Incorruptible Mass

Tufts Student Abducted

• Anna Callahan • Season 6 • Episode 6

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In part two of our series on immigration during the Trump administration, we talk with Nicole Eigbrett, a co-executive director of the Asian American Resource Workshop. We discuss ICE's abduction of Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, the importance of defending immigrant rights from the administration's assault, the LUCE Network, and steps our listeners can take to help here in Massachusetts.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help you transform state politics. We know that together we can make Massachusetts policy reflect the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state.


And today we have a really great conversation again. This is our second podcast on immigrants under Trump. We will be talking to Nicole Eigbrett from the Asian American Resource Workshop and we will be covering the recent abduction of a Tufts student who was a pro-Palestine — who sent in an op-ed on pro-Palestine a year ago.


I mean craziness. We'll be talking about grassroots people stepping up and what people are doing right now. There is an immigrant justice coalition forming in Massachusetts.


We'll talk about that. We will also talk about the Luce Hotline that AARW is working to create to be able to deal with these kinds of situations. Also deportation defense organization organizing.


So it's going to be a fantastic conversation. But before we do, I am going to have my illustrious co-hosts introduce themselves and I will start with Jonathan. Hello. Jonathan Cohen.


He/him/his. Joining from Boston in the South End. And I've been active in kind of progressive advocacy on like state and local like for on issue and electoral campaigns for here in Massachusetts for over a decade now, which is always wild to say. And Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers.


He/him in Worcester, Massachusetts. And I've been active in politics for like, at least in Massachusetts, for 15 years or so, a little bit longer. How long is long? I don't know, 16, 18 years.


What is time? What is time? Exactly. 


I'm Anna Callahan. She/her. Coming at you from Medford where I'm a city councilor, done a lot of work sort of across the country helping local folks get elected, progressives. But also you know I will say for me that while I've there are many things that I've been deeply in, you know the policing thing I've been in for 25 years, there's other things I've been in.


And I will say that these immigrant discussions are something that I have not been deeply engaged in. And so you know, it's very moving for me, very informative to hear these stories. I hope that our listeners will get as much out of this as I am sure I will.


And with that I would love to introduce Nicole Eigbrett who is with the Asian American Resource Workshop. And Nicole, if you can tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to this work and also about your organization and what you do. Thanks Anna, John, and Jordan, it's really great to be here with you.


So yeah, my name is Nicole Eigbratt. I use she/her pronouns. And I am a queer Chinese-American organizer and resident of Somerville.


And this past August actually marked my decade in Massachusetts. I was raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York, went to college in northern New York State, studied foreign languages and globalization theory, and then came to our great state 10 years ago by way of the Berkshires actually, and joining AmeriCorps VISTA, doing a year of service at a Habitat for Humanity affiliate. And that really kick-started my journey in community organizing and doing social justice work.


So I actually identify as an immigrant myself. I was adopted from China at a very young age. Longer conversation for a different podcast around my lens on adoption.


But yeah, I think the work that I'm doing right now as one of the co-executive directors of the Asian American Resource Workshop, or AARW for short, really strikes close to home. And I joined the organization as one of its staff leaders nearly a year ago in May 2024, after actually being one of its volunteer members for nearly seven years. So yeah, this organization has really been my political home since I moved to the Boston area at the beginning of the first Trump administration.


So personally, all of these things happening in our world right now, I'm just having like things are coming full circle in powerful ways, not necessarily good ways, but that is what is really personally motivating me to show up and continue building collective power where we need it. And so to talk a bit more about AARW, we are a pan-Asian organization that organizes members in the greater Boston area. And our office is based in Dorchester and we're actually celebrating our 45th-year anniversary this year.


And so a lot going on as an organization, but our theory of change is to organize through an anti-displacement lens. And so that means really trying to tackle all the different ways our communities, our people are being displaced. So we are fighting for housing justice, immigration justice, as well as climate justice.


And we do a lot of work around the criminalization of people of color and especially immigrants with criminal records. And so ARW has a track record of deportation defense organizing as well as abolitionist and anti-criminalization organizing. Wow, fantastic.


I think I know that something big just happened and everyone I know is talking about it. I want us to start off with this story and if you can tell us the story, I know that a Tufts student was abducted by ICE and there was a big rally. If you can give us some more details about what happened and about the community reaction in the rally, that would be great.


Mmhm. Yeah, my heart is admittedly feeling still very, very heavy this week. So, you know, it's no surprise to anyone that Massachusetts has become a target for the Trump administration.


DHS released figures that in this past week alone, more than 370 people, you know, our neighbors, families, workers, leaders, have been detained. And Somerville has become kind of this own testing ground for fascism, quite frankly. I really don't know how else to put it.


And on Tuesday evening, Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk was leaving her apartment just off the campus of Somerville, was going to an iftar dinner to break her fast for Ramadan, and was approached by plainclothes federal agents. Plainclothes and masked. Right.


So, yes, yes, yes. Plainclothes, masked, who abducted her in broad daylight. And in less than a minute, they put her into a vehicle and also took off.


And, you know, it's just our community is really reeling from this, and because by our understanding like this, this was the first student activist that was targeted in our state after the Columbia student, you know, one or two weeks ago, was also illegally detained. And Rumeysa, by our understanding, is a green card holder, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey. Yeah. Yeah.


So following this incident, one of the neighbors witnessed it, and they recorded a video. And actually in the viral footage, you can hear his voice in the background trying to shout. These agents try to interrogate what they're doing.


And this neighbor knew to call our statewide hotline called the Luce Hotline. And that is the reason why our community was able to mobilize a response. Wow.


Amazing. First, before you go into the Luce hotline and how that works, can we just hear a little bit more about the rally and the response? Yep, absolutely. So I have to, like, describe just the chain of events, because after this video was shared with the hotline, the hotline then reached out to me and many of my neighbors here in Somerville, who over the last month have been coordinating a fully grassroots ICE Watch network.


We're calling ourselves the Somerville ICE Watch Network. And it's because of our organization and then ability to get connected with other leaders at Muslim Justice League and Palestinian Youth Movement, as well as the Tufts Students and Grad Workers Union. We put all these pieces together, and we realized we needed to take action.


We needed to make it clear that what is happening here in Somerville, across Massachusetts and across this country is absolutely unacceptable. And we refuse to back down. And this is also an opportunity for everyone to step up.


So, yeah, Wednesday, less than 24 hours later, we held an emergency rally in Powder House Square, which is nearby to Davis Square in Somerville. Just outside of Tufts campus. And certain estimates said that there were between 2 to 3,000 people there.


All folks who had less than 10 or 12 hours’ notice after the first social media post went in. And I think it was really important for us to draw these connections between Trump's deportation machine, what happened to Rumeysa, and quite frankly the ongoing genocide in Palestine over the last one one and a half years. Like we know again that the ceasefire has been violated by Israel.


And you know, the administration has just now decided to target student activists and political dissidents. But I thought it was also important to really uplift that, you know, knowing that Rumeysa’s situation was going to receive this national global attention. People also can't look away from the fact though that our Latine neighbors, many of them from Brazil, El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala, you know, all these countries in Central and South America, have been routinely under attack now for weeks and months.


And then the biggest picture being, you know, again, Department of Homeland Security, this, this stretches back decades, right, under Biden, under Obama, Bush, who started all of this in 9/11. So we were doing our best to try to create this coherent picture for everyone. Yeah, amazing.


What kind of speakers did you have? Yeah, so I, I actually was one of the first speakers on behalf of the Somerville ICE Watch network and I really appreciated my neighbors’ trust and support to represent us. We had the director of Muslim Justice League speak and also shared a statement from Rumeysa’s attorney, which was really important. We had leaders from the Palestinian youth movement and we also had the steward of the Tufts Grad Workers union as well as a few of the Tufts undergraduate students who've been part of Palestinian liberation activism.


But we needed to remain anonymous though, for their safety. Yeah. I just want to say really quickly that she's not a green card holder.


She had a student visa. It's still an escalation. And I think the other thing is I don't want to, I don't want to minimize the importance of this moment, but I actually think it's overstating to call her an activist.


She's co, she co-authored, she co-authored one editorial a year ago that said that Tufts administration should listen to students. And not to say that — I don't want to undermine the importance of this. I actually think it's really important to say that that's actually what's at stake, is that this isn't a person — they can't allege that this person's like, out doing stuff or like, like, you know, some of the things that they're alleging in other places, no one's even — you can't even make that claim, right?


Like the claim like — she goes to class, she teaches classes, she was going home from Ramadan. She co-authored one thing a year ago, and for that, they revoked her student visa and are threatening to deport her. So not to undermine it, but just to say, like that's how seriously fascist this is. Really, it really is chilling that the only thing she did was co-author, in the student newspaper, a request for the administration to listen to students.


So I really, I don't know, I've been sitting a lot with it myself. I'll just say really quickly. I think that they're, I think we should be clear that you — we don't have to agree with someone's speech to think that they should have a right to it and you should not have your student visa revoked because — you know, they keep saying like, oh, we're criminals, gang members, but like you, like, the only thing she did was co-author a student editorial. When was the last time you picked up a student newspaper, a student editorial? A year ago.


And I think that the one thing that always seems to me very, very much so underlying a lot of, let's say some of the recent university-related attacks is knowing how if you're attacking people who have speech that, so that some prominent Democrats disagree with that, of trying to take cases like that where for instance, as you saw in New York where like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries could barely manage criticism that, that you're basically setting the stage to continue to roll back basic protections for people by, by, by like targeting people who are legally, fully legally present, but taking cases where they, where the Trump administration thinks that some high profile Democrats won't have, won't have the back of basic, basic constitutional protections and civil liberties and why it's so incumbent that elected officials at all levels prove that, that prove that suspicion to be wrong.


I know had some elected, some of our Medford folks were — elected officials, city councilors — were, were at that rally. I was not, I was at one of those city council meetings. But, but many of them were.


So I, I feel, you know, that that's, I just think it's important as well. Yeah, go ahead, Jonathan. Oh, yeah.


The other thing that, that, that, that was kind of horrifying with, in a specific Tufts case is the way in which like ICE was surveilling her for two days and the fact that, and I believe also with, I think I was seeing that was the case in Colombia too, of using the fact that it's Ramadan so you have a specific daily cycle that somebody might go through of going if there are dinners in the evening of using that as an opportunity which is particularly pernicious and part of the Islamophobia that has dominated the entirety of DHS and is this existence. And I just think it's really important that we talk about. You don't have to agree with someone's speech to think that that should not be a reason that somebody be deported.


Like that's a, that's a horrifying perspective. You know, one of the things I was talking to an expert in the Holocaust and one of the things that somebody said to me was like the, the whole, you know, we remember that like famous poem like “first they came for.” But the subtext to that story, the subtext of that poem is that the author of that of that poem.


I think Jonathan, you were the one who told me this, but I looked afterwards to somebody I was like somebody else. I confirmed this with somebody at the Holocaust place in Brandeis that like yes, you're right. So I want to quote.


I want to quote Jonathan but I did some follow up research because I wanted to see if it was true. But Jonathan, I don't know if you would tell this story. Oh sure.


It's the fact that in that poem of like “first they came for.” It's the, it's the importance of recognizing the exact invocation of that is when he talks about like “first they came for the communists and I didn't stand up.” The guy hated communists.


Like it wasn't somebody who like — it's, it's less of a story of somebody talking about the need to have stand in solidarity with neighbors because solidarity is good. It is that if you are somebody that when they attack and it's kind of the way in which connections have like these. The way that the Trump administration is attacking let's say like trans youth or other cases is that they attack people groups that are less popular in society.


If you let that happen, it will keep getting worse. Like it'll keep getting closer and closer and closer to you. So it doesn't matter whether like if you're not protecting civil liberties, no matter like civil liberties as a concept and basic protections as a concept that like watch out because it's not too like it.


It doesn't take long for that to get to you.


Any last thoughts on that Jordan, from, from your extra research? Okay. No, that's right. Yeah.


Yeah. Just like the person was like, “Oh, oops. Yeah, I thought I was fine because I hated those people, but then it turned out they came for me.”


Right. So next, I would love for us to turn a little bit to this new immigrant Justice Coalition that you're talking about. So let's just get a little bit of a broader picture.


Now we've heard this, the story, and if we can talk a little bit about what's happening in Massachusetts statewide with a coalition that you guys are helping put together. Yes. ARW is one of nearly two dozen grassroots, base-building, immigrant-led immigrant justice organizations who came together at the end of last year and then more formally in January 2025. We’re calling ourselves the Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts.


Trying to keep it very straightforward. It was important for us to create in this moment a new, immigrant-led formation that was deeply values-aligned and refuses to leave any communities behind because of some of these historic oppressions and ways that our systems and legislative policies often do. So for instance, our coalition feels very clear that we will not leave behind immigrants with criminal records. You know, we will not leave behind black and African immigrants, we will not leave behind Muslim immigrants.


Because I think there's just a really clear dominant narrative right now about like what it means to be an immigrant. And we fully reject the binary of a good or bad immigrant. So I mean, to me — And I have to jump in because like this whole thing about criminals, like it is amazing how they, you know, Trump sold it to people like “Only, oh, the criminals.


We're going to get rid of the criminals.” And now they just redefined anyone who's in this country who wasn’t born here as a criminal. Like literally, they just completely changed what most people thought criminal meant. To be like, no, no, if you are an immigrant, you are by definition a criminal. It's almost like it's predictable. Almost.


Yes. Yeah, we, we are full-throttle sailing off the cliff of fascism. And our, our Justice Coalition is really trying to be the grassroots frontline defense to stop this.


Because we represent our communities, we know our people, we are training leaders and many of our orgs have been now for decades. And so through this coalition, you know, where we're taking kind of a multi-pronged strategy, we're trying to push and transform narrative. We are also trying to advocate for certain policies at the state legislature that we need and I can mention some of the bills that we're actually considering towards the end.


And I would say the third and kind of most key project we're leading right now is a statewide immigrant defense hotline, which is called the Luce Hotline and Luce, L-U-C-E, is derived from the Latin term meaning light. And we had a lot of deep conversations about what the branding and name of this hotline needed to be, because we need it to be short and memorable. But we also realized Massachusetts has an incredibly vast and diverse range of immigrants.


And it was really hard landing on a name that felt fully translatable and relatable in every cultural context. But this is where we are. You didn’t go with Esperanto? Yeah, yeah.


And some of those were taken. We needed to be distinct enough that, that folks would not confuse us with other projects or maybe other existing hotlines that are not quite going as far.


So I really want to uplift a few organizations who've been really anchoring the structure and leadership of this hotline, and that's Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, as well as the Matahari Workers Center. And essentially this, this hotline is modeled after our neighbors in North Carolina who have run the Siembra hotline.


You can actually find their toolkit out on the Internet. And the idea is that there's a statewide hotline that is managed by trained, multilingual volunteer operators. You can contact the hotline via phone or text seven days a week, and between 5am to 9pm we have these trained operators.


And so if you see any suspicious activity by ICE or federal agents in your community, if you witness something, if you record something, the idea is you can call or text this hotline, and then depending on where you're located in Massachusetts, the hotline will then alert a local hub that's near or in that community to then send another layer of trained volunteers to go assess the situation as quickly as possible, try to verify what's going on and really quell rumors and empower our communities to take back their own safety. I think it's — I just want to follow up with that, and thank you first for doing that.


I think it's so critical in this moment and just say that, like, what we know is that ICE benefits when it can do this stuff away from the public eye. And the more that there's people who are willing to stand up, especially people who have protections of being born here, to just stand up and just take visual of what they're doing, that and to video it, if appropriate, and following, again, the laws around audio recordings and so forth, but, you know, doing so legally with training, but the more that we can do that, the better chances that we can ensure that ICE is going to follow the rules.


Because these, these sort of systems, you know, they benefit from darkness, they benefit from confusion, they benefit from us not knowing exactly what they're doing and they benefit from the people they're harming, not being able to have the legal remedy to say, “Hey, what happened to me isn't right” or isn't legal or anything else. And so, you know, the fact that we were able to mobilize so quickly for Rumeysa, the fact that we are — those are protections that we need in this moment. And we need you, if you're listening, to be a part of that, to volunteer, to donate, to be another cog in making sure that we do everything we can to protect people. Absolutely.


That's exactly right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.


I was just gonna ask if there are places either where you have hubs or places where you don't have hubs that maybe some listeners here could get involved and try and make sure that there's coverage across Massachusetts. Yeah, thanks for that question, Anna. And I think I do want to emphasize one thing again, that we are not a direct action or intervention network.


Really the goal of our network is to witness, record, and verify. So I do want to make sure listeners feel clear about that.


And, you know, the other thing we said at the rally the other day, like, this is not the time for lone actors. This is not the time to be acting as a vigilante, even if it's with good intentions. So this is really a call and an invitation for folks who aren't organized yet to get organized.


And this training piece feels especially important to all of us at the state levels and in our local hubs. And so last week, our hotline received over 100 calls and texts alone. And it's increasing every single day.


And so even if, again, 100% of these, you know, sightings aren't, like, verified as federal agents, like, it is empowering, though, to know that we have the infrastructure to get out there and find out and then again, equip our communities with this knowledge. And so we are seeing a lot of patterns, unfortunately, beyond the Boston, immediate Boston area, like, I think initially in the suburbs, that where we know a lot of our immigrant neighbors live. Everett and Chelsea have been really hot spots.


Somerville, of course, where I live. We're also, though, seeing a lot of activity in the farther out suburbs and gateway cities like Lowell and New Bedford, as well as Framingham and certain parts of Worcester. I also read a really disturbing article this morning that at least a dozen people in the Berkshires have been detained.


And so this is really a statewide assault. And I would really urge folks, you know, if you are not tapped into a local immigrant justice organization yet who's leading this in your community to try to reach out and find out if there's capacity to move that or if you could be supportive in being a grassroots leader in your own sense. And that was honestly part of the assessment we need to make in Somerville.


A lot of our nonprofits and movement organizations right now are strapped. You know, we are then systemically underfunded. We've been systemically taxed to try to fill these governments — I'm sorry, fill these gaps where government has failed us. And now again, in this specific moment, are scrambling to make it work. So, you know, rather than continuing to look around or point fingers, we decided to step up.


And that's how our local hub formed. You know, I have to take this opportunity only because it's my job and I got to do it on this podcast. But, you know, please, if you are listening to this, we hope that you will support the AARW and that you will support the immigrant justice networks around you. They need your donations, they need your volunteerism. You could just drop five bucks to us as well for this podcast, getting the word out about these things. This is our second in a series on immigration under Trump.


You will not hear these stories in many places. We need for people to be hearing this information, to be getting the word out.


And so while you are donating to these super important causes, just a little bit to support our — the young people who help us make sure that this podcast can be seen by as many people as possible, doing graphics, doing video editing, and social media. Our podcast is very inexpensive because none of us get paid, but it does cost just a little bit.


And we're close to having the number of regular donations that covers the podcast every month, but we're not quite there just for those keeping score. And I think there was. Is there anything else that you want to say about the Luce Network? I think it's a really exciting project that you're working on and just see if there's anything else we will be posting in the show notes like how people can get involved.


Anything else to say about the Luce Network? Yeah, thanks, Anna. The Luce Hotline and this Immigrant Justice Network came together quickly and so really want to emphasize to folks that we are all trying to build this plane as we fly it. But again, I think it just feels very values-aligned and clear in our mission in wanting to make sure that our immigrant neighbors who are most impacted and under attack by the Trump administration, are at the center and leading on these resources and you know, that is not to say that this is the only tool or solution.


I want to be clear about that as well. But it is an important aspect of what needs to be moved right now. And for folks who are listening there, if you want to support and get involved in the hotline itself, we are in need of operators who are multilingual.


So if you go to the organization's website, lucemass.org you will see the languages that we are currently operating in and what our other needs are. And so please fill out the form.


And if you're wanting, though, to maybe get trained or connected to your local hub, that's also the best way to get involved. Great. And I know that you wanted to, if we can just touch on this, that you guys are also doing something specifically for Southeast Asian communities. So if you want to tell us a little bit about that, that would be great. Yes.


AARW is actually the only organization in Massachusetts that does deportation defense organizing for Southeast Asian refugees. And this, again, wasn't necessarily work we were looking for. But in 2016, after Trump was elected the first time, and then when he unleashed his first assault on our immigrant communities, he was really targeting Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao people, many of whom have been in the United States since we were there in the 1970s, waging war and genocide and then rounding them up and deporting them back to countries they haven't even called home for 40 or 50 years.


So it was again evident that there was a gap. And I'm just so proud of my friends and comrades within AARW who stepped up and were ready to take on this work. And we do it in partnership with movement lawyers at the Asian Outreach Center of Greater Boston Legal Services, as well as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.


But, yeah, you know where AARW’s office is located in Fields Corner, Dorchester, has one of the biggest Vietnamese communities in the country, let alone the state. And then farther north in Lynn and Lowell, that's where some of the biggest Cambodian communities in the country reside, too. And so for AARW, we remain really invested in making sure, again, are people who have been historically marginalized and, again, left out of, like, dominant narratives of immigrant justice or, you know, overlooked because people have criminal records.


Like, we don't leave any of them behind. So there are, you know, obviously a lot of, like, language-specific needs and cultural needs that we're addressing, but we're doing a lot of, like, family preparedness and know-your-rights legal workshops and continue to lead on that front. And can I ask, it's just crossing my mind now that when we're talking about, we did these genocidal wars in Southeast Asia and then we continue to deport people.


Am I wrong in recalling that Laos was one of those places where we left the most unbelievable number of landmines? Yes. Literally, it is filled with landmines. And so when you deport people back to a place that just got — I mean, like, this is, it's so crazy. The reality of the idea of deporting people to places where we have made it uninhabitable to exist.


Yep, that's 100% correct, Anna. And again, these are the exact types of narratives and bigger-picture connections that we are constantly trying to help people understand, right. Everything that we see today with detentions and deportations and DHS, like it is part of this bigger global project of militarism and US-led imperialism and you know, all the suffering that we see in other parts of the world, like Palestine, you know, has legacy and has parallel to wars and genocides of the past.


So as bleak and horrifying as this all feels, it is also continues to give me hope of the organizations and the organizers though, who are moving into deeper solidarity because of these shared legacies. That kind of historical connection — and I'll let, Jordan, I'll let you happen after that because I just saw that just reminds me of — I appreciated, Nicole, your framing around displacement early on and how that kind of legacy of war connection also speaks to that in the way that the US displaces people from other countries.


They end up here and then constant risk of the US trying to displace them from being here. Yeah. Jordan, you got any closing thoughts? I know you have to go.


Yeah, just, I think, like, it. We just. This is all horrifying and I think we can.


The one thing I hope for people is that it shouldn't matter sort of how you conceptualize or think about sort of the global politic about all of these things. Like, what should be unifying is that people should be able to just stay where they are, like to like a. Like a just status quo.


Like no one, like, and, you know, no one can. Seriously, like, I have lots of thoughts about sort of like the quote-unquote “gang members” and all this other nonsense that people throw around. You know, you would think that like there was just like, I don't know, like the gangs are just running — like, it's just not true. So like beyond just like the fact that I agree that I think like people should be more than the things they're alleged to have done, let alone maybe have done — like, you're more than the worst thing you've ever done — besides all of that, that's just not the reality. Like, what's really happening is they're just they're kidnapping innocent — they're kidnapping people who have done nothing wrong.


You know, people who they’re kidnapping people who they know where they are, because they're reporting in, because they pay taxes. Right? Like, they're not — like, this is not, you know, and so it really should not matter at all what anybody's — you know, like, we should be unified in being, like, “You cannot be kidnapped for something you said,” and that's it. You shouldn't be disappeared into a black hole for that.


You shouldn't be tortured for having, for having a tattoo for your autistic brother, little brother. You shouldn't be sent away and tortured because you happen to be LGBTQ and you thought America would be a safe place for you. And then you get sent to a place you've never, you don't even, you're not even from that place, to go get sent to be tortured for the joy of some of, of some really sadistic people. Like, this is this — you should be against this. Like, it really should be easy to be against Nazi stuff. And it's, it's like, that should be the bare minimum.


And so that's my call for people, is you don't have to agree with every single person's position. You don't have to. You don't even need to care about the interconnectedness of all these things.


You should just be able to believe that people should be able to just be here who are already here, and we should be humane to each other. And like, this is, this is insanity.


And so my pitch to you is, please get involved. I almost want to reframe that, that, that poem quote thing and say, first they came for the people I didn't like, then they came for people I didn't know. And then they came for me. Well said.


No, exactly. The “didn't know” part, the thing that, that always gets me is how much people talk, like, experience the concept of immigration as a fundamental abstraction where they can't make the connection between people they know and the larger issue and the large — and like, the larger attacks and how much that kind of xenophobia is able to thrive in that, as well as the necessity. Connected to the point I made before about how much Democrats have failed in recent years about making any affirmative defense of immigrant communities rather than reinforcing toxic narratives coming from Republicans and trying to outdo them on who's going to be “tougher on the border,” quote-unquote, when all of that does is reinforce these narratives around criminality, around harm that, that kind of erase fundamental humanity of people and whitewash the — what is the actual criminal activity, which is everything that ICE is doing now.


And like to the point of when it comes to, let's say like, people committing crimes, just can't get over like how blatantly criminal, like literally everything that the Trump administration is doing in this and to make sure that that reality gets fundamental, fundamentally centered because of how much like — if we ever get a better world on the other side, there is so much that needs to happen to, to make sure things don't happen like this, don't happen again. Yes. Yeah.


Thank you, John, for putting it plainly. Yeah. All of us grassroots organizers, I think feel pretty clear that the Democrats are complicit in where we are right now.


And I really hope folks remember not to whitewash how many deportations Biden, Obama were also responsible for and the way they have wholly contributed to the deportation machine that we are now all experiencing. So, yeah, just really grateful for the time to really unpack this all with you today and if I could make another call to action like beyond — Yeah, I think, you know, if you're, you're ready to get organized and get trained, the Luce hotline is wanting to receive your support.


But you know, humbly, I would also say if you have the financial resources, I would really urge you to consider giving to grassroots organizations right now, especially ones that are immigrant-led and doing, like this important base-building and leadership development work because our movement organizations are also being stripped of our resources, like the funders and the federal contracts that we hold are all being removed. And grassroots donor support, even again, as little as like $5, $10, $15 a month, ensures our longevity and ability to continue fighting for our people. Amazing.


Thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Thanks so much for coming on the show and thanks to our listeners for taking action on this, and we look forward to chatting with you all next week. Thanks.