Bay Area community advocates are cautioning community members to be wary of what they see, interact with, and post on social media regarding information about the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and immigration, following a rumor that targeted the Marin County Library.
‘South Novato Library has safe rooms that cannot be accessed by border patrol or ICE without a court order,’ an Instagram story post reads, with photos of a room in the library next to the text alongside the library address. The graphic claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not have the right to enter the pictured room without a court-ordered warrant.
Despite the graphic becoming a popular share among the local community of Novato, a Marin County city located just north of San Francisco, the information is false.
“I am extremely concerned that people have taken the information that I shared in a specific meeting out of context and used it erroneously,” Héctor García, Bilingual Community Library Specialist, said in an email statement.
García believes whoever created the post took information he shared earlier in the year from a meeting in which he relayed information given to the library staff by the county. At the time of the meeting, the staff spaces at the South Novato Library were considered off-limits to ICE agents, he stated.
“Someone took a screenshot of this chat and shared it on their social media,” he said. “However, as we agreed in all our meetings concerning Immigrants Rights and Justice is that everything is changing at a fast speed during this administration and that we need to make sure before sharing that we are not misinforming people.”
South Novato Library’s Media Manager, Andre Clemons, said after looking at the post, a few things stood out to him.
“The quality of the image is not something we would produce, and there is no way to verify this information on who to call, but it did have our address, and it was written in a tone as if we wrote it, but that's not something that we write,” he said.
Clemons says he wishes people would call the library before reposting.
Despite the social media post’s claims, ICE agents do not need a court-ordered warrant to enter the South Novato Library. There is an ongoing investigation over the social media post, according to Clemons.
“The hope will be that we are able to protect our voice from being misused in a way that causes confusion and just creating more fear unnecessarily,” Clemons said.
The post became a popular share on social media platforms during a time of unrest and high tension across California after President Donald Trump’s order in April to go after sanctuary cities that “obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.” Tensions escalated in June when ICE began raiding parts of Los Angeles, and the city began to heavily protest all ICE activity. But it wasn’t just Los Angeles; protests erupted all throughout California in support of the immigrant community.
And for those who didn’t see it on their streets, they saw it on their screens. Social media apps like TikTok and Instagram are used to post sightings, videos of protests, and even videos of people getting detained by ICE.
However, local leaders warn that misinformation is flooding social media platforms at an increasing rate. Lisa Bennett, Executive Director of the nonprofit Multicultural Center of Marin, says misinformation is growing even beyond mainstream social media apps and manifesting in apps like ICEBlock and People over Papers. ICEBlock and People over Papers allow the public to post ICE sightings, confirmed or not.
“It’s difficult [to differentiate between fake and real content], we can’t even differentiate sometimes,” Bennett said. “There are people who do this maliciously, and so I have to look out for that.”
The Multicultural Center of Marin County hosts the Marin Rapid Response Network, a 24-hour hotline that serves immigrants by providing resources and assistance if they are faced with ICE. Bennett says they receive about 10-15 calls a day with people reporting or inquiring about ICE sightings. The network verifies in two ways: by sending trained observers or receiving a call from a community member whose family member has been detained.
Bennett says the most helpful action people can take is to call the Marin Rapid Response Network's 24-hour hotline and relay what they have heard or seen, allowing them to verify the information.
The Multicultural Center of Marin is working to create a mass alert system using its hotline. The hotline will notify the community about ICE's presence and debunk false sightings.
Above all, Clemons and Bennett advise that the community should not repost information regarding ICE without verifying it with the hotline or contacting entities directly, especially if the online content ties entities to specific information, such as the library.
Pricila Flores is a journalist in Northern California. Flores is a UC Santa Barbara alumna with a degree in Language, Culture and Society with a minor in Professional Writing under the Journalism track.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.