Speaking Up is a community-driven podcast documenting what is happening in real time to people and neighborhoods impacted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and how communities are responding when silence is no longer an option.
This show exists because too much of what happens during immigration enforcement never makes it into official records. Raids are reduced to press releases. Detentions are described as procedures. Harm is flattened into language that avoids responsibility. Meanwhile, the people living through it are left to carry the consequences alone.
Speaking Up is about changing that.
At the center of this project are first-person stories—shared directly by community members through one-on-one interviews and a voice message submission system. These are voices speaking in their own words, on their own terms, about what they’ve seen, experienced, and survived. Some stories describe encounters with ICE. Others describe the ripple effects: families disrupted, workplaces emptied, fear becoming routine. Many describe resistance—not as an abstract idea, but as something practical and necessary.
Resistance looks like neighbors warning each other when agents are nearby.
It looks like people filming when they’re told not to.
It looks like legal observers, mutual aid, court support, and rapid response networks.
It looks like refusing to disappear quietly.
This podcast does not belong to a single narrator or perspective. It is intentionally structured to give a voice and a platform to the people most directly affected. The role of the show is to listen, to document, and to preserve what is too often dismissed or erased.
Every voicemail shared with Speaking Up is treated as testimony. Some voices are named. Others are anonymized for safety. Not every story can be independently verified in full—but where possible, context is added, patterns are identified, and lived experience is clearly distinguished from interpretation. What matters most is that these stories exist in the open, rather than being lost to fear, time, or silence.
The title Speaking Up is deliberate. It reflects a collective decision—by individuals and communities—to say something now, rather than later. History shows us what happens when people wait for the “right moment” to respond, or assume someone else will do it for them. This project is rooted in the belief that attention itself is a form of resistance.
This is not a debate show.
It is not a policy explainer.
It is not neutral.
It is a living record of what people are experiencing and how they are pushing back against a system that depends on secrecy and normalization to function.
Speaking Up will continue as long as these stories continue—because community resistance doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t end when the news cycle moves on. It builds quietly, through memory, documentation, and the refusal to let harm go unnamed.
If you are living this, you are not alone.
If you are listening, you are being asked to pay attention.
These stories are being told because they matter.
And because this time, the community is speaking up.