Patchwork of Resistance is an ongoing, collaborative archive built through testimony, textile, and collective memory. The manifesto below sets out the principles, commitments, and political grounding that shape the project as it grows. It serves as our About page for now, until the full project sections are published.
Manifesto
We are a collective of makers, observers, witnesses, and rememberers.
We gather across kitchens, classrooms, living rooms, and continents to stitch a record of what has been lived, but too often denied. Our work begins where the official narratives end: in the fabric scraps, inherited cloth, worn seams, and the embodied stories people carry within.
We refuse the erasures (abductions and murders) that accompany state power.
Operation Metro Surge — and the fascist climate that made it possible — has reshaped daily life in Minnesota, and far beyond as well. Families have been separated by fear, communities surveilled into silence, and ordinary people forced to navigate extraordinary danger. These realities are not abstractions. They are the texture of lived experience, and we insist on making them visible.
We claim the tools of making.
We claim quilting. We claim fabric. We claim the very threads of our lives as a democratic, defiant medium.
For centuries, quilts have held the memories of those pushed to the margins—women, migrants, communities of color, working‑class families, and all the people whose stories were never invited into the archive.
Quilts have been maps of survival, tools of solidarity, and quiet acts of rebellion. It is in that lineage that we stand. We stitch in conversation with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, with suffrage quilts, with freedom quilts, and with every communal textile that has insisted upon humanity in the face of indifference.
We work collectively, but we do not demand uniformity.
Each panel is a voice. Each voice stands on its own terms. We welcome testimony. We welcome grief. We welcome anger, hope, and the unnamable.
We welcome the overt and the abstract. We honor anonymity and celebrate individuality. Our quilt is not a single story — it is a constellation of lived truths. It is bits and pieces formed to create a whole.
We gather fragments — names, testimonies, absences — not to smooth their edges, but to insist that together they form a record that cannot be ignored.
We reject the idea that safety is a privilege granted by the state.
We reject the notion that anyone is illegal on stolen land.
In rural Minnesota, people now meet in secret in order to be able to speak freely. In Minneapolis, teachers and neighbors have been teargassed simply for existing in public space.
Nurses and poets have been murdered.
Across the ocean, in futility, families watch these events unfold with fear and solidarity intertwined. Our collective emerges from this shared vulnerability — and from the belief that community care is a form of resistance.
We build a global fabric of accountability.
Our members span Minnesota to Scotland, and beyond — connected by family, shared memory, collective trauma, and a refusal to look away. We understand that policing, surveillance, and authoritarian drift are global phenomena. Our quilt is a bridge: a reminder that local harm reverberates across borders, and that resistance can, too.
We believe in the power of making as testimony.
To sew is to slow down. To cut fabric is to choose what to reveal and what to protect. To assemble a quilt is to insist that individual stories matter — and that together they form a truth larger than any one voice. This is not craft as hobby. This is craft as archive; as protest; as resistance; as care.
We create a public record that cannot be quietly dismissed.
When the quilt is assembled, it will stand as a collective document — a living archive of what people have endured, what they have witnessed, and what they have survived. It will travel. It will speak. It will refuse to let these stories be forgotten.
We are The Patchwork of Resistance.
We make visible what power tries to hide.
We honor the people who live through what others only debate.
We stitch because silence is not an option.
The Human Cost of State Violence
At the time of this writing, since January 2025, we are aware of at least 50 people who have been killed by or as a result of ICE and CBP agents. Given the lack of transparency within the U.S. Government and DHS, the true number may be higher. And even this count cannot capture the thousands who have been terrorized, abducted, assaulted, or disappeared by these agencies — people whose stories rarely make headlines, whose families are left with questions instead of answers, and whose suffering is treated as administrative debris rather than human loss. The toll does not look to be stopping anytime soon.
This quilt — and the collective that builds it — insists on remembering what power tries to erase. We gather these names not as a list, but as a chorus. We speak them aloud because remembrance is a form of resistance. We stitch them into fabric because fabric endures. We carry them forward because no one should vanish into the machinery of the state without witness.