Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.

Ian Austin near Delaney Hall, June 1, 2026

While people blather about how the arrested protesters are “outsiders,” the more salient fact is that charges against at least 40 of the 90 are being dropped for lack of probable cause, which is to say there was no legal basis for having arrested them in the first place. Much the same was true of the arrests over Gaza Solidarity Encampment. “Normies” have a lot of trouble digesting the idea that law enforcement might simply want to violate peoples’ rights en masse rather than protect rights on the whole but violate them at the margins. We’re not talking about marginal, accidental violations. We’re talking about a wholesale desire to end real dissent so that all that remains are paralyzed skeptics rendered unable or unwilling to act on their own behalf or anyone else’s.

“The complaints contain nearly identical, generalized allegations and fail to identify the specific conduct attributed to each individual,” Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti said in a statement. “Based on the information available to us, we contend that the complaints do not provide individualized facts sufficient to support the charges.” In short, they dialed it in and made it up.

For libertarians or anyone else keeping score: this is an admission by the State that it initiated force against 44% of the arrestees. This is not to say that it didn’t initiate force against the other 55%. Nor is it to say that the force initiations admitted are the only ones or the only kind in play. It’s simply the admission of a 44% rate of rights violations against those it regards as targets. Remember that the next time someone triumphantly brings up the brick thrown at a car, the punch thrown, or the fire started in the street by protesters. Whatever you think of those things, they simply do not represent a 44% rate of rights violations of any countable set of victims. It’s the government that is admitting its guilt on that score and at that scale. And its admissions are merely the tip of the iceberg of what it’s doing.

I didn’t mention Austin’s arrest before because I couldn’t find it “confirmed” in mainstream media. I still can’t, even though I can confirm (by his own assertion, on Instagram) that he was arrested last night and has been released. The mainstream media is great at covering Austin well after the fact, when they can find some neat narrative in which to place him and others like him. But they aren’t sufficiently invested in daily, or hourly, or minute-by-minute reporting to report on what’s happening to him in real time. If he were arrested without charge, beaten, and thrown into solitary confinement, you’d only hear about it after he’d been admitted to the hospital, if he ever was. And that’s only if you were listening.

It goes without saying that he is only one of dozens, possibly hundreds of activists at Delaney Hall of comparable courage, initiative, and stamina that I encountered at Delaney Hall. I just happened to be standing next to him one day that I was there. They’re all up for arrest. They all deserve accolades. Their audacity is what stands between us and fascism. It’s a story we should start chronicling now, before it’s overtaken by falsehood, evasion, amnesia, and inertia. I’ll try to chronicle as much of it as I can with attention to the extraordinary people who are making it happen.

If you want to know what’s going on at Delaney Hall–if you really seek truth and want to be informed–you have to follow events on social media. The people best positioned to report the news are the protesters on the scene. Full stop. Not mainstream media. Not law enforcement. Not the Baraka Administration, or the Fraternal Order of Police, or the Sherrill Administration, or the Democrats or the Republicans. No one else has the sustained interest, the tolerance for risk, and the personal stake in 24-7 scrutiny of every last detail of what happening there. The one thing I’ve learned from time I’ve spent at Delaney Hall is that epistemically speaking, nothing beats direct, first-hand observation. The next-best thing is relying on the first-hand observation of someone you trust. The minute you start relying on impersonal, unknown intermediaries, you lose your sense of the reality and gravity of the situation, and place yourself in the hands of potential duplicity and manipulation. In Austin’s case, I follow him on Instagram at weaponofmassproduction_, and recommend that you do, too. It’s remarkable to me that he only has 21,600 followers. He should have a hundred times that. The more he has, the safer he is. The safer he is, the freer we all are.

I’ve spent hours standing next to him, and hours poring over his videos. He is verbally aggressive but not a physical aggressor. He belongs to a type I encountered within the Popular Resistance in Palestine: the confronter who must have a say and won’t back down until he’s said his piece and been heard. Without guys–people–like him, we’re fucking done. I’d believe him over law enforcement any day. But take a look and decide for yourself.