Last year, a well-known street vendor in Los Angeles' Culver City neighborhood was detained by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Ambrocio "Enrique" Lozano had been selling ice cream in the area for decades — a photo of his abandoned paletero cart soon went viral on social media, a striking representation of beloved community members being targeted by heightened immigration raids. Artist and activist Dali Colorado, who grew up in LA and now lives in Oregon, saw the photo as a call to action.
"Let's not let the paletero cart just sit in the street and be forgotten about," Colorado remembers thinking. "Let's build on it. Let's build speakers, let's build a voice and let's push it to create the Contra-ICE sound system."
After more than 100 days in detention, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lozano was able to return home to his family and was granted a green card. But Colorado's project, a benefit album spanning music, comedy and spoken word, was just beginning. The result, Contra-ICE Vol. 1: ICE OUT, will be released Oct. 2 through a non-profit established by Colorado and her collaborators called Build Art Make Change. The record features contributions from over 30 artists, including Kathleen Hanna, Fred Armisen and Tom Morello, with the cover art taking inspiration from Lozano's paletero cart, retrofitted with a booming sound system.
"It's become this iconic symbol of the resistance," Colorado says. "We are anti-ICE. We don't want to beat around the bush here."
NPR reached out to ICE for comment on the creation and mission of the compilation album, but did not hear back.
Proceeds from the album, as well as a benefit concert in LA on Oct. 3, will go towards political and social activist organizations National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and Unión del Barrio. Colorado says she chose organizations advocating on the ground on behalf of immigrants being targeted at their job sites and their families.
Almost all of the tracks feature ruminations on the political climate, from a back-and-forth exchange between comedians Al Madrigal and Chris Estrada on the feeling of seeing Latino ICE officers on the street, to the rumbling, anti-prison musings of Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine. The compilation is a mix of previously recorded songs and newly written compositions, brought together by Colorado to create a historical and artistic record of this moment.
"There's been hours and hours and hours of me listening to what each artist was saying and then spending time with it, resonating with it, going through those stages: anger, fear, sadness," Colorado says. "I really want people to listen to it from beginning to end because it really does carry a beautiful narrative of all of these emotions."
The album is tied together through solemn, urgent, sometimes meditative interstitials produced by Jim Filer Coleman, formerly of the noise-rock band Cop Shoot Cop, who also served as sound designer for the project. One moment of hope strikes midway, on a cover of DJ Snake and Justin Bieber's song "Let Me Love You" performed by Kathleen Hanna, Ad-Rock, Money Mark, Fredo Ortiz and Frank Figueroa. The tropical house sound of the original is swapped for a punchy rock melody, with Hanna's playful vocals breathing new life into the song's meaning: "Don't you give up, nah, nah, nah / I won't give up, nah, nah, nah / Let me love you."
"I always liked how the lyrics could lend themselves to being about political burnout," Hanna tells NPR. "I like it when you can re-imagine a love song to be about community instead of about like two heterosexual lovers, which is the way it's usually put across in a lot of pop music."
For Hanna, the song speaks to the perspective of an older activist looking back on the idealized politics of their youth, and knowing that even if progress is nonlinear, justice is still worth fighting for. Musician and producer Adrian Quesada, who follows Hanna's cover with an instrumental hip-hop track titled "33 Degrees" — the melting point for ice — says he hopes people will sit with the feeling of unease that permeates much of the compilation.
"When we look back at the art that's made around this time, ideally it's telling some of these stories that are not always comfortable stories," Quesada says. "We're reflecting the times around us and expressing it through art and music."
For Tijuana-born singer and activist Ceci Bastida, the album strikes a doubly personal note. Growing up on the border, she says, seeing people make their way from Mexico into the U.S. was a normal part of daily life. But she says as the zone has become increasingly militarized and criminalized in recent years, she felt the need to take more immediate action. Since 2019, Bastida has been volunteering with the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, which advocates for unaccompanied minors. Her song "No Tengas Miedo," which translates to "Don't Be Scared," was inspired by some of the children she's worked with.
"Going through Mexico is one of the scariest things you can do. It's very dangerous, and the fact that these kids are sometimes 14, 13 years old — some of them come by themselves or some of them are separated at the border," Bastida says. "It's really hard for me to understand how you can do that, and so I see it as sort of an homage to them and their courage."
The compilation album joins a growing body of anti-ICE protest songs, which include Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis," U2's "American Obituary" and the Carlos Santana and Becky G collaboration "Mi Gran Amor," which recently received a Latin Grammy nomination for song of the year. Colorado says she sees this album not as a standalone project, but as the beginning of a musical social justice movement; she hopes to be able to produce a second volume with artists from Minneapolis, following heightened ICE raids, protests and deadly confrontations there earlier this year.
Hanna, who recently performed at Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields festival, says she hopes Contra-ICE Vol. 1: ICE OUT helps ground listeners in the emotional reality of what immigrant communities are going through. The never-ending pace of the news cycle, she says, can make shock seem like apathy. She hopes these songs can drive people to connect with each other and to keep pushing for collective action.
"I think it reminds people of all the different ways to protest, all the different ways that you can use your voice to protest and that you should protest with anger," Hanna says. "Anger is a really positive force that leads us to action. It's not something to be stuffed down and denied, but from expressing that anger can also come great joy, and the joy of community."
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