Safety Is a Practice We Enact Together: Building Solidarity Under Trump 2.0

Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, his administration has issued a series of executive orders escalating the U.S.’s demonization of trans people, migrants, and activists against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A key strategy of the White House appears to be controlling the mobility of these groups and removing them from public life — whether it be through targeting migrants and activists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and deportation, or implementing travel bans against trans women athletes and criminalizing the use of public bathrooms for trans people.

Several of these executive orders call on the public to report people in their own communities, under threat of economic and criminal sanctions. They frame the authoritarian state as protecting “us” by attacking “them.” Eliminating trans people’s right to exist is “defending women”; detaining and deporting migrants is “protecting the American people against invasion”; McCarthy-esque targeting of activists “combats antisemitism.” These policies set self-preservation against community care, forcing us into compliance and turning us against one another — all while the far right peddles the fascist belief that casting out entire sectors of our society is not only acceptable but necessary. The Democratic Party has not offered any meaningful alternative narrative; instead, it advocates a “daring” strategy: “Roll over and play dead.” Indeed, some Democrats directly foment these attacks, including characterizing trans rights as a politically toxic issue and voicing approval for police crackdowns on student protests, leading to students facing criminal charges and deportation.

Our safety will also not be doled out by legislatures or courts. Because the U.S. legal system structurally favors whiteness, wealth and patriarchy, the mere existence of legal rights does not equate to material safety. Basic rights for trans, immigrant and activist communities can be swept away with the stroke of a pen, and we cannot count on the Supreme Court to defend the Constitution, as seen in its decisions giving a pass to Trump’s Muslim Ban and overturning pregnant people’s bodily autonomy.

Instead of pleading with the state to stop violating its own laws and international agreements, we are better served by “doing justice” through our actions in community with each other. Doing justice requires us to work across our differences and refuse to allow the state to pit us against each other. We are engaged scholars of migration and gender studies who understand that the attacks against trans people, migrants and pro-Palestine activists are entangled — and in our meetings and classrooms, we have found that foregrounding the shared roots of attacks on some of the most marginalized members of society helps us combat efforts to fracture solidarity. Below we highlight some of the most powerful approaches we’ve seen to contest this fascist regime.

Empowering Our Communities

Scholar Kelly Lytle Hernandez calls immigration policy “one of the least constitutional and most racist realms of governance in U.S. law and life.” Indeed, it provides effective weapons for an authoritarian government to wield against people it deems do not belong to U.S. society. The threat of ICE raids terrorizes migrant communities into staying home, fearing that merely stepping into the public puts them at risk for detention and deportation. While schools, clinics and religious sites are no longer shielded from ICE raids by the “sensitive locations” memo, community members and employees continue to protect each other from the intrusion of law enforcement.

One way of doing this is through Know Your Rights trainings: Public education practices to inform vulnerable community members of their constitutionally protected rights.

In an era in which we are facing drastic attacks on constitutional protections, these practices have taken on new life. Nationwide, all kinds of nonprofits and activist organizations are facilitating Know Your Rights workshops on everything from how to engage immigration officials, to transgender rights with employers or the State Department, and rights during protests in a time of extreme surveillance and repression. That the federal government frames these workshops as lessons on “how to escape arrest” speaks to how this fascist regime views community empowerment and rights as obstacles to its agenda. Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan complained that, “Sanctuary cities are “making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, [is] very well educated.” In reality, what communities make difficult are illegal apprehensions.

In Chicago, a public elementary school denied entry to U.S. Secret Service agents, initially identified as ICE, because the school followed its sanctuary campus protocols to protect students. Hospital workers are also protecting their immigrant and transgender patients. Nurses from the California Nurses Association, for example, have distributed information about immigrant rights and held protests affirming trans rights to contest any threats to gender-affirming care at the San Francisco Medical Center. Videos of health care workers, teachers and unions circulating on social media explain how to refuse cooperation as employees with duties to safeguard privacy through HIPAA and FERPA regulations. By prioritizing community safety over cooperation with an authoritarian state, service providers are enacting abolitionist practices that reject the criminalization and punishment that the executive orders rely on. As these few examples show, labor and unions are a central front of the resistance that have the potential to coordinate across different sectors of the economy.

Creating Sanctuaries

To counter the deployment of ICE, U.S. Marshals and other federal cops to kidnap community members, ordinary people are coming together to form community watches and rapid response teams that document ICE raids in their neighborhoods. Organizations are providing Migra Watch trainings and hotlines to support the proliferation of community countersurveillance. These types of projects call on community members to take action by bearing witness to the workings of immigration enforcement, which often lacks transparency or accountability. Organizations like the Black Trans Travel Fund and the Trans Continental Pipeline have emerged to provide transgender people with relocation resources and access to safer means of travel. The need for organizations and resources like these has only increased as many states rapidly expand the criminalization of immigrant and trans life and wield carceral violence against protests and political speech.

Other communities have moved to expand notions of sanctuary. Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently extended its sanctuary policy for immigrants to include trans and nonbinary people, pledging non-cooperation with anti-trans federal or state policies and resolving to ensure equal access to housing, health care, education and employment. These forms of community care and defense can be adapted to protect other targeted communities, like those enduring aggressive police presence. Campaigns that have brought together police and prison abolition with migrant justice already provide vibrant models. For example, the #EraseTheDatabase campaign in Chicago works to permanently end the city’s gang database, which relies on racist narratives of criminality that target Black and Brown people and which shares data with 500 agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The coalition simultaneously pushes for financial and structural investment in Chicago’s most under-resourced communities as a strategy to break the cycle of criminalization. These and related campaigns offer an expansive vision of sanctuary that not only disrupts the surveillance and capture of Black and Latinx communities of all legal statuses, but proactively strives to make daily life safer for every resident.

The original sanctuary movement for Central American migrants fleeing U.S.-sponsored Dirty Wars in the 1980s laid a foundation for our work today. Faith-based groups in the United States provided shelter, legal aid, and other forms of material care to refugees and immigrants who were under threat of deportation. Sanctuary practitioners risked their own criminalization, motivated by their understanding that U.S. imperialism abroad was inseparable from unjust immigration policies at home. They drew on the Nuremberg trials to craft their approach: Because the state was violating the law and causing violence and death, ordinary people had a duty to intervene and create justice through acts of community care. Today, sanctuary is a vital framework for protecting each other and for addressing the targeting of specific vulnerable groups as linked pieces of a much larger attack. As authoritarian forces try to separate our communities, we must act to defend each other, knowing that our fights — and our collective survival — are intertwined. In doing so, we affirm that safety is not in a place — it is a practice we enact with each other.