On an early morning in September, federal immigration agents knocked on the door of Baltimore resident M.T., looking for someone who did not live there.
Instead of opening the door for ICE, another resident in the apartment immediately referred to the “red card” — a small ‘Know Your Rights’ card stating that a person can decline to speak to ICE agents, deny them entry into a home, and refuse consent to a search.
Using the card to assert their rights, they refused to answer questions or allow entry into the house, and the agents quickly left.
ICE has arrested some 400,000 people nationwide over the past year, often in operations that violate constitutional protections. Knowing and asserting your rights is one of the few ways to push back.
This close call with ICE “really kind of made it real” for M.T., a worker-owner at Red Emma’s Coffee Shop and Bookstore, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “It’s different from seeing it on the news and then they are at your house.”
Red Emma’s has long served as a print and distribution hub for flyers and zines — small, self-published booklets often used for creative expression and political organizing, like the red card, specifically designed to be read quickly and shared widely.
In recent months, Red Emma’s has ramped up its production, distributing prints that share knowledge about how to oppose ICE and printing at least a thousand “Abolish ICE” flyers for people to hang in their homes, workplaces, and vehicles.
“I’m gonna produce as much as I can to make their jobs as difficult as possible,” M.T. said.
Across the country, artists and organizers are increasingly turning towards print. As the federal government has escalated prosecutions related to protest activity, leading tech companies have handed over private data to immigration enforcement, drawing attention to the extent of digital surveillance. At the same time, sponsored anti-immigrant content is flooding social media as ICE carries out made-for-social-media immigration raids, and is planning to spend $100 million on a digital recruitment campaign.
In this environment, many see sharing information through zines as a strategic necessity.
“Zines can be a guide,” said Baltimore artist and educator Jennifer White-Johnson. “A toolkit. A teaching tool for safety, for survival, for justice.”
While they can’t compete with the reach of mass media, they are distributed for free or cheap and are difficult to censor. Some creators distribute anonymously, aware that voicing opposition to ICE can land you on a secret domestic terrorist watchlist and that even possessing certain political materials can carry risk. Nationally, outlets such as 404 Media have published printable ICE survival guides.
In Baltimore, the demands of grassroots movements — abolishing ICE, opposing American intervention in Venezuela, supporting Palestine — are sitting in storefront windows, stacked up on café counters, and circulated at protests. They are often created collectively in community spaces and coffee shops, and more residents are getting interested in this direct, alternative approach to media, messaging, and organizing.
On a frigid Tuesday morning in January at Common Ground Cafe in Hampden, activists gathered around tables covered with paper, markers, and glue sticks. They were making art for a protest marking one year of the second Trump administration. “It’s a culmination of people’s anger,” said Nik Koski, a worker-owner at Common Ground. “About this war on Venezuela, about the recent murder of Renée Nicole Good, and about so many others at the hands of ICE.”
One of Koski’s most widely circulated designs is a “No War on Venezuela” flyer created as the U.S. escalated its attacks in 2025, killing more than 100 fishermen off Venezuela’s coast. The print’s purpose was to share perspectives rarely reflected in mainstream coverage by connecting the cruelty of mass deportations at home with U.S. sanctions and interventions abroad, underscoring how domestic crackdowns and foreign policy operate in tandem.
When the attacks against Venezuela intensified, Red Emma’s printed and distributed hundreds of additional copies of the flyer, rapidly circulating it across the city and exposing its anti-intervention message to many that might not normally see it, and communicating to politically-engaged residents that many share their concerns.
“The power of art and resistance is that it can shape people’s consciousness in a mass way,” Koski said. “Sometimes you need to meet the moment with an image that makes it clear: this is real, this is wrong, and we have to act now.”
“The power of art and resistance is that it can shape people’s consciousness in a mass way,” Nik Koski said. “Sometimes you need to meet the moment with an image that makes it clear: this is real, this is wrong, and we have to act now.”
Nik Koski, a worker-owner at Common Ground
For Koski, accessibility matters. “We’re seeing massive literacy drops and people struggling to find reliable information,” they said. “Creating zines that working-class people can actually access is really significant — especially when democracy itself is under attack.”
Print activism is not new; veteran artists have long worked in this tradition.
White-Johnson, a nationally renowned Baltimore-based artist, educator, and disability justice organizer, has long used zines and collage as tools of rapid response — work meant to circulate when institutions stall, distort, or disappear. Her work has influenced many younger zinemakers across the city, establishing a design practice rooted in care, clarity, and resistance.
Over the years, families have asked White-Johnson to memorialize loved ones killed by police or immigration authorities. Her floral portrait collages are meant to keep names and faces circulating after the news cycle moves on. It is a practice that White-Johnson describes as entering an emotionally taxing space — slow, manual labor shaped by real relationships, rather than automation.
“This isn’t uploading an image to ChatGPT and asking it to make a collage tribute,” she said. “This is me being asked by families to create something that holds a lot of weight.”
One of White-Johnson’s recent tributes honored Keith Porter Jr., a Los Angeles father of two fatally shot by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s Eve. (White-Johnson also designed a 2023 Baltimore Beat cover honoring Donnell Rochester, an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by Baltimore police.)
Another strand of her work moves deliberately toward joy, countering mainstream portrayals of marginalized communities and depicting them as beautiful and fully human rather than criminals or victims.
In a recent collaboration, White-Johnson created a collage from photographs by Anthony Orendorff of young Latina women at anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles holding signs that read “No one is illegal on stolen land,” and framed the images with vibrant florals.
“I wanted to honor them as they are now,” White-Johnson said. “Celebrating their humanity, their Latina girlhood — not sensationalizing harm, but showing them as beautiful.”
As an educator at MICA and Stevenson University, White-Johnson brings these practices into the classroom. She uses zines as tools that help students develop their own artistic voices rather than conform to institutional expectations.
“Zines let people cut and paste definitions of democracy,” she said. “You’re crafting something original, through your own eyes.”
“Zines let people cut and paste definitions of democracy. You’re crafting something original, through your own eyes.”
Baltimore artist and educator Jennifer White-Johnson
That refusal to let dominant institutions define the narrative is central to the Blackberry Zine Collective, a group of Baltimore-based artists who see zines as both counter-history and living archive.
The collective includes Kennedy McDaniel, Momo Mullings, and Didi Cook-Creek, who together host workshops that pair hands-on creation with political education about Black press traditions.
Cook-Creek, a writer and zine maker, sees their work as rooted in tradition and deeply personal. “As a Black American, our community has a really storied tradition and a reverence and respect for writing and the written word in a way that I don’t see existing in a lot of other American cultures.”
For McDaniel, zines counter how Baltimore is portrayed by outsiders. “Baltimore City is a city that has such rich artistic and cultural traditions and practices,” she said. “But so often when I tell people I’m from Baltimore, the first thing they say is, ‘Oh yeah, The Wire, right?’”
Self-publishing creates space to tell different stories. “Zines are a way that individuals can really share what their reality is,” McDaniel said. “And I think that that often does not match with what we see in the media.”
For Mullings, a writer, researcher and archivist, that impulse is rooted in history. They maintain the Black Zine Archive, a digital archive of Black zine work, and have produced work such as “See Them, See Us,” which draws parallels between anti-Blackness in the United States and the genocide in Palestine.
“Black people have historically been unable to go to traditional means to tell their stories,” Mullings said. “So this is what we’ve always fallen back on.”
Baltimore, they noted, has a deep tradition of Black print culture, from self-published pamphlets by Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass and the long-running Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, created to evade censorship.
“There’s all these little examples throughout time of Black people saying, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna let me do this thing? I’ll do it myself,’” Mullings said. “And I think that is what we’re doing now.”
Cook-Creek says that history makes today’s renewed interest in zines feel less like a trend and more like a return towards human connection. “It seems like we are dispelling a lie … stepping back from so many abstracted layers to get back to what really connects you to another person … to a person that is standing in front of you,” she said. “That’s what feels right to us.”
Cook-Creek says that history makes today’s renewed interest in zines feel less like a trend and more like a return towards human connection.
For the collective, the appeal of print is also about permanence and accountability in an era of “enshittification” — when digital media platforms are deliberately degraded to maximize corporate profits.
“It very much feels like a natural reaction to knowing and seeing that the digital world is quickly becoming falsified,” Mullings said. “You really can’t do that with a piece of paper.”
“They’re personal. They’re political,” McDaniel said. “They resist being algorithmized, and they resist censorship.”
A growing number of independent print shops are sustaining Baltimore’s print revival.
Inside the Making Space Bmore building in Mount Vernon, Jess Lin, a zine and printmaker, works beside a hulking Risograph printer covered in stickers. This is Jess Jess Press, co-founded with Jess Lipinsky — an emerging comic and magazine press that creates high-quality prints and works with marginalized artists and authors in the city.
For Lin, zines translate complex political analysis into something people can carry with them.
“They’re a really great way to distribute information and distill harder theories or ideas into something that’s easy to understand and easy to replicate,” they said.
That accessibility matters as activists face intensifying surveillance and repression. In recent federal prosecutions tied to protests outside an ICE detention center in Texas, authorities treated anarchist and antifascist zines as evidence of criminal conspiracy. Legal advocates have warned that such cases reflect a broader effort to criminalize dissent itself.
Lin is clear-eyed about those risks. Some zines are widely distributed, with downloadable PDFs designed for easy printing and sharing. Others are circulated quietly, or not posted publicly at all.
“If you have a platform, you have a responsibility to use it,” Lin said, noting that not all work needs attribution or visibility to be effective.
Zines help build what Lin calls “informational power.”
“When people have the information and the tools, they’re able to make informed decisions about how they should be moving and what comes next,” they said.
At a moment of escalating enforcement and protest crackdowns, the question guiding her work is direct: “How can we best equip people to be prepared for the escalation that feels inevitable at this point?”
In a media landscape shaped by algorithms, surveillance, and disinformation, Baltimore organizers are choosing print because it provides them the tools to share the vital information they need.
“The revolution isn’t going to happen on Instagram,” Lin said. “The real work is happening in the streets. Zines help people get there.”