With all eyes on the tension and violence surrounding immigration enforcement in Minnesota, the ACLU of Arkansas is hoping to arm people with knowledge about their rights to protest, observe and advocate for their immigrant neighbors.
The American Civil Liberties Union, in collaboration with the organizers of the 2025 No Kings protests, produced a virtual training session on how to document abuses by federal immigration officers while remaining within the confines of the law.
The Monday evening training was livestreamed to YouTube and came just two days after U.S. Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, an intensive care nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, also in Minneapolis.
An off-duty ICE agent also shot and killed Keith Porter, a 43-year-old father of two, in Los Angeles on Jan. 16, though Porter was not mentioned during the training.
ACLU staff conducting the online training urged people to document abuses while complying with any directions and following federal and local laws, which can vary.
In Arkansas, you have the right to record police activity under the First Amendment, but can be lawfully asked to move out of the way of police activity.
The full training can be viewed below:
Arkansas hasn’t seen as much activity from federal immigration agencies as places like Minneapolis, Chicago or Los Angeles have, but immigration enforcement efforts have ramped up here under the second Trump administration.
Every weekday, immigration agents load detainees on a bus at an ICE office near the Little Rock Airport to be transported to an ICE facility in Louisiana. A Little Rock woman’s husband was deported to Honduras in November after she started La Voz Del Pueblo, a community organization that documents ICE activity in Central Arkansas.
The Benton County Sheriff’s Department has arrested hundreds of people under a state program that allows county sheriff’s departments to work with ICE. The Arkansas State Police is also assisting ICE, notifying the agency of potential illegal immigrants who are arrested for other crimes.
