Weekly Action: Stand Against ICE at Hanscom Field

By focusing so much on Trump, we have allowed all those who make his atrocities possible to escape responsibility. Here are some tips for focused, stronger messaging to hold Republican enablers accountable as we approach the midterms.

A few days after the No Kings rally in Lexington, Lexington Alarm held a debrief session to gather reactions. There were several successes and a few things to change before our next event.

At a post-event debrief on Zoom, organizers, marshals, volunteers, and participants went through the rally piece by piece. The consensus: it was a success. Nearly 2,000 people attended, more signs were sold than at the 6,000-person October rally, and close to 100 new contacts signed up at the tables. The mood among volunteers was described repeatedly as “uplifting.” The table setup was the best yet — positioned closer to the crowd than in October, generating real conversations, sign sales, and genuine engagement with organizational literature.

The recent letter from Maura Healey demanding that ICE halt flights out of Hanscom and the Boston Globe article examining ICE flights from Hanscom Field was the result of months of organizing, research, and coalition-building by Lexington Alarm and allied groups across the region. Far from being a sudden media moment, the story reflected a growing public effort to bring transparency and accountability to the use of a Massachusetts state facility for immigration enforcement operations.

The issue first gained momentum after a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Massport had knowledge of ICE-related charter flights at Hanscom but was not fully sharing that information with the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission. This lack of disclosure raised the possibility that Massport was deliberately keeping information about ICE flights from the Commission.

In response to the Commission’s request for this data and our desire to increase public scrutiny, Lexington Alarm and partner organizations launched a coordinated letter-writing campaign directed at Massport executives, the Massport Board of Directors, and Governor Maura Healey. To make participation easy and accessible, we developed an online tool that allows individuals to send letters directly to Massport and the Governor both electronically and via regular mail.

As of this week over six hundreds of letters and emails were sent. This response demonstrated that concern about ICE flights from Hanscom extended well beyond Lexington and involved residents across multiple communities.

ICE raids are tearing apart the social fabric of our State. Each person deported has a family or other ties such as a job or community, and ICE is deliberately trying to force self-deportation, even of citizens, if they were born elsewhere.

Here is a recent story. ICE agents stayed for one week at the Holiday Inn in Marlborough…

Alex Pretti, a 37 year old nurse known by neighbors as an amiable man in his neighborhood was murdered by federal ICE agents today in Minneapolis.

Alex was not the target of any investigation. He was using his iphone to film the violent threats of ICE agents in the street, and he was talking to another woman filming the scene. ICE agents approached him and the woman, wrestled him to the ground, and after he had been subdued one agent took out a gun and fired up to ten shots killing him. His last words, to the woman who was pinned to the ground near him as they were pepper sprayed, were “all you alright?”

We are at war. No sense mincing words. Until we tear the present DHS agency down to the ground and start with a new structure, no one in America is safe.

Toby Sackton at First Parish Wayland: Why Movements Are Built on Trust, Not Leaders.

In a talk at First Parish in Wayland in March, Toby Sackton gave what might be the most complete account yet of why this moment demands something different from conventional politics and what Lexington Alarm has been building since Patriots Day 2025.

The talk, titled “Building Effective Resistance,” was part history, part organizing theory, part urgent call to action. Sackton began with the personal. “I have been an activist since the 1960s,” he told the room. “When the war in Ukraine started, I was glued to the news every day. Gaza was worse. When Trump was reelected, it was another shock. Truly, the world was coming apart. I doom scrolled. I read every atrocity from doge, the attack on science every firing, every attack on immigrants and Black people.”

What broke the spiral, he said, was not a policy win or an electoral outcome it was human connection. “When a group of us founded Lexington Alarm one year ago, for the first time since the Vietnam era, I felt part of this broad network of people, a movement, that had majority support, all working towards a rough common vision grounded in the ideas of equality and the promise of what America could be.”

Sackton started with a diagnosis. “Since the beginning of 2025, the laws and traditions that have shaped the last hundred years of our history have been violently attacked.