Trump’s anti-immigrant push 

Part 1: Before the inauguration

Dana Cloud: Maybe you could start by talking a little bit more about the last decade or so—what that’s been like to organize around immigration.

Aly Wane: Sure, absolutely. It’s been a really long, what, 12 years and pushing that boulder up the hill only to see it come back down.

The only way that you can really understand how we got here is to take into account Democratic Party complicity. There’s so much focus, obviously, on Trump and his anti-immigration rhetoric, as it should be to a certain degree. In terms of his overt statements, talking about mass detention camps and mass deportation, he attracts a lot of attention. But what doesn’t get talked about is how the Democrats have been basically working within the Republican frame. It’s been a pattern since I started organizing on this issue, probably since the mid-2000s.

I’ve been seeing the same pattern over and over again, which is, a Democratic Party that is ultimately so terrified of being painted as too sympathetic to immigrants that they almost always start negotiations by making tons of concessions on the enforcement side with very little on the relief side in terms of paths to citizenship. We have a Democratic Party that, in some ways, wants to play the middle. The Republicans for the past couple of years have been very clear that they’re full-on anti-immigration, except of course for the business section of the Republicans.

Organizers and activists have pushed and pressured the Democrats to get crumbs every step of the way. We’ve had to push the Democrats to get the bare minimum. I get really frustrated when I see Barack Obama boasting about the DACA program, because as someone who organized on that issue, I absolutely remember how long it took to convince the Democratic Party that this was a lane they could use to at least offer some relief to immigrants, once it became very clear that Republicans were not going to be negotiating on immigration legislation.

It’s just been frustrating to witness this cycle. One of the things that has definitely been a pattern has been that, when Republicans are in office, there’s more attention to the immigration issue, and folks on the Democratic Party side tend to be much more willing to do some activism on the issue, talking about family separation, for example. In the first Trump administration, we had to deal with that.

But a lot of Democrats and their supporters go completely silent when a Democratic president is in office. I still remember this very clearly when we had our first era of Trump in 2016. My fear and the fear of a lot of organizers was that a lot of people would focus so much on the extra cruelty that the Trump administration was bringing in that people would forget the eight years of the Obama administration that absolutely led to this kind of intensely xenophobic era. In fact, a lot of people don’t know this, but there was actually quite a bit of overlap from an administrative point of view between the Trump administration and the Obama administration.

One thing that I often like to remind people is that immigrant family detention as a practice absolutely expanded under Obama so much so that when the Trump administration came into office, they basically used the very same lawyers that Obama used in order to push for that expanded power.

So that just gives you a sense of continuity between the two parties: This was 2016 and you had, even back then, two parties that were really pushing tons of enforcement, tons of incarceration, but of course the party that got the most attention were the Republicans because they were so outlandish in their rhetoric. But the Dems have absolutely been contributing by basically always agreeing to whatever their frame is. By agreeing to the framing of the Republicans, the Dems themselves contribute to the moral panic about immigrants, and then they find themselves in this situation where they don’t understand why people end up giving the votes to Republicans on this issue.

We’ve gotten to the point now when, in a lot of these immigration negotiations, Dems always start out by offering the Republicans some concessions on enforcement. The Republicans then say, we actually want way more than what you offered us, which moves the entire negotiation to the right. And then the Democrats propose a small concession on the relief side. And usually, at least in the past couple of years, what that has meant is some kind of relief for people with DACA—Dreamers or young immigrants.

That’s, I think, to the detriment, generally, of the larger immigrant population. The Democrats have really focused on the one population of immigrants that they feel like they can expend some political capital on protecting—the DACA folks and Dreamer folks–because of the whole narrative of, hey they came here not through their their own fault, but because of their parents’ faults, and we can deconstruct that narrative.

When Biden was still in office he attempted to push for some kind of immigration reform program that was almost all enforcement. I remember thinking, oh my God, this is actually way worse [than what had been seen in the recent past]. Not only were there tons of enforcement proposals, but there was nothing in there in terms of protecting DACA folks and Dreamers.

We’ve gotten to the point where the Democrats aren’t even putting in protections for Dreamers. What chance do the rest of us who aren’t, who don’t qualify for that, who aren’t Dreamers, have?

The reason Biden failed to get his 2024 border bill through was, as usual, because the Republicans wanted more. And when those negotiations failed, President Biden basically invited Trump to help write the next immigration proposal.

The thing that frustrates me about this cycle is that it’s not just cruel, which it is, of course—but it’s also stupid electorally. It’s not a good play. Every single time the Dems basically agree with the Republican frame and push for more enforcement, Republicans are the ones who win out electorally.

DC: How are the organizers around you responding to the Trump victory and imminent inauguration?

AW: The reason why so many of my immigration friends aren’t freaking out about this is that everyone was ready and preparing for either administration. Everyone already expected that immigrant incarceration and immigrant deportation would increase under a Harris administration. So, we were ready to defend our communities from what the Dems were about to do, as well as the Republicans.

One of the things that I often tell people, one of the most clarifying things for me as an organizer on this issue, is remembering and really anchoring myself in the fact that we’re dealing with two law-and-order parties. They’re both law and order parties. It’s just that one is willing to carve out a couple of exceptions for a few immigrants.

But ultimately, the commitment to police, ICE, Border Patrol, all of those things is ideologically across the board. And that is one of the major problems that immigrant organizers have to face, unfortunately.

DC: About that history, I’m just looking at statistics. George W. Bush deported 2 million people. Donald Trump decreased the number of deportations. Trump actually deported fewer immigrants than Democrats prior. Trump also deported fewer than either Obama or Biden. What is the difference? I think the rhetoric is different. I mean the narratives about immigrants eating people’s pets and the generation of terroristic threats out of that. At the level of culture, the narratives are different. In this context, how do you assess and how should we respond to the threats of mass deportations coming from Trump in 2024?

AW: I always go with the assumption that we should take them at their word. If they say they want mass detention camps, we should take them at their word and we should organize accordingly because I do believe there’s a willingness to do this. I don’t know if there is the capacity, but certainly what makes Trump 2.0 so dangerous is I think that he’s already gone through it the first time. One of the few things that slowed him down that first time was that he felt that he still needed to appeal to a certain degree to the establishment wing of the Republican Party, so a lot of the folks that he brought in were not completely ideologically MAGA-right, and many of them ended up resigning. Depressingly, a bunch of them ended up kind of becoming weird auxiliary surrogates for the Harris campaign.

But now Trump is hiring primarily MAGA folks, and the person who’s the most important among the people he brought in is our good friend Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is back in charge. He is one of the worst anti-immigrant people in the country.

In the context of a hearing about mass deportations, we’re really getting into fascist territory. Here you have Democratic Party politicians, many of whom, by the way, were screaming at leftists about not being serious enough about the threat of Trump before the election, when they were just trying to get everyone to support the Harris campaign, now openly collaborating with Trump on this issue.

Some of the same folks who were talking about Trump as Hitler are now like, all right, well, let’s see where we can meet Trump in the middle. And that’s the piece, if anything, that scares me the most.

DC: So Trump has threatened to deport something like four percent of the population of the United States. I think I read that they were going to make it so that people could not use their birth certificates as identification to avail themselves of social services like health care or schools. It’s an end to birthright citizenship.

AW: I don’t know exactly what their plans are, but certainly they’re going to try everything to make life much harder on undocumented folks. The REAL ID Act is going to be implemented in 2025.

In a lot of states, when the REAL ID Act is implemented, a lot of people are going to be back in this status where they’re going to have to be worried about any kind of interaction with law enforcement. We’re going to go back to the era when your every move as an undocumented person—especially if you happen to be in a state where you don’t have access to a driver’s license—is going to be questioned.

I’m trying to stave off any kind of unnecessary panicking by not going into all of the details of what the Republicans have planned, but they’re talking about going after birthright citizenship, which I absolutely remember fighting off over ten years ago. It’s not like this came out of nowhere.

It’s credible that they could go after that. But I think that’s unlikely to happen because you would really need to tinker with so many laws to make that happen. But the MAGA Republicans are in power. One of my frustrations with the Democratic Party is that they fell in love so much with the sort of “never-Trump Republicans” who were overrepresented in their imagination, because I think that the party right now belongs to Trump.

That’s why I think we should take their threats seriously, because if there is one promise or one thing that I think Trump feels a certain sense that he owes to his base, it’s the immigration stuff.

Moving to the more hopeful side, I do think that if you’re an organizer on this issue, this is an opportunity to sort of review the history of the movement and to remember those times when there wasn’t that much of a nonprofit complex around immigration. There weren’t a lot of institutional protections. It was just like you were out there, you were undocumented, and you had to figure out how to survive. And there are strategies that we used in the past that we can revive. We’re not helpless but we will need to go back to those strategies. I do have some fears about young folks who have DACA because, and this is a fear that I had when DACA was implemented, it could be taken away.

For a lot of us who’ve been organizing since before DACA, we were used to having no status: you just figure it out. I think one of the cruel things about this coming era is that we offered these meager protections to young folks with DACA and there’s a good chance they’re going to lose all of those things, and they’re not going to have the experience or the resilience to remember that even without DACA, there are ways to survive.

I’m happy that there is space for Dreamers and DACA, but these groups are often talked about as “exceptional immigrants.” I would like to see rights for immigrants as a whole. I think the Democratic Party really tied itself to the narratives of the DACA and Dreamer folks. To be clear, I’m not blaming the DACA folks. I’m talking about the way that they have been used to sort of create what a lot of us talk about when we talk about the “good immigrant” versus the “bad immigrant.”

With the DACA folks being the “good immigrants,” everyone else is out. Now we’re at a point where even DACA folks have very little sympathy in the mainstream narrative.

And that’s also because the Democrats have bungled the narrative on this so much so that when people talk about immigrants now, there’s no real distinction anymore. I mean, before it used to be kind of important to talk about legal status. Now, if you’re talking about immigrants, whether you’re talking about undocumented, documented, asylum seeker, refugee, all of those things, they all form one big blob in the general imagination.

And that’s because the Dems have been so terrible at explaining how this system works. Like during the Biden administration, there were all of these fights in New York City about asylum seekers being there “clogging up resources,” and then there was this fight about whether or not to give these people work permits.

Now, that was driving me crazy, because they’re asylum seekers. They have an internationally enshrined right to work. There shouldn’t be a political battle over whether to give these people work permits, because that’s international law.

When people heard about these asylum seekers, to their minds they might as well just have been undocumented “illegals.” That was another marker where I realized, oh man, they are bungling the narrative so much now that all of these things are interchangeable now: asylum seeker, refugee, undocumented—you’re just talking about immigrants.

And the xenophobia has gotten way over the top, and the Dems have done very little, if anything to address it. Think about those asylum seekers in New York City. Mayor Eric Adams demonized them in ways that absolutely reminded me of how Republicans have demonized immigrants over the years.

Eric Adams is one of the worst examples. When a Democratic Party mayor perceives that there’s competition in the labor market among immigrants, asylum seekers, and regular U. S. citizens, then, of course, they’re going to throw the immigrants under the bus no matter what their category is.

This gets us back to how much this is a problem of the crisis of capitalism. Because we’re talking about the labor market here. I’ve always felt like if you really want to understand this issue, you do have to understand that this is about the divide and conquer of labor. And this is what we’re dealing with. This is what this messed up conversation about H-1B visas is about right now with Republicans and MAGA.

There’s a divide that’s always been there in the Republican Party between, a lot of the rank and file who are just, let’s just deport everyone, and the business sector that wants a pliable workforce through these H-1B visas.

That conversation should be a nuanced and delicate one, and it is just completely all over the place to the point that even people I respect, like Bernie Sanders, for example, get it wrong. He really made it out to be a matter of business wanting cheaper labor, about immigrant workers versus U.S. workers. That is true to a certain degree, but you have to take into account that H-1B worker visas are susceptible to employer exploitation because the workers’ immigration status is tied to their employers.

We do want to talk about the labor exploitation of H-1B work visas. But we don’t want to have that conversation in a way that actually harms those immigrants who are also being exploited. So, it’s a very complicated conversation that is now being completely flattened and that makes me very nervous. Once again, H-1B visa holders are a relatively privileged group and so, if people are going after them now, what is it going to mean for people who have no chance of qualifying for an H-1B?

The thing about that conversation that gets lost is that there’s a process that needs to happen in order for you to get an H-1B visa. The employer has to advertise for a certain extended amount of time and they have to really show and prove that they tried to find American workers before they give that H-1B worker visa to someone from another country. So the broader conversation that we’re having about it is not based on the reality of the situation.

One of the things that has always frustrated me about immigration law is that it is labyrinthine. It is so complicated, so complex, and the thing that makes it so hard to organize on this issue is that most people who don’t have to deal with this system, have no idea of the complexity of it.

DC: I would like to turn to organizing. What do you know about the level of discussion, planning, and coordination among immigrant rights organizations? And what does that look like on a local level?

AW: Locally, I would say that the two groups that are the most important are the Workers’ Center of Central New York and the New York Immigration Coalition. What I am hearing from reaching out to different groups that I trust is that people are saying, well, back to the basics. We’re going to have to go back to focusing on anti-deportation work. We have to go back to focusing on “know your rights.” And we’re going to have to get back into the weeds on a whole host of issues that we thought we didn’t have to go back to.

It is important that, when years ago I was doing anti-deportation work, so many of the folks that we were working with ended up being incarcerated simply for driving without a license, and very often what would happen would be that, local law enforcement call ICE or CBP to “help with translation services,” or whatever.

And of course, when agents show up, they incarcerate the person, and the person gets deported.

DC: What are some intersectional struggles linking immigration to other issues?

AW: For one, immigration struggles are tied to transgender struggles. Jennicet Gutierrez is a trans undocumented person who’s done amazing organizing over the years. And I think she would be really relevant to listen to right now, because I think of trans folks as the canaries in the coal mine of the political system. If you start allowing the fascist right to go after them, you best believe they’re going to come after everyone else. There are a lot of really good immigration groups that deal with that queer intersection and their analysis is really important.

DC: You’ve said that there’s a necessary return to the survival strategies, the mutual aid, the most basic protections, and teaching people how to get by and strategize to survive in an increasingly hostile and difficult climate. But beyond those efforts, are there any recommendations you would make about what the Left should do in terms of organizing?

AW: The major one that jumps out at me and that has really guided me over the years is making connections and allies with folks who have been fighting the mass incarceration system as a whole to really understand and see this issue as part of the fight against the broader mass incarceration system and the broader prison industrial complex.

I think you get the best analysis from understanding how those two communities are basically fighting the same system.

And of course, as a person of color, I’m concerned that they’re mostly coming for people of color communities. So I think it’s really, really important for folks who want to fight this as a whole to realize that the criminalization of immigrants is tied to the broader criminalization process and that the broader criminalization process should be interrogated as a whole.

I do think there are a lot of great organizations that are focusing specifically on detention centers and their sprawl. And I think they’re a huge piece of this. There are just so many financial incentives for states to add prisons and the immigration issue is a way to fill those coffers.

It is actually connected to the Laken Riley Act because states and agencies can make the argument that they need more prison space for newly detained immigrants. They’re not going to let people out of jail to make room.

Another fight that will be important is about driver’s licenses, figuring out ways to allow immigrants to have them or any kind of paperwork that would keep them from being terrified of interacting with anyone [of authority.] Just figuring out a way to secure the most basic sort of rights for undocumented folks, those things concretely are going to make a huge difference.

DC: When you were talking, I was thinking about Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the idea of racial capitalism. And I’m wondering if you could talk about perhaps how the oppression of immigrants is part of racial capitalism.

AW: Ruth and other abolitionists have described incarcerated people as what you do with the surplus labor of failed capitalism. It’s the same analysis with immigrants, who are largely seen as a labor force. This is what you do in a system that increasingly does not work for more and more folks. Instead of really going to the heart of the system and trying to reform it, you create these warehouses for this surplus labor.

And in the same way that I think of regular incarcerated people as surplus labor, I think it’s the same for immigrants, even though the labor conversation with immigrants is so complicated because immigrants represent surplus labor that is necessary.

In the fires in California right now–I hope that people are paying attention to the people from Mexico, South Africa—there are all sorts of firefighters being imported right now because there aren’t enough of them.

DC: They’re using prison labor also. I’ve seen stats that said that’s something like 25 percent of the firefighters are incarcerated, paid five dollars a day or something like that. And their lives are on the line.

AW: And you can trace the connection between those incarcerated folks doing this work and undocumented workers and their labor. All of this should be seen as an attempt to deal with late-stage capitalist America. On the Left, we talk about this being the late stage of capitalism. This is one of the first times that I’ve thought to myself, Oh my god, maybe we’re here. It’s getting to the point when, instead of dealing with structural problems, what fascism and Trump are bringing is, just give us a bunch of targets of people to be angry at to misdirect from the failure of the neoliberal era. We’re seeing the failure of the neoliberal era affect people globally. It’s obvious that it’s not just the U.S.—France, Canada, Trudeau just went down. I think that what we are seeing is the failure of that neoliberal consensus.

And the problem is, and bringing it back to the two-party system, that we have been here in the crisis of neoliberalism since 2015-2016. In the Republican Party, that manifested in Trump and the anger of the populist right. On the Democratic Party side, you saw the revolt of Sanders, AOC, the Squad, and so on. And the problem is that on the Republican side, the populists overtook the party. But the Democratic Party is still spending more energy pushing down on that populist revolt than they are actually focusing on the assaults coming from the right.

So we are very much in this era of neoliberal collapse. But the problem with our two-party system is that on the right, they are addressing it head-on in a fascist way, but they’re addressing it. And in the Democratic Party, they still have their heads in the sand about, well maybe if we can just find the center-right people to align ourselves with, we might be able to win elections.

And by doing so, they are, number one, ignoring the crisis, and number two, shooting themselves in the foot because it keeps depressing their base. That’s not even taking into account the fact the Democratic Party has been fully supportive of the genocide in Gaza.

The right is ready and locked and loaded to do its worst, and the Dems are just kind of like, well, what’s the middle ground?

DC: Is there anything else you wanted to mention?

AW: Just my usual recommendation that if you’re a lefty organizer activist on any issue, find at least one or two other issues that your issue connects with and get close to those organizers and start to think about systemic connections between your issue and that issue  We are getting to a point now where we are facing a fascist onslaught from the right. If we keep ourselves siloed in our organizing lanes, we’re going to get picked apart very easily. The best way to survive this is to be able to figure out that my liberation is tied to the liberation of this group of people and to strengthen the analysis and the community to push back. We are so far from being able to deal with this on a single-issue basis. Trump is coming, and all we can do is count on each other.

Part 2: After the inauguration

DC: You said that despite your knowing what was coming, that the flurry of Trump orders hit you harder than you thought. You said that it would be important to separate out the bombast from the threats. Can you say a little more about that?

AW: It’s about the scope and intensity of it. But I’m not seeing anything that is surprising to me in the least. I do feel that I was prepared for it because I expected the worst. If anything, on immigration specifically, for example, I certainly had room for a way worse beginning than this. That comes from a place of having done organizing on this for a while. I think that right now they’re just ramping up. This is not even close to the final form of how bad it is, and I am actually encouraged by grassroots resistance in a way that I am proportionately discouraged by what the “resistance” coming from the Democratic Party.

In terms of my mood, it’s going to be hard. I keep going back to this idea of, they’re going to throw everything at us on whatever the issue is. I have kept recommending to people, to take two or three issues, specialize, connect to other movements, but don’t spread yourself out too thin. Because they are trying to overwhelm us and paralyze us by throwing everything at the wall and having us be reactive.

This goes to the other piece you were asking about reading through these executive orders separating what is dangerous and what is out there to put out this atmosphere of fear. This is why I brought up the birthright citizenship executive order.

When I first read the order, I was like, oh my god, they’re coming to take it away. But I read through it, and this does not look like it has any serious chance of sticking without some major overhauls of the system, which are possible down the line. As soon as a Republican judge looked at it and said, what are you guys talking about? This makes no sense; it’s like it was written by a toddler.

I hope that people pay attention to that. Although MAGA in some ways has gotten better and Trump is surrounded by sycophants who are going to do whatever he wants, that doesn’t mean that, all of a sudden, they’ve developed this immense sophistication, because so much of what they are trying to do really strains against constitutional restraints and boundaries.

I’m not saying the greater danger is not possible. If things are seriously overturned and overhauled, that could happen in the next couple of years or so. But in terms of priorities and what Trump is putting out right now, there’s a lot of stuff that is very dangerous, and we have to pay attention to what’s going to affect us now. The strategy of putting out all of these orders is overwhelm, overwhelm, overwhelm. And I feel it. I’ve been doing this work for many, many years and I felt ready. And even I thought, this is so much. This is exhausting.

I’ve had to remind myself, don’t stray too much. Don’t start to react to—there’s something happening with this issue or that issue and run towards it and try to do something. Instead, I’ve really been trying to focus on what are the things you’re good at or that you’ve gained some expertise on, immigration, racial justice, these types of questions.

I’m thinking about the passage of the Laken Riley Act. This awful act mandates law enforcement to basically detain and incarcerate undocumented immigrants for minor crimes, including shoplifting. This act would mandate the incarceration of immigrants charged with petty crimes, not immigrants convicted of them, which gives you a sense of how easily this could be abused. You could just make up a charge and that’s enough for an undocumented person to be incarcerated.

46 Democrats collaborated on that in the House and 12 in the Senate. What was very clear about that piece of legislation was it implied a tremendous amount of more money for mass incarceration and ICE agents and CBP. There is no way to decouple those things. If you voted for the Laken Riley Act, what you are in effect voting for is more prisons.

And we’re seeing an even worse version of this than I thought because since then, Donald Trump has talked about using Guantanamo Bay to house 30,000 immigrants.

And to me, those two things are absolutely connected.

So maybe there’s a way for us to get to some of those representatives to make the connections and connect the dots to help them understand that these are not inoffensive compromises that hurt only “criminal aliens.”

What does “criminal alien” mean? Yesterday, I was paying attention to what was going on in Ithaca, NY. In Ithaca, what happened was that an undocumented immigrant got nabbed by ICE when he was going to the Department of Social Services. And he’s being described, obviously, as “this criminal alien.”

This designation of “criminal alien” is technically because he was deported and then re-entered the country, which then makes him into a “criminal alien.” That is a huge category of “criminal aliens” whose issue does not get talked about a lot in the media. There are a tremendous number of people who are designated as criminal aliens when their only crime was to re-enter the country after being deported.

When you are deported, there are three and ten-year bans to be able to come back into the country. So, if you’re deported, you have to wait either three years or ten years to reapply to come back into the country.

And obviously, immigrants have families, sometimes kids. Ask yourself, if you’re an average person, say you’re separated from your child. Are you really going to wait another ten years to dutifully wait your turn to maybe be able to go back and reunite with your kid? No, of course not. You’re going to do what you have to do to be able to come back and reconnect. And that is how a tremendous number of people get caught in that designation of “criminal alien.”  And at that point, it’s a federal offense, and then you get shunted into incarceration and get added to those statistics.

The Dems have not offered a counternarrative. It’s been the narrative of invasion, invasion, invasion. That has shifted the atmosphere completely. Every poll that I’ve noticed shows that there is majority support for mass deportations. And when I’m saying mass deportations, I’m not saying, deporting people with criminal records. I’m talking, get rid of all of them.

If you compare the public attitude around immigrants in 2016 to the public attitudes around immigrants in 2025, you can see the xenophobic shift. Because as crazy as Republicans are, they’ve been pushing out this narrative and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. Whereas the Democrats really have not pushed back.

So, one of the organizing problems is that as activists, we are going to have to do the education work, the re-education work.

What I’m really paying attention to right now is the whole sanctuary city conversation, which is a really important conversation to have now. I think that sanctuary city laws became a way for Democrats to say, oh, we’ve protected immigrants.

There is such a gap between the imagination around what sanctuary city laws mean and what they actually do, which is, from my perspective, very little. All that sanctuary city laws do is simply say cops can’t be deputized to do immigration enforcement. But there are two important things about that: It does nothing to actively stop ICE and CBP from going after people. So, there’s no “sanctuary” in that sense. And number two, and this is really important in terms of fighting the narrative battle, there’s no funding going to immigrants.

What Trump and MAGA are doing, which is masterful in some ways, is to talk about how sanctuary city laws take resources away from others and give them to undeserving immigrants that should be going to citizens. That’s playing really well. And I’m not seeing Democrats push back again on this framing at all.

DC: You said that you were at least feeling a little bit optimistic because you see some people around you starting to do things, form networks, engage in some activity. What are you seeing? And is there a reason for hope there?

AW: The reason for hope, and it feels a little paradoxical, but the more MAGA pushes, the more it activates people who would not have even thought about this issue that much. For example, Trump and MAGA have basically allowed ICE and CBP to go into schools and churches. Obviously, that is horrific. But as an organizer, it’s certainly one of those issues where I think it could turn to our advantage.

I think that as MAGA pushes into, schools, churches, and hospitals, it could build some organic resistance, because even some MAGA folks are already starting to say things like, okay, well, we didn’t vote for that.

As Trump pushes these excesses, we’re going to have organizing opportunities. Whatever the issue is, MAGA is probably going to try to push the envelope in ways that are going to arouse resistance from people who might not have paid attention.

This is true of queer issues, too. When MAGA pushes too hard on this, they arouse resistance in people who normally would not have paid attention to the issue. Because queer people exist everywhere. Many people who have queer family members will be, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa we didn’t sign up for this assault on my queer family.

I’ve been impressed with grassroots resistance. I was worried. I was nervous that people would crumble pretty quickly and follow the lead of where the Democrats are going. That’s not what I’m seeing at all. I’m seeing people in schools, people in the faith community get really angry.

And of course, as MAGA keeps pushing this whole freeze of government grants and loans, threatening SNAP and basic benefits, you see some MAGA folks breaking away. The Democrats lost the working-class vote to Trump. That means that Trump’s constituency includes many working-class folks, and working-class folks are affected by taking away basic social services.

We are nowhere near as powerless as we think we are. There are lots of organizing opportunities for when and where MAGA pushes the envelope. Lots of alliances to make. And I certainly have not at all given up on the “MAGA crowd.” Obviously, there are fundamentalists who are going to do whatever the dear leader Trump says. But I think that even in this first week, we’re seeing the cracks emerge. Some of them are starting to have buyer’s remorse.

This is our opportunity. I think about the folks who voted for all of this, and I get into this fury mode. But as an organizer, I also see the opportunities.

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