Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online only reached 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So, Grambo bought a Segway MAX G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ha-ha bitches, I got a new scooter!”
Grambo’s nickname comes from the buzz cut he has sported ever since a drunk driver crashed into his childhood bedroom, hitting him in the head and sending him to the hospital. Of late, he has earned another moniker, according to the Baltimore Banner, from fans of his mission to warn neighbors of ICE presence: modern-day Paul Revere. At the No Kings rally in the Charm City last month, Grambo dressed up as the Boston silversmith and revolutionary patriot, mostly because of his wife’s encouragement. (He also did it for Halloween, but trick-or-treating kids mistook him for Alexander Hamilton.)
“I told everybody: ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day. If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’”
“A lot of people are worried about being under the spotlight of this regime,” Grambo told me. “I figure I’m already in their spotlight.”
At 43, Grambo is one of countless everyday people across the country stepping up to repudiate the descent of federal law enforcement agencies onto their cities and the violent abduction of their immigrant neighbors in broad daylight. In the face of increased threats of repression and at risk of retaliation, their displays of defiance, however small, show that resistance can surface anywhere.
These acts of peaceful disobedience look like the dozens, if not hundreds, of rapid response networks and neighborhood watch groups cropping up to bear witness to raids. It is the Chicago teachers blowing whistles outside of schools when immigration agents are in the vicinity or someone is in the process of being detained. It is the Los Angeles “soccer mom” who drives after ICE cars and documents sightings on TikTok, raising more than $122,000 in donations. And it is Grambo on his scooter.
The work started a few months ago, after Grambo and his wife, Mandy, came across a post on social media about community members who had taken to the streets to protest ICE agents stopping an immigrant. The pair got in the car and drove over to join, shouting at the officers until they left. Afterwards, Grambo and others got together to discuss what seemed to have worked and what more they could do. A lose network formed.
“I told everybody, ‘I’m retired, I sit home all day,’” he said. “’If we get any reports of ICE in the neighborhood, somebody text me and I’ll run over on my scooter and go yell at them.’” Grambo soon started being notified about immigration enforcement activity; sometimes three or four times in a day. At first, when he went out on patrol in Highlandtown, a Latino-heavy neighborhood just east of Patterson Park that has seen a spike in immigration enforcement activity, residents seemed wary. But with time, he said, people came to recognize him as an ally.
“We’re not going out and getting rapists and murderers,” he said. “We’re hunting people that support my community. I just want people to be treated like human beings.”
Grambo is cautious when it comes to sharing information or insights about his sources and tactics, in case ICE is paying close attention. It is sufficient to say that, by now, he knows what models of cars federal agents tend to drive and to be on the lookout for.
His goal is straightforward: He wants to make ICE agents uncomfortable. The way Grambo sees it, it’s a numbers game. If he can draw the attention of officers to himself, perhaps fewer immigrants will get swept up, and that’s a win. “I know I can’t stop them,” he said, “but if I can suck up their time, then at least I can help some people.”
While he’s at it, Grambo also hopes to deflate the agents’ spirits. It’s a lesson he has taken from his days in the military, having joined the US Navy shortly after 9/11 and served as an aircraft mechanic with tours in Japan and Guam before retiring as a chief petty officer in 2022. “I want their morale as low as possible,” he said, “because a team with low morale is ineffective.”
On Veteran’s Day, I met up with Grambo as he braced the first bone-chilling cold temperatures of the season to join other former military service members at Baltimore’s War Memorial Plaza in protest against the Trump administration’s threats to send troops here and amid their deployment to other American cities. “Our people aren’t enemies, they’re neighbors,” Tim Eppers, an Army veteran, said. “Our communities aren’t combat zones, they’re homes filled with stories, families, and dreams.”
Grambo was up next. “In America, we’re supposed to welcome the stranger, not hunt them,” he told a small group of reporters and supporters. He urged MAGA followers to turn off Fox News and realize they’re being lied to. He called for the dismantling of “concentration camps” on US soil. He urged Democrats to listen to their voters over their donors. “Veterans have done our part for democracy,” he concluded. “We should be at home watching sports and taking naps, not fighting fascism.”
Grambo was raised in a conservative part of Calvert County in Southern Maryland. In 1995, when he was 13 years old, he got kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America for admitting to being an atheist. That disciplinary episode made the pages of the Washington Post and, according to Grambo, caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who wanted to have him on her show.
He described himself as “Republican by zip code.” But by the time President Donald Trump came into the national political scene, Grambo had grown disaffected with the party. For a moment, he thought a businessman like Trump could be the answer. Then, Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, and Grambo thought, “hell no.” (He said he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and, instead, he remembers having written in John McCain.)
By then an anti-Trump Republican, Grambo said Trump’s first term led him to break with the GOP. The infamous travel ban targeting immigrants from several Muslim majority countries was too much. “None of the Republicans spoke up about it and that was my breaking point,” Grambo said. “I was just like, this judging people based on their religion, that’s not America.” He decided then that the Republican party was “irredeemable.”
While Grambo doesn’t identify as a Democrat, he has chosen a side. “I look at it as I’m fighting for democracy,” he said. “We don’t have a conservative and a liberal party right now. We have a democracy party and a fascist party.” Grambo will tell anyone who listens exactly what he thinks is at the root of the deterioration of American democracy: a conservative media ecosystem that traffics in disinformation and feeds the “cult” that is MAGA. “I realized Fox News is completely full of shit and that you can put on the record,” he said.
Grambo is chatty and gregarious. He curses a lot, and he knows it. At times, he seems to get overwhelmed and loses his train of thought. (He attributes some of it to head injuries and memory issues.) At the “Refuse Fascism” protest in Washington, DC, in early November, it wasn’t hard to spot him—in a Navy hoodie and Baltimore Ravens hat with a “Human rights are not political” pin—hanging out in front of the 24/7 sit-in tent outside at Union Station, where a group of veterans have been protesting the deployment of the National Guard to the capital.
Grambo said he tries to come support them once a week, but he makes it clear he isn’t exactly thrilled about it. “I’m supposed to be retired,” he said, once more. As we’re chatting, two women wearing the Handmaid’s Tale red outfit overheard us. “Thank you for being here,” Carrie Salamone from Cincinnati told him. “You’re the kind of people we want to hear from.” Right then, CNN’s Manu Raju walked by and Grambo ran off to take a selfie with him. “My wife is going to be so jealous,” he said.
His wife, Mandy, wasn’t surprised when he started to go on patrols; Grambo seems to have a penchant for good trouble. “It’s just part of who he is,” she said. If her work in corporate benefits for an international company allows it, she joins him by car so they can cover more ground and report back to each other.
“When he runs out the door sometimes, I’ll say ‘I have a meeting in 30 minutes and won’t be able to bail you out right away,’” she said half-jokingly. “I was with him probably for the last 15 years of his military career, and it has been scarier to watch him go out the door with some of the things going on now than it was seeing him off to go to deployment.” She has managed to convince him to wear a helmet, which he does begrudgingly.
The couple, who has been together for 16 years, has discussed scenario planning in the event that something goes truly wrong. Back in September, Grambo said, he had a run-in with ICE agents who stopped him and threatened to take him to jail. He protested, asserting he was exercising his First Amendment rights, and continued to follow one of the cars while yelling that ICE was in the neighborhood. “If you’re going to tell me I can’t do it,” said Grambo, who carries a whistle on his keychain and has since bought a body camera to document future interactions, “I’m going to do it even louder.”
That wasn’t his only encounter. On a recent Sunday morning, Grambo and Mandy drove to an intersection in southeast Baltimore where they had gotten word that ICE had been spotted. He called other activists on his network to come to the area and hopped out of the car with a megaphone in hand. Unmarked vehicles lined up the residential street. “Hey, we don’t want you here!” Grambo shouted as he walked towards a group of agents with black vests marked as “police” and some wearing face covers, a video his wife recorded shows.
Next, Grambo said one of the agents, dressed in a hoodie, pointed him to move to the sidewalk and shoved him more than once. (Grambo said he called the Baltimore police and reported the incident. A police department’s spokesperson confirmed that officers responded to a reported “assault by a federal agent on a 43-year-old male” and would forward the information to the “proper federal agency” for investigation. ICE did not respond to a request for comment before publication.) Mandy yelled at the man not to touch her husband and told him he was being recorded. “I don’t care,” the agent said, moving towards her until another officer took him away.
“Hey, don’t run, we got you on camera,” Grambo shouted as the agents appeared to get ready to leave. He stood in front of one the cars and told the men to take their masks off. “You have an oath to the Constitution,” he pressed. “What did you take an oath to?” The car then raced away with its sirens on. For a little while, Grambo continued to follow them, this time on foot.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.