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'A Moment of Reckoning': 4,000+ May Day Demonstrations Across US
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for," said one organizer.
May 01, 2026
In thousands of locations across the United States, workers and students are taking off from work and school and swearing off shopping on Friday as part of a national May Day protest.
May Day Strong, a coalition of activist groups and unions organizing the events, said more than 4,000 actions, from marches to pickets to displays of peaceful civil disobedience, were underway.
It is yet another nationwide display of coordinated resistance to the Trump administration's agenda, including its war in Iran and its use of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to attack immigrant communities, issues that were at the forefront of March's "No Kings" protests.
Six young protesters with the Sunrise Movement were taken into custody after blocking a bridge in Minneapolis in what they said was an act of "nonviolent noncooperation" to "stand up to the war in Iran and against ICE terrorizing our neighbors and our cities."
Dozens more Sunrise protesters in Portland held a sit-in in the lobby of a Hilton hotel that was housing top officials with the Department of Homeland Security, leading to eight arrests.
"It's May 1st, it's workers' day," one of the protesters was recorded saying while being led away by police. "Don't forget that you have power."
In New York, over 100 activists lined up outside every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan, banging drums and chanting "No ICE, no war!" where they were met by a flood of cops.
In the spirit of May Day, a global day of solidarity among workers, Sulma Arias, the executive director of the social justice organization People's Action, said Friday's "Workers Over Billionaires" protests are just as much about confronting injustices as about building an alternative.
“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for," Arias said. "We are for affordable housing for low-income people. We are for free healthcare for all. We are for utility laws that ensure every home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer at costs that a person on a fixed income can afford. We are for the right to a fair and equal vote for Americans from every race and in every state. May Day is our day to assert and defend our rights.”
"They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse."
Despite claims by President Donald Trump that the US is entering an economic "golden age" under his leadership, a Gallup poll released this week found that 55% of Americans said their finances were getting worse, the highest number ever recorded in more than 20 years of polling, and even higher than in the doldrums of the Great Recession.
A coalition of labor unions across several major cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, has coordinated what has been called an "economic blackout," which includes avoiding buying from private sector retailers.
"When we say 'workers over billionaires,' 'billionaires' is not just this amorphous figure, right? They're real people," said Jana Korn, the chief of staff for the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO, in an interview with The Real News Network. "In Philadelphia, we're kind of a poor city. We don't have that many billionaires, but we have one. The CEO of Comcast is the only billionaire that lives in the city."
"So why should we, as a city, accept that they take and take from us? And then with that money, what do they do? They donate to Trump's ballroom project," she continued. "People in Philadelphia are struggling... Our transportation system barely works. We're at risk of having 17 schools close down this year."
Some labor organizers have described economic boycotts, undertaken as part of prior mass protest movements against the second Trump administration, as an act of building strength for something larger, such as a future general strike.
"I think really for us in the labor movement," Korn said, "[the boycott is] about how do we build the capacity to really disrupt, to strike when necessary, to shut things down when we have to. And that's something that we have not been called to do as a labor movement in a very long time."
Other unions have used May Day to confront their own employers directly. In New Orleans, hundreds of nurses at University Medical Center announced that they were beginning a five-day strike after attempting to negotiate a contract for more than two years.
In New York City, Amazon workers unionized with the Teamsters assembled on the steps of the public library before marching to Amazon's corporate offices to demand the company cut its contracts with ICE, which has used its cloud computing services to target immigrants, including some Amazon workers and contractors.
Matt Multari, who has worked as an Amazon driver for a year and a half, told Mother Jones that he joined the protest to "demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect."
Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said, "May Day is a moment of reckoning."
"Immigrant communities—from farmworkers in our fields to nurses in our hospitals, from refugees fleeing war to families who have built their lives here for generations—are under siege," she said. "They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse."
"Workers and immigrants—documented and undocumented, native-born and newly arrived," she said, "will stand together in the streets because we know the truth: there is no workers' rights without immigrant rights, and there is no justice for working people here while our tax dollars fund devastation abroad."
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The Fight for a Livable Climate Is the Fight Against Fossil-Fueled Fascism
The fossil fuel industry is funding fascism because they know they lose in a democracy. Young people are ready to fight for both, because we see them as inseparable.
Apr 04, 2026
In early 2025, Sunrise launched a campaign to make polluters pay for the effects of climate disasters. This campaign had the usual strengths: a focused message, easy to villainize targets, and real opportunities for state-level wins. It allowed us to engage the public directly following climate disasters, when attention to the climate crisis is highest.
But taking the campaign from the drawing board to the streets felt like pulling teeth. It was hard to recruit young people, bring local hubs on board, and build organic momentum. Our leadership team felt unmotivated and lethargic. Ignoring the elephant in the room of escalating fascism was getting to all of us.
In response, our leadership team came together over the summer to reevaluate and reassess the broader landscape. We watched Immigration and Customs Enforcement escalate in Los Angeles, watched as President Donald Trump broke every rule in the book and rapidly consolidated power. He was gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dragging us back into the coal era, joking about running in 2028, and threatening to cancel elections. It became very clear that running a Make Polluters Pay campaign was like bringing a knife to a gunfight (figuratively of course).
Here’s what we realized:
1. Local Wins Cannot Outpace an Administration Fully Captured by Big Oil
From a purely emissions perspective, we were losing. We could get a few polluters to pay for cleanup costs. In some states, like California or New York, state legislation mattered a good amount. But while we were focused on state-level policy, the Trump administration was opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, reversing vehicle emission standards, withdrawing from international climate agreements again, eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) tax credits, and staffing the EPA with fossil fuel executives. It was changing the green economy so that there was less incentive to build wind and solar, pausing IRA-funded projects, and actively driving up pollution. We were just being outstripped.
2. We Can’t Wait This Out Until Trump Leaves Office
Many of our partner organizations decided to focus on local organizing for three years in order to prepare for what we wanted to win when we won back power. However, this approach depends on stable democratic systems, and the ability to organize freely. Both of which are increasingly unrealistic based on our assessment.
First, Trump may not leave office. He’s openly discussed ignoring term limits. He’s installing loyalists throughout the military and Justice Department. Republican state legislatures are passing laws that would allow them to override election results. Trump has looked at changing ID requirements to require proof of citizenship to vote, and has gerrymandered and mandated Republican states redraw districts. Even if he personally leaves, it’s very likely that he will change the rules of the game to make it basically impossible for a Democratic trifecta to come to power—and because of our levels of polarization, that’s the starting point for climate legislation.
Second, protest is being criminalized. Anti-protest laws passed in 17 states since 2024. Sunrise itself was going to be targeted. Our infrastructure was likely to walk out of the next few years weaker, not stronger.
We need a movement that can force Trump out of office. That won’t be a single-issue movement.
3. Under a Functional Democracy, We Would Already Have Widespread Climate Action
As we started to explore further, it became clear the links between rising fascism and the climate crisis.
Public opinion data currently shows that people support climate action by significant margins: 65% of Americans support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 72% support transitioning to clean energy. Majorities support Green New Deal-style investments.
In a functional democracy, that should translate to legislation, easily. But our fight for Build Back Better—what later got watered down into the Inflation Reduction Act—taught us that it wasn’t that simple. The broken link—the reality that our government is more bought out by pharmaceutical companies and fossil fuels than it is accountable to everyday people—is exactly how Donald Trump won, promising to be an un-buyable strongman.
And fossil fuel companies recognized that as well. The Biden administration was a clear lesson for fossil fuels: Under a democracy, they will lose their business model. So they’ve made a calculated decision to fund authoritarianism, because under authoritarianism, they win. Fossil fuel industry donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign reached record levels. Trump promised oil executives whatever they wanted in exchange for $1 million in campaign donations. Oil executives are staffing his administration at unprecedented rates. This is fossil-fueled fascism. If we want to stop the climate crisis, we need a democracy that can’t be bought.
4. We need a massive base
The final reason came down to our base and organizing. At the end of the day, Sunrise has always been by and for young people, and the reality that we saw on the ground was that young people were deeply concerned about rising authoritarianism and didn’t know what to do about it. Running a climate-only campaign under these conditions felt like we were ignoring reality. Our members had an intuitive sense that to stop climate change, we needed to stop authoritarianism first.
The last six months have only confirmed that instinct. Students showed up in record numbers to fight for sanctuary campuses and to stop Donald Trump’s compacts with universities. Our hotel non-cooperation campaigns went viral, and since we’ve broadened our focus, young people have increasingly come to consider Sunrise their political home.
Sunrise’s Strategic Pivot
So we made a decision: Sunrise is pivoting to end authoritarianism and win a democracy capable of addressing the climate crisis.
We’re still a climate movement, but this moment requires the acknowledgment that climate action is impossible under authoritarianism. Winning democracy is a precondition for winning climate policy. The fossil fuel industry is funding fascism because they know they lose in a democracy. Young people are ready to fight for both, because we see them as inseparable.
Our strategy is ambitious, reflecting the scale of the challenge, with three main goals:
- Build the youth base and organizing infrastructure needed to defeat authoritarianism;
- Win structural democracy reforms like proportional representation and public financing that make oil industry capture impossible; and
- Use that democracy to pass transformational climate legislation and defend it long-term.
It’s ambitious, but it’s the only path that works.
This piece was first published on the Sunrise Movement Substack.
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Columbia Students and Faculty Arrested at 'ICE Off Campus' Protest in NYC
Protest organizer Sunrise Movement said “Columbia’s original collaboration with ICE and the Trump administration set the stage for the ICE raids and extrajudicial murders that are now terrorizing communities nationwide."
Feb 06, 2026
A dozen people were arrested Thursday after Columbia University students and professors blocked a major intersection in Upper Manhattan to demand that the Ivy League school declare itself a sanctuary from federal immigration enforcers.
The Columbia chapter of Sunrise Movement—the youth-led climate campaign—organized the protest, which drew more than 150 people on a subfreezing afternoon to condemn US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and what they say is the university's cooperation with the Trump administration.
“Columbia’s original collaboration with ICE and the Trump administration set the stage for the ICE raids and extrajudicial murders that are now terrorizing communities nationwide,” Sunrise Columbia said in a statement following the protest.
A smaller group of protesters blocked the intersection of Broadway and 116th Street, site of the main entrance to the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, at around 3:00 pm Thursday, according to the Columbia Spectator. Activists sat in a crosswalk wearing matching shirts reading "Sanctuary Campus Now" as chants of "No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA!" and "When immigrants are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!" echoed through the air.
RIGHT NOW, Columbia University students & faculty demand a sanctuary campus. ICE OUT OF NYC. ❤️🔥 pic.twitter.com/zaLbor8EJf
— Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC) (@Columbia_psc) February 5, 2026
“It’s very meaningful for faculty and students to take action alongside each other and even get arrested alongside each other,” Columbia student Adeline Sauberli told the Spectator. “I think it’s a message of hope, almost, that you know the core of the Columbia community, the students and faculty who are in classrooms together and talking about ways that the world can be better are also willing to take to the streets and say that we shouldn’t have ICE here.”
Columbia Teachers College adjunct professor E.Y. Zipris told the Spectator that “if I was to really continue to respect the university, then I have to join in with those who are fighting to remind Columbia of how it’s supposed to be."
“For faculty to put themselves in this position where they will be handcuffed and led into an awaiting van and then driven downtown is a tremendous statement of calling out the institution, the board of trustees, and everybody involved, saying, ‘Our students are more important to us than caring for, in this moment, our own actual well being,’" Zipris added.
New York Police Department (NYPD) officers began arresting the protesters blocking the intersection after issuing warnings to disperse. The New York Times reported that the arrests were "calm and deliberate," a "marked contrast from the overwhelming show of force and rows of riot police that often met protesters outside Columbia during the past two years" of protests against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and Columbia's complicity in the slaughter.
US police arrested 12 anti-ICE protesters at Columbia University in New York. The demonstrators accuse the university of cooperating with immigration enforcement agents and are demanding the campus be declared a sanctuary.
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— Al Jazeera English (@aljazeera.com) February 6, 2026 at 2:07 AM
Organizers of Thursday's action accused Columbia's board of trustees of complicity with the Trump administration's deadly immigration crackdown, pointing to ICE's arrest of former Columbia graduate student and Gaza protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent US resident who was abducted last March by ICE agents in front of his pregnant wife and jailed without charge or trial in Louisiana before being released in late June.
Other Columbia students who took part in Gaza protests, including green-card holders Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung and Palestinian Leqaa Kordia, were also arrested last year.
According to the Spectator:
Protesters called on the university to stop sharing student, faculty, and staff information with the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies; remove members of the board of trustees who have “enabled the Trump administration’s repression of noncitizens"; end the surveillance and discipline of students for political activity; and clarify how the university has implemented its $221 million agreement with the Trump administration.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen Columbia violently suppress student speech exposing Columbia’s complicity in ongoing genocide in Palestine,” student organizer Cameron Jones told the New York Daily News. “By suspending, brutalizing, and facilitating the kidnapping of their students, the university has made clear that there is no line it will not cross in service of genocidal regimes.”
BREAKING: Columbia students and faculty are blocking the road to demand Columbia become sanctuary campus.That means ending collaboration with ICE's kidnapping of students and workers.
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— Sunrise Movement (@sunrisemvmt.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 1:33 PM
Columbia University denies that it worked with ICE to arrest students, saying in a statement that it "supports the right of individuals to peacefully protest. However, claims made against the university during today’s protest activity, which took place outside of our gates, are factually incorrect."
Arrestee Jennifer Hirsch, a professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, told the New York Times that “Columbia was the test case for this government strategy of kidnapping people first and then asking questions later."
In a separate interview with the Spectator, Hirsch said that “it says in the Torah, be kind to the stranger for you are a stranger in a strange land and that was actually in my bat mitzvah Torah portion, and so I’m just responding to what to this moment asks of all of us."
“I think history will judge us for what we do at this moment,” Hirsch said. “It’s scary and dangerous but it’s more scary and dangerous to have masked agents come to your door, break down your door, and kidnap you.”
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‘This Is Disgusting’: Trump Pardons Henry Cuellar After Bribery, Money Laundering Charges
"Henry Cuellar, the last anti-choice Democrat in the House, sold out his own community for bribes from a foreign government and oil corporation," said Sunrise Movement in condemning the Trump pardon.
Dec 03, 2025
President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he was pardoning Democratic US Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was indicted by the Department of Justice in 2024 on charges of bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering.
In justifying the pardon, Trump baselessly claimed that the Texas lawmaker was the victim of vindictive prosecution by former President Joe Biden in supposed retaliation for Cuellar's criticisms of Biden's immigration policies.
"Henry, I don't know you, but you can sleep well tonight," Trump wrote at the end of his pardon announcement. "Your nightmare is finally over!"
According to federal prosecutors, Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, engaged in a corrupt scheme that involved taking $600,000 worth of bribes from a fossil fuel company owned by the government of Azerbaijan in exchange for desired policy outcomes.
"The bribe payments were laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar,” prosecutors alleged in their indictment. “In exchange for the bribe payments to Imelda Cuellar, Henry Cuellar agreed to perform official acts in his capacity as a member of Congress, to commit acts in violation of his official duties, and to act as an agent of the government of Azerbaijan."
As noted by congressional reporter Jamie Dupree, Cuellar is the twelfth current or former member of Congress whom Trump has pardoned, and is the first one to receive a pardon without having been criminally convicted.
Cuellar is also just the second current or former Democratic member of Congress to receive a pardon from Trump, who also pardoned former Illinois Gov. and ex-US Rep. Rod Blagojevich, who was found guilty in 2011 on multiple corruption charges related to his attempt to sell a US Senate seat that had been vacated by Barack Obama after his election to the presidency in 2008.
Some progressives expressed revulsion at Trump's pardon of Cuellar, one of the most conservative members of the House Democratic caucus who has nonetheless been defended by party leadership despite criminal charges leveled against him.
"This is disgusting," wrote Sunrise Movement's official X account. "Henry Cuellar, the last anti-choice Democrat in the House, sold out his own community for bribes from a foreign government and oil corporation. Then he cozied up to Trump for a pardon while the Democratic establishment stood by and watched."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of Campaign for New York Health, speculated that Trump pardoned Cuellar as a reward for stifling past progressive policy ambitions.
"Henry Cuellar is part of the Problem Solvers Caucus—a 'bipartisan' group where the Democrat members repeatedly undermine the Democrats' agenda to help Republicans, while taking campaign donations from Republican billionaires," she wrote. "This is a 'thank you.'"
Emma Vigeland, cohost of "The Majority Report" talk show, wondered if Trump had worked out an explicit quid pro quo with Cuellar ahead of the pardon.
"Cuellar is an anti-abortion Democrat who will likely switch parties now that Trump has gotten him out of a dozen bribery and money laundering charges," she wrote.
However, the Texas Tribune reports that Cuellar on Wednesday filed to run for reelection as a Democrat, which for now casts doubt on him switching parties as a condition of getting pardoned.
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'Time to Clear House': Sunrise Movement Launches Major Primary Effort Against Corporate Dems
"For far too long, Democratic leadership has failed to meet the moment," the leader of the youth-led climate movement said.
Nov 13, 2025
Amid growing outrage over corporate Democrats' failure to meaningfully stand up against President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, Sunrise Movement on Thursday launched what it called it "most ambitious" primary campaign to replace feckless incumbents with progressives.
"For far too long, Democratic leadership has failed to meet the moment; it’s time to clear house,” Sunrise Movement executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay said in a statement.
“I’m extremely excited about the crop of candidates running in 2026," Shiney-Ajay added. "This year, we have an unprecedented opportunity to elect a new generation of leaders who are challenging our broken political system and fighting for a livable and affordable country.”
Like many progressive groups, Sunrise Movement has expressed its growing frustration with most congressional Democrats' acquiescence to Trump and Republicans' growing authoritarianism. The youth-led, climate-focused organization was particularly incensed by Senate Democrats' recent capitulation in the government shutdown fight.
"Why the hell would Democrats cave with nothing for the working people? When millions are losing healthcare?" Sunrise asked last week. "If you cave now, you don’t deserve to lead, you deserve to be replaced."
To that end, Sunrise says its new campaign "will include a nationwide field, protest, and communications program targeting over a dozen congressional primaries."
"Sunrise organizers and volunteers will mobilize thousands of young people to knock on doors, make calls, and take direct action to elect progressive champions ready to challenge the Democratic Party’s complacency and reimagine what Democratic leadership can look like," the group continued.
"In the 2026 general election, Sunrise will lead one of the largest youth electoral efforts in the country, organizing students on campuses across the country to ensure young voters turn out to reject authoritarianism at the ballot box and are prepared to mobilize in defense of election results if Trump or his allies attempt to subvert democracy," Sunrise added.
The new Sunrise campaign comes as progressive groups such as Indivisible, MoveOn, and Our Revolution and some Democratic House lawmakers including progressives Ro Khanna (Calif.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) are urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to step down in the wake of the shutdown surrender.
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100+ US Campus Protests to Call Out Trump Attacks and Unaffordable Education
"Trump's higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities and our democracy," said one union leader as the president pressures universities to sign a "loyalty oath."
Nov 04, 2025
Aiming to "organize millions of students to disrupt business as usual and force our schools and our political system to finally work for us," progressive groups and labor unions are planning a nationwide day of coordinated protests at over 100 US campuses on Friday, November 7.
Planned by Students Rise Up, in coordination with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Higher Education Labor United (HELU), the upcoming demonstrations "will be the first in a series of nationwide days of protests leading up to student strikes and worker actions on May Day 2026," according to organizers.
In addition to the unions, groups backing the effort include Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Gen-Z for Change, Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, March for Our Lives, and Sunrise Movement, whose executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, stressed in a Tuesday statement that "everyone deserves an accessible, affordable, and quality education."
"Everyone deserves to be safe at school—no matter their race, gender, or immigration status," Shiney-Ajay said. "Everyone deserves the freedom to peacefully protest. We're joining with worker allies to demand our administrations and politicians start fighting for an education system that works for our generation."
We demand an end to student debt! We're disrupting business as usual on Nov 7 to demand college affordability, the freedom to teach & learn, and safety for the most vulnerable on our campuses. Signs made by Josh MacPhee 🔥 grab one when you protest this Friday! #DefendHigherEd#EndStudentDebt
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— AAUP (@aaup.org) November 4, 2025 at 11:14 AM
The plans for the protests come as campus administrations are considering President Donald Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which schools can sign for priority access to federal funding and other "positive benefits." Critics have condemned it as "authoritarian" and an "extortion agreement," and some top universities have declined to sign on.
Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, said Tuesday that "young people are making their message very clear: Universities should be a place of learning, not propaganda machines. That's why students, workers, and alumni around the country are taking action."
As part of Friday's protests, organizers said, participants will urge campus leaders to reject Trump's "loyalty oath" and, more broadly, "commit to freedom of expression, college for all, and security for all at school."
Asked to comment on the day of action, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the US Department of Education—which initially offered the compact to a short list of prestigious universities—repeated previous statements, telling Inside Higher Ed that "the Trump administration is achieving reforms on higher education campuses that conservatives have dreamed about for 50 years."
"Institutions are once again committed to enforcing federal civil rights laws consistently, they are rooting out DEI and unconstitutional race preferences, and they are acknowledging sex as a biological reality in sports and intimate spaces," Biedermann added, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Meanwhile, AAUP president Todd Wolfson put out a statement taking aim at the president's assault on higher education.
"From attacks on academic freedom in the classroom to the defunding of lifesaving scientific research to surveilling and arresting peaceful student protesters, Trump's higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities and our democracy," he said. "We're excited to help build a coalition of students and workers united in fighting back for a higher education system that is accessible and affordable for all and serves the common good."
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Campus Leaders Mobilize to Battle Trump's Anti-Education 'Compact' Tooth and Nail
"Workers, students, campus community members across this great country are coming together to fight for a higher education system that actually works for all—one that is affordable, strengthens freedom and democracy, and stands up to its public mission."
Oct 08, 2025
Campus activist groups are banding together to fight against President Donald Trump's proposed "compact" with universities in which they would receive priority access to federal funding in exchange for pledging support for aspects of the president's political agenda.
The Sunrise Movement on Wednesday said that students and workers at the universities who have been invited by the Trump administration to sign the compact have "already gathered thousands of petition signatures" urging school administrators to reject it, and they are "planning coordinated campus protests in the coming weeks" to keep the pressure on their schools to resist any effort to infringe upon academic freedom.
The proposed deal with the Trump administration requires that universities abolish institutions on campus that "purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas." Additionally, it would completely overhaul admissions processes so that schools are not allowed to consider factors "such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, [or] religious associations."
Critics have said that agreeing to these terms would essentially end schools' academic freedom, and the Sunrise Movement compiled quotes from both students and professors explaining their opposition to the Trump administration's proposed deal.
Kelsey Levine, a student at the University of Virginia, said the school's signature on the agreement would be tantamount to "selling out its most vulnerable populations of students: international students, transgender students, and students of color," as well as "compromising its foundational principles of independence, truth-seeking, and democracy."
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, described the Trump administration's proposal as a "corrupt bribery attempt" that "would usher in a new draconian era of thought policing in American higher education, cripple our technological innovation capacity, and assault our very democracy."
Evan Bowman, vice chair of Higher Ed Labor United, said that the battle against the Trump administration's efforts to infringe upon academic freedom were being waged with an all-hands-on-deck effort.
"Workers, students, campus community members across this great country are coming together to fight for a higher education system that actually works for all," he said. "One that is affordable, strengthens freedom and democracy, and stands up to its public mission."
Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University, wrote in The Guardian on Tuesday that all universities must reject Trump's proposal on the grounds that "it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of 'academic excellence in higher education.'"
Müller also linked the agreement to what he described as "Trump's emerging mafia state," in which "there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again."
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Monday that only one institution, the University of Texas at Austin, has so far signaled support for the compact, while others have started to signal their opposition.
Dartmouth president Sian Beilock, for instance, said late last week that she was "deeply committed to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values and will always defend our fierce independence," and vowed that "we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves."
National legal organization Democracy Forward on Wednesday announced that it was launching an investigation into the Trump administration's efforts to strong-arm universities into signing the compact, which it described as an effort to "stifle free thought" on college campuses.
To that end, the organization is seeking access to all public records related to the compact, including "all records and communications between U.S. Department of Education officials... and any representatives" of the nine universities that were invited by the administration to sign.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said "every American should be concerned about these threats to freedom" from the Trump administration, adding that the organization would "get to the bottom of what is happening to protect people and our democracy."
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Shopping Differently Won't Solve the Climate Crisis, So What Should We Do Instead?
Large companies like BP have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
Sep 26, 2025
This article has been adapted from Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (The MIT Press, September 16, 2025) by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly. It is taken from Chapter 1: “You Do You: The Misdirected Individualist History of Climate Activism,” and is provided courtesy of the publisher.
Your Footprint, Your Responsibility
The more recent notion of everyone having a “personal carbon footprint” has similar roots in the dark arts of corporate PR. The oil giant BP popularized the term and bent it to its own purposes.
BP worked from the same playbook as the Ad Council. After acknowledging that climate change exists, the company makes you feel responsible for it. And then they give you something to do that helps you feel like you're part of the solution. Meanwhile, BP continues pumping away, enjoying massive federal subsidies and outlandish profits while avoiding any new, restrictive regulations.
The strategy was popular. One analysis of decades of ExxonMobil’s public communications found that the corporation framed climate change in terms of consumer energy demand when speaking publicly. But in internal company documents, ExxonMobil recognized that it could not continue to supply fossil fuels without disastrous consequences to the environment. They knew they were causing the problem (supply) but put the blame on us (consumer demand).
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better.
ExxonMobil even conducted its own secret research on climate change in the 1970s. The results were consistent with scientific predictions. The corporation's in-house models predicted that global temperatures would rise to within 0.2°C of what they have in fact risen to since. While it publicly claimed in 1997 that “some of today’s prophets of doom from global warming were predicting the coming of a new ice age,” in the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists had privately been in agreement all along with the overwhelming majority of published science on climate forecasting.
Once you know what to look for, you start to see the message of personal responsibility everywhere. Worried about retirement? Start saving more. Have a gambling problem? Exercise some willpower and stay away from the casino. Worried about obesity? Fix your lifestyle. From 2008 to 2010, 87 percent of all alcohol ads in magazines told consumers to “drink responsibly.”
While it was becoming clearer that Americans consume too much sugar, Coca-Cola fought back by subsidizing research arguing that the problem was not calories in but calories out: “Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.” The central plank of the food industry’s lobbying has been to frame discussions about eating habits in terms of personal responsibility (e.g., “portion control”).
What these messages minimize are all the social, structural, and systemic drivers of health problems like diabetes. In one New York Times article, Dr.Dean Schillinger explained how “our entire society is perfectly designed to create Type 2 diabetes.” There is no amount of scolding about sugary foods and exercise, he explains, and “no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot, and inequitable access to healthcare, particularly in minority communities.”
Yet these companies have devoted enormous amounts of money to teaching the public to focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying system. They have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
A Too-Convenient Model for Facing Inconvenient Truths
Whole social movements have been built around this individualist, little-things-add-up ethos. An iconic poster from the early days of the modern environmental movement mirrors the Ad Council’s claim that personal choices are both the cause of and the solution to pollution. This individualist thinking prevailed all the way from the 1970s environmental movement to May 2006, which marks one of the biggest box office events in documentary history: the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary reached millions of people around the world. Its vivid depictions of solar rays pelting the atmosphere and glaciers melting raised public awareness of climate change to new heights and ignited collective fervor about the environment like never before. It demanded action.
Widely and deservedly lauded, An Inconvenient Truth presented the facts in a way that was hard to argue with. It also presented solutions:
Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource.
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better. This is another effect of the long history of corporate-funded individualist messaging: the first thing that comes to mind for many of us when we ask “what can I do?” is a series of thoughts about stuff. What should I buy? Where should I buy it from? What should I do with it? Even leaders in the fight against climate change have perpetuated our preoccupation with consumption.
As the credits of An Inconvenient Truth roll, the film offers concrete suggestions for how to make a difference, stating, “The climate crisis can be solved. Here’s how to start.” Here are the first five items in the list:
- Buy energy-efficient appliances + lightbulbs.
- Change your thermostat . . . to reduce energy for heating + cooling.
- Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
- Recycle.
- If you can, buy a hybrid car.
These are good things to do, though energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs are basically illegal now and hybrid cars may be on their way to being old news. But An Inconvenient Truth exemplifies a whole world of books, TV, and academic research that looks at climate change through the lens of our personal consumer choices. Even academics have gotten in on the act. One widely cited study examined and ranked nearly 150 personal lifestyle choices by their effectiveness in reducing personal carbon footprints. The four most impactful options, it found, are having one child, living car-free, flying less, and eating a plant-based diet. Eventually, further down the list of action items, An Inconvenient Truth also tells viewers to do the following:
- Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.
- Write to congress.
- If they don’t listen, run for congress
- Speak up in your community.
- Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions + join international efforts to stop global warming.
These suggestions head in a different direction, away from what we buy. They gesture toward our political choices and our communities’ values. This is promising, and we’ll talk a lot more about why in the coming chapters. For now, notice how vague they are. “Speak up in your community” sounds empowering, but what does it really mean? Speak up to whom? Say what? “Join international efforts” sounds good too. But your average moviegoer may be forgiven for thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Most viewers likely walked out feeling alarmed, maybe intending to buy better lightbulbs. After all, lightbulbs were first on the list!
It turns out audiences did become both more knowledgeable and more concerned about the climate crisis. But this new found knowledge and concern doesn’t appear to have amounted to much, at least in the short term. One study found that a month after seeing the film, viewers had done next to nothing to put their newfound climate knowledge into action. Not one of them had examined their carbon footprint or written a letter to their senator.
Another study found that framing solutions in terms of individual consumer choices decreases people's willingness to take other forms of action to fight climate change. Maybe people feel like they’re being blamed for a global crisis beyond their control. Maybe they resent being asked to respond with what to them looks like merely symbolic, even futile, changes to their personal behavior. The danger, then, is not just that such messages don’t help. It’s that they might be making things worse.
System Change, Not Climate Change
Some people have started to get wise to this long history of corporations laying problems at the feet of individuals. The backlash it’s helped create has produced slogans now found on fridge magnets, protest posters, and newspaper headlines. The most common ones suggest a different kind of thing to do: stop worrying about personal choices, and start focusing on changing the system. The news site Vox published an article in 2019 whose headline perfectly expresses this idea: “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle.”
The Sunrise Movement, a decentralized, youth-led group at the forefront of progressive climate politics, advocates system change: “to abolish or reimagine institutions that degrade our communities and our climate.” This marks a generational sea change in climate activism. Abolishing or reimagining institutions was most certainly not on An Inconvenient Truth’s list. Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz recounts a telling experience with a Sunrise group in Philadelphia:
The organizers were scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an organizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no. Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken. Or falafel?”
“Dejah,” an activist named John Paul Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone. He started reciting a movement adage, using the singsong rhythm of a call-and-response: “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.
One way to think about Sunrise’s system-over-individual logic is to recall Iron Eyes Cody. We called him a fraud, but looked at another way, his personal deception obscures the bigger story. A first-generation Sicilian American was able to play some of the most iconic Native American roles in Hollywood because the movie industry excluded actual Native Americans from taking those roles. The biases woven into cultural norms and movie business practices allowed, and incentivized, Cody’s personal fraud. Too much focus on what he should or shouldn’t have done, as a single person, makes it easy to overlook the system that structured his options and made his personal choices possible in the first place. Coming to appreciate the significance of systems can be disorienting, but keeping that significance firmly in view is crucial to understanding the bigger picture. The little-things-add-up take on individual responsibility is too easily weaponized by corporations advancing their own interests. When it comes to climate change, they have long pushed a picture where “taking action” means tweaking our shopping choices. It’s this history that Sunrise and other progressive climate activists are rightly standing at war, yelling stop.
But even if we accept this change in perspective, it’s not at all obvious what we should do next. To take that step, we’ll look at another area of life where a loud chorus is rightly demanding structural change.
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'We Won't Be Silent': 1,000+ Students Protest Trump's DC Takeover
"The students leading today's walkouts are showing the entire nation what it means to resist authoritarianism with strength and solidarity," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 09, 2025
As US President Donald Trump expands his authoritarian takeovers of Democrat-led cities, more than 1,000 students from four universities in Washington, DC walked out to protest the Republican's recent actions in the nation's capital.
Students from American University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Howard University are protesting Trump's deployment of National Guard troops and federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), which have also provoked a lawsuit from DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb and a congressional resolution that aims to stop his takeover.
"Students are showing the country that we won't be silent while Trump tries to strip DC residents of our rights," American University student organizer Asher Heisten said in a statement circulated Tuesday by the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
"When Trump sends federal forces into DC, he is trying to intimidate and silence us," Heisten continued. "But students are proving that we will fight back to reject Trump's dangerous authoritarianism."
The students were joined by a pair of progressive lawmakers, US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
"Trump's federal takeover is a direct attack on democracy and the people of Washington, DC," Jayapal said in a statement. "The students leading today's walkouts are showing the entire nation what it means to resist authoritarianism with strength and solidarity."
The congresswoman told a crowd at Georgetown, her alma mater, that "this is an unprecedented moment in our country, where we have an authoritarian leader who is deploying federal troops to Washington, DC—to cities across the country, militarizing our streets, kidnapping people on the streets."
"The only bulwark that we have is the people, and so what you are doing here today is so important, because, at the end of the day, the checks and balances that were supposed to be built into our Constitution so that we could protect our constitutional rights are not working right now," she stressed, calling out Republicans in Congress and US Supreme Court justices for refusing to hold Trump accountable.
Acknowledging the thousands of protesters who marched to the White House on Saturday, Jayapal declared that "we are not powerless," a line that drew loud cheers from the crowd.
Markey, in his remarks at Georgetown, noted that when the president's supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in hopes of stopping the certification of his 2020 electoral loss, "Trump refused to send in troops."
"He allowed for that assault," Markey said of the attempted insurrection. "But now, here in DC, the president is attempting to create an impression that the crime rate is going up rather than down, that there is in fact a crisis here in the District of Columbia."
"And what he is doing, not just here in DC, but in Chicago, in LA, in Boston, is to try to characterize communities that are majority minority, that are majority Black and brown, as being unsafe to live," Markey noted. "And it's not a coincidence... It is to scare America. You cannot make America great again by making America hate again."
Markey argued that "this is not about policing, this is about political theater," and denounced Trump's DC takeover as a "charade."
Like the lawmakers, Georgetown student Scout Cardillo suggested that the DC takeover isn't just about the district. Cardillo told The Washington Post that "the effects of the occupation of DC and federalization of MPD is going to be felt throughout the country imminently, and it is on us to take a stand and fight back."
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'What Could Possibly Go Wrong?': Trump's ICE Is Now Recruiting Teenagers
"ICE opening up recruiting to teenagers because they can't find enough adults willing to be their racist storm troopers is some real dystopian shit," said one critic.
Aug 06, 2025
"We're taking father/son bonding to a whole new level."
That's how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday told social media users that it is lifting age limits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) applicants—evidence, critics said, of the Trump administration's desperation to fill the ranks of federal agencies tasked with carrying out its cruel and illegal anti-immigrant policies.
In a move reminiscent of how the U.S. military attempted to stem flagging enlistment during the George W. Bush administration's so-called War on Terror by lowering recruitment standards to welcome felons, gang members, white supremacists, and high school dropouts, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that "we are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement."
Approved applicants will be joining an agency rife with human rights and legal abuses as it scrambles to satisfy alleged ICE arrest quotas and President Donald Trump's desire to carry out the biggest mass deportation campaign in the nation's history—a campaign of kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and expulsion of innocent people, family separation, concentration camps, terrorization of American communities, alleged torture and sexual crimes, and many other outrages.
Noem told Fox & Friends Wednesday that in addition to lifting the 40-year-old age cap, ICE applicants can now be as young as 18.
"What could possibly go wrong?" independent journalist Tina Vasquez quipped on Bluesky.
Author Patrick S. Tomlinson wrote on X that "ICE opening up recruiting to teenagers because they can't find enough adults willing to be their racist storm troopers is some real dystopian shit."
Wednesday's announcement is the latest Trump administration effort to lure 10,000 new recruits, including by offering $50,000 sign-up bonuses and student loan repayment assistance—policies that can be paid for thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's historic funding for ICE.
Some critics pointed to a similar move to increase recruitment at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where lower hiring standards resulted in increased reports of sexual misconduct and corruption among Border Patrol recruits.
"If they start waiving requirements there like they did for Border Patrol, you're going to have an exponential increase in officers that are shown the door after three years because there's some issue," former senior ICE official Jason Houser told The Associated Press last week.
Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate campaign, offered some friendly advice for those considering working for ICE: "Instead of joining the Gestapo, perhaps find a unionized workplace that's not involved in kidnapping instead."
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