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 Road and Chicago Avenue. 5 years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood on the curb outdoors Cup Meals, raised her cellphone, and bore witness to 9 minutes and 29 seconds that will impress a world motion towards racial inequality.
Frazier’s video didn’t simply present what occurred. It insisted the world cease and see.
In the present day, that legacy lives on within the palms of a special neighborhood, going through completely different threats however wielding the identical instruments. Throughout america, Latino organizers are lifting their telephones to not go viral however to go on file. They’re livestreaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, filming household separations, documenting protests outdoors detention facilities. Their footage isn’t 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 digicam, pleading with him to not signal any official paperwork. He turns, gestures for her to settle down, then blows her a kiss. Throughout city, LAPD officers on horseback charged at peaceful protesters.
In Spokane, Wash., residents shaped 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 impression of smartphone witnessing has been each instant 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 isn’t 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 numerous media codecs to struggle 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 in the course of the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The People Over Papers map, for instance, displays an older lineage: the resistance techniques 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 continues to be very actual.
Likewise, the Stop ICE Raids Alerts Network revives a civil-rights-era blueprint. Throughout the Nineteen 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 site visitors or climate studies — “congestion on the south aspect” meant police roadblocks, “storm warnings” signaled incoming violence. In the present day, that infrastructure lives once more via WhatsApp chains, encrypted group texts and story posts. The platforms have modified. The mission has not.
Layered throughout each programs is the DNA of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the information that after helped Black vacationers navigate Jim Crow America by figuring out secure cities, gasoline stations and lodging. Individuals Over Papers and Cease ICE Raids are digital descendants of that legacy: survival via shared data, safety via mapped resistance.
The Latino neighborhood’s use of smartphones on this second isn’t 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 via Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram. A knock turns into a livestream. A raid turns into a receipt. A video turns into a defend.
For undocumented households, the danger is actual. To movie is to show oneself. To go reside is to turn out to be a goal. However many do it anyway. As a result of silence could be deadly. As a result of invisibility protects nobody. As a result of if the story isn’t captured, it may be denied.
5 years after Floyd’s last breath, the burden of proof nonetheless falls heaviest on essentially the most weak. America calls for footage earlier than outrage. Tape earlier than reform. Visible affirmation earlier than compassion. And nonetheless, justice isn’t assured.
However 2020 taught us that smartphones, in the best palms, can fracture the established order. In 2025, that lesson is echoing once more, this time via the lens of Latino cell 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 aren’t remoted occasions. They’re chapters in the identical story of presidency repression.
And since the cameras are nonetheless rolling — and individuals are nonetheless recording — these tales are being instructed anew.
5 years in the past, we had been pressured to see the insufferable. Now, we’re being proven the plain.
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.
