It has been five years since May 25, 2020, when George Floyd gasped for air beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. Five years since 17-year-old Darnella Frazier stood outside Cup Foods, raised her phone and bore witness to nine minutes and 29 seconds that would galvanize a global movement against racial injustice.
Frazier’s video didn’t just show what happened. It insisted the world stop and see.
Today, that legacy continues in the hands of a different community, facing different threats but wielding the same tools. Across the United States, Latino organizers are raising their phones, not to go viral but to go on record. They livestream Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, film family separations and document protests outside detention centers. Their footage is not merely content. It is evidence, warning – and resistance.
Here in Los Angeles where I teach journalism, for example, several images have seared themselves into public memory. One viral video shows a shackled father stepping into a white, unmarked van as his daughter sobs behind the camera, pleading with him not to sign any official documents. He turns, gestures for her to calm down, and blows her a kiss. In another video, filmed across town, Los Angeles Police Department officers on horseback charge into crowds of peaceful protesters, swinging wooden batons with chilling precision.
In Spokane, Washington, residents form a spontaneous human chain around their neighbors mid-raid, their bodies and cameras erecting a barricade of defiance. In San Diego, a video shows white allies yelling “Shame!” as they chase a car full of National Guard troops from their neighborhood.
The impact of smartphone witnessing has been immediate and unmistakable – visceral at street level, seismic in statehouses. On the ground, the videos helped inspire a “No Kings” movement, which organized protests in all 50 states on June 14, 2025.
Lawmakers are intensifying their focus on immigration policy as well. As the Trump administration escalates enforcement, Democratic-led states are expanding laws that limit cooperation with federal agents. On June 12, the House Oversight Committee questioned Democratic governors about these measures, with Republican lawmakers citing public safety concerns. The hearing underscored deep divisions between federal and state approaches to immigration enforcement.
The legacy of Black witnessing
What’s unfolding now is not new – it is newly visible. As my research shows, Latino organizers are drawing from a playbook that was sharpened in 2020 and rooted in a much older lineage of Black media survival strategies that were forged under extreme oppression.
In my 2020 book “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism,” I document how Black Americans have used media – slave narratives, pamphlets, newspapers, radio and now smartphones…
