Welcome to How We Won, a new newsletter about organizing victories and the people that made them happen.

I’m Lindsay, a Chicago-based writer and editor, and the creator of the Beyond November resource guide. In the overwhelm of living through what some days feels like a neverending tidal wave of crises and cries of “we’re cooked,” once a month, this newsletter will highlight a big community win — be it related to housing justice, climate, education or any number of other issues — and interview the organizers behind it about what worked, what didn’t and what lessons you can apply to the fight in your own communities. In honor of Banned Books Week, we’re starting with this story of a student-teacher collaboration to fight book censorship in central Pennsylvania.

I hope this is a source for grounding, guidance and hope in a difficult time. Thank you for being here, and hope to see you again next month. Onward! 

Prior to diving in, I encourage you to read this powerful reflection from today’s interviewee, Umme Hoque, and Daniel Hunter on the campaign to end Avelo Airlines’ contract with ICE.

As masked federal agents terrorized immigrant communities across the country this past fall and winter, organizers began shedding light on the many corporations that allow the deportation machine to function. We saw creative resistance like noise demonstrations outside the chain hotels where ICE agents were staying, and mass bookings and cancellations of Hilton hotel rooms and Enterprise rental cars to throw sand in the gears of companies providing lodging and transport to ICE.

As the creative resistance grows, while there is much work still to be done, the movement has seen some significant wins as well — this is one of them.

At the beginning of 2025, low-cost commercial airline Avelo signed a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to supply deportation flights for ICE. Local activists in New Haven, Connecticut, the airline’s hometown, began generating national attention to the contract, holding protests, launching a petition and calling for a boycott unless Avelo ended their ICE contract.

And in places like Connecticut, the airline was accessing tax subsidies, meaning the airline was kidnapping people for profit on the taxpayers’ dime. The outrage began to fuel small, local actions in the areas the airline flew. An organizer launched a Stop Avelo Coalition website to start sharing resources and bring people together.

From there, labor organizations got involved. The Association of Flight Attendance were among the first to express their concern about the impact of deportation flights on passengers and workers, followed by Jobs With Justice, SEIU and the Democratic Socialists of America, who worked on municipal resolutions. 

One of Avelo’s key locations is North Carolina, where Latino base-building immigrant and worker rights organization Siembra NC is based. Umme Hoque, an organizer with Siembra and its training and education initiative Defend and Recruit, says the organization got wind of this partnership, and wanted to get involved in the fight to end it. They worked with digital movement building hub Mijente to organize a mass call and began to bring in partners, including the Stop Avelo Coalition, Indivisible and faith leaders like the Unitarian Ministry.

Through research from institute Little Sis, it became clear to organizers that Avelo was a particularly vulnerable brand.

“They had already said, ‘We are taking this contract so we can keep our commercial airlines going and that business is struggling,’” Hoque says. “They had shifted flight paths numerous times over the past couple of years because they were looking for ways to be able to make money and they had accessed subsidies from all over the country to try to be able to fly to different airports and regions.”

Defend and Recruit and other organizers created a toolkit with ways people could get involved and take action depending on if Avelo flew locally or not. If not, because the airline was looking for more destinations, there was still a lot people could do. 

The toolkit included information about political strategies organizers could use to end government subsidies or pass legislation to prevent state and local governments to offer subsidies to companies working with ICE. Avelo’s ICE contract was cited as one of the main reasons for the New York Safe Air Act, a bill proposed to enact accountability measures around deportation flights at state airports that remains in committee. 

The bulk of the formations around stopping Avelo, Hoque says, were hyper-local, based on how people wanted to organizer, from faith leaders acting to businesses getting involved to attorneys general writing letters to the airline.

One of the aspects of this campaign that most excited Hoque was how decentralized, self-organizing and locally-grounded the strategies and tactics were, whether it was Indivisible or DSA, a faith-based group or an immigrant rights organization, and based on the relationship Avelo had with their own communities. Local efforts would even snowball into coordinated national weeks of action.

“It was bottom-up and top-down at the same time in a way that was really inspiring,” Hoque says. 

In every location, people found their own lane to take action, from municipal ordinances to airport protests. In Delaware, multiple groups formed a coalition to put political pressure on their governor, who had said he wouldn’t fly Avelo, to strip the airline’s fuel tax incentives and to advance policies that protect immigrants statewide. A politician in New Hampshire bought billboards. In New York, protesters chained themselves to chairs near the airport on a freezing, snowy day. 

“It is just a remarkable visual of perseverance and community solidarity,” Hoque says.

Despite the challenges that come with an intense national campaign like this, constant communication at all levels, from the networks built through the Stop Avelo Coalition and the Defend and Recruit Network to a host of small Signal chats, organizers could share ideas and nimbly respond. One of the most exciting ideas that emerged were cross-city protests, where community members would protest at both the departing and destination airports for an Avelo flight.

“The way that community members were coordinating on both sides of the flight path was really inspiring to see,” Hoque says. “It was community groups just talking to each other and figuring it out.”

After Connecticut organizers successfully stopped the state subsidies for Avelo, they escalated by engaging the universities and local students to end the airline’s other state partnerships.

“The way that people shifted tactics was really remarkable,” Hoque says. “Thinking about not just how we do one thing but how we keep building on that, to show this is something our entire community does not stand for. And people did that so quickly.”

By the middle of 2025, after organizers had taken actions in 20 cities across the country, Avelo announced they were ending West Coast operations entirely. As activists celebrated this progress, they continued to build pressure in other regions, particularly in the regional East Coast hub.

In January of 2026, following a year of sustained pressure and tens of thousands of people boycotting the airline, Avelo announced that they would be ending their contract with ICE and no longer providing deportation flights.

At first, the news didn’t feel real. Hoque and her colleagues were triple checking, verifying, and enthusiastic to break the news once it was confirmed. 

They were able to celebrate for about 20 minutes. And then, the news came through that a federal agent had murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis. 

“Sometimes we will achieve things together and literally the same day, we will be reminded of how much more work we have to do,” she says. “Hopefully it grounds us in the reality of why it is possible to win and also that we must keep fighting together, because otherwise we will lose more incredible souls as we already are seeing.”

Hoque says one of the key takeaways of the campaign was to identify a strategic target and the power you have in the community to apply pressure. Although Avelo only provided services in 20 states, like any business, they wanted to expand. And in some locations, they were the hometown brand or accessing millions of taxpayer subsidies, so mapping the brand’s relationship to that locality was key. She compares this to the organizing in Minneapolis now in opposition to Target, a “hometown” brand that has been complicit in ICE’s devastating operations in that metro area. 

“There’s a direct connection there,” she says. “There’s opportunities and leverage that we can see to be able to impact a company. That sort of thing is really important in terms of picking the right target. We need to make the smart decisions that make sense for what matters to the community and the relationships there.” 

Another lesson Hoque hopes people looking to take on ICE take away from this win is that there is a powerful role that every individual and every organization can take right now.

“It was so inspiring to see Jobs With Justice and labor unions say, ‘This is an important issue to us,’” Hoque says. “Equally, brand new groups formed to get involved in the Avelo fight and people were holding their first protests. And there were 60-year old-ministers who were sending letters to Avelo. Everyone found a way and role to get involved.”

That kind of grounded, community-oriented organizing lays the groundwork for the future too, Hoque says. 

“We will continuously be in responsive mode if we’re only fighting today’s fight,” she says. “How do we build infrastructure and organizations around these moments so that we can change landscapes, change the political conversation, change things into the future. How do people want to actually organize around this, and what’s the next thing that we can do together?”

When we spoke, what Hoque underscored the most was how many different avenues exist for involvement in the fight against ICE and the deportation machine, and how many different resources and toolkits exist for identifying the agency’s corporate pillars of support, and she encourages anyone looking to get started to begin with that information. Not one specific actor or theory of change will dismantle the deportation machine and its corporate actors, she stresses, so building strong relationships and solidarity across different constituencies, demographics, and organizations old and new, is essential.

“Now is the time and we can do it,” she says. “We have won and we will win if we organize together.”

Join us every second Friday for more stories of How We Won. Thank you for reading and sharing. Keep going!