Community Care: How Museums Can Respond to ICE Threats and Intimidation of Targeted Communities
We cannot guarantee safety, but we can be bold and guarantee solidarity. Solidarity may be the most powerful tool we have.
Guest post by @storied_strands
On July 9, 2025, Homeland Security officers arrived unannounced at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Art & Culture in Chicago’s Latine Humboldt Park neighborhood. Although officials later denied immigration enforcement was the reason for their nearly two-hour stay at the museum, museum staff overheard officers discussing upcoming Latine cultural festivals and events.[i] The incident drew immediate condemnation from elected officials, nonprofits, and community members, sparking a coordinated effort to ensure ally presence at the museum and at upcoming festivals. In the days that followed, area Latine businesses and nonprofit allies were defaced with hateful graffiti in further attempts to intimidate and destabilize the community.[ii]
Following increased immigration actions across the country, this incident was not surprising but was nonetheless shocking as it threatened museum stakeholders. As museum professionals, we understand the difficulty of maintaining trust with communities. Establishing value statements and policies, let alone ensuring they are adhered to during times of cultural attacks, political turmoil, and community crises has been a field-wide debate. Museums feel pressure from funders, boards, and the public, but as we continue to tout our high level of public trust,[iii] museums must ensure they are protecting their communities.
How can museums offer care, connection, and cultural affirmation in a time when physical safety cannot be guaranteed? As funding for immigration-enforcement is exponentially increased,[iv] will the events at the Puerto Rican Museum become more common? As we approach Latine Heritage Month, are our community celebrations safe places? Cultural institutions have prepared for active shooters, hostile visitors, and civil unrest, but what happens when the threat does not come from a lone individual, but from the government, from agents who are being mobilized to intimidate and target the vulnerable?
This moment demands moral clarity and collective action. It is not enough to acknowledge these threats; museums must become places of resistance and care.
A Call to Action: From Condemnation to Care
Culturally specific institutions, particularly those serving Black, Latine, Indigenous, and immigrant communities, have long faced political hostility and censorship. We are currently facing an administration that denies the historical reality of systemic racism and is seeking to rewrite history.[v] Whether through funding cuts or direct intimidation, they want to erode community power and suppress cultural expression.
Museums must respond across multiple fronts, through public statements, internal strategy, and community partnerships. Our actions must be grounded in care, urgency, and solidarity.
It is time for all national museum associations to issue clear, public statements condemning intimidation, surveillance, and the use of federal power to threaten cultural expression. Museums can leverage their relationships, outreach and even their buildings to help support undocumented and mixed-status community members, while providing historic context and educational resources.[vi] Museum education around historic immigration patterns and policy helps provide the public a more holistic understanding of immigration to counter narratives rooted in racism and fear mongering. Museums should also ensure that grassroots organizations are included in partner collaborations, programming, and events.
Museums must push beyond the calls for basic cultural competency and seek out training on how to respond when ICE shows up in their communities and at their institutions.[vii] Museums must be active in their communities to understand the systemic pressures being placed on people. Leadership should be prioritizing community information channels to ensure they are acting as repositories to document the times we are living through, while better preparing to meet audiences’ needs and serve our neighbors.
We have learned repeatedly to be flexible in planning, but this must extend to reporting as well. Registration methods for program attendance can be rethought to ensure people do not feel they are risking their security to attend events. In the face of community fears around immigration enforcement, events can be shifted and reimagined. We can decenter physical spaces and institutional buildings, offer hybrid programming or self-guided and asynchronous ways to participate. Public art and external exhibits can also allow for community stories to be shared while providing community members more control over their environments.
Community Collaboration and Mutual Aid
Museums are not alone. Extensive networks already exist to support immigrant and targeted communities. We must connect with and amplify them. Rapid response networks respond in real-time to ICE actions. Museums can provide space, share communication tools, or recruit volunteers to be involved in such community-led response teams. Just as Planned Parenthood has used patient escorts for community safety, museums can engage allies and community supporters to provide protection for visitors at in person events and to combat hate on social media.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, museums around the country committed to do better by their communities. Many of those commitments have faded, particularly over the past year. But with the reminder of clear and present threats against our communities and our institutions, museums must meet the challenges of our current world.
We continue to hold events, fully aware and prepared for potential risks. Fear is real, but our work is more essential than ever. And, in this moment of courage, we may also welcome new allies who answer the call to stand together.
Museums must be spaces of both memory and resistance, celebration and care. We must show up not only with statements, but with actions by reimagining programs, redistributing resources, and standing visibly with our communities.
We cannot guarantee safety, but we can be bold and guarantee solidarity. Solidarity may be the most powerful tool we have.
@storied_strands is a museum professional working in the western suburbs of Chicago. You can contact her at storiedstrands@gmail.com
[i] Masterson, Matt. “Chicago Officials Say Federal Agents Targeted Puerto Rican Museum; Homeland Security Pushes Back.” WTTW 9, July, 2025.
[ii]Ortiz, Alex. “‘ICE RULES’: Chicago police seek suspect in vandalism of West Side buildings.” Fox 32, 26 July 2025.
[iii] American Alliance of Museums and Wilkening Consulting. Museums & Trust Project.
[iv] American Immigration Council. “What in the Big Beautiful Bill? Immigration and Border Security Unpacked.” 14 July 2025.
[vi] Although this article specifically addresses the targeting of immigrants, these tactics are also applicable to attacks on those in the LGBTQAI+ community.
[vii] NYLPI. “Guidance to Nonprofits Regarding Immigration Enforcement.”
QUESTIONS, COMMENTS?
Has your museum faced threats from ICE? How are you handling this?
Where are the national and regional museum associations? Why the silence?
Smithsonian updates
We’ll publish a more complete list of updates from around the country in our next post. For this edition we summarize key developments in the administration’s near-daily pressure on the Smithsonian Institution.
In July, the Washington Post reported that the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History had removed text referring to Trump’s two impeachments and his role in the January 6, 2021 uprising. Although the text removed was relatively brief, this change called to mind instances in the past when the Smithsonian had modified text or exhibitions under pressure: the National Air and Space Museum’s interpretation of the US use of the atomic bomb in World War II, and in Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, a display of portraits by and of gay people. In this most recent case, The American History Museum responded that the text was being removed only temporarily and would soon be replaced with more complete information on all presidents who have been impeached.
New text was recently installed discussing the impeachments of Andrew Johnson, William Clinton, and Donald Trump. According to Hyperallergic the new label is “shorter and safer.”
More recently, a letter from top White House staff to Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced an upcoming review of a number of Smithsonian Museums that will “pay attention to exhibits planned for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence….” Following the review, Smithsonian museums will be required to “make corrections that replace ‘divisive or ideologically driven’ language with ‘unifying, historically accurate,’ public-facing materials.” In addition the Smithsonian must, in 30 days, turn over org charts, visitor survey results, documentation of art choices, and a variety of other types of information that are not necessarily confidential but that exceed ordinary federal requests on the internal workings of the institution.
As a Smithsonian alumnus commented on this latest incursion, “This is more than quibbling over language about artwork labels or the content of exhibition panels. Secretary Bunch is now faced with a decision about whether to agree that the White House will be allowed authority (notwithstanding the letter’s protestations to the contrary) over the operations and contents of the Smithsonian.”