This article originally appeared in The Barbed Wire.

Tuesday morning, state Rep. Nicole Collier awoke from her seat on the floor of the Texas House, “bonnet and all,” after spending the night locked in the Capitol. 

It’s an image that will go down in history.

In a photo posted online, the Fort Worth Democrat is wearing a dark blue eye mask and white and red blankets. They match her Texas flag, which marks a page in the book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.” Next to her lies a pink-tasseled pillow that reads, over a rainbow, “Y’all means all.”

It’s immediately clear: None of these items were placed there by accident.

Collier — an attorney, a mother, and the first woman to represent Tarrant County’s House District 95 in North Texas — was protesting the decision by the Texas House to order 24/7 monitoring by DPS state troopers of Texas Democrats who broke quorum over the past two weeks. More than 50 Texas Democrats left the state last month for Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to protest racist redistricting efforts by Texas Republicans. In addition to creating five more Republican seats in Congress, the Texas GOP’s redistricting map would substantially reduce the representation available to Black and brown Texans. 

“If I’m telling you that there’s 26 seats and there are 11 million white residents, that breaks down to 430,000 white residents per congressional seat,” said state Rep. Vince Perez, a Democrat from El Paso, according to Houston Public Media. “So, what does it take for Latinos? Well, there’s one congressional seat for every 1.2 million Latinos, and there’s one Black seat for every 2 million Black voters. That’s why the value of a Latino resident in Texas is one-third of the political power of that that a white resident in Texas delivers, and again, for Black residents in Texas, it’s one-fifth.”

During those weeks, Republicans increasingly escalated rhetoric, court filings, and threats of felony arrests, while the Democrats in Illinois were forced to evacuate their hotel over a credible bomb threat. 

Still, the goalpost has kept on moving, even after their return to the Capitol.

There’s no question that the House’s latest decision — to force returning Democrats to sign what the lawmakers described as “permission slips” — was unprecedented. The slips of paper were agreements to be under 24/7 surveillance to ensure they return to the Capitol on Wednesday at 10 a.m. according to NBC News. 

Dozens of Democrats lined up to sign the permission slips and were paired with plainclothes DPS agents, the Houston Chronicle reported. Rep. Mihaela Plesa, who represents suburban Dallas, said her officer followed her everywhere: to lunch, to her office couch, down the hallway for bathroom breaks, and even on her drive home.

“They told me, ‘I have to stay glued to your hip,’” said state Rep. John Bryant — after asking who his escort was — and if they were going to Dallas with him. 

“I think most people were not taking it that seriously because it’s so performative,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt told The Barbed Wire on Tuesday morning. “But what is it performing? It’s authoritarianism.”

The only holdout was Collier, who wouldn’t sign the slip.

‘I refuse to sign away my dignity’

“I refuse to sign away my dignity as a duly elected representative just so Republicans can control my movements and monitor me with police escorts,” Collier said in a statement. “My community is majority-minority, and they expect me to stand up for their representation. When I press that button to vote, I know these maps will harm my constituents — I won’t just go along quietly with their intimidation or their discrimination.” 

Texas Democrats even posted a livestream overnight from the House floor, which showed other lawmakers, including some Democratic senators and state Rep. Gene Wu, visiting Collier with provisions.

Social media exploded overnight, as activists, civilians, and lawmakers — like U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke — called Texas Republicans “fascists” using “some old Jim Crow playbook.” 

“Texas Republicans have lost their damn minds,” Crockett posted on X.

Texas Congresswoman Julie Johnson called Collier a “badass” for “holding her ground.”

“This situation says it all,” Johnson added. “Republicans holding a Black woman hostage so they can finish their business of rolling over Texas voters for Trump. Disgusting, racist, and shameful.”

Meanwhile, in the face of such authoritarianism, Democrats like Collier have shown “genuine vulnerability,” Eckhardt said.

“She invented a form of protest in that moment,” Eckhardt added.

“The House members have taken real risk,” she said. “Real risk, professionally, personally, and politically. They have put themselves on the line, and people are responding to that.”

At the beginning of the evening, Collier appeared to be alone in her demonstration. 

But that didn’t last long. 

Dozens of members of the public — who had seen news reports of the situation — appeared at the Capitol to defend the representative on Monday evening.

“People just started spontaneously showing up for Nicole,” Eckhardt said, describing 50-75 people chanting “Let Her Out!” on Monday evening and past 10 p.m.

They were enraged, Eckhardt said.

“That particularly a woman, and particularly a Black woman, would be held captive,” Eckhardt continued. “They were just shocked that in a modern democracy, you could hold a duly elected representative on a civil warrant regarding a quorum break in a session that sine died.” (For the unfamiliar, “sine die” means the end of a legislative session.)

“The rules keep changing to their authoritarian power play,” said Eckhardt. “If the call to arrest legislators was for quorum break, that was in the last special session, and quorum is established now.”

Thus, Democratic lawmakers are asking: What right does the House have to hold a member when quorum has already been established?

“When they change the rules inside the building to assure that dissent loses, dissent’s only option is to take the argument outside,” she said.

‘The more they try to push us down, the more we rise together’

As for the demonstrators outside the chamber, “they didn’t have a plan,” said Eckhardt, but they wanted to help. By the time law enforcement officers were determined to clear the building at 10:30 p.m., some of the protesters agreed to pack it up and return later.

But four women remained, Eckhardt said, who told The Barbed Wire she acted as their attorney “for the purposes of having gotten them out of jail this morning.” 

The four arrested women were Angel Carroll, organizer of last night’s protests and president of the Black Austin Democrats; Megan Chopra, a political content creator; Jessica Cohen, with Stonewall Democrats of Austin; and Jill Van Voorhis, President of Westlake Eanes Democrats.

The women were finally released from the Travis County Jail at 5 a.m. 

“Had a girls night at the county jail,” Chopra wrote in a video of the four women in the jail’s lobby.

One commenter wrote underneath the video: “BAD BITCHES WHO NEED 20 COPS TO DETAIN THEM.” 

“This is NOT what democracy looks like, but it is what RESISTANCE looks like and this is only the beginning!” Carroll said in a separate video posted to Instagram. “We are looking straight in the face of fascism and we cannot back down✊🏾” 

Along with Eckhardt, Pooja Sethi, an attorney and community advocate, spent most of the night at the Travis County Jail waiting for the four women to be released.

Ultimately it was a cascade of support. Collier stood up for her constituents, the women who protested stood up for Collier, and Eckhardt and Sethi supported them in turn.

“I was there to offer legal guidance, but more importantly, to stand in solidarity with the women taking this brave action,” Sethi told The Barbed Wire. “My presence was rooted in support, care, and deep respect for their courage.” 

Sethi said at least three of the women are mothers — and were still willing to leave their children for the evening to fight what they saw as an abuse of power. And after their arrest, the women have been banned from the Texas Capitol grounds for a full year. For now, they said, in the video of their release, “It’s up to you all to keep it going.”

“The more they try to push us down, the more we rise together,” Sethi said. “Women have always been on the front lines of justice movements.”

Hours into her detention, Collier reportedly filed a habeas corpus petition in Travis County, according to Courthouse News Service. In the court filing, Collier requested that a judge declare her restraint illegal and argued that, while the House has the authority to compel the attendance of absent member, she is present. Thus, there’s no need for Collier to be held in the House’s custody, she said.

By 6:17 a.m. Collier posted a video with Wu. Both agreed that it was “real cold” on the House floor overnight.

As for the lawmakers who did sign, all wasn’t smooth: Rep. Sheryl Cole posted on X that her DPS escort “who was forced upon me to track my every movement” accompanied the lawmaker on her morning walk in her Mueller neighborhood. But after the officer lost her on the trail, the lawmaker said he “threatened to arrest me” and “made a scene in front of my constituents.”

Several hours later, just before 11 a.m., Collier thanked her supporters.

“I’m still here on the floor of the house chamber,” Collier said in a live video. “Thank you for standing up for our democracies, for taking a stand against our oppressor. Join us in resisting.”

Fellow lawmakers took her live video feed and showed demonstrators lining the capitol hallways holding signs that read “Liberation” and “No justice, no peace.” 

More than 24 hours after her detainment began, the crowd again chanted, “Let her go!”