Municipal Adhesives

The last weekend of January of 2017, after Trump’s Executive Order 13769 (the Muslim Ban), tens of thousands of protesters stormed dozens of airports across the US in solidarity with immigrants, especially those specifically targeted from Muslim-majority countries. Over 1,000 demonstrators flooded Raleigh/Durham airport.

On the Sunday night that followed, this banner appeared on a fence at the main intersection in the middle of downtown Carrboro, NC.

The fence itself was a contested site in the city of Carrboro. It surrounded an abandoned lot that in 2012 had, briefly, been a squatted social center and the site of a confrontation between local anarchists and corporate developers. An occupation of the building drove out the corporate developers who wanted to erect a CVS across the street from another CVS, and left the lot fallow and enclosed to this day, with a chain link fence that has since been the canvas for local social movements.

In June of 2018, Occupy ICE sprang up in protest encampments around the country outside ICE detention facilities to resist Trump’s “Zero Tolerance Policy” and separation of immigrant children from their families, cementing child trafficking in official policy.

Charlotte, North Carolina’s occupation lasted a week 7 miles from the city center outside of a golf course with no foot traffic. Police forbade structures amid torrential thunderstorms and 90+ degree July heat. Occupiers delivered a masked press conference in front of a similar banner painted on site to end their demonstration.

In February of 2019, Trump declared his intent to call a state of emergency to fund the border wall the baying fascists supported his election to build. In response, a wide coalition of radical groups declared their intent to cause a true state of emergency for his administration.

As a modest contribution to this day of action, the same banner from the Occupy ICE Charlotte encampment was installed on the same fence from the earlier Carrboro banner drop.

The sticker and the banner off of which it was designed rely on the graphic design of a Diné artist named John Hood. In 1990, Caltrans commissioned Hood to design a sign after a spate of pedestrian vs. motor vehicle accidents at a then-popular border crossing site.

This was the first sticker Municipal Adhesives’ ever printed back in January of 2019, predating by two years the official start of the Municipal Adhesives project. Since that time, between March 2021 and June 2026 we sold about 8000 of this sticker design and gave away 3000 more, roughly 4 stickers sold every day.

March 19 of 2025, this design was retooled as a stencil.