SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
ice
Want to Stop ICE? Run for School Board. Run for County Supervisor. Run for State Rep.
These overlooked offices control the budgets, databases, and cooperation that make the terror possible—or impossible.
Feb 08, 2026
Trump and Noem’s strategy of deploying federal agents to punish our cities is backfiring.
Here’s why: Local elected officials have enormous power to resist federal immigration enforcement. Sheriffs can refuse ICE detainer requests. City councils can pass sanctuary policies. County commissioners control jail access. State legislators can restrict cooperation with federal agents and protect residents' civil rights.
But this is only possible if those offices are filled with people who will fight back.
If you are looking at your leaders and wondering why they aren’t taking a stand against these human rights violations, this is where you can and must step in.
In 2026, thousands of local seats are up for election across the country. Sheriff. County commissioner. City council. State representative. School board. These are the frontline defense against Trump's overreach, and unfortunately, the violence being inflicted on communities across the country.
The reality is brutal to face but can’t be ignored: Alex Pretti is at least the sixth person to die during ICE’s nationwide reign of terror since last year, with at least five shootings in January alone involving federal agents. This will keep happening in communities where there's no local resistance.
People are done staying silent, and we can’t let up the pressure. Since Alex's murder, nurses across the country have organized vigils and acts of resistance. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has demanded that all ICE and Border Patrol agents leave the state. Protests are growing, not shrinking. I'm seeing people who've “never been political before” suddenly asking what they can do to help.
My answer is always to run for office or recruit someone who will. Some of us must step up to build long-term power that defends our communities, while others hold down the immediate fight on the front lines.
We have three more years of MAGA-proofing to do. The organization I started, NDTC, is already investing in building up the resistance down ballot – at no cost to campaigns. Since Trump took office again in January 2025, over 970 campaigns chose us to lead them to victory. This weekend in Texas, NDTC-learner Menefee won his House seat and shrunk the GOP majority to one vote.
We are already filling crucial roles in school boards, councils, and legislatures – we need thousands more to mount a real challenge. No race should go unchallenged.
So one path forward is clear:
- Run yourself — Explore what offices are open (or unchallenged!) in your area and get all the tools and information you need to run (for free).
- Recruit someone - Know a teacher, nurse, social worker, or community organizer who'd be amazing on your city council? Forward them this post. Direct them to Emily’s List. Direct them to Run for Something. Direct them to us. We want to help them run.
- Support candidates who will resist — Local campaigns rely on volunteers, donations, and voters who spread their message and show up.
- Organize your community — Get involved in your local Democratic party, immigrant rights group, or other active coalition near you.
Filing deadlines for the 2026 elections are approaching fast in many states. In most places, it's not too late to get on the ballot this year. But you need to move now.
Trump and his administration want us to be afraid. They want us to believe resistance is futile. They want us to stay home. We're not going to do that.
I have supported thousands of campaigns over my career, training more than 120,000 candidates, staffers, and volunteers in the last ten years through the organization I founded. Together, we’ve won in red districts, swing districts, and everything in between. We’ve seen people less qualified than you do it. The fact that you’ve read this far proves that you have a spark. Answer the call, and let us teach you how to win.
The MAGA plan is to exhaust us by flooding the zone with muzzle velocity. They are betting on us giving up. We’ve already mobilized thousands to prove them catastrophically wrong; we need you to be next.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Will Democrats Ever Learn How to Beat Trump on the Immigration Issue?
Not only is the president's policy cruel and inhumane, it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.
Jan 30, 2026
Ever since Trump rode down the escalator in 2016 attacking immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists, immigration has been his signature issue, often putting the Democrats on the defensive.
During his first term, however, his cruel policies of separating families at the border and his BS about Mexico paying for the wall contributed to his defeat in 2020. But the Biden administration had no answer for the flood of immigrants who then crossed the border, which Trump used as a cudgel during the 2024 campaign. Once again the issue was Trump’s and in his second term he’s decided to play hardball by, in effect, totally shutting down the border and deporting record numbers of immigrants.
And it was working. While his handling of the economy tanked his poll numbers, immigration enforcement remained strong, until Minneapolis.
There, he overplayed his hand and did not stick to his argument to deport undocumented felons. Instead, he allowed the psychotic Steven Miller to round up undocumented immigrants, non-felons and felons alike, with even some darker-skinned citizens (literally) tossed into the ICE detention centers.
Not only is this a cruel and inhumane policy, but it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.
For different reasons Trump and the Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the American people support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and committed no felony crimes.”
Trump doesn’t give a damn about these hard-working immigrants. He’s quite happy to support the MAGA “replacement theory” that calls for the protection of a white America from people of color. For Democrats, a pathway to citizenship is too hot to handle, making them look as if they support “illegals,” even if these undocumented immigrants are not felons. They fear Trump’s cudgel and ignore what the American people want.
According to our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 63 percent support the “granting legal status” statement and only 37 percent oppose it.
In urban areas in these four states the support is massive:
- Democrats: 91 percent
- Independents: 73 percent
- Republicans: 47 percent
Looking at urban and non-urban areas combined, 36 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported this path to citizenship. And 81 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.
We also have 2020 data on the support of the white working class throughout the country, which shows that 62 percent supported this same exact “granting legal status” statement, up from 32 percent in 2010.
It’s as if Trump and the Democrats are stuck in 2010 and don’t realize that the working-class has great sympathy for hard working undocumented immigrants, especially in urban areas where day-day contact is greatest. That’s where nearly everyone comes into contact with immigrants who do so much of the hard labor that makes our economy function. Just 20 metro areas account for 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants.
It is politically explosive to send thousands of ICE and border agents into urban areas to randomly round up undocumented workers. Unless you are trying to foment an urban rebellion so you can send in troops to crush it in the name of law and order and cancel the midterms.
What about the dangerous felons?
The Trump administration has deported each month approximately 1,100 undocumented immigrants with prior violent convictions, according the New York Times. I have no doubt that many Americans support their deportation if it is done in a reasonable way. But at the same time Miller’s shock troops have deported 2,100 immigrants with no criminal records per month. Per month!
That’s what happens when thousands of heavily armed mask-wearing troops invade an urban area, stopping people on the street and raiding houses of worship, businesses, and hospitals without court-approved search warrants. That’s not how you catch felons, that’s how you round up undocumented non-felons. That’s how you get away with stopping people based solely on their skin tone, not on any investigative information about criminal activity. And it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s not OK with much of the American people, something Trump slowly is realizing.
Will the Democrats Come to the Defense of Undocumented Workers?
You couldn’t ask for a better political moment given that Miller’s goons have killed two protesters in the last two weeks. This would be the perfect time to demand that ICE be prohibited from conducting any and all random stops throughout the country, and refrain from arresting any undocumented immigrants who have not committed a felony crime. And this is the time to call for a clear path to citizenship for hard working, non-felonious, undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness...
But there’s little indication that the Democratic Party is willing to go there. The political calculous is obvious: let Trump overplay his hand and hope the anger against him crests into a massive blue wave flooding the midterms. Why risk supporting a path to citizenship, which only will be thrown back at the Democrats declaring they are weak-kneed on immigration? Stopping Trump, the thinking goes, is more important than grandstanding about paths to citizenship given that the Democrats don’t have the votes to deliver. And besides, undocumented workers can’t vote, angry protestors can and will.
But here are two problems with this strategy. The first is that Trump will adjust the ICE invasions between now and November. He has to realize that rounding up felons requires a different, less visible approach that refrains from random searches and street brawls in urban areas. It should be obvious to Trump that Miller’s masked goons will cost the Republicans the midterms if the shock troops continue to roam the streets. White House border czar Tom Homans already is in Minneapolis saying that the shock troops will stand down, in some way, soon.
The second problem is that undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness, something that working people of all shades can connect with.
The anti-ICE protestors are leading the charge with the backing of a few state and local Democrats. But nationally the Democrats seem more comfortable talking about Epstein than protecting terrorized immigrants.
The Democrats may not have the nerve, but Dan Osborn, a working-class independent in Nebraska running for the U.S. Senate sure does. Here’s how he put it:
I believe that undocumented workers, there should be a clear path for them to become documented or become legal status.
We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.
Did that kill his chances in his 2024 race? He lost by six points but ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris and he’s running again in 2026. He deserves our support.
And, as Bruce Springsteen sings in his a song he wrote last weekend, so do the people who are protecting “the stranger in our midst.”
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump’s Imperial Proto-Fascism Can Only Be Defeated Through a United Front
More and more people are recognizing Trump’s government for what it really is, an abomination. But without organized resistance, there is little hope for defeating him or forging the better future we deserve.
Jan 29, 2026
The United States is on a very dark path under President Donald Trump, argues political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. Democratic rules and norms have virtually collapsed, and cruelty is the name of the game. Trump has used the military and federal law enforcement to build a paramilitary force that carries out pogroms against immigrant communities, assaults the constitutional rights of citizens and even murders people if they protest against its Nazi-like tactics. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. How to fight Trump’s fascism is the million-dollar question.
Alexandra Boutri: I want to start by asking you to elaborate a bit on the concept of “imperial proto-fascism” that you referred to in the last interview we did together. I don’t think I have encountered this term before.C. J. Polychroniou: It’s really a pretty basic and straightforward term. It seeks to capture the type of political order that is unfolding in the United States under Trump 2.0. The United States is and has been an imperialist power at least since the late 1890’s, although imperialism has changed its pattern over time and surely since the time of the writings of Hobson, Lenin, Luxembourg, and Hilferding. Yet, in a very surreal way, the Trump administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine and seeks to take over foreign territories through whatever means necessary while making a mockery of international law. Whether you want to call it “Old Imperialism” or “New Imperialism” is a rather academic matter. The point is that the Trump administration envisions a new role for the US in today’s word in which might is right. No tricks or deception about pursuing US interests in the name of democracy, human rights, and freedom, which has been the rhetorical approach to US foreign policy by all previous administrations since the end of the Second World War. There is no point talking about international niceties because as Trump’s Waffen-SS chief Stephen Miller recently put it, “the iron laws of the world” are strength, force, and power.
On the domestic front, you have the emergence of a regime that relies on the same tactics that it uses on the international arena. Cruelty and brute force are its main traits. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. But Americans are rebelling against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist political order, so interesting times do lie ahead.
Alexandra Boutri: The Trump administration has brazenly lied in order to justify the deaths of the two people in Minneapolis. What sort of government people can justify the murders of their own citizens?
C. J. Polychroniou: Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by Trump’s own fascist paramilitary squad. The mission of ICE is to capture undocumented immigrants and instill fear across communities. In shooting and killing two harmless protesters, ICE thugs did not violate any protocol. They followed the protocol. When pressed about ICE’s tactics and the murder of Alex Pretti, Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller turned against each other. But they are both complicit in Trump’s lawless police state actions. They work for a criminal government and are carrying out its leader's orders. Miller is in fact the architect of Trump’s inhumane anti-immigration policies.
The current administration in Washington DC does not pretend to be a national government looking after the interests and the well-being of all Americans. So let’s put aside political niceties. It is an administration of hateful, racist, ruthless thugs who have embarked on an open war against democracy and the rule of law, against the “other,” and against human decency. It is fascism with US characteristics.
Alexandra Boutri: It appears that Trump has switched tactics and is now trying to turn attention back to the economy. Will it work?
C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what he decides to do with his inhumane immigration crackdown. I don’t see anti-ICE protests going away as long as the paramilitary squad's barbaric tactics continue unabated. Most Americans are clearly fed up with Trump and his policies. He has nothing to point to that would make the public feel good about his administration. He had made life much less affordable in just one year. He has added trillions to the debt and the US dollar is collapsing. Only those supporting Trump like sheep, either because they are wearing blinders or because they have vested interests in him being in office, like the tech oligarchs, can find something positive with his administration. But he has three more years left in the White House and there is no doubt that his wrecking ball will keep swinging. And Trump will continue with his distraction tactics during damaging stories for his administration. And that includes embarking on new military adventures abroad, more bombings and killings, and even pursuing regime change.
Alexandra Boutri: How do people push back against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order?
C. J. Polychroniou: The anti-ICE protests are very important because they signify resistance against one of the administration’s cruelest and most dangerous policies. The US is indeed on a very dangerous trajectory under Trump. The situation is so critical and overwhelming that only a united front, I believe, could defeat Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order. In this context, what is needed is full-fledged resistance against the Trump regime and all its collaborators, especially including its corporate collaborators. A united front against fascism is an alliance of working-class organizations with all progressive forces whether they are reformist or even attached to liberal institutionalism. And I am not necessarily referring to the united front strategy of Leon Trotsky against Hitlerism. The united-front formulation predates Trotsky, and it was a united front strategy in France that defeated the far right in the legislative elections of 2024. The primary goal here is to resist and ultimately defeat Trump’s plan for an imperial proto-fascist order. Nationwide general strikes which are a very powerful tool against unpopular and repressive regimes, but are exceptionally rare in the US, have a much better chance of happening if there is a movement of mass resistance based on a united-front formulation. Hopefully, with each passing day, more and more people will come to recognize Trump’s government for what it really is, an abomination, and realize that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train,” as Howard Zinn aptly put it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular