Quilting Against ICE
A collaborative textile archive documenting lived experience under immigration enforcement
Quilting Against ICE is a community‑built strand of the Patchwork of Resistance. It brings together makers, witnesses, and rememberers to create a textile record of what people have endured under the enforcement practices of DHS agencies — including ICE, CBP, and their local operations — in Minnesota, and beyond.
Through stitched panels and shared testimony, the project documents experiences that are often unrecorded, unacknowledged, or deliberately obscured.
The project brings these experiences together through slow, material work. Stitched panels, written testimony, and shared memory form a growing archive that holds personal accounts alongside collective history. Contributions come from people directly affected, those who have witnessed harm, and those committed to documenting what official channels overlook. Each piece stands on its own terms while becoming part of a wider record of life under DHS enforcement.
This page introduces the project’s purpose, methods, and ongoing work — and connects you to the materials that form its foundation.
What the Project Does
- Stitched panels that speak to lived experience
- Testimony from those affected by ICE, CBP, and DHS operations
- Accounts of daily life under Operation Metro Surge
- Documentation of the human cost of state violence
- Acts of resistance, solidarity, and survival
The archive is built collectively and held collectively. It centers care, memory, and the right to tell one’s own story.
Why Quilting?
Quilting is a deliberate choice. It is a democratic, accessible medium with a long history of carrying stories excluded from official archives. What was dismissed as domestic or minor has always held political memory.
Across generations, quilts have:
- Mapped survival
- Held grief
- Signaled solidarity across distance and danger
- Preserved the histories of women, migrants, communities of color, and working‑class families
This project stands in that lineage.
To sew is to slow down.
To assemble a quilt is to insist that individual stories matter, and that together they form a truth larger than any one voice.
A Collective Record
Each panel is a voice.
Each voice stands on its own terms.
The archive welcomes testimony, grief, anger, hope, and the unnamable. It honors anonymity. It does not demand uniformity.
The resulting quilts form a constellation of lived truths — bits and pieces assembled into a whole. When complete, they function as public records: tactile documents of what people have endured, witnessed, and survived.
How to Participate
Quilting Against ICE is a collaborative project. People contribute in many ways:
- Sewing panels
- Hosting quilting sessions
- Sharing testimony
- Supporting affected communities
- Bearing witness
Participation is open, flexible, and shaped by the needs of those most affected.
Political Grounding
The project is rooted in the commitments outlined in the Patchwork of Resistance manifesto. These principles guide how the archive is built, held, and shared.
→ Read the Manifesto
A Cross-Atlantic Fabric
Participants span Minnesota to the United Kingdom, connected by family, shared memory, and a refusal to look away. As policing, surveillance, and authoritarian drift intensify globally, so does the need for collective resistance.
Quilting Against ICE grows through the choices people make every day: witness over silence, care over fear, collective memory over erasure.