Washington, D.C. residents have had enough — and now they’re taking matters into their own hands.
A new grassroots campaign is sweeping across the nation’s capital, marking sites where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have allegedly detained undocumented people. The signs aren’t subtle. “ICE ABDUCTED SOMEONE HERE,” reads one, stapled to a telephone pole with the time, date, and a call for others to come forward with sightings.
It’s a blunt message — and it’s igniting a political firestorm.
The Trump White House is already lashing out, calling the campaign “dangerous” and “false.” Spokesperson Abigail Jackson slammed the effort in an email to The Washington Post, calling the signage “untrue smears,” and claiming the term “kidnapping” is misleading. “These claims that ICE is ‘kidnapping people’ are false,” Jackson insisted. But the signs keep going up.
Barbara McCann, a local resident helping spearhead the effort, says the campaign isn’t based on rumor or political grandstanding — it’s based on what she saw with her own eyes.
“They are targeting those who are least able to defend themselves, people without homes and people without documentation,” McCann told The Post. “In the past, when there’s been great injustice, moral clarity takes a long time.”
She says she watched ICE agents pull two men from a car in her neighborhood — a moment that left her shaken, and activated. Now, she’s part of a growing number of D.C. locals using street signs to expose what they view as systemic abuse hiding in plain sight.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, is fuming.
“ICE is not ‘kidnapping’ illegal aliens,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement to The Post. “These smears are leading to our officers facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them including terrorist attacks, cars being used as weapons, and bounties on their heads.”
To be clear, ICE arrests aren’t conducted in secret under the law. But residents pushing this campaign argue that secrecy isn’t the only issue. It’s about who is being targeted, and how.
Critics say ICE disproportionately goes after the most vulnerable: people experiencing homelessness, undocumented workers, and others living at the fringes of society. Without legal protections or advocates, many simply disappear into the system without warning — and without accountability.
It’s that pattern that prompted the use of the word “abduction.” To the feds, it’s inflammatory. To organizers, it’s just honest.
What’s still unknown is whether this signage campaign is organized or simply a spontaneous uprising — but it’s clearly hitting a nerve. As signs continue to multiply across the city, so does the tension between residents and the federal government.
For D.C. residents like McCann, though, the message isn’t complicated.
“When there’s been great injustice, moral clarity takes a long time,” she said again. “But it does come.”
Until then, the signs are staying up.
