An organized campaign is now coaching Americans to lie their way onto juries and acquit defendants in cases tied to resistance against federal immigration enforcement. The training is open, replicable, and aimed at a narrow set of prosecutions. Freedom Trainers distributes free slide decks that teach participants how to answer a summons, survive voir dire without revealing their plan, and then vote not guilty regardless of the evidence. The group calls the tactic the people’s pardon and places it inside a larger library of noncooperation tools that includes pillar mapping and efforts to strip support from targeted policies. Sessions in Minneapolis and Washington have promoted the same approach for enforcement cases. This is the sharp end of a longer adaptation.
The methodology did not begin with American courtrooms. It draws from a global set of ideas about how organized noncooperation can erode the pillars that sustain a policy or a government. Those ideas have moved through different contexts. One clear recent example came in Israel in 2023, when hundreds of thousands of citizens mounted sustained protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul. The movement used decentralized coordination, strict nonviolence rules, sophisticated messaging that framed the changes as a “judicial coup,” and targeted pressure on institutions and coalition partners. Organizers built a “Protest HQ” model that linked roughly two hundred separate groups without a single central leader. They combined weekly mass demonstrations with highway blockades, business shutdowns, and threats of mass reservist resignations that threatened military readiness. Legal academics produced plain-language explainers of each proposed bill. Funding came from crowdfunding, Israeli philanthropists, and diaspora sources. The campaign succeeded in halting or delaying key parts of the overhaul and forced the government into negotiations. It demonstrated how nonviolent, cross-sectoral mobilization could function inside a democracy to block a policy with broad domestic opposition.
Tactical and organizational parallels appeared in the wave of U.S. campus protests that followed the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Those demonstrations featured sustained encampments, building occupations, rapid-response networks, and efforts to raise the operational cost of normal university functions. Reporting showed that student organizers in several cities consulted with national groups such as National Students for Justice in Palestine, attended “Resistance 101” style trainings with veteran activists, and studied past campus actions and land-conflict parallels. While the U.S. protests had their own distinct drivers and networks, the methods—decentralized action, internal discipline, and institutional disruption—echoed patterns seen in other large-scale nonviolent campaigns, including the Israeli judicial reform protests. Some trainings emphasized handling internal disputes and maintaining message discipline across dispersed groups.
The same tactical logic then surfaced in campaigns against U.S. immigration enforcement after the expansion of deportation operations in 2025. Activists mapped the private contractors and financial supports that made large-scale removals possible and applied sustained reputational and economic pressure. Avelo Airlines, which began operating ICE charter flights, faced coordinated national boycotts, petitions with tens of thousands of signatures, billboards, union opposition, and local political campaigns. The company exited the program in January 2026, citing operational complexity and revenue problems amid the pressure. Similar divestment and brand-damage efforts targeted detention operators and technology providers tied to enforcement. The approach followed the pattern of identifying logistical and institutional pillars and inducing withdrawal through noncooperation and public cost.
The most recent extension targets the grand jury and trial jury systems in enforcement-related cases. Freedom Trainers and aligned groups now run explicit sessions that coach participants on how to reach predetermined acquittals while concealing their intent during jury selection. The materials instruct trainees never to mention nullification in court, to avoid signaling any agenda, and to affirm they will listen to the evidence. Once seated, the direction is to acquit for any reason the juror believes is just. These trainings have run in cities where federal prosecutors have already faced documented difficulties securing indictments or convictions in protest and enforcement cases. In Washington, D.C., and other districts, grand juries have returned no true bills or stalled on matters involving resistance to immigration operations. While some observers attribute certain refusals to prosecutorial overcharging, the existence of organized, replicable training designed to produce such outcomes in specific categories of cases represents a deliberate new application of the noncooperation framework.
Freedom Trainers is a decentralized network of trainers focused on noncooperation skills, including jury nullification framed as “the people’s pardon.” It operates under fiscal sponsorship from Community Change, a progressive organizing group that works on immigrant rights, economic justice, and related issues and has received substantial funding from the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Tides network, and structures associated with Arabella Advisors. Free DC functions as a fiscally hosted special project of Community Change and Community Change Action; it runs juror information projects and organizes resistance to federal policies in the District. The Horizons Project, co-led by Maria Stephan, connects earlier peacebuilding and civil-resistance work to domestic efforts and draws from overlapping philanthropic streams.
One pathway that carried the methodology from international work into domestic application runs through Maria Stephan’s career. She served in the U.S. State Department from 2009 to 2014 during the Obama administration, including roles supporting nonviolent actors and stabilization efforts in conflict zones. She later directed the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace before co-leading the Horizons Project and training with Freedom Trainers. This trajectory placed experienced practitioners inside government institutions and networks that have long backed democracy promotion, governance reform, and civil-society initiatives. Philanthropic support for related training and research has come from foundations including the Ford Foundation and networks associated with Open Society, creating continuity across shifts in political power. The infrastructure of researchers, trainers, and funders did not disappear when earlier foreign or diplomatic applications receded. It remained available for adaptation when new domestic targets emerged.
Erica Chenoweth supplies much of the empirical backbone. As co-author with Stephan of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, she helped quantify patterns across hundreds of campaigns from 1900 onward. The data showed nonviolent efforts succeeding roughly twice as often as violent ones, largely because they drew broader participation and triggered defections from security forces, civil servants, businesses, and other pillars that sustain authority. Chenoweth directs Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab and maintains the NAVCO dataset that underpins much of the field’s analysis. Her research has examined successful cases such as Serbia’s Otpor movement, which contributed to the ouster of Slobodan Milošević through sustained nonviolent pressure and institutional defections. Some critics have alleged indirect influence through the spread of these ideas into activist training worldwide, though Chenoweth’s documented role remains that of scholar and data analyst rather than operational participant. Her findings and datasets continue to inform training materials used by groups now applying the framework inside the United States.
This sequence reflects adaptation of a shared tactical repertoire across contexts rather than a single centralized command. The 2023 Israeli protests showed how sophisticated nonviolent organization could constrain a democratically elected government’s policy agenda. Elements of that organizational and messaging approach echoed in subsequent U.S. campus actions. The same underlying logic of mapping and pressuring supports then appeared in contractor-focused campaigns against immigration enforcement. The jury trainings represent the latest domestic application, moving the pressure inside the institutions that decide individual cases. Traditional American traditions of civil disobedience did not feature systematic training in concealment to seize control of verdicts or the mapping of private logistics contractors as removable pillars. The current program borrows the language of conscience while deploying tools developed for different settings and different targets.
The stakes center on the premise that underpins any jury system: citizens who swear to decide cases on the evidence will do so. When organized efforts coach participants to hide their intentions and reach preset outcomes in enforcement matters, they test that premise directly. Grand juries that decline to indict and trial juries that acquit despite evidence do not always result from these trainings. Yet the documented existence of replicable instruction explicitly designed to produce those results in a targeted set of cases marks a clear escalation. The groups behind the trainings have stated their intentions in their own materials. The question is whether institutions built on trust can continue to function when that trust is treated as an opening to exploit.
Sources
Key details on the 2023 Israeli judicial reform protests come from contemporaneous reporting in the Jerusalem Post, Stanford FSI, Washington Post, AP, New Yorker, and academic oral-history projects documenting the decentralized headquarters model, nonviolence discipline, and institutional pressure tactics. Connections to U.S. campus organizing draw from Wall Street Journal reporting on trainings by national activist groups and veteran demonstrators. Avelo Airlines’ exit from ICE charters is documented in multiple outlets including the Washington Post and FlightGlobal. Jury training materials and event promotions are drawn from Freedom Trainers’ public website and reporting in the Washington Free Beacon, Washington Examiner, and local coverage of Minneapolis sessions. Grand jury outcomes in enforcement-related cases are covered in New York Times reporting on prosecutorial difficulties in several federal districts. Stephan’s State Department service and subsequent roles, along with Chenoweth’s book and academic positions, are documented in professional biographies and public records. Funding details for Community Change and related entities are drawn from tax filings and public grant records. All claims rest on these public records.
This has been going on for decades, although it’s only now being directed at Immigration.
Tom Woods did a speaking event on this very topic about 15 years ago.