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Trump's Proposed Census Rule Changes Are a Threat to Democracy
Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card as part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda.
Oct 28, 2026
With the nation’s focus on the upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration is quietly proposing changes to rules for the 2030 census that would threaten American democracy for decades to come. If we don’t act now, the next census could erase millions of people from the count.
The last Census in 2020 undercounted Latinos by almost 5%, three times the undercount of the 2010 Census, making this racial-ethnic group second only to American Indians and Alaska Natives in undercount. Latinos are now at even more risk of being undercounted by the next Census. The Trump administration has created fear and mistrust of the government by unleashing Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) terror on our communities and is now scheming to strip us of political power and economic resources.
For the first time in history, Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card from the census count. The proposed rule changes are part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda to unravel civil rights protections and erase immigrants from our nation.
Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.
Our organization, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, is sounding the alarm on how these changes would harm Latino and immigrant communities. Census undercounts have real world consequences, not only in the loss of congressional representatives, but also in the reduction of lifesaving resources like funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as funding for public education and school lunches. More than 300 federal programs allocate resources based on Census data.
The constitution mandates a numerical count of every person living in the United States every 10 years, regardless of immigration status, and requires that congressional seats and federal tax money be apportioned based on the number of people living in each state. The census has included questions on race since it was first initiated in 1790.
Removing questions on race and ethnicity would make it harder to track whether Black and brown communities have equal access to education, housing, and healthcare, and make it more difficult to monitor and address racist exclusion from resources and opportunities.
The proposed rule to exclude noncitizens without a green card would not only exclude undocumented immigrants but also exclude refugees, asylees, and residents with pending immigration applications. LatinoJustice objects to treating such residents as absent from our communities for purposes of representation.
Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.
Adding a question on immigration status to the census would further discourage Latinos—regardless of their immigration status—from participating in the count at a time when trust in the government is at an all time low in our communities. ICE terror has made many immigrants afraid to interact with the government in any way—whether to report being the victim of a crime, access medical care, or accept disaster assistance. A census designed to heighten those fears could erase millions from the count.
The Trump administration is proposing another rule change that would cause even more confusion and lead to an undercount of students, snowbirds, and those in non-traditional housing by using tax records to establish residence. All of these proposed changes seem aimed at reducing census participation and undercounting vulnerable communities.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF has worked to promote participation in the census—as imperfect as it is—because we know what a huge impact the count has on our communities. We submitted commentary opposing the dangerous rule changes proposed by the Trump administration. It’s not too late for you to submit your objections, too. But you need to act now.
The open comment period on the proposed census rule changes ends on November 2. We’re calling for the comment period to be extended at least another 90 days so that advocates and experts have the opportunity to weigh in, but we don’t know if the extension will be granted.
Latinos’ enormous contributions to our economy and society make America what it is. Each and every one of us deserves to be counted.
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MAGA ❤️ Motherhood (If You’re White)
The Trump-Vance family policy reeks of white supremacy and misogyny.
Sep 25, 2026
Creepy. That’s the word for the rising right-wing interest in family policy, exemplified by a recent administration proposal to pay $9,000 each year per child for women to stay at home with their children. The money would come from, and deplete, an existing federal program that helps working parents pay for childcare.
Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.
MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”
In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”
But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.
Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz warns that “1 in 3 Americans are under-babied.” Declining teen pregnancy is part of the problem: Fox medical analyst Marc Siegel laments that teen pregnancies (15-to-19-year-old girls) are “down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people who are young not to have babies.” To remedy that problem, President Donald Trump is actually defunding federal programs designed to reduce teen pregnancies.
This despite the well-documented medical and developmental risks of teen pregnancies for both mother and child: high blood pressure, preeclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, systemic infections, mental health difficulties, life-long health issues, premature births, neonatal fatalities and stillbirths, low birth weight. And the teen mom’s interruption in schooling commonly means a life of poverty and instability.
MAGA family policy bears striking similarities to that of Nazi Germany, which linked national greatness to more babies—of the correct race. In the interest of higher birth rates, German mothers could not terminate pregnancies if the child would be “of good blood.” The Nazi state also offered “marriage loans” and child financial incentives, and—in a society that treated single mothers as pariahs—they even tried to destigmatize unmarried motherhood.
Medals for motherhood were a Nazi honor Trump might consider offering. Hitler awarded the Mother Cross for large families. (In bronze for mothers of four children, silver for six, gold for eight or more babies.)
The American fertility rate is indeed substantially below the 2.1 required to maintain the American population level. But if a declining population is a problem, the answer is obvious: Welcome immigrants.
America is already suffering from Trump’s mass deportation efforts, as the agricultural workforce is decimated, and workers in home healthcare, food packing, restaurants, home construction, and building services are in desperately short supply, exacerbating inflation. We plainly need more immigrants, not fewer, to sustain our nation.
Immigration is not an acceptable solution for MAGA because they demand a whiter America, and more immigrants come from what the president has called “shithole countries” than from “Aryan” nations like Norway. But non-whites are not “replacing” supposed “real” Americans because America is and always has been a multiracial, multinational society.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing (white) women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
A 2025 survey of Americans showed that two children was the most desired family size, and only 20% wanted to three or more. Similarly, an international survey conducted by the United Nations showed most respondents wanted just two children.
In the US survey, cost and the state of the world were high among the reasons Americans gave for not wanting more children.
Here is what the Trump regime is doing to address those concerns: defunding healthcare; slashing food assistance for families and children; weakening education and child welfare systems; imposing eligibility requirements for government rental assistance; denying climate change; ignoring the challenge of AI; deregulating polluting industries; and fueling inflation through deportation, tariffs, and an unending war.
Why are women in the workforce and not staying home with the children? The determination to lead full lives is a driving force. But, in all likelihood, the number of stay-at-home moms has plummeted since the 1970s because rising income inequality has made it impossible for a working class or middle class family to survive on one income. Before right-wing “traditionalists” utter any more demands that women give up their jobs, ambitions, independence, and self-respect, perhaps they can start by confronting the unbearable greed of the billionaire class that has rendered the supposed MAGA aim beyond reach.
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We Should Never Forget That Diversity Is What Makes America Great
Amid Trumpian attacks on immigrants and erasure of history, it is more important than ever that we stop and examine the record of who we are and how we got to where we are as a country and an American people.
Jun 16, 2026
June is National Immigration Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the diverse peoples and cultures that have made America great.
This year–when not only immigration and cultural diversity are being challenged, but also the complex history of our country is being erased–it is more important than ever that we stop and examine the record of who we are and how we got to where we are as a country and an American people.
First, we should never forget that this country was born with two “original sins”: slavery and genocide. The current administration in Washington wants to rewrite our history by eliminating mention of negative events and practices that defined our past, focusing instead on the “greatness and industriousness” of our founders and their “glorious victories.” In reality, there would be no America if not for the surplus wealth created by the labor of enslaved people across the South and the riches accrued by those who benefited from the theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands.
Nor should it be forgotten (although it is) that the Declaration of Independence names one reason for the War of Independence against the British Empire as the American settlers’ grievance that King George would not defend them against “merciless Indian Savages,” who were resisting having their lands taken from them. And, of course, we fought a civil war not so much to end the deplorable practice of human slavery, but to rein in the power and independence of the Southern states.
What would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?
As the country grew and with the industrial age upon us, the need to build infrastructure to transport people and goods, mine coal for power; and operate factories opened the doors to new immigrants from countries far afield. Chinese built railroads; Irish dug canals; Irish and Eastern and Central Europeans worked in the mines, and they were joined in the mines and factories by Italians, Greeks, and Arabs.
As needed as these new immigrants were for America to grow and prosper, their very presence, growing numbers, and unique cultures provoked a backlash among the earlier northwest European settlers who had come to see themselves as the original and “real Americans.” The “new immigrants” were demeaned, discriminated against, and subjected to state and vigilante violence.
Tragically, we see the same pattern of behaviors playing out today as Americans are confronting our newest immigrants. In a brilliant paper written a decade and a half ago for the Immigration Policy Center, Jeffrey Kaye examines the immigration history of one town in Pennsylvania. He notes that when the Irish, Italian, and Eastern and Central Europeans were first moving into the community, newspaper articles and speeches by City Council members described the Irish as “drunkards,” the Slavs as “peculiar,” the Hungarians as “ignorant, immoral, and filthy,” and the Italians as “the most disreputable.” All were subjected to derision for their “queer languages” and not fitting in. The tragic irony is that one century later, the descendants of these same groups are now saying the very same things about the newest immigrants who were mostly from Latin American countries.
Forgotten in this history of miserable repetition are the lessons we should have learned and the benefits we accrued along the way. We now know that the early English settlers in New York and the eastern colonies learned lessons in governance and agriculture from the Native Americans, and yet they referred to them as “savages.” And we know that it was the hard work, for no wages, that brought wealth to white Southern landowners who nevertheless demeaned Blacks as lazy and shiftless. Much the same can be said about the immigrants of the industrial age. Despite the bigotry and violence they endured, we can ask, “Where would America be today if not for the hard work and inventiveness of these immigrant communities?” Further, what would be American food, fashion, music, art, humor, literature, diplomacy, and so much more be without the contributions of African Americans, the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Latino, and Arab immigrants (and so many more)?
The lesson here is a simple one: We should never forget that what makes America great is its diversity and its capacity to absorb so many peoples and cultures. What threatens our greatness is when we forget this and stupidly attempt to fabricate our history and “whitewash” our culture.
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What the Knicks Can Teach Us About Surviving Unprecedented Times
On Wednesday night, the Knicks embodied hope as remaining present. Hope as remaining committed. Hope as continuing to work when you are 29 points down and the other side is telling you they're in your head.
Jun 13, 2026
I was one of millions of people who died multiple times during Wednesday night's NBA Finals game. And I was among the millions who were reborn, multiple times, during that same game.
Much has been written about the power of sports, and I may not be adding anything new to the conversation. That's all right. Sometimes it is enough to join the chorus in effervescent awe. But like millions of others, I cannot help finding deep metaphor in being part of the Knicks family during these times of horror.
Wednesday's game broke records, first in the wrong direction. Shockingly early in the night, the Knicks fell behind by 29 points, on their way to the largest deficit ever overcome in NBA Finals history. They were down 27 at halftime; until this series, no team had rallied from more than 24 points in a Finals game, a mark set by the 2008 Celtics against the Lakers. The Spurs were shooting the lights out of Madison Square Garden, and their superstar seemed unstoppable. At one point, after absorbing a hard foul, he rose from the floor, pointed to his temple, and taunted: I'm in your head.
In my head, I felt nothing but devastation.
Fromm was right that art captures human experience better than abstraction ever could, and the art of basketball, through the brilliance of these Knicks, captures hope better than any essay I could write, including this one.
There is so much to be devastated about in this world. President Donald Trump is making a mockery of our dream of a democracy and of our collective efforts to build a more just world, taking our taxpayer money to wage a war (which he calls flippantly an excursion) on Iran that includes attacks on civilian infrastructure. He has torn into the White House itself, a building whose restrained architecture once symbolized a leadership that refused the grandiosity of false emperors. And this Sunday, on his 80th birthday, he is converting its South Lawn into a $60 million carnival of toxic masculinity: a cage-fighting spectacle staged to soothe an unbelievably fragile ego, men bashing into one another beneath the windows of the people's house.
This is only scratching the surface. If the Spurs were truly in our heads, the heads of so many of us in the United States and around the world, they would find us grappling to locate our way back to hope during this time of polycrises.
And yet, somehow, that is exactly what is happening. It has nothing to do with chest-thumping enactments of domination. Nor does it have anything to do with positive thinking, manifestation, or any other individualizing nonsense. The Knicks, friends, are showing us something about how communities find their way out of despair, and maybe even out of fascism.
The long arc toward justice is indeed long. It can look devastating. Unprecedented. It can break new records in how low it sinks. There might be a step toward the championship, and then suddenly the gap grows wider than it has ever been.
But Jalen Brunson and his teammates did not simply believe. They did not repeat mantras. They did not lash out with aggression because they were threatened and humiliated. They kept working. Possession by possession. A 13-0 run to claw the lead under 20. Brunson answering basket after basket, he would finish with 36 points, while OG Anunoby added 33 of his own.
Mariame Kaba, the brilliant abolitionist organizer and author, teaches us that hope is a discipline. Not a feeling that visits us when conditions improve, but a practice we commit to precisely when they don't. Half a century earlier, the critical psychologist Erich Fromm arrived at the same insight in The Revolution of Hope, distinguishing real hope from both passive optimism and desperate waiting. For Fromm, hope is active or it is nothing, a readiness to move toward what does not yet exist. He also warned that our language for experiences like hope has been flattened into "worn-out coins," and that art often captures what essays cannot.
On Wednesday night, the Knicks embodied what Kaba and Fromm theorized. Hope as remaining present. Hope as remaining committed. Hope as continuing to work when you are 29 points down and the other side is telling you they're in your head. That is hope. That is also how change happens.
Some fans at Madison Square Garden walked out early during those moments of deep devastation. I don't judge them, they weren't wrong about how bad it looked. They were only wrong about what it meant to stay. They read the score as the ending rather than the middle, and walking to the subway they missed witnessing one of the greatest moments in NBA history. So many around us conclude that the score of our democracy is final. Despair is a premature exit from a game that is still being played.
And, the lessons do not stop here. That winning basket, with 1.2 seconds left, was not a triumphant swish. Brunson's three-pointer missed. The game was won because Anunoby crashed the boards anyway and, unthinkably, miraculously, gloriously, tipped the miss in with one hand. The decisive act of the greatest comeback in Finals history was someone showing up for a shot that failed. If you want a single image of disciplined hope, there it is: The work continues even when the shot doesn't make it, especially when the shot doesn't make it.
I would be remiss as a critical psychologist if I did not name a very important irony playing out before us as well. The Spurs' young superstar is a French immigrant, beloved and celebrated by a state whose government has made the persecution of immigrants and white supremacy its signature project. None of this is his fault, he is 22 years old and magnificent at his craft, and he deserves none of our resentment. The contradiction belongs to Texas, and to a country that cheers immigrant excellence in its arenas while caging immigrant families at its borders.
So this is my invitation. This Saturday night, while the machinery of spectacle prepares the White House lawn for Sunday's celebration of brute force, watch the Knicks instead. Watch a group of people who were further down than anyone has ever been, who did not posture and did not quit, attempt to finish what they started, one win from the franchise's first championship since 1973. Fromm was right that art captures human experience better than abstraction ever could, and the art of basketball, through the brilliance of these Knicks, captures hope better than any essay I could write, including this one.
We need to understand how change happens in devastating times. We need to understand how we, too, can participate in revolutionary care. Not by thumping our chests when we are up. Not by throwing in the towel when we break records in our losses. But by continuing to show up. By the discipline of persisting, not out of naïve faith, but out of practice.
The game isn't over. Find your team, and keep making your way toward the basket. And, when it is time to celebrate, get in community and dance under those famous orange and blue skies!
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Birthright Citizenship Is a Promise We Cannot Break
Defending birthright citizenship is not only about protecting children of immigrants. It is about preserving a constitutional framework that recognizes our shared humanity and limits the government’s ability to decide whose rights matter.
Mar 31, 2026
For more than 150 years, the 14th Amendment has been an uncompromising line: If you are born on US soil, you are a citizen. That principle is so foundational, many of us take it for granted.
But that principle is under attack.
On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments challenging President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. At the center of the case is an executive order issued on the first day of Trump’s second term to end Birthright Citizenship for children of undocumented parents.
The justices will now decide whether a president can rewrite one of the clearest promises embedded in American law.
If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.
On the surface, threatening the rights of children born in the United States might seem like an immigration debate. But history tells a different story.
Birthright citizenship was never an abstract ideal. It was a response to America’s long history of dehumanization—a past that Trump and his MAGA allies are now openly trying to resurrect. The 14th Amendment was designed to dismantle a system that denied Black people a political voice, treated us as property, and denied our humanity.
Ratified in 1868, the amendment overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Birthright citizenship was meant to be simple and permanent so no government could take it away based on race, ancestry, or political whim.
For formerly enslaved people and their descendants, it guaranteed recognition as full citizens in their own country. But the 14th Amendment did more than correct the injustices of slavery: It expanded who counts as American.
The Constitution says plainly that anyone born in the United States and subject to its laws is a citizen. That principle was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a citizen, establishing that US-born children of immigrants are citizens. This was despite the fact that Chinese immigrants at the time were barred from naturalization under the Chinese Exclusion laws.
The case now before the court seeks to undo that understanding.
If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.
The 14th Amendment’s authors understood the danger of that approach. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right soon follows.
Ending birthright citizenship would affect everyone—not just children of immigrants—in a system that has long questioned the belonging of people of color, including Black Americans.
Who must prove their citizenship? Who is presumed to have it? Who gets stopped, questioned, or detained? Who lives under suspicion?
History answers clearly: Marginalized communities pay the price first.
I write this as someone who has spent more than 15 years organizing for racial justice and as a Black man whose citizenship was once explicitly denied by law. Today, I see how systemic racism—from policing to voter suppression—continues to shape the livelihoods of Black Americans.
And that danger does not stop with birthright citizenship: These attacks threaten the entire 14th Amendment, including the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses that underpin victories against segregation, discrimination, voter suppression, and unchecked government power.
If the government can redefine citizenship, unequal treatment under the law becomes easier to justify. Civil rights become conditional. Equal protection becomes negotiable. State power expands while accountability shrinks.
We have seen this playbook before. After Reconstruction came Jim Crow. During industrialization came the Chinese Exclusion Act. Black workers were excluded from key New Deal protections. The gains of the civil rights movement were followed by voter suppression and mass incarceration.
Each time progress threatened entrenched power, the response was restriction rather than inclusion.
The 14th Amendment was written to break that cycle.
Defending birthright citizenship is not only about protecting children of immigrants. It is about preserving a constitutional framework that recognizes our shared humanity and limits the government’s ability to decide whose rights matter.
So the stakes could not be clearer during these Supreme Court arguments.
Birthright citizenship is more than law. It is the promise that America’s diversity, struggle, and resilience matter. It is the legacy of those who fought to be recognized as fully human—and the foundation of a democracy that must belong to all of us.
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Without Haitians There is No Collective Liberation
Two Haitian immigrant advocates chart out a path for what a truly liberatory policy toward Haitian and other Black immigrants could look like.
Feb 26, 2026
We started Black History Month with a critical—though potentially momentary—win for Haitian immigrants, specifically those with Temporary Protected Status. Although the Trump administration has appealed the decision, the current pause of the termination of TPS for Haitians has been a moment of reprieve for our community.
In this period of polycrisis, this victory also demonstrated the continued power of community organizing. But, in order to ensure this win is sustained and pushes us toward Black liberation and collective justice, we have to amplify the monumental role of Haiti and Haitians in our shared struggles for equity and justice in the US—past, present, and future. There’s a great deal for us to learn from Haiti and Haitians about collective liberation.
We felt momentary relief with the court ruling on TPS, but the unease we carry was not able to dissipate altogether because we know this government is undeterred from flouting the legal system. Living in limbo is already difficult for TPS holders, but like with all immigrant communities, there is the heightened fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its inhumane and life-threatening tactics, which we see vis-a-vis their modern-day recreations of slave catchers.
Furthermore, Haitians live with another kind of fear—the fear of being both invisible and hyper-visible, but never fully human. This characterization has been deliberate and by design; a punitive response to Haiti’s successful revolt against slavery—the first in the world—and what it set in motion for Black and other colonized people across the world.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms.
The paradox of hyper-visibility paired with erasure is part of a larger pattern of anti-Blackness in this country. White supremacists tend to treat Haiti as symbolic of everything they intentionally mischaracterize or misrepresent about Black people, as a pretense to spew racialized anti-Black hatred. The public imagination they craft around Haiti is carefully curated to dehumanize us and to stoke fears around Black people rising up once again. We are an enduring threat to white supremacy and racial capitalism, which is why we continue to be punished and targeted as a people and a country.
This public imagination is exactly what the Trump administration leveraged to spread sensational lies that many Americans went on to accept as factual. It is why our community faces higher detention and deportation rates, and sees disproportionately lower rates of being granted asylum. And, it contributes to why philanthropy has not prioritized sustained giving to Haitian organizations. Even though we face unceasing attacks from the administration that have stripped over half a million Haitians of their statuses, targeted them repeatedly for halts on adjudication for almost all forms of relief, and imposed the most severe forms of travel bans for both non-immigrants and immigrants, we are not seeing a commensurate response to support us from the philanthropic community, to give us a fighting chance against these attacks.
Every day, there is a reminder of our invisibility. Language justice for Haitians is often an afterthought. We regularly have to advocate to immigrant rights organizations and grassroots organizing groups to provide Kreyòl interpretation for webinars, trainings, and materials that are directly applicable to hundreds of thousands of Haitians. Even though Haitian immigrants are the second-largest population with TPS, language access is usually not extended to Haitian TPS holders.
We are routinely rendered invisible by all factions of US society—policymakers, philanthropy, media, and even progressives—and yet we become hyper-visible in moments of crisis, political convenience, or scapegoating. We saw this hyper-visibility in the response to Haitians arriving in Del Rio, Texas, when Border Patrol agents were caught chasing Haitian refugees on horseback in 2021 and in the last presidential election when Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were thrust to the center of Republican political theater vis-a-vis the circulation of blatant misinformation designed to incite anti-immigrant sentiment.
Being left out of—or misrepresented in—mainstream narratives of immigration and American identity has real-life consequences. We feel it in the lack of services tailored to our community, insufficient language access, and more. We see it when we’re treated as an afterthought in immigrant rights advocacy and grossly underfunded compared to other immigrant communities—multiplying the unseen labor of the few Haitian migrant groups that exist. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Black migrant justice groups received less than 2% of all funding for the movement, 0.04% of funding explicitly granted for Black communities in general, and overall less than 0.01% of all foundation grants given during 2016-2020,” which is why initiatives like the Black Migrant Power Fund—launched to address these gaps—are so crucial in this moment.
Our exclusion has also led to the distortion and flattening of our identity–we are often seen as victims with no agency, our significant present-day contributions have largely gone unnoticed, and centuries-old imperialist policies by the US and France continue to go unchecked despite playing a big role in the ongoing injustices in Haiti.
We reject this single story of victimhood and believe there is an urgent need to platform the pivotal leadership and perspectives of Haitian migrant rights’ leaders advocating for their communities across the region, which is why the Hemispheric Network for Haitian Migrants’ Rights was started. Haitian leaders’ initiatives and organizations are significantly under-resourced, yet they are undeterred in their battle against the anti-Blackness that knows no borders and confronts Haitians at every turn in their migration journeys.
In terms of contributions to the US, Haitian TPS holders alone contribute $5.8 billion to the US economy and pay $1.5 billion in taxes, but this is rarely considered in discussions about Haitian immigrants. Moreover, in our recent report from Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, we shared that through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) Parole Program, a two-year humanitarian parole program, CHNV immigrants contributed an additional estimated $5.5 billion to the US economy annually through spending alone.
The February 3 verdict offered momentary relief for the 350,000 of us who have TPS status, but we must continue to fight tooth and nail for humanitarian protection. It remains to be seen whether the appellate or Supreme Court will grant the administration’s emergency appeal, and strip so many people of merited and necessary protections. Legislative efforts to protect TPS continue, with a discharge petition proposed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with over 155 co-sponsors.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms as the next phase of our fight starts up to protect not only TPS, but to advocate for all forms of policy and practice that ensure Haitian migrants can be safe and thrive. Philanthropy must provide sustained support to our organizations because supporting Black migrant communities is a moral and social imperative, particularly for any institution that espouses a commitment to racial justice.
But above all, we must push back against white supremacy and fascism by finally recognizing that how we treat Haiti and Haitian immigrants, and really any group of people who occupy this paradoxical position of invisibility and hyper-visibility in our society, is a barometer of our commitment to collective liberation.
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It's Too Late, Trump. You Cannot Undo the Multi-Racial, Multi-National Real America
Our nation's true history is one of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational. You are the one who should leave. Your sleazy appeals to racial hatred are not welcome here.
Feb 13, 2026
Notice to Donald Trump and his MAGA myrmidons: It’s too late by centuries to turn the United States of American “back” into the ethnically homogenous nation for white people which it never was. And that’s nothing to be disappointed about.
Most Americans aren’t swallowing your so-called jokes depicting African-Americans as apes, your white supremacist lies about Haitians “eating the pets,” your slanders of law-abiding farmworkers as the “worst of the worst,” your creepy wails about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, your demand we exclude refugees who come from what you term “sh**-hole countries.”
Fear and hatred are all you offer, and relief from an imaginary conspiracy of Jews and elites which you claim are plotting to “replace” white Americans with invaders from abroad.
The reality: Americans have always been a polyglot people of multiple races and ethnicities. We did not become a multi-national, multi-ethnic people because of a scheme to open our borders. Rather, our nation and its leaders—through ambition to expand the United States—incorporated other peoples into the American mix from our earliest days. Our true history is one of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational.
If the Anglo-Saxon whites who first colonized North America wanted it to be an exclusive homeland for white people, they should not have brought half a million enchained Africans to American shores. By the time the Constitution was adopted, the result was that one in five residents of the new nation were enslaved or free Black people.
If whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for Anglo-Saxon white people, President Thomas Jefferson should not have made the Louisiana Purchase, bringing people of French, Spanish and African ancestry and still more Native American tribal nations into the territory of the United States.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, pro-slavery forces should not have launched the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 to seize almost half of what had been Mexico, and incorporate its Mexican population into the enlarged United States.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, we shouldn’t have employed tens of thousands of Chinese immigrant workers to build the Transcontinental Railroad, man the mines, and perform the other dangerous and dirty work that helped build the West.
And for that matter, if Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for “pure-bred” white people, they should not have encouraged the immigration of millions of Europeans who, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, weren’t really regarded as “white”: Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs, eastern European Jews and others—“the wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shores”—to work the mills and mines, the factories and farms of America.
Today desperate, hopeful and hardworking immigrants come from the lands south of our border, from India, from China, from the Dominican Republic. Many are fleeing horrific gang violence, persecution, or the impacts of climate change on their native lands. Undocumented immigrants—the so-called “invaders”—commonly do work native-born Americans won’t do.
Those without documentation provide most of the farm labor force. Trump’s own Labor Department has acknowledged that “agricultural work requires a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.” “Such jobs are still not viewed as viable alternatives for many [U.S.-born] workers.”
Similarly, the labor of undocumented immigrants is critical to the meatpacking industry, food processing, construction, and elder care. Immigrants are not “replacing” American citizens—they are filling needs and struggling for a good life for themselves and their children. That’s what immigrants have always done.
It’s too late, Mr. Trump, for your sleazy appeals to racial hatred. Most Americans know that seeking to degrade others because of their race or ethnicity is deeply wrong—a violation of the values of fairness and decency we struggle to live up to, but seldom spurn entirely.
Our nation and the world have real problems—climate change, shrinking opportunity, inequality and poverty, violence and unnecessary suffering. But it has become clear to more and more Americans that your program of meanness, malice, and spleen are not the solution. It is time for you to get out of the way.
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An Injury to Immigrant Workers Is an Injury to All Workers
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
Feb 08, 2026
In late 2025, federal immigration authorities detained a non-union janitor who’d accused contractors for Minnesota’s Ramsey County of wage theft.
The worker is now in deportation proceedings. But his courage helped win policy changes in Ramsey County, and his fierce advocacy in a similar wage theft case in nearby Hennepin County also paid off: More than 70 subcontracted workers for Hennepin County received nearly $400,000 in back pay in December 2025.
When someone who fights for workers is detained, “it sends a chill,” Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, told me. “When the workers who are stepping up to try and reveal violations are silenced, the standard comes down for the whole industry.”
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
“They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
In Minneapolis, federal agents abducted an educator trying to ensure safe dismissal at a high school. In Southern California, they chased a day laborer at a Home Depot onto a freeway, where he was hit and killed by a vehicle. In Chicago, they detained a childcare worker as children watched.
Agents have even directly harassed striking workers.
On December 16, Juanita Robinson was out on the picket line in Chicago when armed federal agents—including border chief Gregory Bovino—approached and demanded identification. The group “interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line,” according to a press statement from Teamsters Local 705.
“It was scary when they pulled up on us,” said Robinson, who was born in Chicago but calls her immigrant coworkers family. “We’re out there trying to make ends meet, and y’all abusing us,” she said of the agents. “They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
The scholarly research backs Robinson up.
By studying “Secure Communities,” a federal program that resulted in the deportation of nearly half a million people from 2008 to 2014, scholars found that upticks in immigration enforcement are associated with increased minimum wage violations and more dangerous workplaces for all workers.
“If I complain to the Wage and Hour Division that I’m not getting paid minimum wage, it might mean that my wages get restored,” said Matt Johnson, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But it also might affect my coworkers, who were facing similar violations. So when one worker becomes more reluctant to complain,” he told me, it ultimately affects “the rest of the labor market.”
Research also shows that immigration crackdowns actually reduce jobs for US-born workers. Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that’s because immigrants and US-born workers “complement” each other rather than compete directly.
For example, in order for a restaurant “to hire waiters, waitresses, hosts, and hostesses, which are jobs typically taken by US-born people, they also have to be able to hire cooks and dishwashers, jobs more often taken by immigrants,” she explained. When they “can’t find anybody to do the dishwashing, they may have to reduce their hiring overall.”
The effect ripples out. “When many people are all of a sudden removed from a local area because of detention or deportation, or afraid to leave their homes to get haircuts and eat at restaurants,” she explained, that hurts the economy “for everybody, including US-born workers.”
The GOP’s so-called ”Big Beautiful Bill” gave the Trump administration an unprecedented $170 billion over and above existing funding to carry out abuses like these. That enormous sum comes directly at the expense of programs that were cut, like Medicaid and SNAP, and could end up hurting all workers and their communities.
They’re trying to “break the unity that we have to have to be able to actually get raises and health insurance and retirement,” Nummacher told me. “Working people have never been able to win these things without being organized.”
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The Working Class versus an Authoritarian Police State
Resisting Operation Metro Surge is expanding working-class consciousness about the corporate state's responses to people's resistance to oppression.
Feb 07, 2026
As people are watching online and in person, American federal immigration enforcement is stepping up a policy of an authoritarian police state using violence against immigrants and their native-born backers. Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis is a primary case in point. It's a thing of beauty to see the multiracial working class resistance rising there and across the US.
Let us pay tribute to those who have lost their lives at the hands of federal immigration enforcement. Federal immigration agents have killed two US citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—in 2026. Meanwhile, six immigrants—Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos—have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in 2026.
One thing is clear to me. Resisting Operation Metro Surge is expanding working-class consciousness about the corporate state's responses to people's resistance to oppression. The political point is that given such current circumstances, conditions of adversity can and do serve as a basis for working-class solidarity across demographic differences. Working-class people of all backgrounds struggle against an authoritarian police state of brute force waging a "might makes right" battle against freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.
Whether born abroad like Maryse Balthazar, a Haitian journalist and elder-care nurse caring for a World War II veteran, or stateside, like ICU nurse Alex Pretti, a union employee for the Veterans Administration whom ICE agents executed, workers sell their labor services to buyers, or employers. This marketplace transaction defines the class relationship between employees and employers, sellers and buyers of labor services.
Organized labor's awakening is a positive action for the working class.
Halting this buying and selling of labor services, or “shutting it down,” hits at the power of the capitalist marketplace to rule people’s lives. In our time of a decaying US empire, the capitalists ruling the marketplace are the billionaires and monopoly corporations that fund Democrats and Republicans, America’s political duopoly. Their voter coalitions differ demographically but are similar economically. Both coalitions are majority working class, sellers of labor services, but the ruling class funds the two political parties. The so-called left-right, blue-red demographic lacks a political party that advances its material interests. Why? The donors' votes cast with millions of dollars before elections set the policies of both political parties.
Additional differences between the sellers of labor services range from gender to race (a biological fiction) to religion and sexual orientation. These identities matter. However, class relations are at the center of these identities. The Democratic Party and GOP weaponize their coalitions’ identities as political strategies to compel voters to oppose their class interests.
Ideology from the start plays a big part in this political equation. In the US, for example, its beginning gets ideological spin as a great founding of democracy and freedom versus a slave-holding republic waging genocide against the native inhabitants. This fictionalized national history whitewashes (heh) the meaning of democracy and freedom so central to a national narrative. We hear some working-class people say the following in the face of an authoritarian police state waging war on US soil: “This isn’t America. We are a nation of immigrants.”
It’s easy to blame, deservedly, the GOP’s attack on the teaching of history. Republicans’ efforts to ban some books is a transparent attempt to miseducate a new generation of Americans about the past. (S)he who controls the past controls the present. The Trump administration's bid to end the teaching of chattel slavery is a case in point. It's as if 250 years of enslaved Africans toiling for the wealth of a Caucasian slavocracy never happened stateside.
Against this backdrop, the corporate state’s use of force to attack workers trying to organize to bargain collectively is a consistent theme in US history. While collective bargaining is not center stage in Operation Metro Surge, corporate state-sanctioned violence against the working class is a chip off the block of coercive measures against dissent.
Organized labor is pushing back against Operation Metro Surge flooding Minneapolis with violent federal immigration enforcement agents. “The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO along with regional bodies throughout the state, including the Saint Paul Regional Labor Federation, the West Area Labor Council, the North East Area Labor Council, and the East Central Labor Council, have joined in solidarity to endorse a powerful unified statewide action on January 23: Day of Truth and Freedom.” A US working-class pushback didn't stop there.
One week later, working class people of all backgrounds, in and out of unions, across the US took part in a national action: “Shut It Down. No work, no school, no shopping.” Hundreds of thousands of adults and youth protested peacefully against the violence of federal immigration forces following the marching orders of the White House. Those orders to target brown people for arrest and deportation flow from a white supremacist orientation that fundamentally misinterprets that fact the US itself lies on lands stolen from the native inhabitants and enriched via the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans.
Organized labor's awakening is a positive action for the working class. Yet it would be remiss of us to ignore the role of the AFL-CIO in supporting the Democratic Party’s backing of the US empire and its dozens of militarized foreign interventions since the end of World War II.
The violence of federal fiscal policy is also a weapon to discipline the working class. Take the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services' announcement on January 5 that it would freeze over $10 billion in federal funding for childcare providers in five Democrat-led states based on baseless and racist claims of fraud against Somali childcare providers. In the Golden State, this fiscal move represents over $2.2 billion dollars in annual funding that could be lost during a freeze. Working families would have to borrow money to bridge the funding gap, relying in part on credit cards with their 22-plus percent interest rates that enrich the big banks.
Meanwhile in California, there has been a rise in harassment from white supremacists against San Diego’s Somali community, including its childcare providers, according to the United Domestic Workers (UDW/AFSCME Local 3930). San Diego is home to the country’s second-largest Somali community, after the Twin Cities. Immigrants who perform caring labor there and across the US are essential workers.
Johanna Hester is the UDW deputy executive director and co-chair of Child Care Providers United. “For over a month,” she said in a statement, “Somali childcare providers have endured harassment by internet vigilantes who are dead set on exposing fraud in California’s highly regulated government childcare system. In the process, they are stalking and intimidating our members at their homes and places of business."
“These provocateurs are sowing seeds of hatred and distrust of our neighbors after taking cues from the president who referred to Somalians as ‘garbage.’ We treasure our Somali members and their contributions to our families, our union, and our communities,” she concluded.
Using one part of the working class to control other parts of it is a proven method of class control. In this way, the capitalist class can and does attempt to weaken workers' solidarity. In contrast, the capitalist class does not fund the control of corporations. The corporate state's mission is to free the millionaires and billionaires from working-class influence. Economically speaking, the corporate state's political duopoly has shifted income and wealth from the working class to the capitalist class since the end of the Vietnam War.
Recently in California, citizens pushed back against the AI warlords behind the scenes of violent federal immigration enforcement.
For example, around 50 people interrupted a talk by Andrew Abranches, the vice president of wildfire mitigation for Pacific Gas & Electric, demanding the company immediately end its contract with Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm that sells mass surveillance software to ICE. Palantir also provides the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with militarized AI tools to maim and murder Palestinians.
There are four main products that Palantir provides. Here’s one, dubbed Gotham, according to the American Friends Service Committee. Gotham is “Palantir's flagship product for military, intelligence, and law enforcement applications. It ingests, integrates, and organizes large amounts of data from many sources to detect patterns and insights. Gotham can also integrate with sensors and autonomous systems like drones and give them tasks.”
War abroad, directly in the case of military operations to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and by proxy to fund the IDF’s extermination campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, is the flip side of the class war underway globally. Stateside in the guise of federal immigration enforcement agents rampaging against workers who dare to dissent on the streets of American cities, class war is raging as a workforce from around the world laboring on US soil is finding its legs.
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Somali-American Day-Care Hysteria Is Latest Attempt To Distract Americans with Hate
It's 2025. No one should have to point out how evil and irrational it is for elected officials to smear an entire race or ethnic group because of the alleged criminals among them.
Jan 07, 2026
It happens almost every year.
An overblown, exaggerated, or manufactured controversy involving people of color, immigrants, Muslims—or all three at once—suddenly consumes America’s political discourse.
Remember the summer of 2010? Every media outlet spent the month of August in a frenzy over a Florida pastor's planned burning of the Quran in Florida and the expansion of Park51, a Muslim community center falsely branded the “Ground Zero mosque."
The flames of that controversy were stoked by fringe anti-Muslim bigots who were then elevated from the dark corners of the internet to cable news shows and weaponized by politicians ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.
When will we stop falling for this?
The hysteria over Park51 paved the way for a series of racially charged moral panics in the following years: the Obama “birther” conspiracy that culminated in 2011, the migrant caravans poised to invade the southern border in 2018, the viral videos that claimed to show Black election workers stealing the 2020 election, the stories about Haitian refugees eating pets in Ohio in 2024.
Since 2025, much of the manufactured outrage has targeted American Muslims. Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories that died out years ago have been resurrected by the usual suspects on social media along with politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Even Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that Americans Muslims are on the verge of imposing "sharia law" on Paterson, New Jersey, of all places.
Why this renewed obsession with Muslims?
A poll commissioned last year by the Israeli Foreign Ministry found that the best way to restore support for Israel among Western populations upset about the Gaza genocide was to distract those populations with fear of Islam and Muslims.
Hence why the Israeli government and its supporters have been whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria over the past year. They hope to achieve various goals at once: smearing American Muslims who criticize Israel First policies, shoring up Israel’s eroding support among political conservatives, and distracting the broader public from real issues, whether the Epstein files or the billions of US taxpayer dollars being poured into Israel’s war crimes.
Most recently, this campaign of hate against Muslims has taken the form of racist hysteria targeting Somali Americans, driven by a dishonest and largely debunked video circulated by a conservative social media influencer.
It's also important to recognize that the crimes Americans increasingly care about do not involve Somali-American day-care centers.
That influencer has shown up at Somali-run day-care centers and declared some of them fraudulent because they were empty after hours or because the staff refused to allow random men with cameras to come inside and see the children in their care. The consequences have been real and dangerous. Somali-run day-care centers and businesses have received threats. White supremacist copycats have appeared at childcare facilities demanding access to more children. Millions of dollars in federal childcare funding have been suspended, harming innocent families across Minnesota who rely on those services.
When will we stop falling for this?
Every one of these hate-driven campaigns follows the same pattern. A racist or bigot posts something inflammatory that goes viral. Media outlets amplify it. Politicians exploit it. Then, once the story collapses under scrutiny, the arsonists who started the fire walk away without accountability, only to search for the next group to target.
In this case, the Somali day-care hysteria may have crossed a legal line. While law enforcement has investigated and prosecuted legitimate cases of childcare fraud in Minnesota for years, many of the centers smeared in viral videos have never been accused of wrongdoing and are operating lawfully. Branding them as criminals and exposing them to threats could subject these social media influencers turned amateur detectives to lawsuits for defamation.
In the meantime, the rest of us must refuse to play along with this tired, racist scheme.
It's 2025. No one should have to point out how evil and irrational it is for elected officials to smear an entire race or ethnic group because of the alleged criminals among them. During the peak of the fight against the mafia, no president called for the expulsion of all Italian Americans. It would have been just as racist and insane to subject all Jewish American businessmen to extra scrutiny for the crimes of Bernie Madoff.
It's also important to recognize that the crimes Americans increasingly care about do not involve Somali-American day-care centers. Any Somali Americans and others who actually engaged in fraud are already facing investigation, and some were convicted years ago. Meanwhile, the corrupt officials funneling our taxpayer dollars overseas to support Israel's genocide in violation of federal law and the officials hiding documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes in violation of federal law are all walking free.
That is the real scandal—and the one that deserves our immediate attention.
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