It has been 5 years since Might 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 outdoors Cup Meals, raised her telephone, and bore witness to 9 minutes and 29 seconds that will impress a worldwide motion in opposition to racial inequality.
Frazier’s video didn’t simply present what occurred. It insisted the world cease and see.
Right now, that legacy lives on within the arms of a distinct neighborhood, going through completely different threats however wielding the identical instruments. Throughout the USA, Latino organizers are lifting their telephones to not go viral however to go on document. They’re livestreaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, filming household separations, documenting protests outdoors detention facilities. Their footage just isn’t content material. It’s proof. It’s warning. It’s resistance.
Right here in Los Angeles, the place I educate journalism, a number of photographs have seared themselves into public reminiscence. One viral video exhibits 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 relax, then blows her a kiss. Throughout city, LAPD officers on horseback charged at peaceable 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 “Disgrace!” as they chased a automotive of uniformed Nationwide Guard troops out of their neighborhood.
The affect of smartphone witnessing has been each quick and unmistakable — visceral at avenue 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 integrated witnesses’ smartphone video, serving to it attain a wider viewers.
What’s unfolding now just 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 People have used numerous media codecs to combat for racial and financial equality — from slave narratives to smartphones. I argued that Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells have been doing the identical work as Darnella Frazier: utilizing journalism as a instrument 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 folks mapped freedom through the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The Individuals 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 help hubs and sanctuary areas. The map is crowdsourced. The borders are digital. The hazard remains to be very actual.
Likewise, the Cease ICE Raids Alerts Community revives a civil-rights-era blueprint. Through the Nineteen Sixties, activists used Vast Space Phone Service strains 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 facet” meant police roadblocks, “storm warnings” signaled incoming violence. Right now, that infrastructure lives once more by 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 Inexperienced Guide,” the information that when 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 by shared data, safety by mapped resistance.
The Latino neighborhood’s use of smartphones on this second just 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 by 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 chance is actual. To movie is to show oneself. To go stay is to turn into a goal. However many do it anyway. As a result of silence will be deadly. As a result of invisibility protects nobody. As a result of if the story just isn’t captured, it may be denied.
5 years after Floyd’s remaining breath, the burden of proof nonetheless falls heaviest on essentially the most susceptible. 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 suitable arms, can fracture the established order. In 2025, that lesson is echoing once more, this time by 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 will not be 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 informed anew.
5 years in the past, we have been compelled 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 creator of “Bearing Witness Whereas Black: African People, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.” This text was produced in partnership with the Dialog.
