New Orleans   I read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, in November 2014, but had forgotten her notion of “blockadia” until I was listening recently to the Bioneers broadcast on KABF following our new public affairs show last week. She was giving a speech to their convention along with other Canadian activists. She was trying to coin a phrase to brand what she hoped would be a movement. Going back to her book, she offered a definition:

Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.

Given what we have seen in the fight over the Keystone Pipeline and other pipelines in Canada and the dramatic and temporarily successful fight by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies over the Dakota Access Pipeline, Klein seems prescient on the effectiveness of this tactics around environmental issues. Certainly, we have seen it elsewhere around Shell Oil’s Artic drilling plans, which we can expect to see soon once again.

The story of the deportation of a more than twenty year resident of Arizona and mother of two children from Arizona recently, after she dutifully reported to immigration authorities for her annual visit for the terrible crime in 2008 of having been caught using a fake social security number was also the story of a different call for an application of “blockadia.” Puente Arizona, the well-known and effective immigrant advocacy organization in Phoenix, and many of her family and friends from long experience knew the way ICE used decoy buses to thwart protests, so while one group engaged the decoy, other protests ran around the back of the ICE facility and managed to surround the van that contained the woman and others being driven to Mexico. They didn’t ultimately stop it, but their actions and this one woman’s story was a national event, publicized in newspapers, television, and radio everywhere. In that way, it stood out in a time when we know in our hearts and minds, and this same story is being repeated hundreds, and probably thousands of times throughout the country today.

Just as all of the spinning stories and alternative facts, could not disguise the conflation of anguish, heartache, and then joy as refugee families and others with green cards and visas arrived at airports around the country during the respite in the Trump travel ban, thereby creating a political and public relations disaster for the White House, a blockade movement might have the same impact from community to community to raise the status of resident immigrants without status, but with friends, family, and positions in the community. If the resistance, blockades, and protests of such deportations can be public acts, rather than private moments, the price of the policy may also prove more than the White House can handle. Even immigration lawyers are no longer advising their clients to report for these interviews, so the forcible extraction of law abiding men and women who have spent their whole lives here needs to be met with the same kind of preparation, protest, and civil disobedience that in fact makes Blockadia a place where all of us live, until we win.