It has been 5 years since Could 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on the nook of thirty eighth Avenue and Chicago Avenue. 5 years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood on the curb exterior Cup Meals, raised her telephone, and bore witness to 9 minutes and 29 seconds that may impress a world motion in opposition to racial inequality.
Frazier’s video didn’t simply present what occurred. It insisted the world cease and see.
At this time, that legacy lives on within the arms of a distinct neighborhood, dealing with totally different threats however wielding the identical instruments. Throughout america, Latino organizers are lifting their telephones to not go viral however to go on report. They’re livestreaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, filming household separations, documenting protests exterior detention facilities. Their footage is just not content material. It’s proof. It’s warning. It’s resistance.
Right here in Los Angeles, the place I teach journalism, a number of pictures have seared themselves into public reminiscence. One viral video reveals a shackled father stepping right into a white, unmarked van — his daughter sobbing behind the digital camera, pleading with him to not signal any official paperwork. He turns, gestures for her to relax, then blows her a kiss. Throughout city, LAPD officers on horseback charged at peaceful protesters.
In Spokane, Wash., residents fashioned a spontaneous human chain round their undocumented neighbors mid-raid, their our bodies and cameras forming a barricade of defiance. In San Diego, white allies yelled “Shame!” as they chased a automotive of uniformed Nationwide Guard troops out of their neighborhood.
The influence of smartphone witnessing has been each quick and unmistakable — visceral at road stage, seismic in statehouses. On the bottom, the movies have fueled the “No Kings” motion, which organized protests in all 50 states final weekend. Legislators are responding too — with sparks flying within the halls of the Capitol. As President Trump ramps up immigration enforcement, Democratic-led states are digging in, tightening state legal guidelines that restrict cooperation with federal brokers.
Native TV information protection has included witnesses’ smartphone video, serving to it attain a wider viewers.
What’s unfolding now is just not new — it’s newly seen. Latino organizers are drawing from a playbook sharpened in 2020, one rooted in an extended lineage of Black media survival methods cast throughout slavery and Jim Crow.
In 2020, I wrote about how Black Individuals have used varied media codecs to battle for racial and financial equality — from slave narratives to smartphones. I argued that Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells had been doing the identical work as Darnella Frazier: utilizing journalism as a software for witnessing and activism. In 2025, Latinos who’re filming the state in moments of overreach — archiving injustice in actual time — are adapting, extending and carrying ahead Black witnesses’ work.
Furthermore, Latinos are utilizing smartphones for digital cartography a lot as Black individuals mapped freedom throughout the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The People Over Papers map, for instance, displays an older lineage: the resistance ways of Black Maroons — enslaved Africans who fled to swamps and borderlands, forming secret networks to evade seize and warn others.
These early communities shared intelligence, tracked patrols and mapped out covert paths to security. Individuals Over Papers channels that very same logic — solely now the hideouts are ICE-free zones, mutual support hubs and sanctuary areas. The map is crowdsourced. The borders are digital. The hazard remains to be very actual.
Likewise, the Stop ICE Raids Alerts Network revives a civil-rights-era blueprint. Throughout the Sixties, activists used Wide Area Telephone Service lines and radio to share protest routes, police exercise and security updates. Black DJs typically masked dispatches as visitors or climate stories — “congestion on the south aspect” meant police roadblocks, “storm warnings” signaled incoming violence. At this time, that infrastructure lives once more by means of WhatsApp chains, encrypted group texts and story posts. The platforms have modified. The mission has not.
Layered throughout each methods is the DNA of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the information that when helped Black vacationers navigate Jim Crow America by figuring out protected cities, fuel stations and lodging. Individuals Over Papers and Cease ICE Raids are digital descendants of that legacy: survival by means of shared data, safety by means of mapped resistance.
The Latino neighborhood’s use of smartphones on this second is just not for spectacle. It’s for self-defense. In cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and El Paso, what begins as a whisper — “ICE is within the neighborhood” — now races by means of Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram. A knock turns into a livestream. A raid turns into a receipt. A video turns into a protect.
For undocumented households, the danger is actual. To movie is to reveal oneself. To go stay is to develop into a goal. However many do it anyway. As a result of silence may be deadly. As a result of invisibility protects nobody. As a result of if the story is just not captured, it may be denied.
5 years after Floyd’s closing breath, the burden of proof nonetheless falls heaviest on probably the most weak. America calls for footage earlier than outrage. Tape earlier than reform. Visible affirmation earlier than compassion. And nonetheless, justice is rarely assured.
However 2020 taught us that smartphones, in the fitting arms, can fracture the established order. In 2025, that lesson is echoing once more, this time by means of the lens of Latino cellular journalists. Their footage is unflinching. Pressing. Righteous. It connects the dots: between ICE raids and over-policing, between a border cage and a metropolis jail, between a knee on a neck and a door kicked in at daybreak.
These usually are not remoted occasions. They’re chapters in the identical story of presidency repression.
And since the cameras are nonetheless rolling — and persons are nonetheless recording — these tales are being advised anew.
5 years in the past, we had been pressured to see the insufferable. Now, we’re being proven the simple.
Allissa V. Richardson, an affiliate professor of journalism and communication at USC, is the writer of “Bearing Witness While Black: African Individuals, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.” This text was produced in partnership with the Conversation.
