Public Shaming Worked Against The KKK. It Will Work Against ICE Too.

Call it public shaming, call it doxxing, whatever you prefer, it's an effective method of fighting racist gangs

By André Costa | October 6 2025

In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan surged northward. What had begun as a violent terrorist movement in the South was now trying to mask itself as respectable, men in suits, not sheets, buying political seats and embedding themselves into city councils, police precincts, and even labor unions. Chicago, like much of the industrial North, was supposed to be immune. But hate adapts. And the Klan brought a message not just of white supremacy, but of moral panic, anti-Catholic bile, immigrant scapegoating, and militant nationalism, all cloaked in the language of law and order. It was a political engine built to rewrite society. And for a time, it worked.

But that power didn’t last. The Klan’s deepest fear wasn’t confrontation or protest. It was exposure. For all their posturing and public parades, most Klan members wanted the mask, they wanted plausible deniability promised by the mask. They wanted to return to work the next morning, respected in their communities, free of consequence. When that was taken from them, when newspapers printed their names, when neighbors pointed and whispered, when their children’s teachers started asking questions, the empire cracked. Shame broke them.

Some resigned from public office. Some lost jobs, housing, and social standing. Membership rolls shrank. Donations dried up, and the Klan faded, not entirely, never entirely, but enough to matter. Enough to save lives. Enough to buy time.

That same vulnerability runs through ICE, and perhaps even more so, and we are working to take them on using these same methods.

ICE agents, contractors, and collaborators wear different uniforms, but rely on the same shield of plausible deniability . They drag people from their homes, separate families, detain children in for-profit cages, then vanish into bureaucratic anonymity. They kick down doors before sunrise and fly deportation charters by nightfall, shielded by acronyms, red tape, and the willful ignorance of the public.

But just like the Klan, ICE crumbles under scrutiny. Its strength lies in obscurity. Pull that obscurity away, and what’s left is a group of people who are so embarrassed about the line of work they chose, that they think a mask is needed to hide it.

They don’t want to be recognized. So we recognize them.

That’s the point of the ICE List. To identify, documen, and build a record they can’t scrub. Every agent. Every contractor. Every police officer and sheriff’s deputy who signs onto a 287(g) agreement to act as a proxy ICE agent. Every jail that shares names. Every landlord who tips them off. Every corporation that builds the software, supplies the buses, flies the flights, fuels this deportation machine. Every single one. This isn’t a few bad apples. This is an ecosystem of enforcement, and we are naming every piece of it.

Some still ask why. Why trace the names? Why publish the jobs? Why keep these lists? The answer is simple: because power hides.

It counts on forgetfulness, and it fears being held responsible for its consequences. Because this system wasn’t accidental. Every family separation, every deported child, every midnight raid was executed by someone who signed a contract and collected a paycheck. There is no neutrality in that, and frankly, there never was.

And when these people are named, when they are no longer anonymous, something shifts. They are suddenly uninvited from birthday celebrations, their kids best friend is told to stay away from their house, they are refused service in their local shops. This is what we want, and what the USA needs.

It’s already working. We’ve seen local jails reject ICE detainers. We’ve seen county commissions end 287(g) deals. We’ve seen ICE quietly retreat from neighborhoods it once terrorized. All of it fueled by the same tactic that brought down the Klan’s influence in cities like Chicago: public exposure.

They called it shame then. Maybe it still is. Or maybe it’s something sharper now. A refusal to let memory fade. A refusal to let complicity go unnamed. A refusal to let the people doing this live without consequence. We are not trying to persuade them. We are not debating them. We are confronting them with the facts of their own actions and refusing to let them walk away clean.

You don’t need to wait for Washington. You don’t need new laws. What you need is a name, a face, a record, and a public that refuses to pretend they didn’t see what they saw.

Public shaming broke the Klan in Chicago. It dragged their cowardice into the light. It shattered their grip on the city not with fire, but with facts. And it will do the same to ICE, to the agents, the deputies, the jailers, the contractors, the corporate sponsors, and the local enablers.

They’ve spent years hiding behind bureaucracy. That ends now.

We see them.
And we are not looking away.
Come join our efforts here.