Community Movement Builders Core Values
In alignment with our Core Values, Community Movement Builders stands with the Michigan 8 and all anti-imperialist organizers struggling for liberation.
Community Movement Builders (CMB) stands in unwavering solidarity with the Michigan 8 and with all people facing political repression for standing with the Palestinian people against genocide, occupation, and U.S.-backed imperialism.
Among those targeted is a member of our Ypsilanti chapter. We know this repression is not abstract. It is an attack on our organization, our communities, and every movement struggling for liberation.
On the morning of June 10, the FBI—alongside the Michigan State Police and the University of Michigan Police Department—carried out militarized raids on the homes of pro-Palestine organizers across Southeast Michigan. Armed agents deployed armored vehicles, heavily armed tactical units, surveillance technologies, and coordinated raids to arrest eight activists. These actions are not about public safety. They are about sending a message:
anyone who challenges U.S. imperialism, Zionism, and the institutions that profit from genocide can become a target of the state.
CMB rejects this criminalization of political organizing.
The indictment itself reveals the extraordinary resources the federal government has devoted to monitoring organizers—their communications, movements, relationships, and daily lives. While Black communities continue to face displacement, over-policing, unemployment, housing insecurity, environmental racism, and disinvestment, the federal government chooses instead to invest enormous resources into surveilling and prosecuting those who organize against genocide.
This is not justice. It is political repression.
As a Black organization, we recognize these tactics because they are not new. The same state that wages war abroad has always relied on surveillance, infiltration, criminalization, and incarceration to suppress Black liberation movements at home. From COINTELPRO to today’s FBI raids, the goal remains the same: isolate organizers, manufacture fear, and weaken movements capable of challenging systems of racial capitalism and empire.
The struggle for Palestinian liberation is inseparable from the struggle for Black liberation.
The weapons, policing strategies, surveillance technologies, and political repression deployed against Palestinians abroad are deeply connected to those imposed upon Black communities here in the United States. The corporations, universities, politicians, and financial institutions that profit from occupation and apartheid are often the very same institutions that profit from prisons, policing, displacement, and exploitation in our neighborhoods.
We reject every attempt to portray solidarity with Palestine as criminal or extremist.
The real violence is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, sustained by U.S. military funding, political support, and corporate investment. The real threat to public safety is the imperialist system that values profit over human life and criminalizes those who refuse to remain silent.
The targeting of the Michigan 8 is part of a broader national escalation against movements demanding liberation—from Palestine to Atlanta, from Detroit to Los Angeles. As the contradictions of capitalism deepen and resistance grows, the state increasingly relies on repression rather than justice.
But history teaches us that repression is not a sign of movement weakness. It is evidence that organized people possess real power.
Community Movement Builders refuses to be intimidated.
We call upon all organizations committed to Black liberation, anti-imperialism, and working-class struggle to stand with the Michigan 8. We urge our communities to attend court hearings, contribute to legal defense efforts, organize political education, and continue building the institutions capable of defending our people against state repression.
Our commitment to Palestine will not waver.
Our commitment to Black liberation will not waver.
Our commitment to building people’s power against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism will not waver.
An injury to one movement for liberation is an injury to us all.
Defend the Michigan 8.
Defend political organizers.
End U.S. support for genocide.
Free Palestine.
Power to the People.
Community Movement Builders (CMB) is a member-based collective of black people creating sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing.
