Go Get In Some ‘Good Trouble’: All the Activist Groups Bruce Springsteen Has Backed on His Land of Hope and Dreams Tour
The singer has welcomed the organizations into each venue to do outreach and solicit support, while publicizing their efforts before tens of thousands of his fans.
On each night of Bruce Springsteen’s short-but-impassioned Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour, he has declared: “We are here to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in these dangerous times.”
But Springsteen has brought more than the incendiary performances of the E Street Band to what he has called this “celebration and defense of the American ideals and values that have sustained our country for 250 years.”
This time, as he has throughout his career, he has brought in boots on the ground.
During this tour, Springsteen has partnered with more than 20 activist organizations working on the front lines of the battle for democracy and human rights in the cities around the country where he and the E Street Band have performed since March. He has welcomed the groups into each venue to do outreach and solicit support, while publicizing their efforts before tens of thousands of his fans.
In Washington D.C. Wednesday (May 27), the penultimate show of this tour, which closes Saturday (May 30) in Philadelphia, Springsteen took the stage of Nationals Park, less than three miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Washington Monument visible on the horizon.
“Let them hear you at the f—- White House,” he shouted, as the crowd chanted “Ice Out Now!” during his performance of “Streets of Minneapolis.”
Later, during his show-closing call to action, he ad-libbed, “call the White House switchboard!”
The call to action ending each show on this tour counts. The music is an inspiration — not a substitute — for activism.
“When you go home tonight, hold your loved ones close. And in the morning … find a way to take aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals,” says Springsteen on each tour stop.
“And as the great civil rights leader John Lewis said, go on out and get into some ‘good trouble.’”
At the D.C. show, Springsteen announced he was partnering with the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The ACLU is the courts and in the streets defending the rights of all people nationwide,” said Springsteen. “They have been at the forefront of almost every major legal battle on behalf of immigrants’ rights for the past 25 years.”
Here are all of the activist organizations that Springsteen has partnered with during the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour.
When agents from ICE — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security — brought “smoke and rubber bullets/ in the dawn’s early light” to Minneapolis, “they picked the wrong city,” says Springsteen, who has called the response of the citizens of Minnesota an inspiration to the nation.
Evoking his own involvement with the Human Rights Now! Tour organized by Amnesty International in 1988, Springsteen teamed up in Minneapolis with The Advocates for Human Rights. Five years before that tour, in 1983, a group of lawyers founded the nonprofit “seeking to leverage Minnesota’s spirit of social justice to promote and protect human rights worldwide,” the organization states.
Innovation Law Lab drew Springsteen’s support in Portland. The group describes itself as leveraging “law, technology and organizing to advance immigrant and refugee rights.” It states simply: “We build cool technology to defend human rights.”
In April, the group filed a habeas corpus petition to challenge the prolonged detention of four individuals at an ICE facility 60 miles from Albuquerque.
Springsteen’s two-night stand in Los Angeles brought attention to the work of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (IDLC) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The IDLC lawyers step in at a time when less than 34% of immigrants, including unaccompanied children, were represented by attorneys in court, by one estimate.
In advocating for immigrant laborers, NDLON states: “We believe that nonviolent confrontation and peaceful resistance are legitimate and effective means for achieving social change and justice.”
In San Francisco, Springsteen’s shout-out went to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which traces its roots to the tumultuous year of 1968. Along with other groups, the committee in December successfully sued to pause the wide-scale arrest of immigrants at immigration courthouses within the jurisdiction of ICE’s San Francisco field office.
“Medical Neglect, Strip Searches, and Abuse: Deadly and Dehumanizing Conditions in the Eloy [Arizona] Detention Center,” is the title of a report on that ICE facility, compiled by the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which was represented at the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour stop in Phoenix.
Founded in 1989, the organization provides free legal services to asylum-seekers and other migrants in remote parts of Arizona “where there was no meaningful access to counsel,” the group states.
Prior to his partnership Wednesday in D.C. with the national ACLU, Springsteen in Newark backed the group’s work in his home state. Mid-show in Washington, he offered a bulletin on immigrants “being held in for-profit detention centers like around the country, such as Delaney Hall [in Newark] in my own home state of New Jersey.” People detained at that ICE facility “are facing brutal and inhumane conditions,” says ACLU-NJ executive director Amol Sinha.
When Springsteen’s tour arrived in Florida — where local law enforcement agencies have received massive amounts of money to support ICE immigration detention efforts — the Florida Immigrant Coalition was on site at the Amerant Bank Arena in Fort Lauderdale.
The group describes itself as “a grassroots movement led by [a] diverse membership … including community organizations, farmworkers, youth, advocates, lawyers, union members, and more.”
Early this month, the group warned of an immigration crackdown coinciding with the FIFA World Cup games in Miami in June.
What began in 2002 as a fight against wage theft from construction workers “pretty quickly evolved into an organization dedicated to fight for worker Justice in Texas,” says the Workers Defense Project, which Springsteen welcomed to his tour stop at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas. “We are now a power-building organization with statewide impact that is organizing for worker and immigrant justice at the local, state and national level,” the group reports.
In a city which has also seen citizens rise up to resist ICE actions against its immigrant neighbors, Springsteen in Chicago encouraged fans at the United Center to support the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Among other actions, the organization has created the Illinois “Eyes on ICE” text alert system around verified ICE activity.
The fight to protect the rights of immigrants, primarily within the Latin community, has long preceded the current deportation efforts. The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, which Springsteen partnered with for his tour stop at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, began 15 years ago to support the right of undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. It has since become “the largest Latino grassroots organization in Georgia as a result of its efforts to organize Latinos to defend and campaign for their rights and human dignity and organizes and educates Latino immigrants around civil and human rights, community defense, and against ill legislation,” the group states.
“Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Pervades Long Island Suburbs,” read a headline in the New York Times a few days before Springsteen’s performance at the UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., on the western edge of that suburban region, just over the New York City border. From the UBS stage, Springsteen announced his support for United We Dream, which describes itself as the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation, advocating for “just policies that allow everyone to thrive regardless of immigration status.”
