414. Red May 2026: ICE-Age Policing presented by Town Hall Seattle and Red May

Red May, a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington, gathers each spring to discuss a world beyond capitalism. For this year’s event at Town Hall Seattle, Red May brings together a panel to discuss policing in the age of ICE.

“Counterinsurgency has come home. Since the end of the Vietnam War, innovations in militarized policing have come one after another. No knock raids. AI surveillance. Clear and hold neighborhoods. Each new tactic or strategy has been rubber-stamped in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans under the guise of a never-ending War on Crime. Now, the Trump administration has fashioned its own masked Gestapo; it has taken an existing organization designed for border control (ICE) and built it into a private army serving at the prerogative of the President, most egregiously for assaults on Democrat-run cities like Portland, and Chicago and the murder of protestors, reclassified as ‘domestic terrorists.’ How did we get here? How do we get out of here?”

Join Red May and a panel of scholars to guide us through the labyrinth.

Stuart Schrader is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins and the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, to be published by Basic Books in April 2026.

Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean communist, and a professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research is interested in the socio-spatial reconfigurations of global capitalism from the late twentieth century to the present through a focus on global supply chains, the Transpacific logistics industry, and policing. Her first book, The Logistics Counterrevolution, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota press in April 2027. Her work has been published in Society and Space, Review of International Studies, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-directs the Marxist Institute of Research, serves as the Chair of Labor Organizing with the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and organizes with the Logistics Workers League, the communist caucus of the DSA, and No Harbor for Gencoide. In 2023, she was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar.

Dan Berger is a Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. He is an interdisciplinary historian of activism, Black Power, and the carceral state in twentieth-century U.S. history. His latest book is Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, which is a biography of the modern Black freedom struggle through the lives of Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons.

Angélica Cházaro is a Professor at the University of Washington Law School. She teaches Critical Race Theory, Poverty Law, Professional Responsibility, and courses on Immigration Law. Professor Cházaro served as a chief negotiator during a 56-day hunger strike at the Northwest Detention Center, representing immigrant detainees. She is a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission convened by the National Day Laborer’s Organizing Network to provide the Executive Branch with recommendations on administrative relief for undocumented people.

Related Books

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Hardcover)

Elliott Bay Book Company