August 27
A gripping, on-the-ground account of the growing movement against state violence, featuring interviews with those on the frontlines of the fight for immigrant justice.
A war is being waged on the streets of the United States of America. On one side, there are the ICE agents, the DHS, and their supporters, terrorizing communities throughout the United States with the threat of arrest and deportation. On the other side is the growing national movement dedicated to protecting communities, reversing racist and authoritarian policies, and otherwise challenging MAGA’s violent anti-immigration regime.
In Breaking ICE, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents her conversations with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars on the frontlines of the fight. Through their courageous stories, Kolhatkar documents the impact of ICE violence, workplace raids, mass surveillance, and intimidation tactics, and how communities from Maine to California are organizing for a better world. Our present actions will not only determine the nature of American demographics from here on out, but also whether the future of the United States will look like an open multiracial democracy or a fascist police state.
Features conversations with: Pablo Alvarado, Nikki Marín Baena, Eduardo Delgado, Adela de la Torre, Shannon Gibney, Ron Gochez, David Huerta, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G. Kelley, Josefina Lopez, Leonardo Martinez, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Favianna Rodriguez, Luis Rodriguez, Ruben Torres, Richard Wallace, Yohuru Williams, and Kent Wong. Foreword by Roberto Lovato.
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Letter to the Reader: Sonali Kolhatkar on “Breaking ICE”
On the publication of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror & MAGA Fascism, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar shares a letter to the reader on the making of her new book and the devastating circumstances under which the text emerged.
I put together the manuscript of Breaking ICE during the worst period of my life. At a time when the United States is undergoing its greatest contemporary challenges to democracy and equality, I too find myself in the midst of a topsy turvy world.
In fairness, I did expect 2026 to be a year of great personal turmoil. My oldest child—I’ll call her N—would find out if and where she got accepted into university, and would be leaving the nest. I braced myself for the coming emotional upheaval.
But nothing prepared for what actually came next. On January 4, 2026, the day I turned 51, my older sister Sameera experienced an unexpected and catastrophic heart attack. The next day I flew out to Calgary where she lived, and spent the night in her hospital room as she lay hooked up to tubes that kept her artificially alive. I whispered tearful entreaties into her ear to please wake up. The next day, they pulled the plug and I bade my childhood companion a final goodbye.
I returned home to Los Angeles, gutted and hollowed out. In between great bouts of grief, during which I forced myself to cover the murders of Keith Porter, Renee Goode, and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents—after all I am a journalist—my long-time editor Greg Ruggiero approached me to put together a book of interviews with people fighting ICE terror.
Plot twist: It would have to be fast tracked to meet the moment, and would publish by the end of the summer.
I don’t know what possessed me to say yes to Greg other than the very real understanding in the wake of Sameera’s death that our fragile lives are never neat, nor predictable. And that we make meaning any way we can, for that makes us human. And I desperately needed to feel human.
Figuring out how to make sense of my sister’s loss was something I was utterly unprepared for (and still struggle with daily). But, putting a book together? That I could do. So, I accepted Greg’s challenge: Six weeks to put together a collection of interview transcripts into a coherent book-length treatise on how communities around the US are fighting the ethnic cleansing of our nation.
I deployed my 20+ years of experience as a journalist covering anti-immigrant racism, from the post-9/11 attacks on Muslims and South Asians to the Sensenbrenner bill and the rise of Barack Obama and the first Trump Administration.
I worked feverishly, adding some new interviews to the trove I had already gathered over the past year, transcribing and editing them, contacting my interview subjects for permissions, organizing and reorganizing the order of the conversations, and writing a 4,000-word introduction to frame the collection.
Around this time, my daughter N began getting college decisions, bringing more emotional whiplash. She also came out as transgender—something I’d suspected for years—but now, in the thick of the virulently anti-trans world we inhabit, this revelation, coming on the verge of her leaving home to live in another city, added a new layer of fear for her life and well-being.
Today, as the fastest book I’ve ever put together is publishing, my on-going grief at Sameera’s death is compounded by N’s impending departure for college. A project bookended by two great upheavals in my life is also garnering far more attention than my earlier books—in large part because of the timeliness of the issue it covers. I am taking deep breaths.
—Sonali Kolhatkar
September 2026
SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.
SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.
Sonali earned her MS in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California.
