There’s No Time for Helplessness: An Interview with Behind Enemy Lines NYC
By Staff | February 27, 2026
Behind Enemy Lines NYC is a committed anti-imperialist collective dedicated to confronting the American war machine from within what they term the "belly of the beast." Rejecting traditional electoral politics and managed dissent, the group focuses on turning state repression into a catalyst for further resistance. They prioritize direct action over symbolic protests, often refusing legal compromises like plea deals to expose the political motivations behind police tactics. Whether challenging the deportation infrastructure of ICE or calling out milestones in imperialism—such as the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States—the organization seeks to transform widespread disillusionment into organized, sustained disruption aimed at dismantling the infrastructure of U.S. global power and promoting social justice.
We share their message and were pleased to be able to speak with them.
You’ve been vocal about the NYPD’s use of catch and release and bogus charges to intimidate protesters at the Israeli Consulate. Beyond legal defense, how does Behind Enemy Lines physically and politically prepare its members to withstand state efforts to criminalize dissent?
We don't seek out repression, but it's inevitable when you stand up against this system. Our principle is that we will always meet repression with more resistance. When the NYPD used "catch and release" tactics and and bullshit charges to intimidate the protestors who answered BEL's call to disrupt business as usual the second anniversary of the Al-Aqsa flood by protesting the genocide outside the Israeli Consulate on October 7, 2025, we exposed how the law enforcement functions to protect the status quo of US imperialism and fought their attempts to crush dissent. That meant fighting the charges, launching public drop-the-charges campaigns, packing courtrooms, and using the repression as a chance to bring more people together to stand against a system that so transparently criminalizes any resistance to the bloodthirsty interests of the US empire.
During our 2024 protest against the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, protestors were singled out, violently tackled and arrested. 56 people were charged—mostly with minor ordinance violations that normally warrant a ticket—yet everyone was jailed and held for hours. Prosecutors followed up with inflated charges and drawn-out court dates, hoping people would quietly take deals. Instead, ten defendants refused on principle to take any plea deals and demanded trials. They ranged from longtime BEL members to people who simply showed up because they opposed the Gaza genocide. Together with BEL and a few courageous NLG attorneys, they forced the city to justify its crackdown in court.
The city’s case boiled down to one claim: that the defendants were present at a protest. Prosecutors paraded riot commanders and arresting officers who couldn’t point to a single illegal act beyond alleged “failure to disperse.” They pushed the absurd logic that CPD can arrest anyone, at any time, simply for being in the vicinity of a protest police demonstration. They couldn’t even establish that individual protesters had heard dispersal orders. In some cases, people were targeted for carrying large Palestinian flags or criticizing officers.
With the full weight of CPD and the city law department behind them, prosecutors lost all ten cases, exposing how flimsy and politically motivated the prosecutions were.
That's how we answer repression: we will not isolate, we will not capitulate, and we will not allow the state to quietly criminalize dissent. Every attempt to scare people off the streets can be turned back on the state through exposure— and that's our job: to expose every instance of even the smallest repression like catch and release arrests for what they are: attempts to intimidate people from going beyond business as usual, as any real dissent should and must. To keep up any meaningful momentum of dissent to the crimes of US imperialism, we need to be fighting every instance of repression.
In your critique of Zohran Mamdani and NYC mayoral politics, you argue that a new face in City Hall cannot dismantle the war machine. In a city like New York, where many activists feel pressured to vote for the lesser evil, how do you keep the masses focused on revolutionary resistance rather than the ballot box?
Sure, many activist and leftist types may feel pressured to vote for the lesser evil, but people are not nearly as captivated by the ballot box as some activists assume. Many are deeply disillusioned with it and largely disillusioned with figures like Mamdani as well. After his election, people we spoke to in the South Bronx weren't optimistic that he would bring about any real change. A few men I spoke to near Maria Sola Greenspace were quick to tell me that he wouldn't actually do anything to help people facing homelessness and drug addiction, as they were. In a separate conversation, a woman in the same neighborhood woman called Mamdani a liar, rightly pointing out that his talk about arresting Netanyahu was likely to be nothing more than a grift.
Our role isn’t to convince people that elections don't "work"; people largely already know that. It’s to challenge that disillusionment into sustained collective resistance rather than letting it dissipate into cynicism or helplessness, neither of which is effective at changing the tides.
With events like February 13th National School Walkout against ICE, you are engaging a younger demographic. What is the strategic importance of high school and college students in the broader fight to "Melt ICE," and how do you protect these students from institutional retaliation?
Brave youth have a revolutionary history of bold, rebellious leadership in this country. The Young Lords were mostly teenagers when they launched the Garbage Offensive in East Harlem in 1969, collecting mounds of trash in Puerto Rican neglected by the city to pile in the streets and block traffic, even lighting some of the mounds of trash on fire to force the city to respond. Youth often have more clarity, righteous anger, and revolutionary hope than adults who are more likely to have been numbed to the atrocities committed by the US empire.
So when students filled with righteous anger at the ICE terror tearing through the country want to take the stage, it is our obligation to bring them into the fold of struggle. When Dare to Struggle announced the nationwide walkouts against ICE on February 13, we were eager to take up the call and join the students by walking out with them. We don’t pretend we can shield students from retaliation entirely. The fight against ICE is inseparable from the fight against repression. When students step forward, institutions often move to discipline and intimidate them. That’s why organizing to expose and fight back against repression has to be built into the movement itself.
In Virginia and Oklahoma, for example, students who took up Dare to Struggle's call for nation-wide walkouts are currently facing mass suspensions for participating in the walkout. Dare to Struggle is exposing how this repression aligns school administrators with DHS and ICE, and is calling on supporters to demand that the suspensions be reversed and expunged from students’ records.
The question isn't "how do we protect the students from institutional retaliation?" In fact, that framing is often used to infantalize and sideline youth, telling them to shut up and obey while they watch the adults around them fail to act. The real question is: how can we best support the brave students as they fight ICE terror and institutional repression? Instead of "shielding" students, we need to be standing with them publicly, drumming up enough mass public support for their courage that political repression becomes costly for the institutions doing it.
The upcoming Anti-Imperialist Resistance Conference asks what it would take to stop the next crime of the U.S. empire. Without giving away the whole conference, what are the primary pillars of resistance you believe are missing from the current American anti-war movement?
It's not enough to "stop the war." We’re not trying to pressure the empire into behaving better. We want to stop the US war machine entirely. That requires many capacities that the resistance movement in this country lacks. But I'll start with one: seriousness.
Large sections of what's seen as mass resistance are dominated by organizations like PSL and DSA that posture as "progressive" while ultimately orbiting electoral politics or tightly stage-managing and containing dissent. Whether it’s funneling energy and hope into electoral campaigns, protecting relationships with "progressive" politcians and nonprofits, or keeping protests permitted and working with the police to lead them, the result is the same: routines that never escape safe containment to become real resistance aimed at the US war machine and its representatives.
At the DNC protests in Chicago, marshal-heavy coalitions made sure marches stayed within city-approved routes and safely away from the politicians responsible for the genocide as they coronated the next butcher of Gaza. Police openly praised protest marshals for “policing their own.”
Mass resistance (or any attempt at it) cannot be serious if it is subordinated to electoral calculations or managed by people more concerned with an appearance of legitimacy or a career than with defeating the empire. Like parasites on the potential of the people in this country to get seriously mutinous, careerists and opportunists feed on the anger of the people while redirecting it back into the same institutions responsible for the crimes in the first place.
Your weekly newsletter focuses on shedding light on atrocities that mainstream media often ignores or justifies. In an era of information overload, how do you curate these stories to ensure they move people toward organized action rather than just doom-scrolling or despair?
We’re not carefully "curating" from a small pile of horrors. The pile is endless. We cover what we can every week. The question isn’t how to avoid "doom-scrolling"—it’s whether you’re willing to move from reading to joining us. If you read our newsletter and it pisses you off, makes you cry, feel rage or despair: hit us up. There's no time for helplessness.
That being said, if you haven't read our newsletter before, please check it out and subscribe: https://behind-enemy-lines.org/newsletter/.
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As we move further into 2026, the U.S. empire faces various internal and external pressures. What does a win look like for Behind Enemy Lines by the end of this year? Is it a matter of numbers, a shift in public consciousness, or the successful disruption of specific imperialist infrastructure?
2026 marks 250 years of US Empire. That's 250 years of genocide, slavery, exploitation, military plunder, coups, sanctions, occupation, and more horrors. If the ruling class plans to celebrate that milestone, then a win for us is making sure as many people as possible understand exactly what is being celebrated, feel righteously angry about it, and join us in confronting the rulers of this bloodthirsty empire. We will announce our July 4, 2026 call to action — to protest the 250 years of US empire celebration in Philadelphia — at our conference in Chicago, March 27–29. Stay tuned.
The Conference will address question like: Why did we fail the people of Gaza? What would it actually take to stop the next crime of the US empire? And how do we build a movement capable of winning? By seriously addressing these questions we hope to bring in the people who were changed by the events of and following October 7 but haven't yet found a political home because they've been frustrated by dead ends they've found in the pro-Palestine movement.
We want to come out of this year with more chapters rooted in more cities. We are aiming to launch a Philadelphia chapter through our July mobilization there, and we have contacts in other areas in which we hope to grow full chapters as well. Doubling our number of chapters by the end of 2026 would significantly increase our ability to respond quickly, and sustain nationwide momentum beyond one-off events into a real culture of anti-imperialist resistance within the belly of the beast.
Beyond expanding membership and chapter numbers, a big win would be forcing ICE onto the the defensive. The state’s deportation machine thrives on impunity, with ICE agents continuing to kill, kidnap, and terrorize people across the country because they know they won’t face real consequences. That's why we're taking up Dare to Struggle’s call to Melt ICE, joining nationwide actions from February through May to force a direct confrontation with those who enforce, support, and align with ICE's terror. Check out Dare to Struggle's call to melt ICE and get involved!
Attend the BEL Conference in Chicago, March 27-29! Registration is free: https://behind-enemy-lines.org/conference-2026/
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