Brendan McQuade is an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Southern of Maine. He is also an organizer with NoICE4ME.

A day after we ritually quote Martin Luther King Jr. about justice and beloved community, federal agents surged into Maine with a target list of approximately 1,400 people. On the first day of what the Department of Homeland Security calls Operation Catch of the Day, they abducted nearly 50 people. The contrast is jarring, and it tells the truth more clearly than any speech ever could.

The moral language of the nation is ceremonial. The real commitment is visible in the handcuffs and in the cruelty that accompanies them. This crackdown is not happening in isolation. It is unfolding amid a slow-burn apocalypse: climate breakdown, economic instability, mass displacement, the horrors of conflict and genocide and reverberations of future wars.

The refugee crisis is also the climate crisis. As ecosystems collapse and livelihoods disappear, people are forced to flee their homes in search of survival, toward climate havens like Maine. But borders cannot stop a warming planet. Raids cannot reverse rising seas. They can only punish the people least responsible for what is happening.

What this moment reveals is that the state will not protect us from these converging disasters. Not migrants. Not workers. Not communities already living on the edge. When systems begin to fail, those in power invoke the same dark incantations: “security,” “law and order,” curses to summon the machinery of state violence — cops, courts and cages — while offering no protection from the crises that actually threaten our lives.

That is why the most important response to this moment is collective solidarity and active disruption.

Across Maine, communities have moved quickly to protect neighbors targeted by ICE. Mutual aid networks deliver food, provide transportation, and offer court support. The Maine Solidarity Fund pools resources for legal defense and emergency assistance. This is not charity; it is collective survival. Where the state abandons people, neighbors step in. This is what real safety looks like.

Disruption and dissenus are also spreading. For months, NoICE4ME has campaigned to end cooperation between ICE and the Cumberland County Jail. Its strategy—disruptive protest to force elite dissensus — has been vindicated by events themselves.

Demands first raised in defiant, often rowdy public comment sessions have materialized on the ground. A public rupture between the county sheriff and ICE, following the arrest of a second corrections officer, confirmed what organizers said all along: cooperation was never inevitable. It was fragile, contingent, and politically toxic. What once passed as bureaucratic “business as usual” is now publicly denounced by officials who recently defended it.

Meanwhile, Mainers are fighting back. ICE-watch patrols, rapid-response mobilizations, and noise demonstrations outside hotels housing federal agents have spread. They have been met with escalating repression—intimidation of volunteers, arrests of demonstrators—clear signs that legitimacy is cracking.

And that fracture matters. Change does not come from universal agreement. It comes when the illusion of consent breaks, when elites begin arguing among themselves because people below them refuse to absorb injustice in silence. Polarization is not the problem. It is the signal that something long treated as normal is finally being challenged.

We are told disruption is dangerous, that it alienates, that it goes “too far.” But what is truly dangerous is treating deportation as an administrative routine while the world burns. Protest cannot be more disruptive than the rogue security agency laying bare the violence of our world.

This moment feels apocalyptic because something really is ending. We are living through the end of an era in which many people believed the system, while flawed, would ultimately keep them safe. But the apocalypse is also the revelation. It strips away illusions and forces choices.

We can accept a future of fascism and fortress America. Or we can insist on something else: solidarity over “security,” disruption over silence, and a politics willing to say that the “other” — the migrant, the immigrant, the refugee, even the criminal — is not a threat to our freedom. They are our compatriots. And through solidarity, they are the realization of our collective freedom.

Mainers will continue to fight and the state’s leaders should take a cue from its organizers. Those organizing and protesting for their neighbors must be protected, not criminalized. When federal agents violate constitutional rights, state and local officials should use every available tool to investigate and hold them accountable.

The law is a weapon. Will Maine use it to defend its people? Will Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris keep her commitment to hold federal agents accountable when they violate the law? Will Maine, like Minnesota, sue the federal government over the legality of ICE operations?

The day after MLK Day, ICE came to Maine. Its arrival was a rupture and a revelation — splintering communities, polarizing politics, and exposing a federal government moving through the state as an occupying force. What matters now is what we do next.