the fight for the unhoused continues in Quad cities
As the new year turned, so did the resistance. What should have been a moment of renewal instead became a stark reminder of how deeply the Quad Cities has failed its most vulnerable residents. Our first protest of the year the first major action organized under the Nefesh banner was not the success we hoped for. We confronted the Rock Island City Council, focusing especially on DSA‑backed councilman Dylan Parker, demanding immediate emergency shelter for the unhoused as temperatures dropped and conditions worsened. But our numbers were not enough to generate the political pressure required to force action. The city read our turnout as weakness, and in that miscalculation, they revealed their true priorities.
Instead of compassion, they chose violence.
Within days, the city deployed police to clear the homeless encampments surrounding the project site. Officers confiscated tents, clothing, blankets, and personal belongings with the few possessions people had left. Several unhoused residents reported to Nefesh that they lost essential documents during the sweep: IDs, birth certificates, Social Security cards, medical paperwork. These are not small losses. Without identification, people cannot apply for jobs, access services, or even enter shelters. The city did not simply remove property; it removed the tools people need to survive.
Those who escaped the sweep fled to the river's bottom, a place already known for its harsh conditions and lack of safety. There, they now face constant harassment. Police patrols, business complaints, and city pressure have turned the riverbank into a zone of fear. Rumors have already reached us of people losing their lives to the cold preventable deaths, deaths caused not by nature but by policy. When a city destroys someone’s shelter in winter, it is not an act of enforcement. It is an act of violence.
Yet the cities that make up the Illinois side of the Quad Cities continue to ignore what is happening. They speak of revitalization, development, and “public safety,” but they refuse to acknowledge the human cost of their decisions. They refuse to see the people they displace. They refuse to admit that their policies create the very suffering they claim to address. The unhoused are treated as an inconvenience, a blemish on the city’s image, rather than human beings with dignity, history, and rights.
This is the political landscape Nefesh was born into a landscape where compassion is dismissed as naïve, where survival is criminalized, and where the poor are punished for existing. Our first protest may not have succeeded in forcing immediate change, but it revealed something crucial: the city is not neutral. It is not passive. It is actively choosing to harm the people it should be protecting.
And that is why resistance matters.
Every sweep, every confiscated tent, every life lost to the cold is a reminder that the fight for justice is not theoretical. It is lived. It is urgent. It is happening right now in our streets, our riverbanks, and our council chambers. The work ahead will be difficult, but it is necessary. Because if we do not stand with the unhoused, no one will. If we do not challenge the violence of indifference, it will continue unchecked. And if we do not build a movement rooted in solidarity, compassion, and collective action, the cycle will repeat itself year after year.
The new year has turned and so has resistance. What began as a setback has become a call to action. The city may ignore the suffering it creates, but we will not. Nefesh will continue to organize, to document, protect, and resist. Because the lives of our unhoused neighbors are not disposable. Their survival is not negotiable. And their dignity is not optional.
