Why Understanding Organizing and Direct Action Activism Matters

You’ve probably seen this story about Hilton disassociating itself with a Hampton Inn in Minneapolis where an employee refused to rent rooms to the ICE fascists. Good for that person, at the very least, what is a shitty hotel clerk job worth when you can stand up to evil?

But let me suggest a different way. This is a way that does a bit more while also protecting yourself a bit.

In 2001, I was in Albuquerque. My teaching assistantship job did not pay in the summers, so I had to get temp jobs over the summer. One summer, I had some data entry job on some health project. The offices were in the same building as those of Heather Wilson, who was the Republican congresscritter from Albuquerque at that time. A protege of Pete Dominici, Wilson by the standards of 2026 Republicans wasn’t horrible, but she was a militaristic right-winger in her own right and I found her disgusting. In fact, two summers later I quit a different temp job where I was filling in as a receptionist at the last minute because she was showing up to do some bit about how priviatized health care was great and I was like, nope.

Well, going back here, I was also trying to get involved in Albuquerque activist communities at the same time. That never really quite worked out, but at the moment, I was hanging around with some of the folks from the Southwest Organizing Project, which for a half-century now has done great work organizing largely poor Latinos in the area. There was some protest they wanted to do against Wilson. They were happy to protest outside the building. But I raised my hand and said, I could get you inside the building to bumrush her office. Moreover, AFL-CIO VP Linda Chavez-Thompson was going to be in town for it.

See, there was a back door, unguarded, where people had cigarette breaks. Since I was working there, I avoided the protestors entirely. I left for the day. Then I came back in, during the protests, and said I had left something in my office. I went up and got whatever I had intentionally left behind. Then I walked out of the office but not out of the building. I had told Chavez-Thompson and the SWOP leaders to get behind the building. I let them in, walked out, they rushed Wilson’s office to the shock of the staff, and I walked away. The next day, the whole building was ablaze with how that happened. I never said a word.

I figured if I got fired from this shitty job, who cares. But rather than just do something myself, I took the opportunity to connect with activists to do something much better.

In other words, here’s what I would suggest in a situation like this clerk faced. Rent the rooms out. Then find some of the anti-immigration activists. Tell them exactly what rooms the ICE agents are in. Tell them to come protest at the hotel, fuck with the cop cars, rush in and bang on all the doors at 3 AM, protest inside the hotel, scare the living hell out of these fascists. But you? The clerk? Play innocent. Because then you can do more later. If they catch you, well, you’ve lost a hotel clerk job, bfd.

But that only works if you do what so few people do today, even in this time of horror–organize. If you have people around you, have connections, have some sense of yourself as part of a broader whole who can be more effective as a group, you can do much much more. This is why the absurdity I see around here so often of the statement that registering people to vote is the ultimate in political activity–this just came up in comments two days ago–is so frustrating. It’s just not true. Registering to vote is perhaps the least meaningful political activity you can take. It’s a base minimum. There’s so, so much more you can do as a one if you are organized. That does require leaving your homes and, yes, your computers.

Anyway, good for that hotel clerk. But you can be smarter about how you sabotage ICE or other forms of evil if you are organized.