2After a relative lull, BLM protests saw a major resurgence following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and David McAtee, which all occurred during a six-month span between February and June 2020. The killing that served as a flashpoint for mass mobilization under the hashtag #BLM was that of George Floyd, who died on May 25, 2020, asphyxiated under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, while his 9 minutes and 29 seconds of agony and last words “I can’t breathe” were captured on a bystander's cell phone camera before being shared on Facebook and spreading virally online. That after the initial protests in Minneapolis on May 26, additional demonstrations started in other US cities on May 27 and in the United Kingdom (UK) on May 28 testifies to the rapid spread of the protests, which intensified over the month of June 2020, and continued well into the summer, with millions of participants to thousands of demonstrations in countless locations all over the United States as well as in Western Europe and elsewhere. The largely peaceful BLM movement of 2020 was heavily policed in the US, with the imposition of curfews in hundreds of cities in the US, thousands of arrests in the first few weeks of the protests, the activation of the National Guard in over thirty US states and the District of Columbia, and the deployment of nearly 100,000 troops on top of police officers to quell the protests.

3While the outrage over the brutal killing of George Floyd and the all-too-customary killings of unarmed Black men and women by police officers was expressed most directly through the use of the slogan “I can’t breathe,” the 2020 BLM protests rapidly developed into a broader critique of the policing of Black communities and of the institutional racism of police departments, leading to calls to “Defund the Police” in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The protests were also marked by direct attacks on and calls to remove statues and monuments associated with the history of slavery and segregation in the South of the US, and with the history of the slave trade and of colonization in the UK. This reflected the broader engagement with issues of systemic racism on the part of Black protesters and their allies, while also speaking to the cultural dimension of the protest. Alongside deliberate, political acts of vandalism and removal of statues and monuments, the latter were also spray-painted, graffitied, adorned with placards, turned into playgrounds. Street names were altered by protesters and by local authorities, brand names and school mascots changed to reflect an awareness of the pervasiveness of racism. The most visible example of urban change resulting from the protests was the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., with its large, bold yellow capital letters painted on the street.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation

4As protest moved from social media to the streets and public support grew, Black Lives Matter as an organization (#BLM) developing alongside the movement faced the practical need to constitute a legal entity capable of receiving donations. Before it could accept tax-exempt contributions directly, it partnered with two successive fiscal sponsors: Thousand Currents in 2016, then the Tides Foundation in 2020. Both organizations collected donations on #BLM's behalf in exchange for a percentage of the funds. By that point, Black Lives Matter had 37 chapters in the United States and five internationally. In June 2020, Patrisse Cullors became executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF). That same year, BLM Grassroots (BLMgr) was created as a sister organization to BLMGNF. BLMGNF focused on raising and distributing funds and acted as a think tank for the broader movement. BLM Grassroots, led by Melina Abdullah, concentrated on organizing (Black Lives Matter). In October 2020, Black Lives Matter's political action committee was created with the goal of endorsing candidates whose positions matched the organization's values (Ndjila 207).

8Co-founder Alicia Garza articulated that ambition in a 2014 essay:

Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement. (Garza)

9BLMGNF organizes its work across six main areas: policy, arts, culture, frontline organizing, research and education, and healing justice (2021-2022 Impact Report 7). From the outset, #BLM relied on new methods of organizing. Its use of social media to document instances of racial violence made the movement more powerful as the content could be shared on social media platforms without being mediated by mainstream media (Taylor 2024). It also allowed for more inclusivity as anyone could take part in the movement. When the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests broke out, Covid-19 was claiming Black Americans' lives at a disproportionate rate in comparison to other racial groups. The pandemic context, which was driving much of public life online, made social media an especially effective organizing tool. By the end of 2022, the movement which had begun as a Facebook post in 2013, before spreading as the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, had an Instagram following of over 4 million, with Twitter at 1 million and Facebook at over 750,000. Mobilizing through emails also proved effective. By the end of 2020, BLM's collective list had grown to nearly 2 million. That year the organization sent 127 million emails, pushing their recipients to sign petitions, donate, and pressure elected officials (2020 Impact Report 6). Ahead of the 2020 US General Election, BLMGNF ran $2 million in digital advertising for voter registration. The organization also uses these platforms to counter disinformation campaigns directed at it.

13BLMGNF thus engaged in a variety of actions on the social and political front. It mobilized behind the Medicare for All Act of 2021, which would have expanded Medicare coverage to every person in the United States with no out of pocket fees for the patient. It urged President Biden to end the militarization of police departments, lobbied against Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court following Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death and pushed for statehood for Washington D.C., whose population is predominantly made up of people of color (Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation 9).

Criticism of the BLM Movement

14The main attack line from conservatives has been to accuse BLM of promoting racial division and woke ideology through cancel culture. Opponents of the movement have qualified Black Lives Matter activists as radical antifa terrorists bent on dismantling American institutions. BLM demands to defund the police and redirect funds toward housing, education, and health care have been misrepresented as a call for less law enforcement that would inevitably lead to chaos. By late 2020, as the race for the presidential election polarized public opinion, misrepresentations of the racial justice movement were obviously having an effect on part of public opinion. BLM mainly drew criticism for being racially divisive. As the political solidarity of the BLM movement is mediated by race, it led to divergent views of how whites and non-whites view the causes and remedies for racial inequality. (Hooker 7-9)

15Criticism of BLM has also come from the left. In 2014, Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BLM stated that “When Black people get free, everybody gets free. This is why we call on Black people and our allies to take up the call that Black lives matter” (Garza). By emphasizing race instead of class, some critics have argued that the movement was a missed opportunity to spark a wider Black liberation movement. The Democratic Party’s embrace of racial identity politics, rather than class solidarity with the white working class, drew criticism from the socialist left. This political strategy was deemed to be unwise. For instance, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that “basic math would seem to indicate that twelve or thirteen percent of the population, which is what African Americans constitute, would have no realistic capacity to fundamentally transform the social order of the United States” (2016 186). In her assessment of the movement eight years later Taylor concluded that:

the movement for Black lives has argued that we can end the U.S.'s need for brutal policing and mass incarceration by investing in social and public provision of good jobs, good housing, and good public schools. But as critical as that observation may be, Black people alone cannot sustain a movement that has the capacity to compel this kind of dramatic redistribution of wealth and resources across the U.S. Even as they suffer, Black people suffer disproportionately from the absence of this kind of social welfare. (2024)

16For socialist critics, the focus on racial identity politics serves to preserve existing power structures rather than challenge them and prevents the formation of a unified working-class coalition against the ruling class, across racial lines. Symbolic initiatives do not bring substantive changes but preserve the economic status quo and benefit the establishment. Among the donors to the anti-racism cause in 2020 were major companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, all of which were making record profits, while benefitting from government pandemic relief funds under the 2020 CARES Act.

17The World Socialist Web Site, which is the publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International, a Trotskyist organization, wrote:

The facts that have emerged demonstrate that Black Lives Matter is largely a creation of the corporate media and the Democratic Party, not a genuine expression of insurgent popular opposition to the pervasive brutality and social inequality of American society. The revelations illustrate the venal and privileged social layers whose interests are expressed by the elevation of race, rather than class, as the essential dividing line in society. (Austin and Grey⁾

19This type of partnership between corporations or foundations with racial justice organizations is quite common. In 2016, the Ford Foundation pledged $100 million over six years to several organizations associated with the Movement for Black Lives (Austin and Grey^). Critics of these collaborations argue that foundations co-opt civil rights or social justice organization with the aim of influencing their agenda. According to Taylor, “funders and other philanthropic organizations help to narrow the scope of organizing to changing ‘policy’ and other measures within the existing system” (2016 180). Foundations, in other words, muted the more radical economic demands of the movement by channeling it toward manageable reform.

20After 2020, corporations, universities, and institutions in the public and private sectors moved quickly to adopt DEI programs. Companies publicly acknowledged racial disparities, pledged to create more diverse workplaces, created Chief Diversity Officer roles, and sought to racially diversify their ad campaigns. Brands were pressured to speak out on racial justice. And many did so. Despite signs of progress, however, corporate boardrooms remained slow to diversify and remained predominantly white (Binnie). This led many to interpret the initial show of support from companies in the wake of the 2020 as “blackwashing,” that is, token Black representation in communication and in a few select positions with little or no genuine structural change. Some brands were criticized for commodifying Black culture for profit without taking a clear stance on racial justice. As companies gradually retreated from their initial post-2020 enthusiastic commitments, their pledges of allyship in the Black Lives Matter cause increasingly came off as performative.

The Backlash Against the BLM Movement and Antiracist Policies

22Owing to their online activity and presence, the #Black Lives Matter and, after 2017, #MeToo movement protests allowed for the growing visibility and discussion of concepts that complicated binary approaches to race and gender identity. The concept of intersectionality gained wider currency. In the face of glaring racial inequalities, in a post-Civil Rights Movement era and after two terms in office for Barack Obama, the first Black president, debates about the effectiveness of resorting to affirmative action to address racial equity resurfaced. There were also initiatives to implement terminological or typographical changes to center the perspective of historically dominated subjects, preferring “enslaved” over “slave,” for example, or capitalizing “Black” (Foreman). Books offering guidance on race and anti-Black racism became bestsellers (Oluo; Kendi). Under the Biden administration, DEI programs were created to offer a more equitable and welcoming environment for people of color in the workplace or at primarily white institutions. In the field of education, these programs aimed to give white students greater cultural awareness through critical race theory teaching.

23During the 2024 general election campaign, the Democratic Party emphasized presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s heritage as a woman of color by heavily capitalizing on racial and gender politics. The campaign sought to mobilize Black and Latino voters on racial equity as well as women on the reversal of Roe v. Wade. This strategy proved unsuccessful and may have alienated working-class voters, as evidenced by the inroads Trump made among Latino and African American men. However, their support for Trump was driven largely by dissatisfaction with the economy under the last months of the Biden administration (Federico et al. 180; Frey).

24Donald Trump's election to a second term in 2024 marked a new and intensified phase in the backlash against anti-Black racism. In June 2023, the conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) that race-conscious admissions policies at universities violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling reversed decades of affirmative action policies. Seizing on this legal opportunity, Trump, through a series of executive orders issued in the very first hours of his second term, moved to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) programs on the ground they were unconstitutional.

25The cultural, political and institutional gains that were enabled by the BLM and antiracist movement proved fragile. In 2020, African American scholar and antiracist activist, Ibram X Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Public interest for racial justice led to the center receiving several years of funding. But support shifted after the 2023 SFFA ruling and contributions started to wane (Scott). In the summer of 2025, Boston University announced that the Center for Antiracist Research would be closing after five years of existence as a result of Kendi joining Howard University, a historically Black college, in Washington, D.C.

26After Trump's second inauguration, attacks on DEI programs in education intensified (Goldberg; Welbourn; Ellis). The Trump administration froze billions of dollars in university funding over allegations of antisemitism and civil rights violations. To receive federal funding for research, Columbia agreed to settle with the Trump administration for $220 million in July 2025. Fearing to lose $2.2 billion in federal funding, Harvard renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, now the “Office for Community and Campus Life,” in April 2025. The University of Virginia agreed to stop its DEI programs altogether. (Welbourn; Ellis)

27The support for the antiracist organizations and DEI programs also waned in the corporate world. After George Floyd's murder, America's 50 biggest public companies and their foundations collectively committed at least $49.5 billion to address racial inequality. However, over 90 percent of that amount, $45.2 billion, was allocated as loans or investments the companies could stand to profit from, more than half in the form of mortgages. Of the $4.2 billion pledged as outright grants, only about $70 million went to organizations focused specifically on criminal justice reform, the main cause that had mobilized millions of protesters. With hindsight, it may be argued that these corporate commitments were a form of risk management, rather than the wish to implement structural change (Jan et al.) After the 2023 SFFA ruling, companies feared lawsuits and terminated their DEI programs. In 2024, major brands such as Microsoft, Harley-Davidson, Ford and Walmart, the world's largest retailer, ended their DEI commitments (Golden; Aspan).

28Another symbolic event which clearly signaled that the wind of support for the racial justice movement had subsided was when the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. was removed in 2025. Located one block away from the White House, the painting had been commissioned by African American D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser in June 2020. In March 2025, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde introduced a bill to withhold apportionment funds from the district unless the mayor removed the phrase “Black Lives Matter” from the street, redesignated it as Liberty Plaza, and removed the phrase from all websites, documents, and materials under the district’s jurisdiction. Facing the risk of losing funding, the city agreed to remove the painting.

29The current backlash against DEIA initiatives is in keeping with the system(at)ic opposition that social progress for African Americans has historically met with in the United States, a cycle Carol Anderson has forcefully demonstrated, whereby social advances are always followed by backlash. (Anderson)

30The attacks on DEIA programs have however faced multiple legal challenges. A suit was filed against the Department of Education's February 14, 2025 “Dear Colleague Letter” by the National Education Association, the National Education Association-New Hampshire, and the Center for Black Educator Development. The letter had announced that DEI efforts would be treated as unlawful and threatened swift cuts to federal funding. On February 18, 2026, a federal court blocked the legislation by ruling that the government had overreached and violated constitutional protections (Jotkoff).

BLM, a Missed Opportunity?

31Were the BLM protests of 2020 a genuine cultural reckoning or simply a relatively short-lived political moment? Public opinion surveys in the US since 2020 have shown a decrease in support for the movement. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that five years after George Floyd's death, 52% of Americans expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, a drop of 15 percentage points from June 2020. The same poll revealed that 72% of US adults believed the increased focus on race and racial inequality had not led to changes that improved Black people's lives (Horowitz et al.). The loss of support for the racial justice cause has translated into BLMGNF receiving less donations. For the fiscal year 2021-2022, there was an 88.6% decrease in annual revenue for BLMGNF, from $79 million to $9 million. It should be borne in mind that the historic nature of the 2020 racial justice protests created a massive financial influx (Morrison).

32Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that its organizational model, shaped by non-profit culture, structurally reproduced a top-down dynamic, albeit unintentionally. According to her, the conditions for a wider movement existed but the opportunity may have been missed:

The shocking racism emanating from the White House, along with the confidence developed from the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement and the challenge to racism, mobilized new consciousness around anti-racism. This presented a real opportunity to continue to build and develop the movement against racism in the U.S. But even as anti-racist sentiment, ideas, and politics were developing, this did not necessarily translate into the growth of the anti-racist social movement, nor did it develop mass organizations around these politics. (Taylor 2024)

33The BLM protests did not transform into durable political change. The Democratic Party's solidarity with the racial justice movement may have contributed to demobilize racial justice activists who grew hopeful of significant reform after Biden won the November 2020 presidential election. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 that aimed to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct, improve transparency through data collection, and reform police training and policies, passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Parts of the bill were implemented at the federal level through Executive Order 14074, which President Biden issued on May 25, 2022, the second anniversary of Floyd's death. On his first day in office, January 20, 2025, Trump revoked the bulk of those provisions through Executive Order 14148 “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.” Since 2020, several states have restricted or clarified the types of force law enforcement could use, many banning chokeholds. Federal grants and state legislation have led to the majority of police departments adopting body-worn cameras. However, the 2020 protests and the legislative efforts that ensued produced limited results. A longitudinal study carried out by the Washington Post between 2015 and 2024 found that Black Americans continue to be killed by law enforcement officers at twice the rate of white Americans (“10,429 People”).

A Transatlantic, US-UK Perspective on the BLM Protests of 2020

34That the BLM protests of the long 2010s should have been a new iteration in the long history of the struggle for Black liberation in the US is not mutually exclusive with international perspectives on this protest movement, and with an interest in transatlantic circulations specifically between the US and the UK, which share a long history of involvement in and struggle against the slave trade, slavery and the oppression of racialized minorities. Indeed, previous iterations of this struggle had powerful effects on the UK, whether it be the transnational movement for abolition in the mid-nineteenth century and its larger impact on the radical reform movements of the period, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s which inspired the Catholic, nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, or the calls for Black liberation and Black power which echoed powerfully among young Black British activists in the 1970s and 1980s.

35The antiracist protests that culminated in the BLM wave of the summer of 2020 were characterized by a direct political and organizational link between UK antiracist activists and the US BLM organization and organizers. The first chapter of the BLM movement in Europe was established in Nottingham in 2015. A year later, the BLM UK coalition was established following a meeting with BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, which led a “national shutdown” on August 5, 2016, exactly five years on the day after the killing of Mark Duggan by the London Metropolitan police triggered the so-called “English riots” of 2011, a major episode of unrest in London and other cities of the UK. This “national shutdown,” albeit of limited impact as it only extended to protests in four UK cities, also suggested a connection with, and inspiration from, the slogans and tactics of the climate change and anti-austerity protests of the era.

36Still, the connection with the international BLM movement and its formal structure is only part of the recent story of antiracist protests in the UK. Another international connection is with the “Rhodes Must Fall” (RMF) movement and slogan, which began in March 2015 at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa with calls for the removal of the statue of the British industrialist and arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The movement initiated at UCT spread not only to other South African universities, where Black activists called for a questioning of the legacy of racism and apartheid in higher education, but also to Oxford University, UK, where activists called for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the façade of Oriel College. That some of the activists calling for the removal of the statue should themselves have been Rhodes scholars, that is to say post-graduate students endowed with a Rhodes scholarship, was not so much ironic as pointing to the long history of racialized students from the former British colonies coming to UK universities and contributing to the development of antiracist politics.

37As was the case in the US, the wave of protests of the summer of 2020 took place under the shared slogan “Black Lives Matter,” but were not specifically called by the organization BLM UK. This led to tensions between the broad, mass movement character of the protests and the visibility afforded by the media specifically to BLM UK spokespeople. The UK protests initially expressed a gesture of solidarity and rage following the killing of George Floyd and referenced the slogan “I can’t breathe.” They were not, however, confined to a denunciation of police violence against Black people and of systemic racism in the US. Slogans such as “The UK isn’t innocent” were also widespread, pointing both to police violence and systemic racism in the UK as well, and to the longer history of British complicity in the slave trade, slavery and colonization. The toppling of the statue of the former slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbor on June 7, 2020, was immediately recognized as a decisive moment and came retrospectively to stand as the most symbolic event of the BLM protests of 2020 in the UK. It also stands as the demonstration of the transatlantic circulation of antiracist ideas, slogans and tactics between North America and Britain as well as between South Africa and Britain.

Political and Cultural Perspectives on the BLM Protests

39First, Grégory Benedetti tackles the topic of the outdoor recreation industry, highlighting the fact that outdoor physical activities make up a very significant part of the US lifestyle, and that, even though the outdoor community was still heavily racialized in 2020, the efforts to address this issue did not draw as much attention as the symbolic protests from professional sportspeople such as Colin Kaepernick mentioned earlier. Benedetti thus sets out to retrace a genealogy of the outdoor industry as predominantly targeting white people, before delving into the ambiguous efforts of corporations to acknowledge their historical marginalization of Black people while trying to capitalize on the Black Lives Matter movement. Emma Bell then takes on the British exceptionalist myth of the “policing by consent” model, which supposedly makes calls to “defund the police” irrelevant to the United Kingdom, by showing that it is actually rooted in colonial legacies. She demonstrates that the British policing system is just as much in need of reform as that of the United States, and that it is far from exempt from accusations of systemic racism. Bell concludes on the transformative power of the abolitionist approach. Églantine Zatout’s paper confronts her fieldwork within a nonprofit association dedicated to LGBTQ+ families, Family Equality, which she conducted in 2018, to the post-George Floyd murder communication strategy as found on that association’s website. Zatout contends that prior to 2020, Family Equality avoided involvement in any topic outside the LGBTQ+ sphere of interest, such as racial imbalance in adoption processes, and that this explains why other associations were reluctant to collaborate with it. She therefore delves into the short-lived rhetorical shift that Family Equality went through between 2020 and 2024, before reverting to its initial positions. Last of those four political papers, Sandrine Sorlin’s article is located in the field of discourse analysis and focuses on the “All Lives Matter” slogan, comparing it to the original “Black Lives Matter” formula to demonstrate that even though “ALM” claims to be more inclusive, it is actually a dogwhistle that feeds polarization and aims to undermine #BLM’s claims.

40Claudine Raynaud then opens the second set of four articles, located in the field of cultural studies. She suggests a comparative examination of two militant memoirs which were both published in 2018 and written by Black, queer, women writers: When They Call You a Terrorist, by Patrisse Cullors, and Unapologetic. A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene Carruthers. Raynaud sheds light on both works’ belonging to autobiographical tradition while acknowledging their different perspectives: while Cullors chooses an intimate, personal retelling of her childhood and the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, Carruthers opts in turn towards the erasure of subjectivity to focus on providing others with a blueprint for founding and joining transformative radical movements. Next comes Yohann Lucas’s take on the anthology The Matter of Black Lives, published by The New Yorker in the wake of George Floyd’s assassination. Lucas begins by exposing the economic motivations behind the magazine’s decision to publish such a collection of its own articles, before assessing its contribution to the movement through content analysis. Despite rendering justice to the global scale of Black Lives Matter and addressing the central tenets of the movement, the author points at the gender imbalance within the book and the lingering “white presence” in the editorial work. To the assessment of that 800-page book succeeds that of a single song, “Alright,” released by Kendrick Lamar in 2015. Claude Chastagner argues that even though it has been critically acclaimed as a protest song, it should rather be considered as pertaining to a new genre, that of the “healing” song, for it fuses the energy of party songs to African American musical traditions. Chastagner thus explains how the hook of the song, “we gon’ be alright,” became the soundtrack of Black Lives Matter protests and gatherings. Moving from the hip-hop genre to folk music, Elsa Grassy’s paper focuses on a Black queer musician and scholar, Jake Blount, and more specifically on his third album, Spider Tales, which was released in the midst of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. She, too, points at Blount’s embrace of traditional musical styles, including some which were falsely constructed as historically white, as echoing the values and claims of the Black Lives Matter movement. She stresses the difficulty of opening up the folk music genre to a wider, more diverse audience.

41Finally, in a conversation facilitated by Monica Michlin and Claudine Raynaud, Patrisse Cullors gives insights into her formative years, especially the artists and activists that have inspired her own journey as a writer and film director. She goes on to discuss the global reach of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the impact that social media has had on the larger historical fight of African Americans for their rights and against police brutality. She eventually confesses her surprise at seeing #BLM’s revitalization in 2020.

42The Black Lives Matter protests of the 2010s and their climax in the spring and summer of 2020 now belong to the history of antiracist organizing and protest, although they have undoubtedly had an impact on more recent protest movements. The protests against the federal agency for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which began in 2025 following the occupation of entire neighborhoods and cities by heavily-armed, masked federal agents targeting immigrant communities, have been shaped by the legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. There are direct political and organizational links, with many antiracist organizations and individual activists trained in the Black Lives Matter protests of the 2010s actively participating in the anti-ICE protests (Oursler). There is also continuity in tactics, from the close monitoring and recording of the action of federal agents, to the sharing and viral circulation of videos of the brutalities and killings committed against racialized people and against anti-ICE observers, as well as calls for national shutdowns as took place on January 30, 2026. The duration and territorial expansion of the anti-ICE protests is also remarkable, with acts of protest taking place almost continually since January 2025, and prolonged action over many months in various neighborhoods and cities targeted by ICE raids. Although there has been no such equivalent to the upsurge of BLM protests in May-June 2020 in the entire US and beyond, the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in June 2025 and in Minneapolis in January and February 2026 were characterized by mass protests, open confrontations with federal agents and the ultimate withdrawal of most immigration officers in February 2026 (Lavietes). “Abolish ICE,” a name under which the anti-ICE protests are sometimes collectively grouped and under which some of the more radical groups in the protest movement have coalesced, echoes the 2020 calls to “defund the police”, and both movements have even started to fuse (Duke Law Podcast 36’37-37’00). The topicality of the anti-ICE protests, their brutality and their visibility should not, however, obscure the continuation of systemic racism and police violence against African Americans, who continue to be the victims of police killings in disproportionate numbers in the US. This makes the moral and political imperative to assert that “Black Lives Matter” as strong as it has ever been.