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

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the 

eith Turner is baffled when he hears rosy news reports about the economy. “Are we living in two different worlds?” said the 53-year-old New Yorker and father of three.

In Turner’s world, the economic picture is grim and getting worse. Inflation has supposedly cooled, but the shockingly high prices of the past few years remain, putting a strain on the budgets of even middle-income households. Unemployment hovers around 4 percent, but the official statistics don’t count millions of people who don’t have work. The Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies to pay for the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts for the rich have led to skyrocketing health care costs that are swelling the ranks of the uninsured.

And the worst is still to come: In October, billions of dollars’ worth of expenses from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will be shifted to the states, leading to further cuts and the possible elimination of food stamps altogether in some places. Onerous new work requirements for Medicaid recipients go into effect on Dec. 31. And with no end in sight for Trump’s war on Iran and erratic tariff threats, prices will only keep going up, especially for essential goods like gas and food.

As always in the United States, Black people have been hit the hardest. According to a 2024 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, 63 percent of Black households reported having difficulty paying bills or expenses, far higher than the overall rate of 43 percent. A 2022 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56 percent of Black people have health care debt, compared with 37 percent of whites. In 2025, the percentage of Black American men aged 25 to 54 who were employed was under 80 percent, compared with an employment rate of nearly 90 percent for white, Latino, and Asian American men in the same age range.

As of July, Turner is one of the unlucky Black men on the wrong side of that statistic. He had been providing the bulk of the income for his family of five. His wife, ZuShanna Turner, had worked as a teacher before the couple had children, but they decided that the high cost of child care made it impractical for both to continue in their jobs. So ZuShanna stayed home, working remotely part-time as a mental health counselor and taking care of their three kids, while Keith remained the primary breadwinner.

That all came to a screeching halt one day this summer. After working for 14 years in the Major League Baseball marketing department, eventually earning a salary of just over $100,000, he had his job eliminated in July. “It was totally unexpected,” he explained. “It’s kind of like before you step onto the street, and you look both ways, and there are no cars anywhere for blocks, and you’re just walking, and out of nowhere, you get hit.” The first few weeks, he said, were like going through the stages of grief. “I’m still dealing with it,” he said. “It’s this anxious feeling I get in the morning, and that’s what wakes me up.”

Turner had hoped to stay in his position until retiring but is instead facing a saturated job market and the new AI-driven realities of the search for work. For now, the Turners are surviving off Keith’s severance package, which will last him until February. After that, the future is unclear. He said, “The kids ask me, ‘Dad, you got a new job?’ ‘No, still looking.’ ‘Where you going to work?’”

Meanwhile, the mainstream media insists that “the American economy has been surprisingly resilient,” as the Associated Press put it in July. “The job market has bounced back this year from a lackluster 2025, giving consumers the wherewithal to spend.” Puzzled analysts acknowledge the widespread feelings of financial anxiety but attribute them to a “vibecession.”

Maybe the analysts should spend some time with Keith Turner in the world that the vast majority of Black people in the United States live in: a world of precarity and fear, where you scramble to get by in the best of times and suffer in the worst of them.

he symptom of economic distress most likely to be acknowledged by political leaders, even Republicans, is higher prices. Inflation hit a four-decade high in 2022, peaking at 9.1 percent in June of that year, and while the inflation rate has gone down, the higher prices haven’t. But the statistics alone don’t convey how lower-income families, especially lower-income families of color, have borne the brunt of the affordability crisis.

Lower-income families spend a much larger portion of their income on necessities, and the prices of these goods and services have risen faster than others and stayed higher. The average price of ground beef nearly doubled from its pre-pandemic price of $3.86 per pound to $6.92 in August. Milk has gone from $3.19 to $4.23 per gallon and eggs from $1.53 to $2.27 per dozen. Average electricity bills have jumped from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour to 20 cents and will only increase further as AI data centers continue their sprawl. And of course, Americans are being hit hard at the pump, with average gas prices shooting past $4 per gallon.

The burden of these higher prices falls heavier on Black and Latino families not only because they are disproportionately represented among lower-income Americans but because of other factors, such as the food deserts of impoverished urban neighborhoods that relegate residents to shopping at smaller corner stores because supermarkets that often have lower prices are so hard to access.

Those burdens are no easier to bear in smaller cities like Jackson, Miss. Brooke Floyd, a mother of two who works at the People’s Advocacy Institute, a social justice organization in Jackson, said that families in her city have seen “every single bill” rise: groceries, mortgages and rents, insurance, and especially utilities. Longstanding problems with Jackson’s water system, including the botched installation of electronic water meters by the tech giant Siemens, have led to residents receiving erroneous water bills that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. “They say you need to get on a payment plan, but I’m like

” Floyd said. “I don’t have it.” One apartment complex, she said, had its water shut off completely because the water bills weren’t paid. “It’s scary,” she said. “I don’t know how families are making it right now.” She continued, “It does make me think when I’m lying in bed at night, 

Floyd’s question is all the more urgent in the face of the Trump administration’s assault on federal programs to combat hunger and malnutrition. The Big Beautiful Bill included the largest funding cut to food assistance in history: $186 billion. Black Americans are already three times more likely to experience food insecurity than white Americans, according to a Federal Reserve study.

The hunger gap will only grow worse as more Black people go through what Cortlin Harrison has. Harrison was born and raised in Buffalo. His father served in the military and afterward got a job in the federal government, working with veterans. His work in the public sector afforded the family relative stability and allowed Harrison and his brothers to pursue higher education. Harrison spent two years at Niagara County Community College before leaving school and getting a job at Starbucks, where he got into union organizing. He later worked as a housing organizer, making about $55,000 a year. But for the past several months, he has been unemployed and has had to adjust his budget and his diet.

“Food is really expensive; transportation is really expensive. It’s just all super expensive,” Harrison told me. “What I would get for $100 now probably costs, like, $150.” Without a job and with the price of food rising — “Yeah, thanks, Trump,” he said — some groceries like meat were now out of reach. Harrison also lost access to food stamps because of new federal work reporting requirements. Unable to afford rising bills and rent, he moved back in with his parents. “But it’s tough on them,” he explained, “because it’s already expensive for them to afford to live for themselves, so they can’t pay for any of my expenses.”

areem Edmonds is used to people telling him that unemployment isn’t his fault. “People will say, 

,” Edmonds told me. “And they’re right. But that’s not changing the fact that we have to play with the hand we’re dealt.”

Sitting in the backyard of a Brooklyn, N.Y., cafe in August, Edmonds’s deflated demeanor was a stark contrast to how I remembered him when we first met last summer. Edmonds, a 31-year-old son of Afro-Guyanese immigrants, had been bubbling over with enthusiasm after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. But in the weeks before we met again, he had lost his part-time job at a private school offering technology classes — and along with it the modest $18-an-hour wage that had kept him afloat. Because his hours had been reduced first, Edmonds was already taking money out of his savings and retirement to pay his bills. But he had worked hard to try to keep his job as he watched the school downsize. “It was such a blow to me,” he said. “I was actively trying to avoid that outcome for years, and it finally happened.”

Edmonds isn’t alone. The official unemployment rate, which has ranged from 4 percent to 4.5 percent recently, doesn’t sound that bad. But the government’s main jobless statistics leave out so-called discouraged workers who are not actively looking for jobs, as well as underemployed workers who need more hours to make ends meet. A recent analysis by the National Jobs for All Network that took account of discouraged and underemployed workers put the real unemployment rate closer to 10 percent.

To understand the full picture, the sociologist Algernon Austin emphasizes the importance of looking at employment rates — the share of the working-age population with a job. By this measure, Black men lag behind white, Latino, and Asian American men. But Austin points out that structural inequality is clear even from the official jobless statistics, which showed Black unemployment surging above 8 percent in November 2025. “If white America faced Black America’s unemployment rate,” Austin said, “they would be saying,

Kearni Warren, a longtime community advocate against environmental racism in Chester, Pa., in front of a waste incinerator located in her hometown, Sept. 15, 2026. Photograph by Ruddy Roye for Hammer & Hope.

Once you lose a job, finding new work is tough — and in an economy where they have historically been the “last hired, first fired,” Black people face even greater challenges. Kearni Warren worked for years at nonprofit and advocacy groups organizing around issues of environmental racism in Chester, Pa., where she was born and raised. A lifetime spent in the predominantly Black city of about 30,000 people had taught her an unwelcome lesson in structural racism. The city is home to the country’s largest waste incinerator, and its public water authority is facing a private company’s hostile takeover attempt. Household income is about half the national average, and the 3 in 10 people living in poverty is almost three times the national average.

In 2024, Warren left her job. She had been working for an organization that prided itself on being Black-led; her bosses often brought her in to meet with funders to project an image of diversity. But behind the scenes, she said, she was being undermined and mistreated by supervisors. She decided to leave her position rather than endure a work environment she considered toxic. Warren spent 18 months out of work, trying to stretch about $2,000 a month in unemployment benefits to make car and mortgage payments that totaled about $1,200 per month. She received food stamps but got no help with electricity bills, which averaged about $300 a month, because her unemployment benefits were too high an income to qualify for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. “Thank God for family members who supported me during that whole time, but it does affect your self-esteem,” she said of her time struggling to pay the bills while searching for new work. “It gets to a point where you don’t even want to look at your rejection letters.”

“It’s a job, interviewing, because you have to study these companies,” Warren said. “You have to practice. You have to show up when you’re feeling defeated. You have to show up and put on a positive and confident demeanor.” And that was on top of almost daily virtual meetings to prove that she was looking for a job in order to maintain food stamp benefits. “It’s a host of emotions that are taking place when you’re unemployed for so long,” Warren said. “You wonder if it’s ever going to end. You know, you just feel really, really, really down. You kind of watch life pass you by.”

As Warren struggled to find work, she tried using her middle name and a postal code from a more affluent, predominantly white suburb on her résumés — in response to what she believed to be greater hostility toward Black and brown job applicants resulting from the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on DEI initiatives and other anti-discrimination measures. “That was a really kind of stressful time,” she said, "not knowing what they were going to do to those of us who are working in environmental justice.” Warren said the job search became “very stressful because I have a unique name.” She continued, “When you’re doing these interviews, you don’t know if they’re screening you. You don’t know why you’re not getting a job. You think that you do very well, then you don’t get a callback. I went for about a year without even getting an interview. And then finally I started getting interviews, but I wasn’t getting hired.”

Thirty miles north of Chester, in Upper Providence Township, Tonita Austin recounted a similar experience. She told me that she has been working in accounting for 30 years and never had a problem finding work before — whether part-time or full-time, whatever was necessary to support her two children as a single mom. She is now 61 and still supports her children, 19 and 25, who have autism and ADHD. But now Austin has been unemployed for a year. Over the course of the last year, Austin has had to use about $16,000 from her savings and retirement accounts, nearly draining both. She has had to go to food pantries and is considering selling her home. Her daughter lost Medicaid benefits as well as the outpatient psychiatric support she used to receive at the Crozer-Chester Medical Center, now closed. Her son, working part-time at McDonald’s, is also uninsured. Austin’s blood pressure has been rising. “It’d be different if it was just myself that I had to worry about,” she said. “You’re always scrambling to try to find something to keep the lights on, to find a job that either isn’t out here anymore, or you’re just not the right color.”

Black women have fared the worst in the job market, suffering the greatest losses in employment compared with other demographics. According to a 2026 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the job losses for Black women were driven almost entirely by layoffs in the public sector: “Large employment losses and labor force departures among college graduates were a direct consequence of the Trump administration implementing massive federal layoffs and buyouts over the last year, a sector where nearly half of Black workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher.” ZuShanna Turner said she has “a lot of friends that are in limbo” because of the large number of layoffs. She said her friends tell her, “

Please pray for me because my job is saying this

. And these are women with degrees, with experience in the business for 20 years.”

Job losses among experienced workers have knock-on effects when new college graduates try to compete for a shrinking pool of positions. The young Black workers I spoke to reported that the entry-level jobs they have applied for are often filled by overqualified applicants. Edmonds, for example, has been looking for design work, the career he spent years in college trying to get into. “I came in the game too late,” he said. “There are senior designers that are taking junior design positions. And now with the advent of AI, it’s a whole other ballgame.”

Warren, a college graduate with years of work experience, finally landed a retail job at a department store in June. “It’s a pay cut, and it’s hourly,” she said; her previous job paid about $72,000 a year. “But I do receive benefits.” She continued, “I didn’t think that I would have to start over like this. You know, that’s not part of your life plan. But at least I’m working, and I can hold my head up high.”

hen Kareem Edmonds reflects back on his family’s experience, the magnitude of how little has changed — or has changed for the worse — hits hard. His parents emigrated from Guyana in the 1980s and hustled to find work. Like him, they pushed themselves to get through extra schooling in order to find more fulfilling work, but the opportunities weren’t there. “Their whole experience was just not being able to do with their lives what they wanted to do,” he said. “Here I am in the same, same way.” He paused, then sighed and said, “I’m sorry. I think I’m just left hurting with that.”

Problems finding employment at a decent wage, a health care emergency, housing costs rising faster than income, obstacles to education, an encounter with the criminal injustice system — all of these mutually reinforcing factors make it difficult for Black Americans like Edmonds to get ahead, no matter how hard they try. As Edmonds put it, the “popular idea of meritocracy, you’ve just got to try to work hard, like pick up some bootstraps, like fry those fries — it’s a bunch of bullshit.” He had worked his way through college, which took him seven years. “I’m a case in point. I did my time,” he said. “I worked tougher jobs. At one point, I was working all seven days. I had no breaks.”

Conditions in predominantly Black cities like Jackson offer a concentrated picture of the compounded effects of centuries of systematic racism. Floyd ticked off the problems: “Neighborhoods not being well-resourced, grocery stores not being accessible, health care not being accessible. If you don’t have a car in Jackson, that’s a problem because buses aren’t regularly available.” She added that 22 schools have closed over the past few years, along with several hospital departments. “Now you have empty buildings in neighborhoods. So what does that tell our children?” Mississippi, Floyd noted, has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. “When our Black babies are born,” she said, their survival is in jeopardy from the outset, and the dangers continue throughout their lives. “All these hurdles, just to live,” Floyd said. “Not thrive — just to live.”

“I don’t know how families are making it right now,” said Floyd. “It does make me think when I’m lying in bed at night, 

” Photograph by Ruddy Roye for Hammer & Hope.

Conditions for rural Black people are even worse. LaTosha Brown grew up in Selma, Ala., and later helped co-found the voting rights group Black Voters Matter. As she sees it, people in rural America have been used as “lab rats” to see how deep cuts to the country’s social safety net can go — and the first to be experimented on are Black folks. According to a 2023 study, 12.7 percent of rural white Americans live in poverty, significantly higher than the national average. But among rural Black Americans, 37 percent live under the official poverty line. Brown said that rural African Americans are treated “as extractive resources” to be used but not valued by those in power. The extent of that extraction is evident in the loss of land. Black people collectively owned 14 million acres of land in 1910; today, they own less than 2 million acres. According to a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation report, between 1992 and 2002, 94 percent of Black farmers lost some or all of their land, three times the rate of white farmers.

Though getting an education increases the chances of having work, employment rates for Black people are lower than for their white counterparts at every level of educational attainment. And that’s after overcoming the tremendous obstacles to gaining an education. After running a children’s program at a nonprofit in Jackson for more than 20 years, Floyd saw what happened to the children she had helped access higher education. “A lot of kids, when they hit the finish line, they don’t have the support that’s needed for the next level,” she said. By contrast, Floyd had help from her family when she took breaks to work before going back to school to graduate. “Other young people don’t have that,” she said. “It’s over, and then you’re back in the neighborhood you grew up in. If it’s not a positive place, we know what can happen.”

Both Keith and ZuShanna Turner described the hurdles they faced to get to college and then to stay there. In part, this is a question of wealth. It’s a lot easier to get through college if your family has money and you don’t have to work your way through school or battle hunger and financial insecurity while trying to study. White households inherit five times as much wealth as Black families; Black households have far greater debt loads than their white counterparts.

ZuShanna made it to college against the odds. She was raised by a single mom whose financial fortunes went from relative stability — based on working three jobs — to economic collapse after a local church took advantage of her. She spent the bulk of her school years without a home, her family bouncing around among a motel, a shelter, and people’s floors until the family moved back to live with her grandmother. Remembering how difficult the plunge into poverty was for her, she recalled being sent to school with no lunch. “I would eat her lunch,” Turner said of a friend who always brought an ample lunch to school. “She’d eat an Oreo and bite her sandwich, and then she’d be like, 

. And I’m sitting there eating everything because I didn’t have breakfast. I didn’t have lunch.” She continued, “I remember feeling ashamed that I was eating her food, but also, like, I don’t have anything.”

Despite the hardships, Turner graduated from high school with honors. She eventually made her way to Oral Roberts University with personal loans. But there she struggled, far away from home and with no preparation for college, she said. Confronting overt racism for the first time at a predominantly white, evangelical university, Turner described feelings of depression, often sleeping until class, then going back to sleep afterward. Her loans sometimes covered basic expenses, sometimes not. “It was the choice of do my laundry or eat. Don’t want to walk around smelling, so I’m going to do my laundry,” she said. Fears of reliving her past pushed her forward despite the racism, the financial burden, and the mental exhaustion. “I don’t have anything else to fall back on,” she explained. “If I don’t persist and get this degree and get a job, get two jobs, I’m going to be out on the street.”

Keith Turner’s parents had emigrated from Jamaica and insisted on the importance of an education, the kind that they never had; they were able to go to school only through third grade. His parents worked hard to give him and his brother better opportunities. Turner said he barely saw his father, who worked three maintenance jobs. “We accepted it because my mom used to say he’s working hard to keep a roof over our head and food on the table,” he said. “We understood, and it was expected of us. We were taught: Go to school, get good grades, get a good job.”

It was a struggle. “I didn’t have any mentors or anything,” Turner explained. In high school, “my parents were like, 

.” He said, “I had to take the SAT, which I had no clue what that was.” Once at City College of New York, he flipped a coin to decide his major: architecture. That was an expensive choice, it turned out, because of the extra materials needed. So after three years, he switched to computer science and ultimately decided to take a break from school to help with the family’s financial burden. “My parents,” he recalled, “they never made an issue.” But he said they would look at the tuition bill — which rose from about $1,500 a year to $3,200 for city residents during his enrollment in the 1990s — and “have this serious look on their face. And then they’d be like, 

.” Turner put one semester’s tuition on a new credit card, maxing it out. “At least for that one semester,” he said he was able to tell his parents, “Y’all don’t have to worry.”

Turner never did return to school, torn between feeling that he owed it to his parents to finish college and wanting to help out financially. Instead he worked his way through computer science jobs to build a career that, for a time, offered some degree of financial stability — and some free baseball games, though he’s never been a big fan. Until it all suddenly came apart in July.

Edward Dupree in the Whole Foods store where he works in the produce department, Philadelphia, Sept. 16, 2026. Photograph by Ruddy Roye for Hammer & Hope.

dward Dupree considers himself lucky. Having worked at Whole Foods for 10 years and found a relatively affordable apartment in Philadelphia — the rent is $750 per month — he said, laughing, “I could be a lot worse.” Dupree recalled feeling financially whole for the first time in the spring of 2020 because Whole Foods briefly paid an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay due to the coronavirus pandemic. Finally, he recalled being able to say, “OK, I’ve paid my rent, I paid my utilities, I’ve gotten my groceries, and I still have a little bit of money. I can go hang out with my friends. I can go, you know, buy a video game. I can do the things that you’re told you’re supposed to be able to do, especially in a capitalist society.” Though the hazard pay came and all too quickly went, his wages rose incrementally over the years, reaching about $21 an hour.

Though Dupree works at a supermarket, he has to shop strategically at three different grocery stores and rarely allows himself the luxury of buying food at his own expensive workplace despite having an employee discount. Still, having stability in his job has given him the capacity to provide “some sort of safe harbor for other people.” He was able to help one of his sisters a few years ago, and another sister and her son are currently staying with him. He’s watched friends, family, and co-workers go through much harder times than he has: forced to skip medications, facing sky-high electricity bills, unable to afford rent, going through mental health crises.

Dupree feels content in his job. He knows the produce better than anyone, likes the people he works with, and helped lead the unionization efforts at his store — the only unionized Whole Foods thus far. But he also remembers the day that he decided not to try to move up the ladder. Recognizing his strong work experience and knowledge, a supervisor had recommended him for a regular local news segment about seasonal produce. Dupree got a haircut and wore a nice shirt for the occasion. He was introduced to the newscaster, but a regional manager turned him away, telling him, as he recalled, “Well, we’re trying to showcase healthy food.” After a moment of confusion, he understood. “Because this is a health segment, a bigger guy can’t talk about greens or fruit or produce,” he said. “When she did that, I was like, 

, because they understood my reputation throughout the department and my work ethic.” The manager, an older white woman, did the segment instead, and that sealed his disillusionment with how things work at Whole Foods. “After that, I was like, yeah, I’ll just be a worker.”

It was a strange moment for Dupree but not an uncommon experience. So many people I spoke to had a story that illustrated the old saying: It’s not 

 you know — and who you look like. This reality goes beyond personal slights; it gets to the heart of occupational segregation. When the economic sociologist Deirdre Royster studied white and Black graduates from the same vocational high school in Baltimore in the 1990s, she concluded, “Both black and white students had attended the same school, performed at comparable levels, and demonstrated similar strengths and weaknesses of character. Nonetheless, even in this carefully matched sample, race continued to be a powerful predictor of wages and employment.” This proved true in blue-collar as well as white-collar occupations, Royster found.

Of course racism plays out far more violently through the criminal legal system. Nearly 2 million Black people are arrested every year; their arrest rate is more than double that of whites, and their incarceration rate is nearly five times greater. The economic consequences are devastating. Recent research estimates that about 60 percent of all formerly incarcerated people are jobless, and the rates are much higher for formerly incarcerated Black people.

Tamaya Dennard’s year in prison led her to become an advocate for formerly incarcerated people, working at the Center for Employment Opportunities in Cincinnati after she was released in May 2022. “It’s really hard,” she told me. “It’s discouraging for folks.” While many companies claim to be “fair-chance employers” that don’t exclude applicants who have been imprisoned, neither the data nor the experiences that Dennard learned about bear this out. When she went to bat for formerly incarcerated people, she found that even with skills and certifications, they would hit a wall with employers: “

’m playing in my mind my grandparents’ sayings,” Brooke Floyd told me. “You know, 

.” Despite the heartache she’s gone through, she feels hopeful for the future. She finds that hope in the small and large ways that people support one another, building community gardens, looking out for one another’s safety, and more.

Floyd and nearly every other person that I spoke to for this article counted themselves lucky compared with how bad things could be. Despite facing their own challenges, they expressed more worry about other people. Tonita Austin said, “Black women have been the rocks of our community. I hope somehow we can save one another from losing all hope.” Through the People’s Advocacy Institute, Floyd has helped organize massive relief efforts through the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, a network of community organizations founded during the Covid pandemic that supports people who need assistance through a mutual-aid fund.

Aisha Nyandoro, also in Jackson, founded Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit that offers a guaranteed income program for Black mothers — because on $7.25 an hour, she said, “there’s no way that you can work your way out of poverty.” Facing a right-wing state government and the reactionary Trump administration can feel “like walking up a mountain of lard also covered in butter,” she said. But at the same time, she added, “I have never been under the illusion that the work should not be hard.”

Dee Reed, an organizer with Black Voters Matter in Alabama, told me a story that she says typifies the community response she is seeing everywhere she goes. In a Chevron station recently, the woman in line in front of her had only $4 to pay for some gas. Reed thought she looked like someone who was “putting $4 in her tank to get from point A to point B” to go home after work. Reed had another few dollars and said, “Sister, here’s a few more.”

Then the guy standing behind her offered a few more. Before she knew it, $25 had been collected among the people in the store.

“We got us” is the theme, said Reed. “Ain’t nobody gonna save us.” Meanwhile, Kearni Warren helped three women she knew who were homeless due to rising rents or taxes. Cortlin Harrison and Edward Dupree have been involved in workplace organizing efforts, and organizations like Black Voters Matter are making sure that Black communities are heard in the face of right-wing redistricting efforts to disenfranchise them.

“It may seem dark right now,” Floyd said. “But joy comes in the morning. We’re going to be OK.” In all the ways that people are struggling to make things right, “we’re going to win,” she said. “We have no choice but to win.”

Brooke Floyd, right, with Sherrell Potts in front of cases of bottled water obtained by the People’s Advocacy Institute to assist with water shortages in Jackson, Miss., Sept. 11, 2026. Photograph by Ruddy Roye for Hammer & Hope.

The Economic Crisis in Black America

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.

Hammer&Hope

Hadas Thier

@HadasThier

Contributions

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Inside the Nationwide Resistance to the ICE Invasions

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The Economic Crisis in Black America

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

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A Spark of Hope From Scrappy Federal Workers

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Can the Uncommitted Movement Realign the Democratic Party?

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Who’s Afraid of the Student Intifada?

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The New Movement for Palestine

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Hadas Thier

@HadasThier

Contributions

Issue

11

Inside the Nationwide Resistance to the ICE Invasions

Issue

12

The Economic Crisis in Black America

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

NO PAYWALLS, EVER

SIGN UP TODAY

NO PAYWALLS,
EVER

SIGN UP
TODAY