an. 5 is a day that Marie will never forget. Minneapolis public schools had just reopened after winter break, and the Trump administration’s invasion of federal immigration agents was in full swing. Marie (not her real name), a community organizer and the daughter of immigrants, had connected with her neighborhood’s rapid-response network in the south Minneapolis community of Powderhorn. Alerted by a report of “a weird vehicle lurking,” she arrived at a street corner to find an ICE agent sitting in a white Durango. Marie said she realized the agent was “watching a mom about to put her kid on the bus” and waiting to abduct the mother. “I’m a single mom,” she told me. “I put my kids on the bus. I say bye to my kids every day, you know. The thought of that infuriated me.”

Marie laid on her horn until the agent left. But before she got to the end of the block, she witnessed another abduction, and this time she couldn’t stop it. Minutes later came a report about another woman pulled over by ICE. When Marie got to that corner, she saw ICE agents taking the woman from her car. “It broke my heart,” she said. “I saw my mom. I saw so many of my aunts and uncles, who accepted less than they deserved just to make ends meet for themselves and their families.” That night, she said, “I pulled into my driveway, and I cried, I cried, I cried, before I walked into my house to hug my kids.”

Two days later, Marie was out on patrol again when she heard about a shooting. She arrived on the scene to find Renee Good’s wife crying in the passenger seat of the couple’s car, with blood covering her face. Marie said she looked down the block and saw an ambulance “leaving with no lights on, and that’s how I knew she died.” She heard an agent say, “Come on, we’re going to go get some more.”

For more than a year, hundreds of thousands of people of color have been terrorized by the Trump administration’s campaign of detentions, deportations, and violence. This reign of terror — centered on “surges” of heavily armed, masked agents carrying out aggressive arrests in urban centers, rather than the previous focus on detentions at the border and transfers from jails — led to a quadrupling of immigration arrests and a fivefold increase in deportations during the first year of Trump’s second term. The war on immigrants is taking place everywhere, but the administration had especially cruel treatment prepared for liberal sanctuary cities: first 

 last summer; then the federal takeover in Washington, D.C.; then ICE surges in 

But these surges were met by a determined resistance that spread across the country and only grew more committed and better organized as ICE and Border Patrol violence escalated. Like the “whirlwind” moments described by the famed community organizer Saul Alinsky and his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman, the nationwide movement against ICE reached deeply into neighborhoods and diverse communities, moving tens of thousands of people into action — from heroic confrontations with federal agents and complex mutual-aid networks to massive demonstrations such as the Jan. 23 day of “no work, no school, no shopping” in Minnesota. A whirlwind moment “involves a dramatic public event or series of events that set off a flurry of activity,” 

This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

. “This activity quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups.”

In interviews with more than two dozen organizers in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles, I learned about the structures that were built on the fly, as well as the existing relationships among diverse organizations that helped ground the resistance. Across the country, large numbers of people — some of them veterans of social movements, others newly activated — tackled longstanding questions about spontaneity and organization, silos and lanes, openness and security, and burnout and long-term organizing. Debates and disagreements that weren’t aired in the heat of the moment are now being taken up. And then there’s the million-dollar question: What’s next?

“I can’t stop checking plates,” a Minneapolis rapid responder I’ll call Nora told me in late April. Nora had shown me the Whipple Federal Building compound that served as ICE’s base of operations and was pulling into a Speedway gas station when she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw a car that she thought looked suspicious. She entered the car’s license plate number into a Signal chat and verified that it wasn’t an ICE vehicle. The hypervigilance that so many Minnesotans adopted out of necessity during the winter surge clung on, and for good reason: Federal agents — more than 600 as of March — remain in the state, doing their dirty work in more subtle and covert ways.

As a St. Paul teacher, Mara Solis, told me, “The surge has ended, but the impact hasn’t. Our students have lost some of their parents, or their parents are having a hard time paying bills, or the students themselves have self-deported back home.” She added, “And just like with Covid, just like with George Floyd, we will not know the full impact for who knows how long.” 

That impact is physical, economic, emotional, and political. The arrest of 15 activists in Minneapolis in June — with more indictments threatened — brought the point home. “If you are actively conspiring to impede law enforcement,” said Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, “you ought to go on the assumption that we’re watching you, and that we’ll get you.”

The surge may be over, but organizers cannot simply move on.“When a creepy car drives by,” Solis said, “we’re all still looking over our shoulder, making sure it’s not stopping for us or stopping for our kids.” But at the same time, she said, “we’re asking: How do we build on the movement that’s been started?”

n early October, at the height of Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, children playing at recess at Funston Elementary School had to be brought indoors as tear gas wafted into the schoolyard from a nearby confrontation with ICE. Teachers at the school, which is located in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood on the northwest side of the city, had been building up an infrastructure of “sidewalk solidarity” for weeks, going out regularly before and after school to provide eyes and ears for students and parents.

Maria Heavener, a first-grade teacher at Funston, told local newscasters that she heard car horns honking outside the school and then got a notification that a fifth-grade teacher on a lunch break had seen ICE agents and blew her whistle to alert neighbors. A person riding a moped saw a car full of agents behind him and stopped in the street to block them. As a crowd gathered, the agents responded by launching multiple tear gas canisters. Heavener alerted the rapid-response groups that she’s part of. By the end of the school day, about 100 community members had shown up outside the school and formed lines up and down the sidewalks to create a safe passage for children and families going home.

The resistance to ICE is made up of thousands of moments like this one. The very public nature of the ramped-up street arrests produced a true “whirlwind moment” of direct actions. Agents faced countless confrontations and challenges, whether they were rounding up immigrants on the street or simply eating at a local restaurant or staying at a hotel. This not only made it difficult for the agents to operate effectively but also precipitated overreactions — like using tear gas near an elementary school in a densely populated neighborhood. These violent overreactions, in turn, deepened the anger at the agents’ presence and spurred more resistance.

Developing parallel to the rapid-response patrols were other forms of resistance, including mutual-aid efforts to support vulnerable populations. Harking back to a refrain that emerged during the 2020 George Floyd uprising — “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!” — and often relying on infrastructure developed at that time, mutual-aid networks organized food drives and fund-raisers, deliveries of necessities from groceries and medicine to diapers, coordinated rides to and from school and work, and underground networks for child care and doulas delivering babies at home. “The words ‘mutual aid’ don’t cover it,” Doran Schrantz, an organizer in Minneapolis, 

 earlier this year. “It reminded me of reading about the Polish Home Army resistance during World War II,” which, together with civilian support efforts, maintained an extensive network of clandestine medical, welfare, and social services.

Mutual-aid and rapid-response networks were often kept separate for safety purposes, but both provided entry points into the movement. In some cases, the networks were launched by existing formations: political organizations, tenants unions, even informal parent groups. Other times, it was just neighbors talking to neighbors. As Paige, a rapid responder from Washington, said, “You would come upon a scene because you could hear the shouting from down the block. Neighbors would just come out, and that’s how folks would meet each other and start these Signal groups.” Organizers in Minneapolis and Chicago said they pre-emptively reached out to neighbors with a QR code to join a Signal or WhatsApp chat and posted fliers with the codes.

Minnesota had the benefit of learning from other cities that endured a surge. Marie — who helped launch a mutual-aid network around the time of the protests against Floyd’s murder — said she started out in December distributing a zine about responding to ICE that she had received from friends in Chicago and adapted for Minneapolis. Soon she began patrolling. After federal agents killed Renee Good in January, the thousand or so rapid responders like Marie who had gotten involved in December multiplied tenfold. Neighborhood Signal chats quickly reached their 1,000-person capacities and had to split into smaller and smaller geographies — first local chats, then hyperlocal chats, and then hyper-hyperlocal chats often covering just a block or two.

The sudden, explosive growth of rapid response forced participants to develop infrastructure on the fly, tweaked and reworked as needed, often with no central direction. People came out of the woodwork to manage the proliferating networks of Signal chats, build databases, analyze data, dispatch patrols, and coordinate legal and aftercare support for those abducted or left behind. Lines of communication were developed to connect different neighborhoods with one another and the mostly English-speaking Signal chats with the mostly Spanish-speaking WhatsApp chats.

In Minneapolis, one woman — who said she got involved to make a safer world for her biracial child — developed a system to quickly dispatch rapid responders to places where ICE was present; more than 1,300 people across the state were trained to use it. Other participants built an easily searchable database containing about 2,600 license plate numbers of known ICE vehicles. At the height of Operation Metro Surge, rapid responders on patrol held continuous live group calls on Signal. Trained dispatchers moderated them, keeping track of where patrollers were to make sure neighborhoods had full coverage. The dispatchers took time-stamped notes and later refined strategies for directing the patrols based on an assessment of the data. In Washington, patrols tended to be simpler; the rapid responders that I spoke with worked in large groups in specific locations and at times when ICE activity tended to be high.

Patrollers known as commuters took on the dangerous work of following known ICE vehicles. Federal agents would pull hazardous stunts like stopping suddenly on a highway, risking an accident. At times, caravans of ICE vehicles would box in commuters against a curb or the side of a building. “They can pin you with a car in front, a car behind, and a car on the side and make it impossible for you to leave,” said Nora, who spent hours on commuter patrol every day. “Then they can do whatever the hell they want to you. Sometimes they yell at you, sometimes they bust your window, and they rip you out of the car and abduct you.’’ Joe (not his real name), also from Minneapolis, told me that he got caught in a caravan of ICE vehicles doing a loop in his neighborhood when he was out on his own on foot. When he walked onto a crosswalk in front of the vehicles, they accelerated toward him, and agents jumped out of their vehicles with guns drawn, yelling, “This is your first warning!” He walked away.

he need to develop organizing structures quickly led to tactical debates that could reach different conclusions across cities or neighborhoods. One question that emerged early on centered on internal security and the process of vetting new participants. Careful vetting stood in tension with the need to expand activism as fast as possible.

In Los Angeles and Washington, existing organizations at the heart of rapid-response networks tended to have a tighter security culture and a rigorous onboarding process. As a result, one Washington activist told me, large bottlenecks developed in the D.C. area, and people who couldn’t get into existing networks often ended up setting up their own separate patrols. In L.A., Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona of Unión Del Barrio, a political organization that does immigrant defense work, told me that vetting new participants is one of the most time-consuming tasks for organizers. The Community Self-Defense Coalition in L.A. has just seven individuals, representing organizations on the coalition’s steering committee, doing all the group’s administrative work — from vetting to making copies of fliers and reserving meeting spaces for trainings. The coalition has been active for more than a year; its biweekly trainings draw anywhere from 60 to 200 people. Maintaining that level of organization without expanding the core at its center has led to some burnout and slowed down the development of block-by-block organizing, Carrasco Cardona said.

In Chicago and Minneapolis, the vetting of participants was less rigorous, leading to quicker growth. Some organizers I spoke to emphasized that not even thorough vetting can ensure that the government doesn’t infiltrate WhatsApp groups or Signal chats, so trainings need to teach rapid responders to operate knowing that what they are doing is legal but making sure not to say anything they wouldn’t want repeated in court or the media. According to Diego Morales from Pilsen Unidos por Nuestro Orgullo (PUñO), an organization rooted in the Mexican American neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southwest Side, a looser vetting process led, surprisingly, to greater centralization. He thinks cities with tightly knit central organizing ended up with competing rapid-response groups disconnected from more established networks. “It made it messy and inefficient,” Morales said. In Chicago, by contrast, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights provided resources and support to local grassroots networks. Groups like Morales’s could harness mass energy in their neighborhoods while also participating in a citywide effort to centralize and analyze data and tap into legal aid networks that connected families to pro bono lawyers.

PUñO grew to about 400 trained and active members. “We were one of the first teams to grow to that kind of size because of the way in which we embraced the public,” Morales explained. The more people who are involved in rapid response, the more eyes and ears are available to stop or slow abductions, he said. “You have members who are just walking up and down the street, going to work, going grocery shopping,” he said. “Maybe it’s the bus driver or a guy that does Uber deliveries around the neighborhood, and he’s always got his eyes open.”

Longstanding organizing debates came up, including whether to engage with the media and how confrontational rapid responders should be in encounters with ICE. But ordinary people, whether plugged into a network or not, often made those decisions for themselves. In scenes that became commonplace and broadcast nightly, crowds of people challenged raids and abductions across the country, phones in hand to record the agents. When ICE descended on immigrant vendors on Canal Street in New York City last October, hundreds of people swarmed the agents, recording with their phones, blocking vehicles with their bodies, and yelling “Shame” and “Fuck you” in equal measure.

Morales believes that those scenes fueled more opposition. “We should be talking to journalists,” he said. “And we shouldn’t be talking to journalists in a way that’s like, 

Oh, woe is me, we’re such victims, we’re helpless.

 Actually, we’re organizing, we’re preventing people from being abducted, we’re getting people out of detention.” That attitude helps to counter the culture of fear that he says only empowers the government. “We have much more power than they want you to think,” he said, “and they have much less power than they want you to believe.”

or all the movement’s organic spontaneity, the anti-ICE resistance developed inside an ecosystem of existing organizations, political relationships, and local experiences. Some of the first people to initiate rapid-response networks had already been through know-your-rights trainings after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. In Minneapolis, earlier iterations of mutual-aid networks and neighborhood patrols arose during the uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Longer-term relationships among labor and movement organizations played a vital role when the anti-ICE resistance reached a new level after the killing of Renee Good.

Twin City organizers had 10 days to mobilize people across the state for the Jan. 23 Day of Truth & Freedom. According to 

 commissioned by movement organizations, roughly one in four people in Minnesota participated in the day of “no work, no school, no shopping” or had a loved one who did. Tens of thousands of people braved dangerous temperatures, with the wind chill reaching as low as minus 35, to march in downtown Minneapolis. The turnout showed the deep well of outrage over the ICE surge — but also the commitment of longstanding labor, community, and social movement organizations.

Greg Nammacher, the president of SEIU Local 26 — which represents janitors, security officers, airport staff, Uber and Lyft drivers, and window cleaners in the Twin Cities — told me how his local helped bring together the forces that made Jan. 23 a reality. “We have been in close relationship with some of the Twin Cities’ most progressive, militant unions and community organizations for over a decade,” he said. After Trump was elected to a second term, Nammacher said, 300 leaders of different organizations met to discuss possible scenarios and contingencies. Nammacher emphasized the importance of aligning groups with existing bases in labor and communities of color, rather than just relying on broad, big-tent organizing. “I wouldn’t say it was easy to come together,” he said, acknowledging the divides along class, race, and gender lines that exist among and within left and progressive forces in every big city. “But there was a muscle,” he said, developed over the course of more than 15 years working together.

In Chicago, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights has played a central role in immigrant rights organizing for decades. When Operation Midway Blitz began in September, the organization devoted funding, staff, and infrastructure to organizing trainings and supporting newly formed networks — including running a widely used hotline to report ICE sightings. The Chicago Teachers Union, with 

 of fighting for “common good” demands beyond bread-and-butter labor issues, also played an important role. The union’s former president Jesse Sharkey said, “For at least a decade, the CTU has developed a cadre of Latino immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants who made the union their social justice home.”

Critical to that work was Rebecca Martinez, an organizer in the Southwest Side neighborhood of Little Village. She had joined the CTU’s staff on the heels of the union’s historic 2012 strike. “As a Mexican woman,” she told me, “I thought that a lot of people who are educators like me feel a connection to their community but don’t quite feel it in their union.” After giving the union leadership grief about the disconnection, she said she decided that a base of rank-and-file teachers was necessary to raise issues that mattered to them and left her union job to work in a classroom. During Trump’s first term, Martinez, with the help of the union’s executive board, planned trainings for teacher-led 

 at schools throughout the city. She also helped launch a Latino caucus to lead on promoting bilingual education and lobbying the city to dismantle its anti-gang database.

When ICE invaded Chicago during Trump’s second term, Martinez said, “We were able to just kind of hit go. We had materials ready and were in a position to explain, ‘This is what a sanctuary team is, and this is what you do.’” The union went beyond supporting school-based efforts and connected teachers to community organizations and networks where needed. “It didn’t just happen,” Martinez said. “It’s been over a decade of the union working with community folks, nonprofits, organizations, and groups to make that possible.”

There are, of course, limitations to relying on established organizations, many of which operate in top-down ways or exert control in movements that they believe are on their turf. While tensions between and among traditional organizations and grassroots formations mostly took a back seat during the height of ICE surges, questions have emerged in the weeks and months since. “I almost think [Chicago] sometimes is a little too organized,” Morales said. “There are certain old ways that get set in, and it can be hard to be dynamic.” In Minneapolis, Joe thought that top-down organizing might achieve a big turnout on a single day, but what happens on the second or third day? “It just dissipates when it’s not led by the community,” he said. How to collaborate among different types of organizations is one of the questions that activists will need to continue to hash out.

nstitutional resources and infrastructure are clearly necessary for coordinating mass action and long-term organizing that can go beyond heat-of-the-moment crescendos in the struggle. Organized labor has a vital role to play. Unions representing millions of workers around the country have the power to disrupt the economy and shift society-wide narratives.

When the ICE assaults began last year, there were early indications that the labor movement could be a leading part of the resistance. When federal agents descended on L.A. over the summer, they violently arrested David Huerta, the president of the SEIU-Social Service Workers West and the SEIU’s California State Council, at an anti-ICE protest and charged him with a felony. Following his arrest, the country’s main union federation, the AFL-CIO, and the national unions the United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, and AFSCME joined the SEIU in condemning and protesting Huerta’s arrest, as well as Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The charge against Huerta was downgraded to a misdemeanor in the face of this pressure. These actions were a stark contrast to the labor movement’s not-so-distant history of opposing immigration. The AFL-CIO reversed its longstanding support for immigration restrictions and enforcement only in 2000. Now it looked as though unions could become a bulwark against ICE’s crimes.

On the ground in Minnesota, labor was an integral part of the resistance. Greg Nammacher said many local unions that had not previously come out against ICE’s occupation “ended up endorsing the day of no work, no school, no shopping after Renee’s murder” in early January. Other unions whose members were hit hard by ICE raids had already gotten involved. Geof Paquette, the lead internal organizer at the hospitality union UNITE HERE Local 17, said he began getting phone calls around Christmas from airport workers saying that immigrants were being abducted at work despite passing significant background checks to get their jobs. Many UNITE HERE members stopped coming to work, Paquette said.

Other union members, like Feben Ghilagaber, an Eritrean immigrant and Local 17 shop steward, jumped into action to help her co-workers. She began daily deliveries to reach co-workers who couldn’t leave their homes. Many kept their lights off and sat in the dark, she remembered, in the hopes that ICE wouldn’t come knocking. “The more I saw, the more I’m like: I have to keep going. I can’t think about myself,” Ghilagaber said. She and Paquette devised a vast food distribution system for vulnerable members. At its height, Paquette said, 200 families were receiving food support, being driven to work, and having other needs met, from diapers to pads and tampons to children’s birthday gifts. The local also raised money so that it could offer rental assistance — support that it still provides today, since workers who had to miss work have fallen behind financially.

Labor’s participation reached a new pitch when Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti, a nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center and a member of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669. That prompted the AFL-CIO to join the call for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota. The American Postal Workers Union had already demanded that ICE stop using postal facilities as staging areas earlier in the month. National Nurses United held a week of actions calling for ICE to be abolished entirely. Pretti’s national union, AFGE, includes not only nurses but also ICE and Border Patrol agents, but even it demanded the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and organized a nationwide day of remembrance for Pretti. AFGE locals held vigils outside VA hospitals in 23 cities; national President Everett Kelley spoke at the vigil at the Minneapolis facility where Pretti worked. Jake Romans, the Minneapolis local’s president, remembered speaking with Pretti, a union supporter respected by his co-workers, a few days before his murder about the state of the union. Now there is a movement among some AFGE locals to get ICE agents out of the union, according to Romans.

As known and trusted community members, union teachers often played particularly critical roles, Mara Solis, the St. Paul teacher, told me. Solis and her fellow teacher Alli Kildahl were leaders in their school district’s Immigrant Defense Committee. The night after Renee Good was killed, she said, “We had like 500-plus people trying to get on the Zoom call with us, signing up to be a regional captain or a site lead or whatever other roles we asked for.” From there, Signal chats were set up, parents came to trainings at the St. Paul Federation of Educators union hall, families in need were connected to mutual-aid networks, and a school patrol network was established, with parents in safety vests showing up every day outside schools. Union members ran weekly meetings and webinars and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for rental assistance. Each school site led its own work, but centralization across the district led to important information and resources being shared and schools in more affluent neighborhoods being paired with those with scant resources.

Labor solidarity with the ICE resistance has gone furthest at the local level. National unions have issued statements and organized some protests, but — whether out of fear that they will alienate conservative locals or simply because they are out of practice — they have yet to wield the much deeper institutional resources and infrastructure at their disposal. Nammacher believes the labor movement needs to step up as a matter of self-defense. “There’s no way through these next few years without politicians and the current administration and their billionaire agenda running directly at unions,” he said. If mobilized, organized labor could activate hundreds of thousands of members nationwide. “I don’t think the U.S. labor movement is up to that task,” Nammacher said. “But that said, I do feel very hopeful.” He went on, “I haven’t talked to a labor leader anywhere in the country who isn’t open to and hungry to think about new ways that we can use our institutional power in this moment,” adding, “Those conversations happening at the local level will be the most decisive examples as we continue to move the full national apparatus into a more aggressive stance.”

he ICE surges in blue-state cities last year and this winter have waned. But federal agents continue to detain immigrants in record numbers. In L.A., says Carrasco Cardona of Union Del Barrio, “It’s ongoing. It’s every single day.” Street vendors are still being harassed and kidnapped outside Home Depots and in the 

 (alleys) in the downtown market area, she said. “It’s the same thing. It’s snatch and grab — grabbing children and using them as bait.” In Minneapolis, rapid responders fear that thousands of agents may still return. One dispatcher told me that responders have seen several hundred black, Ford Expedition–style SUVs parked in a lot, apparently “staged and ready for their next big push.”

At the height of the surges, the anti-ICE resistance benefited from both momentum and movement unity. The situation was so dire that there simply was no time to worry about organizational turf or get wound up about tactical differences, organizers told me. But in this next phase of the movement, debates are surfacing. Organizers hope that there will be space to flush out the discussions positively. After the surges, “expectations became a little bit less clear,” said Joe. “Some people just left, went back to their day job, went to other organizing. This is all normal and healthy, I think. The important part is recognizing that we had such unity for this moment. It might not be required all the time. But how do we make sure that we are able to build that back?”

The movement against ICE reinforced some of the historical divisions within left and progressive movements. Because the people most vulnerable to ICE abductions necessarily had to stay outside of visible organizing spaces, many of the rapid-response and mutual-aid networks were dominated by white participants. That was a vital show of solidarity that helped turn the tide against Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. But the process exposed limitations and fissures. May Day demonstrations in Minneapolis, for instance, included several different events across a couple of days, each organized by different parts of the movement, with only some crossover. A march against ICE down Lake Street in the Powderhorn neighborhood — the site of countless abductions — included many leftists, few unionists, and even fewer immigrant participants.

Marie told me that she’s one of the only Black people in her mutual-aid and rapid-response networks, despite living in a neighborhood that is almost half Black and Latino. “I went to a rapid-response meeting, and one of the things that I said is, ‘I think we have to be talking about how we make amends with Black Americans right now,’” she said. “Because we mobilized at a scale that we haven’t done for them, right? People saw the level of resources that came into the city that never came to them, and they were suffering long before this.”

Martinez of the CTU said that organizers and members of vulnerable communities have a tendency “to look at these things separately, as if they have no relationship.” She added, “I think it’s really easy for folks on all sides to say: Well, you didn’t come out for me. Why should I come out for you?”

At the same time, though, the movement provided inroads to connect struggles and communities. As Joe pointed out, when the state can inflict violence on the most vulnerable communities among us, no one is truly safe, as the killings of Good and Pretti showed. Nora has been reflecting on this. “One of my deep regrets is that I wasn’t activated before Renee Good was murdered,” she said. “It’s a shame of mine that it took the murder of someone who looks like me. I’m a mom of two small children. I drop my kid off to a school just blocks away from where she was murdered. You could have spun the wheel, and it could have been my car with stuffies in it. It could have been me who was murdered.”

Yet the activation of so many people in the aftermath of Good’s killing has strengthened the movement against racism and state repression. In cities and towns across the country, participants are finding spaces to have important conversations, while practical work continues. For some, this means adopting new ways to challenge ICE’s more covert operations. Others are working to connect the government’s attack on immigrants with police repression of Black and Latino people. Still others are focused on political education and infrastructure. At PUñO, Morales says, the organization has built up about a dozen committees for everything from book clubs and creating literature to ongoing mutual aid. By necessity, some of the work will require defending organizers targeted by an administration trying to reclaim the offensive. The June indictment of the 15 Minneapolis activists specifically cites rapid-response networks and the use of Signal chats to monitor ICE.

The movement against ICE showed what’s possible in building bases, creating infrastructure, and forging relationships among different movement forces and communities. In cities around the country, people risked their own safety and well-being over and over again to defend their neighbors. That resistance helped to drive a sea change in public opinion. And now demands that previously seemed out of reach — to defund and eventually abolish ICE — seem possible.

Community members confront federal agents who stopped at a gas station in the Gage Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago, Nov. 6, 2025. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII for Hammer & Hope.

Inside the Nationwide Resistance to the ICE Invasions

asha Cloud, the New York Liberty’s star point guard, was pulled aside on July 3 for an interview after practice. “You were on the road,” a WNBA reporter began, “when Zohran wins the primary the other day.” At the mention of Zohran Mamdani’s name, Cloud broke into a wide grin and interrupted him: “That’s Mamdani. That’s my boy!” Referring to Donald Trump’s threat to deport the democratic socialist if he wins the New York City mayoral race on Nov. 4, Cloud added, “For all of us in New York, I’m just gonna ask that we continue to be on the right path to history — that we protect one another, that we protect Mamdani and what he wants to do.”

What Zohran Mamdani “wants to do” continues to dominate conversations in New York City. When I asked a young technician at Apple about Mamdani as he helped fix my phone back in July, he said Mamdani had inspired him to vote for the first time. “Do you know how I found out about him?” he asked. “He came to my neighborhood! He came to the park where I was playing basketball! And you know what he said? He wanted to know what 

Stories like that help explain why Mamdani is the 

 to defeat disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, now running as an independent after losing the primary decisively to Mamdani, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, subway vigilante, and talk show host. But they also raise another question: Will Mamdani be 

Mamdani has terrified the city’s real estate and finance industries, pro-Israel forces, corporate Democrats, and a hostile federal government in the hands of Trump. If Mamdani does become mayor — and that’s not a foregone conclusion given the power of his enemies — will the landlords, capitalists, and political establishment allow him to achieve anything? And what role can Mamdani’s mass of supporters play in defending him and advancing the agenda for working-class New Yorkers that galvanized Tasha Cloud and so many others?

For some, the answer lies in mobilizing to hold a Mayor Mamdani accountable to the movements that elected him, with activists rallying outside Gracie Mansion to make their demands known. But this assumes that the organizations and volunteers who lifted Mamdani’s campaign will become “outsiders” once the election is over, having to protest to be heard by the new mayor. Others hope for a “co-governance” arrangement, in which decision-making is shared between City Hall and community stakeholders. But in any case, this may be expecting more than can realistically be achieved under Mamdani, given the hostility of financial and political elites and the current state of movement organizations.

The Mamdani challenge has the potential to build an effective inside-outside strategy that relies on 

a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office 

 a grassroots coalition of community, labor, and progressive forces, working collaboratively. But none of that will happen overnight. For one, the left is in the early stages of creating the organization and developing the political experience necessary for this. “It is daunting,” Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the community group Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), told me. “But it is possible.”

Two things can be true at once: A Mamdani victory will transform the electoral landscape and advance the potential for a left-liberal alliance to counter a rising right. But at the same time, the left and working-class institutions are weak, and

the level of class struggle remains historically low. A single electoral cycle will not do away with these obstacles.

Mamdani’s ability to deliver transformational policies largely depends on how effectively a left coalition can mobilize for them. And the left will be strengthened by a mayor using the bully pulpit, political relationships, and city structures to advance the same agenda and promote movements. This already happened during the campaign; organizations that supported Mamdani grew stronger in the process. “The campaign provided us an opportunity to pretty significantly expand our reach within our communities,” Ahmed said. “The very tactful ways in which our sister organization DRUM Beats carried the campaign into our communities and brought our communities to the campaign has given both organizations a lot more prominence and legitimacy.”

Álvaro López, the electoral coordinator for the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, believes “we need to get away from a ‘holding them accountable’ framework toward a ‘building power’ framework.” Building power, according to López, requires ongoing grassroots organizing to widen Mamdani’s base of support, win more local elections, and further develop an inside-outside strategy that can effectively pressure any forces that obstruct the mayor’s agenda.

With a clearheaded assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, but its eyes still looking toward the horizon, the left has the potential to play both a defensive role — organizing movements to counteract the New York elite’s opposition to Mamdani’s policies — and an offensive one of building durable left structures and reviving the belief that government can work for public needs, not big-money interests.

hat does the left do, the Chicago organizer Emma Tai asked, when it has just “a little bit of power”? If anyone can appreciate the importance of that question, it’s Tai.

When I spoke to Tai about the left’s experiment in the Windy City, it had been two years since the teacher and union organizer Brandon Johnson

was inaugurated as mayor. After serving as executive director of United Working Families (UWF) for six years, Tai joined Johnson’s transition team in spring 2023.

The following year, she led the grassroots effort in support of the mayor’s signature Bring Chicago Home ballot initiative — a defeated referendum to raise the city’s real estate transfer tax on the very rich to fund affordable housing and services for the unhoused.

The UWF was founded in 2014 as a political arm of the city’s strong left-labor alliance, anchored by the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare. The organization spent the following decade building working-class electoral power and was instrumental in Johnson’s victory, putting a progressive Black organizer risen from the ranks of the city’s militant teachers’ union in the mayor’s office.

Tai believes the American left has become accustomed to being outside the halls of power, leaving it with an underdeveloped understanding of power. When Chicago organizers came face to face with this reality under Johnson — “that our power still is not enough to transform what we’d like,” as Asha Ransby-Sporn 

 in In These Times — it caused strained relationships and exhaustion among movement leaders.

Though Johnson’s administration has notched some gains for working Chicagoans, important initiatives like Bring Chicago Home failed in the face of an unrelenting opposition bankrolled by Chicago’s elite, leading to sagging popularity for the mayor.

Chicago organizers learned firsthand that having a friend in City Hall didn’t overturn the practical realities of power: structural limitations, like who has authority over taxing bodies and how the municipal bond market works, and financial burdens inherited from previous administrations, like pension debts and giveaway contracts to corporations.

Chicago is not the first to learn this lesson.

a socialist and leader of the separatist organization Republic of New Afrika,

won the mayoralty of the Black-majority city in 2013. He set out to fix the city’s long-neglected infrastructure and foster worker-ownership, as a step toward a “solidarity economy.”

But the city lacked revenue and was hindered by an openly hostile state government. Shortly before his death less than one year after taking office, he said in an interview with 

: “Our administration has very little more control over the economic realities of our society than we did before we got in these positions. We have some technical control over those things — or technical influence, let’s put it that way. But not real control.”

Nearly a decade later, with his son Chokwe Anwar Lumumba in office, the city’s water system broke down — the state had systematically rejected, withheld, or diverted the funding to fix it for years.

Zohran Mamdani and New York Assembly member Al Taylor participate in a paper-shredding event in Harlem, Oct. 5, 2025.

On its face, the economic reality of New York City couldn’t be more different. New York is home to hundreds of thousands of millionaires, countless billionaires among them.

The sleek glass skyscrapers of Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row” on 57th Street function as investment properties, standing largely empty for most of the year, while New York renters scramble to find housing in a market where vacancy rates are in the low single digits. The first task of a Mamdani administration will be to generate the funds needed for policies to confront the affordability crisis and much else. But while the wealthiest residents in the wealthiest city in the world can certainly afford to pay more taxes, only the governor and state legislature have the authority to change the tax code — and they can foil New York City’s plans.

The city’s last progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, confronted this while trying to fund his signature universal pre-K program.

The reality — as any radical, socialist, or even progressive mayor has learned — is that winning City Hall does not grant its occupant the reins of power. The landlord and corporate class still hold most of them. De Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have seemed all-powerful during his three terms, but this was because his agenda was the same as the city’s capitalist class. Zohran Mamdani will be, from day one, at odds with New York’s powerful elite, the state officials who have taxing authority, and the federal government, which can shut off tens of billions of dollars in funding that both the city and the state rely on.

As Jasmine Gripper, co-director of New York Working Families Party (WFP), explained, once the mayoral election is won, “We still have to have and run external campaigns that create the ecosystem and the pressure for those who hold the levers of power to help deliver on his agenda.”

Building the kind of external campaigns Gripper

envisions will require a clear assessment of the left’s relative strengths and weaknesses. DSA’s López told me that some of his comrades were eager to talk about lessons from the 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. “I was just a little bit taken back,” López said. “We’re not forming cordones,” he said, referring to organs of popular power formed by Chilean workers to defend themselves and Allende. “Taking over factories is not on the agenda.”

The New York left is in a different political moment. If Mamdani wins the general election, it will happen at a time when masses of people are rejecting Trump and the establishment Democrats who have refused to stand up to the right. But at the same time, the sustained organizing efforts and structures needed to engage that mass sentiment are largely underdeveloped. Organizations and coalitions will need to develop structures and mechanisms for democratic decision-making, so that newly activated New Yorkers can plug in in meaningful ways.

“An ideal,” DRUM’s Ahmed said, “would be if we could develop neighborhood-based organizing committees” out of the campaign’s neighborhood canvassing operations. “They could play this role of staying well-connected to the community, connected to the administration, and sort of being able to go in both directions.” But Ahmed emphasized that this was still an ideal, while pointing out the wide discrepancy between electoral campaigns and ongoing organizing efforts. “It’s one thing to knock on doors to mobilize people,” he said. “It’s another thing to actually know people behind those doors and know who they listen to or who they influence.”

That type of deep organizing could certainly receive a boost under a Mayor Mamdani. But in the near term, coordinating an inside-outside strategy will depend on the existing left and its ability to build effective coalitions and keep open lines of communication with City Hall.

amdani and the New York City chapter of DSA do have some experience in pushing successfully for progressive taxation. DSA’s 2021 campaign to tax the rich supported the work of Mamdani and other state legislators in Albany to increase taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations.

The budget, which passed despite opposition from Cuomo, then the governor, ended up raising almost $4 billion in revenue annually.

To build pressure on legislators, DSA organized mass canvassing throughout the city. Now the organization is gearing up for a similar effort.

The same method can be used to mobilize popular pressure for other Mamdani proposals, like child care for all and government-owned grocery stores. And the election campaign will provide a ready base. One canvasser I spoke to, Kareem Edmonds, described his evolution from doomscroller to regular canvasser for Mamdani to plugged-in politico. When I asked him what he’ll do next, he answered,

“We have an obligation to sharpen our fangs” to fight for the policies of the campaign. Whether thousands of newly activated voters like Edmonds can plug into future organizing will play a big part in shaping Mamdani’s and DSA’s future.

López is optimistic. “What NYC DSA does have right now is seven geographic branches that can act like little socialist local city halls, where people can tap in, understand the struggles and the challenges that Zohran is facing,” and see how all his agenda items “have to be supported by campaigns from below.” The goal will be for newly activated campaigners to learn about what is being proposed and then discuss what comes next. “There’s going to have to be constant feedback between Zohran’s office and those different campaigns,” López said.

Other organizations involved in the Mamdani coalition have their own means for bringing in and activating new supporters. For example, Ahmed says that DRUM has used a membership-oriented approach, involving its base in discussions and decision-making in campaigns. “With our members, we’re engaging the community institutions, the community leaders, ethnic media, ethnic organizations, faith institutions,” he said. They’re “finding who the organic leaders in the community are and being in spaces of social connection.”

But many other movement organizations don’t engage in the same practices. As Ahmed asked, how common is “deep, rigorous democratic engagement of the rank and file” among the groups and unions that endorsed Mamdani, “versus top-down decision-making,” versus just operating on the basis of what’s good for their particular organization?

Given this unevenness, political education will be all the more important to both grassroots mobilization and deepening public support. 

, during Mamdani’s first year as a State Assembly member, he told me that elected socialists need to be careful about creating a false sense of hope. “Preaching a gospel of abundance within conditions of austerity,” as he put it, requires being clear about the way the system works — or rather doesn’t work. In New York, like other cities, local and state government functions have been hollowed out by decades of negligence, austerity, and now a hostile federal government. “When we talk to our constituents, we try to be honest with them” about the political and systemic challenges, Mamdani said. “There are many obstacles that are unseen, and you need to know them. Because if you don’t connect the dots in politics, it seems like you can never achieve change. And that’s what they want you to think.”

Zohran Mamdani greets supporters in Harlem, Oct. 5, 2025.

s the coalition that supported the Mamdani campaign works to deepen the base of support for his policies, a more democratic vision of the city can emerge. For example, New York City DSA co-chair Grace Mausser

said that any gains Mamdani achieves toward an affordable city need to be accompanied by outreach and education to clarify where the changes are coming from — not for the purpose of winning praise but to drive home a political message: Government should be responsible for helping people live better lives.

In the era of Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE, that is a tall order, but an important one. “We’re talking about decades or more before anything truly economy-transforming happens,” Mausser reckoned. “But in the meantime, if we can improve the condition of working people’s lives, if we can increase people’s trust and belief in the government even a little bit, I think that puts us in a much better place than where we are right now, with a decent portion of Americans believing the government is corrupt and too big.”

During the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, democratic socialists in Milwaukee and dozens of smaller cities and towns showed that socialist governance could be good governance. More than 1,000 socialists were elected to mayor’s offices, local boards, and legislative bodies in municipalities across the country. The longest-serving socialist mayor of the era, Daniel Hoan of Milwaukee, was in office for 24 years.

 was forced to admit at the time that Hoan “remains one of the nation’s ablest public servants, and under him Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.” — despite Hoan counting “the city’s bankers, utilities men and big real estate owners his sworn enemies. The Press, except for a small Socialist sheet, is solidly against him. Republicans and Democrats have virtually lost their separate identities in uniting to oppose him.”

Of course, New York City is far larger and more complex than Milwaukee was during Hoan’s time. The learning curve for Mamdani and his supporters will be steep — but rich with possibilities. “I’ve been very impressed, but maybe also relieved, with the humility that I feel like a lot of folks are taking with this right now,” said David Turner, a DSA member and city worker. Having worked for two years at New York City’s Office of Labor Relations, Turner has been studying the workings of city government and how existing practices could be used or revised under a different administration. His conclusion: Within the structures of City Hall is a trove of tools for governing — “different knobs to turn and levers to pull and switches to flip,” he said. “We don’t need to just hit all of them at once, because there is a comical amount of options available.” To govern effectively, both Mamdani’s administration and its partners outside City Hall will need to learn which knob turns what, and which to turn when.

The smarter that the whole Mamdani coalition is about how the city works, the more effective it can be in transforming New York.

“A lot more people need to be involved in the nexus between an administration, movements, and communities,” Ahmed said. “Knowing how to weigh pressure from the inside, pressure from the outside, if we do this, what’s the impact and what’s the potential blowback.”

Building a democratic movement must also contend with the low level of civic engagement among the city’s roughly 8.5 million residents. Without that engagement, experiments in participatory democracy won’t necessarily lead to positive results. But organizations like

DRUM and DSA can organize their membership base to both deepen political education and expand the mayor’s support. Meanwhile, Mamdani can provide leadership, momentum, and concrete entry points for the movements. For example, New York City mayors have at their disposal the Office of Civic Engagement to reach constituents — along with departments that can hold community events and multiple offices to launch initiatives and projects.

Beyond this, the mayor can explicitly call on supporters to organize throughout the city — as Turner put it, to “flood the zone” of civic life and significantly increase engagement. Mamdani could encourage supporters to run for seats on school and community boards, which could help drive local policymaking and discussion. In the case of the Rent Guidelines Board (a body appointed by the mayor that decides on yearly rent increases), Mamdani could invite New Yorkers to show up to the board’s public meetings, turning this city structure into a space where the public engages its government. Turner recounted how his own City Council member, Chi Ossé, promoted a council hearing on the FARE Act, legislation he had proposed to outlaw landlords charging broker fees.

Hundreds of people showed up — and the act passed.

While much can be done from inside City Hall, building broader democratic institutions remains primarily a job for left organizations.

“I talk to so many city workers who just have so many ideas about how they would want their agency and their respective work to be done better,” Turner said. “Ideally, they would be able to voice a lot of this through their union, but their union has no interest and no desire to voice any of these concerns.” Movements for union democracy could make them more representative of their rank and file, Turner said.

Whether driven by unions or movements for racial and social justice, a left agenda is only as strong as the forces pushing for it. As Gripper put it, “I don’t want Zohran to sit on his own or sit with some of his folks and come up with ‘the Black agenda.’ This is our responsibility to create. It’s on us to create the agenda for our community.”

Building a truly popular governance in New York City is a long-term project. Mamdani’s tenure can go a long way toward providing leadership for that project, but he can’t do it single-handedly, nor should the left want him to. The movement for a truly popular democracy has to be grounded in the current reality of the left and labor movements. But the momentum from a Mamdani victory can simultaneously strengthen both the mayor’s agenda and the left.

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaking in Harlem, Oct. 5, 2025. Photographs by Christopher Lee for Hammer & Hope.

Zohran Got New Yorkers to Hope. What’s the Plan to Deliver?

 guess it’s gotten to me after all,” Russ Schafer conceded, gesturing toward his involuntarily shaking hand. Schafer, who requested a pseudonym in order to avoid workplace retaliation, has worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for more than 20 years. He’s trying to hold on to his job and refused “the fork” — the voluntary resignations pushed by the Trump administration in February, so-called because the subject line of the email to federal employees, “Fork in the Road,” was nearly the same as one sent to Twitter employees in 2022 by the company’s then-new owner, Elon Musk.

“I’m just unwilling to walk away from my work. It’ll take a much bigger bribe to get me to give up on that,” Schafer told me. He lamented that due to decreased funding and staffing at the EPA over the years, he is no longer able to initiate large-scale regulatory efforts or sustain long-term work on “big cases that didn’t generate beans,” as he had in the early days of his career. Nevertheless, Schafer said, “If I’m around and we decide to do something on some of the things I’m tracking that represent a huge environmental risk, I want to be there to do something.”

But tens of thousands of workers have found that neither refusing the fork nor having union and legal protections has shielded them from the mass layoffs. A slew of arcane and clinically termed “reductions in force” is tearing through government agencies. After about 76,000 fork resignations came the illegal terminations of thousands of probationary employees, followed by mass reductions in force wielded against entire offices and departments. The most brazen attack yet came via executive order in late March, putting an end to collective bargaining rights for at least a million federal employees.

The bloodbath at the Department of Health and Human Services, where some 10,000 employees were summarily let go without notice on April 1, bears the sudden and chaotic markings of what have by now become familiar refrains. Dozens of National Institutes of Health employees posted on Reddit: “17 years of service. Entire office let go”; “This was my dream job”; “devastated”; “Ten years of service, I worked my butt off”; “I have a headache that is throbbing. My coworkers and I broke down crying”; and on and on. Now much of the infrastructure, research, and services of the U.S. health system, already frail, are in danger of collapse.

The government is currently at war with what it has vilified as its own “bureaucracy,” in lockstep with Project 2025’s stated aims to outlaw public sector unions and rewrite decades of labor law. In a 2024 

, Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect and now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

With Donald Trump in the White House and his billionaire hatchet man, Musk, deployed, the implementation of Project 2025’s vision seems imminent. Trump is attempting the largest order of mass layoffs in U.S. history, eclipsing the worst instances of corporate job cuts. As the country’s largest employer, the government has over three million employees. Decimating this work force will have enormous knock-on effects, and hit those groups disproportionately represented — veterans and African Americans — hardest.

Despite Trump’s now-rote rhetoric about a ballooning and omnipotent deep state, he is waging war on an already diminished bureaucracy. For decades, the federal work force and the programs it delivers have been steadily eroded through incremental bipartisan clawbacks. Government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was relatively stable in the postwar years, but it began to dive in 1975, dropping from 23 percent to 17 percent today. Meanwhile, public sector workers as a percentage of the labor force have followed a similar decline. 

 among public workers continues to be much denser than among their private counterparts, but it also slipped to 25 percent as of last year, down from 30 percent in 1989.

At the same time, the labor movement has pivoted away from confrontational tactics, like strikes, workplace actions, and mass picketing, effectively tying its own hands in the face of attacks. Mark Smith, a 39-year-old occupational therapist with Veterans Affairs and president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1, told me that the federal sector has been like the proverbial frog sitting in a slowly warming pot of water, unaware that it’s being boiled to death. Federal unions and the public at large have allowed decades of underfunding, creeping privatization, and vilification of government employees to go largely unheeded.

But alongside likely historic defeats, stirrings from within the ranks of government employees are providing a spark of hope. As federal unions are engaged in necessary legal battles that may take months or years to wind through the courts, a scrappy but growing Federal Unionists Network has provided a fulcrum for rank-and-file members who don’t want to wait to resist.

What began in 2022 as an ad hoc group of fewer than two dozen union members has grown into an organization of hundreds of active members, a network of more than 15,000 workers, and a developing infrastructure to organize and train leaders within every federal union in the country, just at the moment when the warming pot is no longer tepid. As Smith noted, the executive branch has thrown a bomb into the pot, giving everyone an incentive to do something. The introduction of new forces onto the battleground might succeed in notching a few defensive wins in the present. Perhaps most important, it has the potential to lay the groundwork for a more potent labor movement in the years to come.

As Paul Osadebe, a union steward at American Federation of Government Employees Local 476 and a FUN leader, put it to a couple of thousand federal workers on an emergency organizing call: “There’s no one who’s going to come in and save us at the end of all of this. But you do have the power to save yourself.” Organizing, he explained, is “not some specialized thing. It’s not something that other people do. It’s something that you can do.”

’ve been eating a lot of egg tacos,” Jasmine McAllister laughed, as she explained the daily realities of organizing while unemployed. “I'm spending my energy doing this.” She pointed to the picket of federal workers behind us at New York City’s Federal Plaza. “And trying to remember to pet my cat and see my husband and stuff.” It was just a month before that McAllister had received a termination notice to her personal email, addressed to “[EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName],” the product of a failed mail merge. She was among dozens of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau probationary employees who received identical emails on Feb. 11, part of the first wave of terminations aimed at probationary employees. Two months later, nearly the entire agency was laid off in a legally contested reduction in force.

But within an hour of receiving the email, fired workers got on a video call. “We got fired at 9 p.m.,” she told me. “Ten p.m. we’re like, OK, let’s get out there tomorrow.” By noon they had almost 100 people assembled in downtown Manhattan. McAllister and her co-workers had seen the writing on the wall and had been talking for weeks. That first picket included just CFPB employees. But after a FUN-initiated national day of action on Feb. 19, McAllister and others connected with the network, and through it met workers at other agencies. Their pickets became multi-agency, drawing on the alphabet soup of federal agencies from the SEC to the EPA to the FTC and others.

The organizers who founded FUN first got to know each other in 2022 through a campaign initiated by Chris Dols, president of Local 98 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Dols and a handful of others sought to pressure Congress to confirm President Joe Biden’s Federal Labor Relations Authority nominees. The FLRA governs federal labor relations (as the National Labor Relations Board does for the private sector) but was still controlled by Trump nominees during Biden’s tenure, despite a Democratic majority in Congress. Had Congress pushed to confirm Biden’s nominees, it would have ensured a more union-friendly board. And more important, the campaign’s organizers asserted in a Labor Notes op-ed, the process of campaigning for Biden’s nominees, regardless of whether it was successful, could be a stepping stone to “cohere a national cohort of the next generation of government union leaders — and the years ahead could be full of experiments in creative, local- and member-led federal unionism.”

That’s how Mark Smith first got pulled into the future FUN’s orbit. Dols was making cold calls, reaching out to contacts at union locals around the country about the FLRA campaign. “He just called and said, ‘Hey, how’s it going in your local?’” Smith recalled. And then, Smith explained, Dols just listened. “Classic good organizer, right? And I told him all the problems and all my frustrations and how you feel sort of isolated and under-resourced.” Smith added, “He listened and I talked a lot, and then he talked about this campaign and how I could get involved in it.”

In the end, their campaign did not succeed. Neither did a 2024 run for the national IFPTE executive board by Dols and fellow FUN leader Colin Smalley. But both campaigns highlighted the need to prepare for a future Republican offensive and likely Democratic inaction, and both built networks and organizing infrastructure. “We said it again and again in the campaign,” Dols told me. “We don’t know if it’ll be in one year or in five years or in nine years, but there will be another Republican administration, and they are going to declare war on the federal sector.”

y the time Trump was re-elected in November 2024, FUN had almost 200 members and was growing rapidly. The network’s numbers might have accounted for a tiny fraction of the more than a million federal union members, but as government workers, they had a lot of experience getting things done with few resources. FUN managed to draw thousands of feds, as they call themselves, to more than 20 towns and cities around the country during its Feb. 19 national day of action. The event got a lot of media coverage and made a big splash within the labor movement and among progressive groups. It positioned FUN’s membership as people ready to fight just as “everybody was finally realizing we need to actually fight,” as Dols put it. It would not be enough, he continued, to “keep our head down and hope they just don’t come for us.”

In the weeks that followed, as word spread about the day of action, FUN continued its outreach work, and national unions and progressive organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible promoted the network. FUN has now reached a spread that roughly corresponds with the geographic diversity of the federal sector itself, its numbers have surpassed 15,000, and mass calls — some of which have featured leaders from the national federal unions, alongside AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and other private sector leaders — have drawn thousands more.

At the heart of FUN’s organizing strategy is what the labor activist and academic Eric Blanc calls “worker-to-worker organizing.” Blanc has argued that if unions hope to turn around labor’s decline, they will need to shift away from top-down, staff-driven approaches. Instead, worker-leaders can be recruited and developed, and can themselves strategize on the ground, gain information and experience, and bring in others to do the same. FUN is raising money and bringing on staff members with experience in this sort of organizing. At town hall meetings of federal workers and on organizing calls, FUN activists break down how to talk to co-workers about organizing. Rank-and-file members share stories about how they organized rallies and actions at their locals, many for the first time in their lives. One union member in Utah — highlighting how little he knew about where to begin — recalled using ChatGPT to come up with a rally agenda. Another union member in Seattle had helped organize science fiction conventions in the past but had never been involved in labor organizing. But in 2025 she and a group of other workers connected through the FUN planned happy hours that became organizing centers for large protests. With this type of organizing, the labor movement can extend its outreach beyond what small numbers of union staffers can reasonably be expected to do around the country.

The ideas that drove the formation of FUN — creative initiatives, a rank-and-file organizing model, and the need for networks and solidarity across the many unions and agencies that make up the federal work force — are critical not only to combat Trump’s charge but also to challenge decades of actions against federal employees and services. Federal workers have never had the same rights as workers in the private sector, and have been villainized by both mainstream parties and numerous administrations. This history created the conditions that allowed the current attacks to happen.

he country’s defining labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, left federal employees out of the guarantees that were recognized for other workers: the ability to negotiate and strike over wages, hours, and conditions of employment. It wasn’t until 1962 that federal unions were even recognized, via an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. This recognition was only enshrined into law in 1978 via the Civil Service Reform Act.

But the CSRA guarantees a scope of bargaining only over conditions of employment, while denying federal workers the right to negotiate over pay and benefits. Public sector unions are also required to operate in an “open shop” environment, meaning that although the union must fairly represent all employees, those employees are not automatically dues-paying union members. Government employees had already been denied the right to strike in previous legislation, and are even prohibited from “asserting” the right to strike.

In what became a defining moment for federal workers and the labor movement at large, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. As members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the air traffic controllers made aggressive demands regarding pay and workplace conditions, and they explicitly challenged the illegality of strike actions.

But when Reagan fired the workers and decertified the union, PATCO found itself isolated from the rest of the labor movement and unable to win mass public support. PATCO became synonymous with labor’s historic defeat in the neoliberal era. In signaling to American businesses that it was time to pursue a no-holds-barred strikebreaking offensive against unions, Reagan forced a final nail into the coffin of labor’s retreat — in both the public and private sectors. Greyhound, Bridgestone/Firestone, and other large private companies took their cue from the White House and permanently replaced their unionized striking workers.

The labor movement had been on the ascendancy in the 1960s and ’70s. But after breaking PATCO and with the help of the Federal Reserve, which unleashed high unemployment and an engineered recession, the government was able to effectively suppress union militancy by the 1980s. Union membership steeply declined, and confrontational tactics like strikes were all but retired in the decades that followed. By the turn of the 21st century labor had pivoted to lobbying, legal actions, and an overall defensive, risk-averse posture. In exchange for relative labor peace, bosses were willing to provide modest wage and benefit increases. Unions chugged along, amassing dues and maintaining their own financial health.

Nowhere has this social contract been clearer than in the public sector, where the government offered long-term stability for workers who managed to get into that work force. In exchange, they whittled back funding and increased subcontracting with little resistance, while union leaders largely treated politicians as allies to lobby rather than bosses.

Federal sector locals, Smith told me, “are notoriously sleepy and moribund. There are hundreds of dead locals that were chartered at some point but have no officers or meetings. They just don’t exist. They’re there technically, but there’s no activity.” When Smith first became a shop steward at his local, he found that nobody was talking about the union, and many didn’t know they had a contract or what a union is. “It just sort of felt to me like we could be doing so much more. We have all of these incredibly talented and smart and hardworking clinical staff and health care workers who are just untapped.”

The problem is largely structural. In addition to the legal constraints enforced upon federal unions, the government work force is also fragmented across agencies and unions. The “traditional model of well-defined jurisdictions and unions that avoid stepping on each other’s toes,” Smalley argued in a recent 

, “that can be really counterproductive to building sectoral power in the federal government.”

In response, and in the context of a broadly more passive and disorganized labor movement, federal unions have fallen mostly into a service model of unionism. In negotiations they have emphasized a model of bargaining for the “impact and implementation” of items that have been deemed outside of their purview. They can negotiate over the procedures and processes by which changes are implemented, but not the changes themselves. Absent a vision for how to push against those boundaries — whether that’s through political fights to change the terms of what is negotiable or through creative actions that find adaptable ways to organize within the realm of permissibility — unions are consigned to accepting the rollback of working conditions.

Smith recounted examples of multibillion-dollar contracts to outsource nursing and other jobs in Veterans Affairs. Bargaining over impact and implementation seems woefully insufficient in response. “And then we’ll just quietly go on our way?” Smith asked. “And I’m sort of thinking to myself: That’s it? We’re not gonna take some kind of action or at least talk to the people affected by these decisions, use our union platform as a bully pulpit to raise these issues to the public?”

Trump is attempting to deliver a greater public flogging to the U.S. labor movement than even Reagan’s historic firing of air traffic controllers managed to achieve. He is also operating with few of the niceties that Reagan skillfully weaved into his assault to build public support. Reagan framed the PATCO strike as an act of greedy insubordination and successfully isolated the union. The air traffic controllers, for their part, were militant and confident, but in overestimating their own strength they did little to build public support or practical solidarity from other wings of the labor movement. According to a 1981 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approved of Reagan’s firings, while 30 percent disapproved. More than two-thirds thought air traffic controllers shouldn’t be allowed to strike.

Trump’s March 27 order to end collective bargaining rights for most federal employees, on the other hand, emphasized the president’s individual political agenda. He openly targets unions for “fighting back” against him, filing numerous grievances and obstructing his efforts rather than working with him. He indicated that he will pursue “constructive partnerships with unions who work with” him — that is, those who acquiesce to his agenda. Where Reagan sought legal directives and the support of public sentiment to fuel his right-wing backlash, Trump is using executive orders to confuse and demoralize his opposition.

But federal workers today are much more popular than either Trump or Musk. According to a 

, half of the registered voters surveyed view federal workers positively, while 21 percent view them negatively. The reverse is true of Musk, with 51 percent holding negative views of him and 39 percent positive. Unions, meanwhile, remain the most trusted institutions left in this country. According to an August 2024 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, far higher than approval ratings for the president, Congress, big business, and the media.

Many people believe the public sector should be doing more, not less. This sentiment is likely to grow as more people feel the direct impact of the attacks. Twenty-seven percent of NBC’s March poll respondents said that they or someone they know had “been negatively impacted by reductions or cuts to federal benefits, programs, or services as a result of changes enacted by DOGE,” and another 14 percent said they or someone they know is a federal employee who had been laid off as a result of DOGE’s attacks.

By taking aim at the whole of public services and government jobs, the Trump-Musk-Vought troika is targeting public services that millions of people depend on: Social Security, veterans’ medical facilities, public lands, and post offices. But the jobs themselves are just as popular. For millions of people, getting a government job has meant that you “made it” — a chance for lifelong work, security, good benefits, and dignity — contributing toward the public good. “Elon Musk and all these billionaires,” McAllister put it, “are like cartoon evil characters of what an evil boss is like. They want people to work at factories and tech workers working 80 hours a week to optimize different things stealing our attention.” They’re trying to create an environment, she explained, to undermine workers’ high expectations of what a job should provide. “The idea that you can have a job where you’re helping people and you have a stable life with normal, humane hours — just the idea that’s the type of job that can exist is very threatening to them.”

Because the government faces public scrutiny and accountability in ways that the private sector rarely has, it has been pushed to use its own hiring practices to chip away at the country’s cavernous racial wealth gap. Today, nearly one in five federal workers are Black, and while it is far from true to claim that government work has equalized the racial wealth gap, it has provided an island of economic security to hundreds of thousands of Black families. A 2020 paper by the Center for American Progress found that the median Black households headed by private sector workers held less than 10 percent of the wealth of their median white counterparts. In the public sector, Black median household wealth climbed to 37 percent of that held by white families. Public sector jobs have provided Black workers — along with women and other constituencies facing persistent labor market discrimination — a ladder into the middle class.

When I spoke with Sam Kerns, a lifelong public employee close to retirement, he reminded me that Vought is now effectively the boss of all federal employees. “I don’t know if his definition of a bureaucrat includes employees like me or if, in his mind, a bureaucrat is a particular type of federal employee,” Kerns said, “but he was already committed to bringing trauma into the lives of federal employees before he was nominated and approved to be the director of the human resources arm of the federal government.”

Kerns, an African American man who grew up in South Carolina, first got his foot through the door of the federal sector in 1977. He spent a year at a junior college, then transferred to Clemson University after receiving a scholarship that aimed to increase the representation of women and minorities in engineering and the sciences. At Clemson as a chemical engineering major, he participated in a cooperative education program, one of many that the federal government had heavily invested in to help underrepresented students get paid work experience and college credits while doing work related to their field of study. While on assignment, students had the opportunity to see if their majors suited them in the real world. They were also given access to experiences and relationships that could set them on a clear career path.

Kerns was assigned to work at the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal–era federally owned electric utility corporation. “That’s how my federal career began when I was still in college,” he said. Ten years later, while still working at TVA, he got a fellowship that funded a postgraduate degree in environmental science and management. He was assigned a job at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and eventually settled into decades of work at the EPA’s hazardous waste program. He proudly explained his role to me as ensuring that businesses that generate, store, or dispose of hazardous waste comply with safety regulations for the sake of public health.

rump may be overplaying his hand. We’re still early in the battle, and federal workers are just one part of a deepening and widening opposition to the systematic dismantling of government services and democratic rights. Anti-Trump protests in 2025 began smaller than the mass marches we saw at the start of his first term in 2017, but they’re growing. Organizers said that millions of people flooded the streets on April 5 at more than 1,200 locations across all 50 states, organized by more than 150 groups. And as Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam from the Crowd Counting Consortium 

, even apart from the size, protests are far more numerous, frequent, and strategically confrontational than those eight years ago.

So far, the scrappy but growing unionists network FUN has succeeded at tapping into the anger and desire to organize that is surfacing all about. The numbers and political power necessary to stop Trump’s attacks will require the group to scale up as quickly as possible. It will also require union leaders in both the public and private sectors to continue to support FUN’s efforts, and even more so to call out the kinds of numbers that they’re capable of mobilizing. Thus far the rallies and even mass protests have seen rank-and-file and local union turnout but not mass union mobilizations. Union leaders can also use their connections to pressure Democratic politicians to deploy the vast resources at their disposal — money, lists, campaign tools — to mobilize constituents as well, and to do so in support of congressional actions that throw sand in the gears and threaten to shut down the government if necessary. Both Democrats and union leaders could take inspiration from FUN — or from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and hold mass town halls in every county in the country. The left more broadly must also build practical solidarity between communities affected by shattered public services and institutions.

The federal work force, like much of the country, is in a do-or-die moment. As Osadebe put it, “When you take collective actions, you can build the power to stop everything that's happening and create a crisis for the administration. Because they think they can just act towards us, and we’re just going to sit here and take it.” But, he added,“ I’m not going to take it, and I know you out there are not going to take it, either.”

A demonstrator outside the Department of Labor headquarters in Washington, D.C., April 14, 2025. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

A Spark of Hope From Scrappy Federal Workers

had been buzzing in the days leading up to the May 19 Illinois presidential primary with discussions about how to vote. Word spread of an effort urging those eager to protest Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel — which included many people in Cook County, home to the largest population of Palestinian Americans in the country — to participate in a write-in campaign, casting a ballot for “Gaza” rather than the incumbent president or any of his challengers. Jimmy Rothschild, an organizer with progressive Jewish groups in Chicago, told me, “The collective was moving towards this feeling of, I’m not ticking the Joe box.” By the end of the day,

more than 67,000 Cook County Democratic voters refused to choose between the candidates on offer. (How many wrote in “Gaza” or something else, or had simply left their ballots blank, is impossible to know because Illinois doesn’t count write-ins and blanks.) In Chicago, almost one in four Democratic voters rejected the incumbent, dubbed by the movement for Palestine as “Genocide Joe.”

Chicago-based activists had learned from a similar campaign organized in the state next door, Listen to Michigan, that pushed for “uncommitted” primary votes — a more unambiguous protest vote, since those votes are tallied by local election boards. Democratic primary voters in nearly half of the country can cast a no-confidence vote that is “uncommitted,” “uninstructed,” or a similar designation. The Listen to Michigan coalition tapped progressive networks and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to hand out fliers, call and text voters, and organize rallies at college campuses alongside student activists. The campaign won more than 101,000 votes, about 13 percent of all votes cast in the state’s Democratic primary.

To organizers’ surprise, they even won two delegates to the convention.

In Dearborn, the first U.S. city with an Arab American majority, and Hamtramck, the first majority-Muslim U.S. city,

“uncommitted” votes outnumbered those cast for Biden. But when polling locations closed in Michigan on Feb. 27, the first numbers to roll in came out of Macomb, Washtenaw, and Oakland, which includes one of the country’s largest Jewish populations.

The votes from these counties more than tripled Listen to Michigan’s goal of 10,000 votes. For many Arabs and Muslims, the war was at the forefront, but so too for many progressive Jews, students, people of color, and other core parts of the Democratic base. Rothschild explained, “Between myself and a lot of the people who I organize with, it is very close to the top of the list, if not the top of the list, of driving concerns.” Layla Elabed,

Listen to Michigan’s campaign manager, told me she was on the phone with her sister, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, when the numbers started coming in: “It was such an emotional time. I don’t want to cry about it.” She continued, “But we were able to accomplish something that I don’t think anybody expected us to accomplish.”

When I met with Elabed in May, she described her path to the Uncommitted campaign as rooted in her experience as a lifelong Democrat. Elabed’s father was a Palestinian immigrant who worked on the Ford Motors assembly line outside Detroit, a proud member of the United Auto Workers. Through him, Elabed and her siblings learned the importance of voting, of engaging in politics and doing so through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, which her father had taught “provided me and my community a voice at the table.” She has been volunteering and working in local politics since she was 12.

Last year Elabed had been organizing against utility rate hikes and power outages in Detroit. But after Oct. 7, it became hard, she told me, “to have conversations about holding our utility company accountable and not recognize that we need to talk about what’s happening to Palestinians.” In house meetings organized to talk about the energy company, the conversations just kept coming back to Gaza. She said that people were asking, “What do we do in November? How can we vote for somebody like Joe Biden who’s complicit in this genocide, but we can’t vote for Trump?” Many people were feeling deep disillusionment with electoral politics, betrayed by the Democratic Party, and saying that they would not vote come November. In those conversations, Elabed recounted, she would respond, “We cannot do that. We cannot have that be the way we’re going to build any power. This is not the way that we can actually accomplish anything for Palestinians.”

In the weeks that followed, Listen to Michigan gave rise to an Uncommitted National Movement. In nine states, those complaints received over 10 percent of the vote.

Nearly a fifth of primary votes in Minnesota went uncommitted, sending 11 more delegates to the DNC. Another 29 percent voted uncommitted in Hawaii,

and in Wisconsin a similar “uninstructed” vote totaled more than twice Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the state in 2020.

Elabed believed that she and other leaders of Uncommitted were doing “the most democratic thing that we could ever do” by making their voices heard in the ballot box. They were not naïve about the ability to shift the Democratic Party’s leadership in the short term, but with hundreds of thousands of votes registered as uncommitted, they felt the wind at their backs — even more so after Biden stepped down as the party’s nominee and Harris initially exhibited a more open posture toward the Palestine movement. Some Democratic Party insiders thought that the current morass might be tied to Biden’s personal commitments and ideology. Tariq Habash — the second Biden administration official to resign over its Gaza policy and a supporter of Uncommitted —

told me in August that based on private conversations, he concluded that it seems “like there is a willingness to actually address the failed policies” by the vice president and those around her.

The unexpected win of 30 Democratic delegates positioned Uncommitted organizers to orient the next phase of their movement around Cook County, where the Democratic Convention was scheduled to convene at the end of the summer. Uncommitted activists took their inspiration from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention, which sought to force the Democratic Party to commit to desegregation. The Uncommitted organizers developed two central goals. The first objective was to cut through the “pomp and circumstance” of the convention and to make sure that not a day of the DNC went by where Gaza went unmentioned by the media or inside the United Center. The second was to engage Democratic Party loyalists at the convention and create pathways for them into the movement, building a stronger coalition of forces that could push the party from within to cut aid to Israel.

Uncommitted delegates hold a press conference outside the United Center before the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Aug. 22, 2024. AP Photo/Matt Rourke.

The Uncommitted delegation and supporters spent every day talking to other delegates, like the MFDP activists who had lobbied delegates day and night to win over sympathizers at the 1964 DNC. Uncommitted succeeded in

who were pledged to nominate Harris to sign a letter urging the vice president to promise an arms embargo and support a permanent cease-fire.

Some Harris delegates took shirts, pins, or “Democrats for Palestinian Rights” keffiyeh-patterned scarfs, and many said encouraging words to the uncommitted delegates.

“I didn’t meet any delegates who agreed with what Israel was doing,” Daniel Denvir, the host of The Dig podcast and the alternate Uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island, told me. “Not one, zero.”

Instead delegates’ views ranged from those who signed the letter and those who agreed but were unwilling to take a political risk to sign on to those who mistakenly believed that Biden and Harris were already doing as much as they could do to end the war.

The Uncommitted delegation also made a related, lesser ask: for a Palestinian American to be given a two-minute speaking slot. They engaged in weeks of negotiations with the party leadership, which waited until the penultimate night of the convention to answer no — the grim horrors ongoing for nearly a year in Gaza were not meant to ruin the “joy” and “unity” vibes ringing through the convention. Uncommitted responded with a sit-in on the pavement outside the

that recalled the MFDP’s convention protests 60 years ago, after the Democratic Party leadership continued to side with the racist, all-white Mississippi delegation, fearing that drifting from the status quo would dampen Dixiecrat turnout in November. Like today’s party leadership who ignored and silenced pro-peace voices, Lyndon B. Johnson characterized the 1964 convention as “a place of happy, surging crowds and thundering cheers” in his memoir. The “display of unity” he described did not include the freedom delegation.

Hammer&Hope

Hadas Thier

@HadasThier

Contributions

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11

Inside the Nationwide Resistance to the ICE Invasions

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8

Zohran Got New Yorkers to Hope. What’s the Plan to Deliver?

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6

A Spark of Hope From Scrappy Federal Workers

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5

Can the Uncommitted Movement Realign the Democratic Party?

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4

Who’s Afraid of the Student Intifada?

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3

The New Movement for Palestine

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TO READ

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TODAY

Hadas Thier

@HadasThier

Contributions

Issue

11

Inside the Nationwide Resistance to the ICE Invasions

Issue

8

Zohran Got New Yorkers to Hope. What’s the Plan to Deliver?

Issue

6

A Spark of Hope From Scrappy Federal Workers

Issue

5

Can the Uncommitted Movement Realign the Democratic Party?

Issue

4

Who’s Afraid of the Student Intifada?

Issue

3

The New Movement for Palestine

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

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TODAY