This news comes out just ahead of the midterm elections, and as voter-registration efforts are reaching new, weird heights. And voting is important—there are dramatic and sometimes dire consequences for elections at every level. But it's also the absolute bare minimum of democratic involvement, especially in a country as undemocratic as the U.S. in 2018.

Take, for example, the fact that the scale is tilted very heavily in favor of the Republicans. Not in sheer numbers, of course: If that were the case, then they wouldn't fight so hard to prevent as many Democrat-leaning demographics as possible from voting. But voter-suppression tactics and gerrymandering have been so effective that, as it stands, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 11 points just to get a simple majority in the House. And with a warped census and an aggressively anti-voting-rights Supreme Court, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Even in a best-case scenario where Democrats retake all of Congress in November, Trump still has the ability to unleash all sorts of malicious chaos on his own. He has no incentive to respond to political pressure beyond his base.

When facing so much indifference and intransigence, bringing more attention to problems isn't always enough. Direct action and civil disobedience go further. Like when immigration lawyers rushed to airports to petition for arriving immigrants after Trump's first stab at his Muslim ban. Or in the early years of the AIDS crisis, when elected officials basically laughed petitioners out when they tried to get literally any state support to fight the epidemic and support the sick. Frustrated organizers with ACT UP got aggressive. Activists threw sand in the gears of the institutions that were ignoring them, from storming CBS Evening News during a live broadcast to shutting down the FDA offices with massive demonstrations.

By contrast, prank calling ICE is almost polite. It's not a solution that will work for every crisis, of course—civil disobedience requires creativity and adaptation and, a lot of times, humor. But huge, structural changes like Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, or fighting climate change can't be won by voting alone, especially when the other side has so much money lined up against those improvements. Squandering their time and resources is democracy in action.