An activist network targeting U.
S. immigration enforcement escalated its tactics in early February when members of No ICE Philly flooded a South Philadelphia Target, chanting ICE out of Target now and refusing to leave until police moved in and arrested roughly 40 demonstrators.
According to Gateway Pundit, more than 100 protesters stormed the store on February 6, marching through the aisles, playing instruments, and pressuring the retail giant to denounce cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at its stores and parking lots. The groups demand is not merely symbolic; organizers insist Target must publicly pledge to bar ICE agents from using its property for enforcement actions unless they present judicial warrants, effectively turning a private business into a political barricade against federal law enforcement.
Police officers issued multiple warnings for the crowd to disperse, prompting dozens of protesters to exit the building before authorities began making arrests. Roughly 40 activists remained seated on the floor in a coordinated act of civil disobedience and were taken into custody, a pattern that has become familiar in left-wing protest circles that rely on mass arrests to generate media attention and legal test cases.
No ICE Philly has staged similar disruptions at other Target locations across the city, portraying the chain as complicit in deportations unless it adopts the groups preferred policies. Organizers frame these actions as moral imperatives rather than political stunts, insisting that corporate neutrality on immigration enforcement is tantamount to siding with ICE.
Group leaders, including Rabbi Linda Holtzman, have gone further, accusing Target of effectively aligning itself with federal immigration authorities. Holtzman and her allies argue that the in-store sit-in was a necessary response to deportations, casting the companys refusal to issue a public anti-ICE statement as a moral failure rather than a reasonable attempt to stay out of partisan warfare.
The Target protests are only one piece of a broader, decentralized whistle kit strategy that No ICE Philly has adopted from similar campaigns in Chicago and Minneapolis. These kits are not limited to physical whistles used to alert neighbors to ICE activity; they also contain know your rights pamphlets, often drawn from materials produced by the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition and the New Sanctuary Movement, both of which are sustained by larger left-wing philanthropic pass-throughs such as the Tides Foundation.
Although No ICE Philly brands itself as an all-volunteer effort, its operations rest on a deeper infrastructure of professional activism and institutional support. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist organization currently under Congressional investigation over its ties to billionaire Neville Singham and potential CCP-linked dark money, organized No ICE Phillys January 26 rally at City Hall and has played a visible role in coordinating its public actions.
When protesters are arrested, they are quickly plugged into a network of bail and legal support funds that draw from the same progressive foundation ecosystem. Among these are the NSM Community Fund and the Juntos Commissary Fund, both of which mirror the funding channels that sustain Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and other national protest outfits.
SURJ, founded in 2009, is a national network explicitly designed to mobilize white activists in support of left-wing racial and economic justice campaigns. Operating on the premise that white Americans have a mutual interest in dismantling white supremacy and that they should work under the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color organizations, SURJ has become a central hub for channeling white progressive energy into a rotating series of causes.
From one campaign to the next, SURJ functions less like a grassroots neighborhood coalition and more like a professional protest machine that continually rebrands around the latest progressive priority. Over the past decade, it has cycled through anti-Trump and anti-MAGA resistance, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Defund the Police and prison abolition efforts, ending cash bail, Stop Cop City mobilizations, justice for Manuel Tortuguita Tern, anti-RICO advocacy, ICE Out for Good, opposition to 287(g) agreements, anti-detention center campaigns, labor and economic justice drives, healthcare equity pushes, and abortion rights activism.
The sheer breadth and speed of this issue-hopping raises obvious questions about the authenticity and sustainability of the activism. It strains credulity to believe that the same individuals can repeatedly take time off work, travel between cities and states, and assume ongoing legal and financial risk for each new cause without substantial institutional backing and financial support.
The constant rotation of priorities also invites skepticism about what becomes of yesterdays supposedly existential crises once the movements attention shifts. If climate change, Ukraine, or Gaza were framed as moral emergencies just months ago, it is fair to ask whether those concerns have somehow evaporated now that the same networks are focused on ICE, or whether the issues simply serve as interchangeable vehicles for a permanent protest class whose real constant is opposition to American institutions.
One illustrative case study is Jamie (James) Marsicano, a well-documented example of overlapping causes and repeated arrests within SURJ-aligned movements. In 2016, Marsicano was arrested in Charlotte while protesting the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, and in 2017, he was arrested again at Charlotte Douglas Airport while demonstrating against the Trump administrations travel ban.
Marsicanos activism did not stop there, as he was arrested in 2020 during the George Floyd protests and charged with assaulting a government official. In 2023, he was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism at a Stop Cop City music festival in Atlanta, and by 20252026 he had become the lead plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against the Atlanta Police Department while remaining a central figure in ongoing anti-repression digital campaigns.
No ICE Philly itself is embedded within a broader ICE Out coalition that coordinates with the Solidarity Organizing Initiative (SOI), a group that SURJ explicitly partners with to train its members in nonviolent resistance and intervention tactics. In practice, this means that national organizations like SURJ provide the webinars, toolkits, and funding links, while local entities such as No ICE Philly serve as the on-the-ground operational arms executing those strategies in specific cities like Philadelphia.
SURJ has not limited its activities to immigration-related protests, instead weaving itself into union-backed national days of action and high-profile confrontations with federal authorities. It has coordinated with unions such as SEIU on a nationwide protest day stretching from Seattle to Boston and centered on events in Minneapolis, while SURJ organizers have appeared at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling to offer solidarity to demonstrators confronting federal agents.
At the same time, SURJ has been running Solidarity Mobilization trainings that instruct white members on how to physically intervene in or hinder ICE operations during neighborhood enforcement actions. These trainings, framed as nonviolent resistance, nonetheless encourage direct interference with federal law enforcement, raising serious concerns about public safety, the rule of law, and the normalization of obstructing officers carrying out duly authorized duties.
Members of SURJ and affiliated groups have increasingly found themselves facing serious criminal charges as federal and state authorities respond to what activists call Business as Usual disruption tactics. On January 28, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the federal arrest of 16 individuals in Minneapolis on charges of assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, signaling a more aggressive posture toward those who cross the line from protest into physical obstruction.
Prosecutors are also examining whether to deploy powerful legal tools such as the 1871 KKK Act and the Stop FUNDERS Act to apply RICO statutes against organizations accused of coordinating protests that escalate into riots. During the January 23 National Day of Action, dozens were arrested across the Twin Cities, and while many local charges for protest-related disruptions were misdemeanors, federal authorities are prioritizing cases involving direct interference with agents or obstruction of operations.
The legal pressure is not confined to Minnesota, as Georgia has become another flashpoint in the clash between left-wing protest networks and law enforcement. On February 2, 2026, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr appealed the December dismissal of RICO charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters, prompting SURJ to launch digital pressure campaigns targeting the Georgia Supreme Court and local officials in an attempt to sway public opinion and judicial outcomes.
Although the RICO charges were dismissed on procedural grounds, domestic terrorism charges against five defendants, known as the Tactical 5, remain active and are moving toward trial. This ongoing litigation underscores the seriousness of the allegations surrounding some of these protests, which critics argue have crossed far beyond peaceful assembly into organized campaigns of intimidation and sabotage against public safety infrastructure.
Behind the scenes, tracing the money that sustains SURJ and similar leftist groups reveals a dense network of familiar donors and pass-through entities designed to obscure the original sources of funding. One documented thread leads to George Soroslinked networks, often routed indirectly through re-granting organizations rather than straightforward, transparent transfers.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF), founded by Soros, have historically provided millions of dollars in grants to organizations that SURJ itself identifies as partners, including the ACLU and Indivisible. Additional organizations such as the Solidaire Network and Borealis Philanthropy, both recipients of OSF funding, have in turn contributed to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund that has supported Stop Cop City protesters facing serious criminal charges.
SURJs own 501(c)(3) arm, the SURJ Education Fund, reported approximately $2.1 million in revenue in 2022, a substantial sum for a group that presents itself as a grassroots movement. While the largest share of its funding is attributed to individual donors and so-called resource redistribution, the organization has also benefited from donor-advised funds such as the Tides Foundation, a central node in the liberal philanthropic ecosystem.
Tides operates as a major clearinghouse for progressive money, including contributions from Soros-linked entities, and allows original donors to remain anonymous while their funds are funneled into activist causes. Donor-advised funds like Tides are among the primary mechanisms through which large-scale financing reaches groups such as SURJ while masking its origins, and Borealis Philanthropy plays a similar role as a pass-through organization managing the Black-Led Movement Fund, which has provided grants to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.
Although SURJ is formally a U.S.-based nonprofit, ongoing investigations suggest that some of the radical activism it supports may be entangled with foreign interests and dark-money networks. In June 2025, House Oversight Republicans launched an investigation into Neville Singham, a billionaire residing in China who is accused of bankrolling a constellation of far-left organizations, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Code Pink, both of which have been active in civil unrest and Stop Cop City solidarity efforts.
Lawmakers allege that this network functions as a vehicle for CCP propaganda, raising the disturbing prospect that foreign adversaries may be indirectly underwriting domestic campaigns aimed at undermining American law enforcement and public order. Separately, a November 2025 report by Americans for Public Trust identified five foreign-based entities that funneled nearly $2 billion into U.S.-based social justice and climate agendas, with one of those entities reportedly linked to the CCP and exploiting a disclosure loophole that allows such groups to avoid naming their specific U.S. grantees.
Taken together, the Target sit-in, the ICE Out campaigns, the Stop Cop City protests, and the revolving door of causes championed by SURJ and its allies reveal a protest infrastructure that is anything but spontaneous or purely local.
For conservatives concerned about the erosion of the rule of law, the politicization of private businesses, and the influence of opaque foreign and philanthropic money on domestic unrest, these developments underscore the need for greater transparency, stronger enforcement of existing statutes, and a renewed commitment to supporting law enforcement officers who are increasingly caught in the crosshairs of a professionalized protest industry.
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