Defend The Block in Bristol

August 23, 2025: hundreds of Bristol antifascists prevent a violent racist mob from reaching the refugee centre they intended to attack.

It’s almost becoming an Augusy tradition in the UK – far-right propagandists stir up hysteria about “migrants” and before you know it mobs of ignorant, racist yobs are coming to town, intent of burning down the local refugee shelter and attacking anyone who doesn’t look British enough for their liking. So it was again in August 2025, except some of that lot made the poor strategic decision of targeting a refugee shelter in Bristol.

Bristol does not have a history of tolerating the presence of violent racist gammons threatening to harm people in the community. Bristol does have a long-standing history of coming out en masse to drive the out-of-town racist invaders back on their trains and hired coaches lest they go for a swim a la the Edward Colston statue.

And so again on August 23rd the racist invaders were prevented from reaching the refugee shelter they targeted by hundreds, if not thousands, of Bristolians. Unfortunately another growing British tradition related to this is the police unjustifiably attacking the anti-fascists preventing the fascists from making good on their violent plans. Earlier this year, a 65-year-old man died after being assaulted at a similar event – not assaulted by the fascists, assaulted by the Bristol police!

While gladly neither the racist filth nor the actual filth were able to murder anyone on August 25, 2025 in Bristol, the Avon and Somerset riot squad – unable to force a path through the anti-fascists so the bigots could attack the refugee centre – had to settle for arresting one of the anti-fascists and sticking him with fictitious charges. Which is where The Interntional Anti-Fascist Defence Fund comes into the picture, by contributing towards the costs for our friend to defend himself in court against the charges the police made up. There’s a crowdfunder set up to support him that you’d do well to contribute to as well! In addition, if you foresee a future need in Bristol for a wad of cash to help pay legal costs for future arrests, there’s also a crowdfunder for that.

After we sent our friend some funds, we received this lovely message form his support team:

Hi comrades. We want to express huge gratitude for the generous donation you made for our comrade’s legal defence. It means so much and has lifted his spirits immensely to see the real solidarity in effect from comrades near and far. Your donation will help him get the best movement solicitors’ representation and greatly improve his chances of fighting and winning his case.

And that is why we do what we do!

Nothing To Declare

Sam Tunick.

When Sam Tunick returned to Atlanta after a vacation abroad, he wasn’t expected his return to result in felony charges. After all, he wasn’t involved in any criminal activity and wasn’t trying to smuggle anything into the country. What Sam didn’t know is that his involvement in Stop Cop City – a peaceful movement protesting the creation of a sprawling police training compound on top of virgin Georgia forest – was enough for his name to be placed on a “terrorist watch list” by U.S. authorities. Which, in turn, was enough for Sam to be taken from the immigration lineup for a “special interrogation” – one where he was denied the right to speak with a lawyer and did not have his Miranda rights explained to him.

Sam had prudently installed Graphene OS onto his phone, so when he finally relented and gave his interrogators his phone’s password, the password they got was actually a code triggering the phone to completely wipe its data, which it did. And that was enough for Sam to be hit with felony charges, which he’s currently fighting.

As a member of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund said regarding the charges, “We all have a right to secure our private data against unconstitutional searches. And we should – especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.” Here at the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund, we agree, which is way we’ve made a contribution to Sam’s legal defense crowdfunder.

0161 = 161!

Chaotic scenes on the streets of Manchester as riot cops strong-armed their way through anti-fascist protestors in order to allow Britain First fascists to terrorize the city centre.

In April 2026, fascist thugs in the Britain First party announced plans to terrorize Muslims, migrants, and visible minorities in Manchester by organizing a mob of bigots to rampage through the streets. Manchester police responded to this threat by mobilizing hundreds of armoured and truncheon-wielding riot cops – to help Britain First accomplish their goals!

Video footage from that day tells the tale – dozens of examples of MCR coppers absolutely brutalizing anti-fascists doing their best to oppose Britain First. A report from the Network for Police Monitoring on police action that day roundly condemns the filth for “indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force,” “a deliberate lack of police accountability,” and what amounted to “an operational attack on the right to protest.” On April 18th, the Greater Manchester Police lived the slogans “Cops and the Klan go hand-in-hand” and answered the question “who protects the nazis?”

While there appear to be no consequences for the police acting as the goon squad for a fascist mob (so far!), there were immediately legal consequences for some of the good people of Manchester brave enough to stand up to the thugs (both the plainclothes racist thugs and their uniformed bodyguards). One friend got in touch with the Defence Fund to ask for support in paying the legal bills he now faces after being brutally assaulted by police and then charged with assaulting them! This is yet another example of a growing trend of UK police charging completely non-violent protestors with assaulting emergency workers (another absurd example here).

Our friend’s mates have set up a crowdfunder to help defer the costs he now faces to fight the fictitious charges in court and remain a free man. We were happy to contribute to it and would encourage anyone who supports street-level anti-fascism and the right to protest to follow suit.

“Minnesota Nice” Does Not Include ICE!

Pictured: how ICE gestapo decided to get into the homes of one of the arrestees.

We don’t know why Donald Trump would choose Minnesota as the testing ground for gestapo-like raids and kidnappings by battalions of ICE agents. Maybe he thought its “Minnesota Nice” reputation meant they wouldn’t meet much resistance from the locals. WRONG! As we all saw in the first few months of this year, practically all of the Land of 10,000 Lakes stood up to defend their families, friends, and neighbors against the ICE offensive. Murdering Renée Good in the streets of Minneapolis didn’t stop Minnesotans. Murdering Alex Pretti didn’t stop Minnesotans, either. After weeks of increasingly strong resistance, ICE staged a partial retreat, moving thousands of its stormtroopers out of the state.

It seems like the next miscalculation by the fascists who now run America was that, if they waited a while, Minnesotans would calm down and forget about the raids and this “cooling off” period would allow the gestapo to return and, this time, go after some of the people who were alleged to have resisted the kidnappings and shootings ICE perpetrated earlier in the year. In mid-June, ICE gestapo staged over-the-top military-style raids on the homes of 15 people alleged to have been involved in the resistance in some way, hauling them to jail in front of their families and neighbors. More arrests soon followed.

But the thing is, “Minnesota Nice” doesn’t mean “Minnesota Folds.” If the fascists who think they now run the country wanted to take the fight into the court system, Minnesota was ready. A crowdfunder quickly sprung up to cover the legal defense costs of the arrestees and thousands of people kicked in to the point that there is now nearly $400,000USD available to defend our 15 friends, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund included.

The lessons should be clear here: Minnesotans are only nice to people that don’t terrorize their communities. You come in with bad intentions, you’re going to regret coming in with bad intentions. Minnesotans stick together. The rest of us need to take lessons about resistance and solidarity from the land of sky-blue waters.

Smash Elbit To Bits

The Ulm Five

 Daniel, Zo, Walt, Vi, and Leandra are five Germans who, like many of us, were frustrated with their inability to halt the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. About 700kms away from their homes, in southern Germany, Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems runs a production facility, making weapons and other products that are used to systematically murder Palestinian civilians.

What happened there on the night of 8 September 2025 is now a matter for German courts to decide, but prosecutors have accused our five friends of breaking into the facility and sabotaging the production line, preventing Elbit from making more tools of mass murder. All five were arrested that same day and have been held in detention ever since, accused of breaking into the facility and causing the damage.

While our friends remain in custody awaiting trial (which began at the end of April), they of course have costs related to their legal defence to consider. A support group set up a crowdfunder for them to help with this and as an project mandated to defend anyone taking anti-fascist action, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund has contributed enough to get them one Euro to their fundraising goal. Perhaps you can help get them over the top by making a contribution yourself!

The Peckham Defenders Vs. the British State Scorecard

May 2024: The good people of Peckham surround a bus intended to use to kidnap their friends and neighbours, who were to be hauled off to a prison barge.

Before we get into this story, we wanted to say hello to far-right extremists and grifters Andy Ngo, Glenn Beck and the “journalists” at pathetic propaganda site The Washington Examiner – all of whom have recently had a grown-up provide them with a cursory summary of a handful of entries on this very blog and concluded from that that this project = AN EVIL TERRORIST CONSPIRACY!

Glenn Beck actually went on air with this.

Pro tip for you lot: real journalists attempt to contact the people they’re writing about, to ask them questions.

Anywho, on to more important matters: while much attention has been (deservedly) focused on community resistance to ICE kidnappings in the US, let us not forget that similar things happen in other countries. For example, this past spring the UK decided an appropriate way to house asylum seekers waiting for decisions on their cases would be to send squads to round them up and haul them off to a prison barge. When the authorities turned up in Peckham with a bus to do so, locals were not having any of it. Opposition quickly surrounded the bus and kept it in place for hours. While this action was highly successful, police tried to punish the locals by laying charges against 44 of the people defending their community. Of course, The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund sent a chunk of change to help defend those charged.

18 months on, here is the tally:
-at least two of the refugees the authorities tried to kidnap & imprison have now been granted full refugee status (there are likely others, but we know for certain of these two cases)
-other asylum seekers, still awaiting a decision on their refugee claim, were rendered homeless by the raids
-of the 44 people charged for trying to prevent the kidnappings, 23 were fully acquitted of all charges; four people pled guilty to their charges; and 12 were found guilty in court.
-NONE of those who were convicted or pled guilty received custodial sentences for their “crimes,” and any costs or fines levied against them were fully-covered, thanks to the fundraising efforts of their supporters & contributions from us & other anti-fascists.
-Of the 12 convicted, two have already filed appeals of their convictions (except to hear more about how to contribute to their appeals soon!).

So: two-thirds of the people charged by police were fully-acquitted or beat the charges in court. Which means that 29 of the 44 accused were charged without any basis for those charges. And of the remaining third who were either convicted or pled guilty, none did prison time and all had their court costs and fines covered.

Had our 44 friends not been able to retain competent legal counsel, the outcome might have been entirely different for them, with life-changing consequences. Fortunately, they were able to retain competent legal counsel, thanks entirely to the generous contributions of anti-fascists around the country and around the world, who would not let them faces charges alone.

This is what solidarity looks like and this is what solidarity can accomplish!

Still Messing With Big Tex

Big Tex, showing off his horticultural skills and fine taste in apparel.

New motto for Texas: Texas never leaves a good deed unpunished. At least that seems to be the lesson they’re intent on teaching our friend Big Tex, who two years ago stood between a drag queen event at a Fort Worth brewery and armed transphobes who had declared their intent to murder the participants and event attendees alike.

Big Tex & friends defending a Texas drag event

Happily, the presence of level-headed, well-armed anti-fascists kept the bigots from making good on their threats and no one was harmed that day. Well actually, that’s not accurate, because the police decided to intervene and arrest three of the anti-fascists doing their job of keeping the peace, including Big Tex! This of course lead to a protracted legal battle, with the Defence Fund helping to pay for a good legal defense team, leading to a not guilty verdict in Big Tex’s case.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. The transphobes then filed a lawsuit against two of the arrested anti-fascists, claiming that the anti-fascists violated their civil rights by preventing them from physically assaulting drag show attendees! Once again, the Defence Fund stepped in to help pay for lawyers to quash this bullshit in the courts (results pending).  

Still not satisfied that Big Tex has not been punished enough for protecting his community, last month Texas special prosecutors charged him with resisting arrest, interfering with public duty, and evading detention – TWO AND A HALF YEARS after the alleged “crimes” occurred! Seem the special prosecutors are sore losers and can’t live with the fact that Big Tex beat the bogus felony charges they slapped him with at the time. Big Tex has some choice words about this, which you can read here.

And so, once again, the Defence Fund has been called to stand with Big Tex and help him defend himself against bullshit charges – which we’ve done via a contribution to his crowdfunder. We strongly encourage anyone to do likewise.

When They Kick At Your Front Door, How You Gonna Come?

Some of the damage done by German police to the homes of antifascists.

Several antifascists in Augsburg, Germany can answer that question posed by The Clash years ago. You see, after antifa in that city were successful in confronting fascist “identitarian” leader Martin Sellner and his stooges and running them out, police decided this was a “crime.” The cops, excited about getting to cosplay the military, launched a series of pre-dawn raids on the homes of antifascists around the city, smashing in doors and completely trashing the homes they raided. This was all done in support of charges of ” aggravated breach of the peace.”

So, thanks to the barbarians in the Augsburg police, there was an immediate, emergency need to repair and secure the entries of several antifa’s homes. A crowdfunder was set up and the Defence Fund was able to get them to their initial funding goal.

The answer to how you gonna come with they kick at your front door? By calling on your fellow antifascists to stand with you in solidarity!

Showdown In Alvarado

January 2025: thousands of people gather in Dallas, Texas to protest the targeted kidnappings of migrants by ICE.

Alvarado, Texas was named by its first sheriff after the town in Veracruz, Mexico where he fought in the Mexican-American war. It’s disappointing to see that the town continues its violent, colonialist tradition by serving as home to the Prairieland Detention Center, one of the largest ICE holding facilities for the people kidnapped by the agency. Out of all ICE facilities, this history made the protest outside of it, on the night of July 4th, especially poignant.

It’s still unclear what transpired during the protest. ICE of course have put out their own narrative – that their Gestapo agents & supporting police were “ambushed” by armed attackers and that one police officer was injured. But remember this is the same agency that would have you believe that most, if not all, of the people they snatch from our communities are criminals, when we know now that 71% have no criminal record whatsoever. So you’ll forgive us if we take their version of events with a big ol’ grain of salt.

What we do know is that eleven people – many of them well-known community activists – are now facing serious charges in a country currently governed by fascists; fascists that repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for the rule of law. The stakes could not be higher for our friends. This is why the Defence Fund has made a contribution to the crowdfunder established to fund their legal defense. We hope it helps them get the truth out, preferably in a court that has not yet been corrupted by the fascist regime that controls the country.

The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund: 2024-2025 Annual Report

June 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund. In 2015, the social media collective Antifa International took notice of frequency of anti-fascists running into some sort of serious trouble as a result of their activities (criminal charges, injuries, repairing damages from vandalism and arson attacks, a sudden and urgent need to relocate their families to a safer home – the list goes on). It didn’t seem fair that these brave souls put themselves on the line to defend their communities from bigotry and hatred and then were left to fend for themselves when very negative consequences for them personally manifested.

Having some familiarity with a defence fund set up by the Anti-Racist Action network in the late 1990s/early 2000s, we came up with the idea to launch a standing defence fund that would hopefully get enough donations and support to be able to provide significant emergency help to anti-fascists when they ran into trouble. We decided this Defence Fund would be accessible to all anti-fascists around the world and that all decisions about how it ran and was used would be made democratically. Specifically, anyone making a minimum donation of $20USD or equivalent would be invited to join a group of antifa that would discuss all requests for help in an attempt to reach consensus (and resort to voting if consensus was not attainable.

We printed up anti-fascist t-shirts and stickers and sold those to start the initial funding of the Defence Fund, then expanded from there. In its first year of operation, a group of 40 anti-fascists was established to run the Defence Fund and about two dozen other anti-fascists in six countries received help from us. As we expanded our network of contacts, we heard about more and more cases and our fundraising efforts struggled to keep up.

But here we are, ten years later, and still playing a crucial role in providing emergency support to anti-fascists. To date, we’ve provided over $250,000USD to more than 800 anti-fascists in 26 different countries. Over the last twelve months, we’ve intervened nine times to assist 52 anti-fascists in Finland, France, Germany, the UK, and the US.

About 12% of the funds we disbursed over the last twelve months went to medical expenses incurred after attacks by fascists. 8% went to repairing damages to physical property after fascist attacks as well as improving physical security at those sites to hopefully prevent further attacks. But the majority of what we spent – four-fifths of our spending – went to pay for legal defence and related costs (hiring lawyers, court costs, fines, etc.).

This was money well-spent. No fewer than 15 of the anti-fascists whose lawyers we helped pay for since June 2024 walked away from criminal trials with not guilty verdicts or having their charges thrown out altogether! You can read about all the cases we provided support for on our blog.

All decisions about how the Defence Fund operates and gets used are made by the Decisions Crew – a body of anti-fascists who’ve contributed at least $20USD to the Defence Fund and then receive an invitation to join in conversations aimed at reaching decisions via consensus whenever possible. In early 2025, we broke the 1600 mark of invited anti-fascists, from over twenty different countries.

After intervening in over 200 cases over the years, we’ve come to the conclusion that a typical emergency faced by an anti-fascist will require around $20,000USD to resolve. We plan to continue our work until we’ve raised enough to cover any expense or need emanating from anti-fascist work, or until fascism is defeated and there is no longer a need for anti-fascist work – whichever comes first!