Why power analysis is key to fighting ICE

This article Why power analysis is key to fighting ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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The ICE campaign to round up millions of immigrants is grounded in tactics designed to inspire public fear and passivity. Dressed in tactical gear and wielding deadly weapons, masked agents strive to project an image of invincible power as they rampage through communities, smashing into cars, breaking down doors and wrestling people into unmarked vehicles.

Nevertheless, many activists have refused to be intimidated, successfully confronting agents on the street to prevent harassment and arrests. Such ad hoc resistance has its limitations, however, since ICE activities often occur out of public view.

In response, activists are using a more systemic approach by targeting businesses that underpin the agency’s ability to function. Because ICE cannot carry out its operations alone, it relies on a network of companies to provide equipment, intelligence, communications, travel, accommodations and everything else huge bureaucracies require.

For example, Palantir has been the target of a campaign because, among other things, it provides surveillance software and database management services to ICE. The Coalition to Stop Avelo targeted Avelo Airlines, forcing it to end its deportation contract with ICE. And boycotts have been launched against Home Depot for allowing immigration raids on its property and Hilton Hotels for accommodating ICE agents.

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While a simple internet search can turn up dozens of companies that have been awarded ICE contracts, sometimes finding your opponent’s most vulnerable pillars of support requires doing extensive research. 

Identify targets that are vulnerable to pressure 

In the early 2000s the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW, did a detailed evaluation of their industry and discovered new targets that drastically changed the direction and effectiveness of their campaign for farmworkers’ rights.

Tomato pickers in the small South Florida town had been struggling since the group was founded in 1993 to increase wages and improve working conditions in the fields. Using short work stoppages, marches and hunger strikes aimed at influencing the growers, they had been able to raise their wages marginally, but the growers remained intransigent. By every measure, the workers were still impoverished.

Discouraged by slow progress, the workers undertook a deep analysis of the food industry. As described by Susan Marquis in her book “I Am Not a Tractor!,” their research revealed a couple of key insights. First, the tomato growers they had been targeting with their protests could not afford to raise the farmworkers’ wages even if they wanted to, because tomato prices were set by the buyers.

The second revelation was that the buyers, unlike the growers, had public-facing brands. The fast food restaurants and grocery stores that were buying tomatoes from the Immokalee growers had brands to protect, and the last thing they wanted was to have their public images tarnished.

Consequently, after targeting the growers for seven years, CIW pivoted, launching a national boycott of Taco Bell. The demand was that the company simply pay an extra penny per pound for their tomatoes, with the extra revenue passed on to the workers. What made Taco Bell especially vulnerable was its ubiquity on college campuses, where student activists could apply additional pressure. 

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Lessons from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for low-wage workers

After about four years of organizing and agitating, the fast food giant’s parent company, Yum! Brands signed an agreement with CIW. Next, the workers targeted McDonald’s, a campaign that succeeded after only two years. After that, the dominoes tumbled quickly as Burger King, Whole Foods, Subway and many more companies were forced to the negotiating table. Using extensive research to expose the industry’s power relationships and find the right targets was the key to their success.

As the CIW’s campaign illustrates, when designing a campaign strategy, your immediate opponent and your best target may not always be the same. Even when your opponent has the capacity to acquiesce to your demand, they may be relatively immune from any pressure you can bring to bear. Fortunately, power is more like a web than a monolith, and while your opponent may seem powerful, their power is not intrinsic, but rather derives from other people and institutions they cannot fully control. Targeting one or more of these pillars of support may prove more fruitful than attacking your opponent head on. 

Don’t stop at the obvious

Finding those pillars requires doing a power analysis. Power analysis is all about uncovering connections and asking how various entities interact to create a web of dependencies that can reveal your opponent’s vulnerabilities and sources of power.

Most professional campaigning organizations understand the importance of doing in-depth research on their opponent, but if you’re a member of an ad-hoc group of volunteers fighting, for example, a data center or a detention center in your community, the idea might not occur. You may try to coerce local politicians or regulatory boards to take your side because they seem to have the power to stop the project. But targeting the most obvious entity may not give you the best chance at success.

“Sometimes we’ll just get stuck at the city council or the mayor … because the immediate decisions stop there,” said Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action. “But what I think is critical is that we are completely mapping the whole terrain.”

“I think that there is utility that can come from going after your immediate opponent, but … your most obvious opponent might not always be who actually has the power to give you what you want,” said Molly Gott, a senior research analyst at LittleSis, a nonprofit research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. “And there can oftentimes be utility to mapping out a little bit more the other powerful players that are involved and the ways that you can pressure them.”

In 2021 the Defend Black Voters Coalition launched a campaign against Michigan state lawmakers who were pushing to overturn the 2020 election results and suppress Black voting. Although the campaign was eventually suspended after Michiganders passed a ballot initiative that essentially accomplished the campaign’s objectives, the coalition’s process was a great illustration of how a thorough power analysis can uncover layers of indirect connections between people and corporations that may not be obvious at first.

As described by Andrew Willis Garcés in a Training for Change podcast, the coalition realized it would be futile to target the entrenched Republican legislators who were attempting to interfere with Michigan elections. But research revealed several big donors who supported the Republican legislators, and one of those companies — insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield — had contracts worth billions of dollars with Michigan cities and counties.

So the campaign targeted Democrat-controlled municipalities across the state, urging them to pass resolutions threatening those business ties if the insurance company didn’t end its support for election-denying legislators. The campaign began to gain momentum as five cities and counties, including Detroit and Wayne County, approved contractor accountability measures before the voter ballot initiative was approved and the campaign ended.

But targeting tertiary targets — Michigan municipalities — to indirectly influence legislators shows how deep research on an opponent can reveal potentially vulnerable connections up and down the power chain.

The nuts and bolts of power analysis

“I know this can be a challenge for groups that don’t have people on staff who are researchers,” Jacobs said. “There’s a lot that we can do via simple Google searches and not stopping on the first page of results. We can dig and find out a lot of stuff that’s in the public domain.”

In addition to deep internet searches, another way to gather information about your opponent is doing what James Mumm calls a “research action.”

“You could be talking to workers, you could be talking to ex-employees of a company,” said Mumm, who is chief of institutional advancement at the People’s Action Institute, a national federation of local groups dedicated to building the power of poor and working people. “If you get a meeting, you could sit down with the target of your campaign and ask them questions.”

Specialized databases can also be useful, Mumm said. For example, Pitchbook provides detailed financial data on corporations, and LexisNexis contains news articles and court cases. But these databases are expensive and may be beyond the reach of all-volunteer groups unless they can find a professional advocacy group that has a subscription and is willing to share.

The questions to explore when doing a power analysis vary based on the type of campaign, but Gott, the LittleSis research analyst, offers some examples: “If we’re thinking about doing a power analysis of a corporation, we look at who are the executives, who’s on the board, how do they get financing, what banks do they work with, who are their investors, who are their customers, who are their shareholders, do they get subsidies, all that kind of stuff.”

When researching powerful people, Gott says the investigation should be similarly wide ranging: “For example, research might include questions such as what boards are they on, what kinds of business and social networks are they a part of, do they have investments, do they belong to a particular country club, what are their political relationships, do they give money to particular elected officials,” she explained.

Mumm suggests a slightly different approach to power research by trying to answer four basic questions about your opponent: what do they want, who do they fear, who has power over them and who do they have power over. The first two questions can help form the campaign’s strategy and test its effectiveness.

“So we’re trying to take what they want away from them and bring what they fear closer,” Mumm said. “And the only way we know if we’re doing either one of those correctly throughout the course of a campaign is we get a reaction from the target. If we get no reaction from a target, then we have made bad guesses and have to do more research.” 

Tracing connections helps answer Mumm’s third research question — who has power over your opponent? You might discover your opponent has financial ties, supply chain dependencies, political affiliations, personal relationships and more — any of which could present promising campaign targets. This is how you can generate secondary and tertiary targets.

Researching the fourth question — who does your main target have power over — can be a great source of intel, according to Mumm, especially in corporate campaigns. That’s because not everyone likes their boss. Employees who are disgruntled or sympathetic to the campaign’s objectives may provide inside information that can shed light on corporate decision making and internal power dynamics. All this information can be compiled to inform a campaign’s targeting strategy.

The information gathering process shouldn’t end after the initial strategy is settled on. Continuing research during a campaign is crucial because power relationships are constantly shifting, especially during long campaigns. Also, as more information about the opponent surfaces, a change in target might be necessary, especially when a campaign gets bogged down.

When a strategy isn’t working, Gott said, “then you go back to the drawing board, maybe do more research, maybe revisit research that you already had.”

Reevaluate your target as needed

A good example of a campaign finding success by shifting to a secondary target occurred during the Riders Against Gender Exclusion, or RAGE, campaign in Philadelphia. In 2010, bus drivers were harassing trans people whose appearance did not match the gender on their passes, and accusing them of using someone else’s pass. RAGE formed to fight the policy.

After some research, the group determined that SEPTA, the Philadelphia transit authority, was the entity that had the power to eliminate the gender markers, so that agency became their target.

“Ultimately we were pretty clear that SEPTA were the ones that could say yes or no to our demands,” said Nico Amador, who was one of the RAGE organizers. “Sometimes as campaigners, we are dealing with a target that really has no direct accountability to us. Voters don’t choose the head of the public transportation system.”

Consequently, after two years of unsuccessfully pressuring SEPTA, the campaign was losing steam. The group took stock and decided to pivot to a less confrontational objective. A new “Ride with Respect” campaign engaged allies to sign cards pledging to intervene if they saw someone being harassed by bus drivers because of a perceived gender mismatch on their bus pass.

Meanwhile, a woman who had attended RAGE meetings decided on her own to initiate conversations with a few Philadelphia City Council members to discuss the gender marker issue. The lobbying resulted in the City Council unanimously passing a non-binding resolution in support of changing the bus pass gender policy. Shortly afterwards, SEPTA discontinued the use of the gender markers on commuter passes.

While it’s likely the RAGE campaign against SEPTA had softened their resistance and set the stage for the policy reversal, it was the City Council that ultimately proved to be the decisive target.

“I think there was maybe an oversight on our part once we had actually built that power and that influence to not notice that the City Council as a secondary target would have been a smart move,” Amador said.

But Amador doesn’t think it was a mistake to initially target SEPTA.

“I think in our case it would have been hard to build legitimacy around the campaign if we had not put pressure on SEPTA directly first,” he said.

Nevertheless, this example demonstrates the importance of constantly reevaluating targeting decisions as power relationships fluctuate during the course of a campaign.

While doing extensive opposition research may seem like a daunting task, especially for poorly resourced groups, there is help. LittleSis provides research assistance and free training programs for activists. It was LittleSis research that aided the successful StopAvelo campaign by identifying some of the airline’s pillars of support, like airports that leased them gates, local governments that provided them subsidies and universities that signed promotional deals with them.

Besides providing toolkits, research guides and their own database of powerful people and institutions, the nonprofit offers an annual four-part webinar called Research Tools for Organizers that covers the basics of power analysis. 

“We talk about intro to power research … understanding the history of it in social movements in the U.S., and then how to research a corporation, how to research nonprofits and how to research billionaires,” Gott explained.

No matter how formidable an opponent appears on the surface, chances are they have social, political or economic connections that render them vulnerable. Power research can help campaigns identify pillars of support, and finding the right target can be the difference between success and failure.

This article Why power analysis is key to fighting ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/04/power-analysis-fighting-ice/