voice dissent, then it is quite reasonable to assume that I agree with him. There will be no switch-flip moment for me to prove him wrong, nor a perfect action I can take that once and for all fixes everything. There is only now, and collective resistance.

Other people’s contribution to that collective resistance will look very different than my own. My risk tolerance is quite high. It was not always; I recently returned to an email I sent a mentor in 2019, before starting law school, where I (seriously) told her how silly it felt not to be participating in direct action at the camps in Texas where family separation raged rampant. Today, I receive many questions from incoming or current law students, recent grads, big law attorneys who are breadwinners, and on and on expressing their own frustration at being unable to take more drastic action. But honestly, you only prepare for drastic action by taking lots of other, smaller actions first. There’s no prize for getting arrested at a time when it is particularly bad for your career. If anything, doing so makes sustained action less possible. Unfortunately, I can promise there will be a need for people to take more drastic action for the rest of our lifetimes, and beyond.

You do not have to do everything now, nor can you. You just have to do something. And you can.

1. This blog is never legal advice. That said, please know I make the decision to talk and write about this arrest while my case remains open both independently and over vociferous objections from all of my friends who are defense attorneys. Doing so can elevate risk substantially, because our system is designed to grant immense amounts of deference to prosecutors to decide how to charge specific conduct.

2. Pour one out for my mother, who, in the era of the Holiday Newsletter, now has to deal with a situation where her Harvard-educated child went from gainful employment at a top law firm to civil disobedience arrests in one calendar year. And I’m 31 and single and, perhaps worst of all, I’m 31 and post on TikTok.

3. This is often followed by the corollary: “In my country/industry/community this would never be allowed to happen, people would be rising up!” When this corollary follows I usually gently ask about the treatment of people in the speaker’s country/industry/community who spoke up condemning the Israeli genocide in Gaza prior to a month or two ago. We all expect to be braver than most of us actually turn out to be.

4. Hannah Arendt’s framing is often very helpful to me, but if you are moved to read her work based on this reference, please do so with the awareness that her writing about Black activism in the United States is profoundly racist and seems to presume that Black people are inherently more violent than non-Black people. Consider Fanon instead (or first).

5. I fear I am a White Person Quoting Letter from a Birmingham Jail in a Substack, but Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. . .We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

6. Say it with me: perhaps it is the system itself that is bad!