These past few weeks, I’ve found myself in rooms with people I never imagined organizing with side by side.
Leaders of tenants’ unions and climate organizers. Immigrant families and labor organizers. Faith groups and youth activists. Neighbors who had never met before, now planning together how to defend their communities from ICE raids.
And I thought: this is the America we’re trying to build.
As a Black and Indigenous organizer, I’ve never been under any illusions about this country. ICE’s current rampage is not an aberration. It’s part of a long American history of surveillance, displacement, and state violence against Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and poor communities. That is the America that has always existed.
And to fight it, we can’t just defend what’s already here. We have to build something new. A new system rooted in solidarity instead of punishment, care instead of extraction, and collective power instead of corporate control.
What’s been most moving, and keeping my spirits up, is the way communities are coming together across struggles.
This past week, I was once again inspired by a direct action I organized with my local community organization, Planet Over Profit (POP). I co-led a massive sit-in targeting a Hilton hotel that was housing ICE agents in Manhattan. In 30 hours, we built a unique and diverse coalition of climate justice organizers, pro-Palestinian activists, and autonomous neighborhood defense groups to take over the lobby of a Lower Manhattan Hilton housing ICE agents.
The action was a huge success, both in terms of admonishing the Hilton hotels that continue to enable ICE operations and bringing together organizers who have been working tirelessly these past few years to make this city safer and welcoming to everyone.
For, even as we resist ICE’s terror in our cities, we know that we cannot keep our eyes off the fight to end the fossil fuel industry.
That’s why, in New York State, even as we push back against ICE, we’re also fighting to pass the Insure Our Communities Act, a groundbreaking bill that takes on the insurance industry for fueling the climate crisis while hiking premiums on working-class communities.
Through powerful grassroots organizing, we’re building pressure on legislators to choose people over fossil fuel profits. We’re forming coalitions with housing justice organizations, community groups, and tenants unions. These are brand new formations, including groups and individuals that have not traditionally been included in NGO-led legislative campaigns.
We’re building this coalition because we know that uniting around the causes that affect us all is the only way we win.
In this moment of rising authoritarianism, it is the organizing and solidarity I am witnessing that gives me hope: Neighborhood groups organizing against ICE are now working alongside climate and housing advocates. Mutual aid networks are connecting with policy campaigns. People who once felt isolated in their fights are discovering they’re part of something bigger.
This is what real change looks like: solidarity, not silos.
And it doesn’t happen by accident. It takes organizers on the ground, resources for community trainings, materials for neighborhood outreach, and sustained pressure on powerful politicians and institutions. It takes coalitions that are nurtured, not assumed.
In a moment when so many forces are trying to divide us, I keep returning to what I’ve seen with my own eyes: people choosing each other anyway.
If you believe in building something new with us, I hope you’ll give what you can today.
In Solidarity,
- Liv Senghor, Stop the Money Pipeline, NY Campaigns Manager.
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