How did ‘wine moms’ become the face of anti-ICE protests?

Forget antifa. “Wine moms” are fronting the anti-ICE backlash to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Trumpist conservatives are taking notice.

Women are “leading the opposition” during Trump’s second term, said The 19th. A new PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll found that while most Americans disapprove of ICE’s tactics, the breakdown is particularly stark when it comes to gender: 40% of men approve of ICE, but just 26% of women do. That is why moms like Renee Good have figured so prominently in protests and in documenting the activities of federal agents. Women are “not always taken as seriously as I believe they should be,” said Katie Paris, founder of the grassroots organizing network Red Wine & Blue. (You do not have to drink wine to join.)

“Momfluencers” are on the “front lines” of ICE protests in Minneapolis, said Salon. Women social media influencers who usually “portray a very curated version of motherhood” are now focusing on the “presence of federal immigration agents” in their communities. It is natural for motherhood influencers to make that pivot “because we are in the headspace of protecting our communities and protecting our children,” said Yelena Kibasova, a Twin Cities mom who usually posts about parenting and hockey. Staying neutral “feels impossible if you care about your community or your kids’ future.”

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What did the commentators say?

“Organized gangs of wine moms” are using “antifa tactics” to harass ICE agents in Minnesota, said David Marcus at Fox News. But their efforts to resist deportation arrests are “not civil disobedience.” Instead, the tactics of “following, harassing and doxxing” agents are a crime. One recent poll found that just 24% say it is acceptable to go “beyond peaceful protest” to resist ICE, but that number “leaps to an astounding 61%” among white women aged 18-44. “How on Earth did this become acceptable behavior in our society?”

Blaming “wine moms” for the deaths of Good and Alex Pretti is a “baseless, misogynist myth,” said Darryn DiFrancesco at The Conversation. The strategy “aims to divert blame” from the Trump administration’s “heavy-handed approach to immigration” by once again “blaming mothers for social problems.” Instead of blame, though, we should recognize that “mothers have a long history of trying to fix” society’s ills. “Mothers like Renee Good are no exception.”

“The world is changing, and women feel it,” said Heidi Lescanec at Katie Couric Media. The women now being labeled as “wine moms” are “standing up for migrants, for children” and for other communities. That is not a temporary fad. “Midlife women are a power base.”

What next?

The wine mom phenomenon may be new, but the tactics are not. There is a “debt of gratitude to Black liberation movements” like the Black Panther Party of the 1960s, said Jill Garvey, the founder of extremism-countering group States at the Core, to The New York Times. Methods have also been borrowed from the American Indian Movement, an indigenous-rights group. The hope is that ICE-watching will one day be embedded in the social structure of cities, said one organizer, “in the same way that people organize a P.T.A.”