We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.
—BAYARD RUSTIN
We need to be there, but we need to follow the lead of folks who are more directly impacted by this than we are.
—TRISH FLORENCE, Indivisible, San Antonio, Texas
After we finished a draft of what would become the Indivisible Guide, we were toying around with titles for the document. The Tea Party, our anti-inspiration, had thrived as a national movement in part because its name had tapped into American history and iconography. It had spoken to their (twisted) values.1 It had helped knit people together with a common frame of mind.
If we were going to replicate the Tea Party, we needed a frame that people could organize under. We racked our brains for historical parallels that spoke to our values—the values we knew were directly under threat when Trump became president-elect. But drawing on common reference points in American history is harder for the left, since, y’know, we understand our country was built on genocide and slavery. There hasn’t ever really been a point where every American is equal and included, at least not yet.
We brainstormed names.
Leah: The Great Society?
Ezra: No.
Leah: The Four Freedoms?
Ezra: No.
Leah: No Justice, No Bills?
Ezra: No, that’s weird.
Leah: Indivisible?
We both got chills: this was the perfect name. “Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” was more than just a phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance. “Indivisible” spoke to us. We were up against an explicitly divide-and-conquer strategy from Trump. That meant we had to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. If each of us waited our turn for our issue or our families to be attacked, we would be waiting for our turn to lose. Our only hope was to stand together—indivisible.
Also, it was a pretty cool word.
The concept of being indivisible was particularly important for us because we were conscious of the huge amount of privilege we personally had. We were (and are!) a pair of married, white, graduate school–educated former congressional staffers who now occupied mid-level roles within the progressive elite. We weren’t the primary targets of Trump’s attacks—but we could stand in solidarity with those who were.
And according to the best research we’ve got on the post-Trump activism boom, this was pretty common among folks who went from zero to sixty after November 2016. Research on new activists in the Trump era has found that they are disproportionately likely to be women, college- or graduate school–educated, middle- to upper-middle-class, and white.
There are some obvious reasons why women responded to 2016 with righteous outrage: they’d just watched an extraordinarily qualified female presidential candidate lose to an extraordinarily unqualified, hateful charlatan with a self-confessed record of sexual assault. But it wasn’t just that. When Indivisible leaders described to us their journey into activism, young mothers came back over and over again to a shared moment: the challenge of explaining to their children how a bully, a man who violated every value they’d tried to instill, had won the presidency. Older women talked about breaking into male-dominated workplaces, about being passed over for promotions and coping with sexual harassment and fighting for their spot at the table and how they’d seen it all reflected in Clinton’s loss. And women of every age described a simple, devastating feeling: America was supposed to be a welcoming, caring society. Trump’s election shattered any illusion of this.
We’ve also got a theory about why the average first-time anti-Trump activist is more likely to be white, middle- or upper-class, and college educated. Those of us who radically changed our patterns of political activity after Trump’s election did so because something about November 2016 shook the way we understood the world. We’d had some faith that something about the existing system—the parties, the elites, the media, the institutions—would stop this obviously unacceptable, dangerous outcome. We’d believed that open racism and misogyny, a record of serial sexual assault, and sheer malevolent stupidity would be disqualifying for enough voters to keep Trump from the presidency. We’d believed in that illusion of America as a welcoming, caring society.
But the system failed. Americans—specifically white Americans—did not reject Trump, not in the numbers we needed. The bully won.
This kind of faith in the system is more commonly found in people who have benefited from the system—folks with one or another kind of privilege. That means even as we’re organizing and taking action, we also have to rethink how we understand the world. We have to think about how it got this bad without us noticing. Because things were not OK before Trump appeared on the scene. And if we don’t start from that understanding, we’re not going to change it.
If this account of your political awakening hits home but also makes you uncomfortable—if you feel a catch in your throat, a bit of a defensive feeling, a need to explain why you’re different—hold on a second. If you were surprised by what Trump’s election said about our country, that’s because pretty much everything about our society is set up to obscure and justify an unjust status quo. It’s the water we swim in and the air we breathe.
And if you weren’t politically engaged before 2016, it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you very normal. The vast majority of Americans were not and are not civically engaged even now, in the Trump era. The scary reality is that, late or not, this massive upsurge in people power over the past few years still constitutes just a small fraction of the American population. To win, we’re going to need you and everyone you know who’s still on the sidelines.
What this does mean for newcomers is you’ve got responsibility. If you’re going to respond effectively to the challenges we face, you need to educate yourself, to learn what’s come before, to be conscious of how your identity and privilege informs your activism, and to think about what it means to be part of a multiracial, cross-class, intersectional progressive movement.2 And then you need to put it into action.
To put it bluntly, it also means you’ve got an opportunity. If you’ve got access to societal advantages by virtue of your gender, race, class, or any other identity, you have the chance to use your privilege for good. For too long, we “good progressives” have indulged in a kind of politics that treats the concerns of those with privilege as central and the concerns of the marginalized as, well, marginal. You have the chance to reject that. You have the chance to be part of a different story—a story about the politics of solidarity.
We don’t claim to be experts here—which is a little awkward, because the whole point of this book is that we’re supposed to be experts telling you how to do things. We’ve messed up and learned and adapted ourselves; it’s all part of the process.3
And here’s what we’ve seen: Since Trump’s election, Indivisibles have fought for themselves and for their neighbors. Indivisible Tohono, led by April Ignacio, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, and seven other members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, formed within days of the election in response to the imminent threat of a border wall on Tohono O’odham lands. They’ve pushed their Arizona senators on the border wall, they held the first candidates’ forum ever on Tohono O’odham land, and April has spearheaded the passage of a bill creating a task force on missing and murdered indigenous women. As April says, “We bring our folding chairs with us, and we’ve let them all know that we’ll no longer be left out of the conversation.”4
Nationwide, Indivisibles have partnered with local immigrant rights organizations and service providers to offer support, from escorting community members to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) check-ins to showing up for sanctuary city campaigns to raising money for DACA renewal fees. They’ve joined campaigns for progressive district attorneys, like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Wesley Bell in St. Louis, or to remove Confederate monuments in New Orleans and Mississippi. They’ve showed up nationwide to stand in solidarity after the horrifying events of Charlottesville in August 2017. They’ve joined national protests to stop the Muslim and refugee ban and to say no to a wall at the border.
This idea of political solidarity is core to Indivisible—it’s in our very name. This kind of solidarity is not easy and it’s never perfect. We mess up along the way, we make amends, and then we try to do better. But this is how we build power inclusively to win the big fights to come. To illustrate how this can work in real life, in this chapter we tell the story of one of those moments when it was time for Indivisible to show up: the fight to defend immigrant youth under attack by the Trump administration in late 2017.
It’s September 2017, and Donald Trump is the monster who just ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA was a sliver of humanity carved into America’s barbarous immigration system back in 2012. It allowed youth who came into the United States as infants and children to remain in the country and work legally, serve in the military, and go to college without fear of deportation. While it wasn’t a permanent solution, and it was far from complete relief for the millions of undocumented Americans in the country, it was life-changing for hundreds of thousands of young American immigrants.
DACA was an administrative policy; it had been put in place by President Obama, bowing to fierce pressure from young immigrant activists after a bill to provide permanent relief, the Dream Act, failed to clear the filibuster in the Senate.5 And because it was an administrative policy, it could be unilaterally revoked by the next administration.
Now Trump was axing it. He didn’t do the deed himself; he sent his henchman, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, to announce the heartless act.6 Sessions seemed barely able to contain his glee during the press conference that would throw the lives of hundreds of thousands of young American immigrants and their families into chaos.
It was a cruel but characteristic demonstration of the xenophobia at the core of Trumpism. Trump launched his presidential campaign with a vicious attack on immigrants as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. He seized the Republican nomination by being more racist, more nativist, and just generally crueler and angrier than the other candidates.
Trump’s victory put to rest the fight over immigration that had been raging within the Republican Party for decades. Many Republican electeds had historically taken a less xenophobic approach, either for moral reasons or, more commonly, because their corporate backers benefited from immigration. In both 2006 and 2013, Republican congressional leaders tried to move compromises on immigration, only to see them defeated by factions in their own party.7 The final blow to the last Republican-backed immigration reform effort came in 2014 when Tea Party candidate Dave Brat8 successfully primaried Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor by painting him as soft on immigration. This killed all prospects for bipartisan immigration reform for the foreseeable future.
With Trump’s victory, the takeover of the Republican Party by its anti-immigrant faction was complete. Republican members of Congress—even those who had long supported immigration reform proposals—fell in line, with few exceptions. The political allure of xenophobia had proved irresistible. Trump’s Republican Party was an affirmatively anti-immigrant party.
Trump transitioned from anti-immigrant speeches to anti-immigrant policy within days of taking office. One of his first acts was the Muslim ban, limiting travel for people and separating families from certain predominantly Muslim countries. He issued executive orders targeting sanctuary cities and directed ICE agents to pursue any undocumented person in the country, regardless of whether they had a criminal record. Trump began unilaterally revoking immigration protections for hundreds of thousands of people who’d been living in America for years or decades. He drastically slashed the cap on refugee admissions. He proposed a plan to dramatically reduce legal immigration.
The protection for Dreamers provided by DACA was enormously popular: it enjoyed not only a majority of Democratic support, or a majority of Americans’ support—it had a majority of Republican support. Perhaps as a result, Trump did not move to end it immediately. As of the summer of 2017, DACA was still the law of the land. But, fed up with Trump’s inaction, a group of Republican attorneys general threatened a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that DACA was unconstitutional.9 They wanted Trump to use his power to kill DACA.
The immigrant rights community was prepared for the worst. Over the month of August, chapters of United We Dream, the leading national organization fighting for immigrant youth, organized nationwide demonstrations to pressure Trump not to rescind DACA, with Indivisibles joining and hosting their own where needed. For instance, Ozark Indivisible in Arkansas and Austin Indivisible in Texas staged protests against their own state attorneys general, urging them to drop out of the anti-DACA lawsuit.
But the xenophobic forces in the White House prevailed. By the time Sessions took to the podium at the Justice Department on September 5, 2017, we all knew what was coming. Within a few hours of Trump’s announcement, the National Immigration Law Center sued on behalf of DACA recipients; Executive Director Marielena Hincapié slammed Trump’s move as “nothing short of hypocrisy, cruelty and cowardice.” Greisa Martínez Rosas of United We Dream, a DACA recipient herself, was defiant: “We will not be thrown back into the shadows.”
Trump’s decision to rescind DACA was a disaster for hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients. Every recipient had voluntarily given their personal information to the federal government based on assurances from the federal government that the information would not be used against them, which meant that the Trump administration had their home or school address. Would Trump’s deportation force come after them? Young people who’d grown up in the United States and built their lives here—who were going to college, supporting their families, serving in the military—were suddenly facing the threat of deportation to countries they might not have seen since they were toddlers.
It’s hard to overstate the trauma of this moment. Immigrant youth had put their lives on the line to win DACA. Now they were watching as it was ripped away. One of United We Dream’s first public responses was simple and devastating: they shared to their audience of DACA recipients the phone number for the national suicide prevention hotline.
For the two of us—privileged, white, nonimmigrant folk—it was a moment of shock, rage, helplessness, and guilt.10 Our partners (and members of our own team whose family and friends were impacted) were managing their own trauma even as they were mounting the next steps in a ferocious battle for their lives and futures. All we could do was try to figure out how to help.
We knew this was an opportunity to use Indivisible’s nationwide constituent power to stand with those under threat—to stand on the principles outlined in the Indivisible Guide. Most of us in the Indivisible movement weren’t immigrants, but, at our best, we recognized our security and privilege as native-born people and asked a simple question: What can we do?
We were fortunate that we had started with close ties to the partners we’d look to for leadership in this fight. Our Guide coauthor and now policy director, Angel Padilla, had spent his career in immigrant rights. And Marielena Hincapié, his former boss at the National Immigration Law Center, had been one of our earliest supporters and advisors in Washington. We’d worked with United We Dream, the National Immigration Law Center, and other immigrant rights organizations to build out our trainings and resources for local Indivisible groups on how to be allies to immigrants. Now we were putting the same principles into action for this fight.
Trump’s decision was horrific, but it should have been quickly remedied. Congress could have easily moved to enshrine protections for DACA recipients into law. In a functional system, there would have been an overwhelming bipartisan push to do so immediately.
But we don’t have a functional system; we have Congress. And in Congress, the majority party’s leadership decides which bills go to the floor for a vote. That meant that the decision to move forward lay with Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. And both of them were more concerned with satisfying the xenophobes on their right flank than they were with the overwhelming support for DACA from everyone else.
There was a small window of hope: Trump had attacked DACA just days before an upcoming budget deadline. The federal coffers were running dry, and Democratic votes were going to be needed to replenish them. This was Democrats’ big chance to demand concessions from Trump. It would be their only chance for months. They could strike now, while the outrage was fresh, and demand protections for Dreamers as part of the deal.
But for that to happen, Democrats would need to prioritize it. Would they press the issue? Were they willing, in this moment, to put their political capital on the line?
It was an open question. Democrats have long had a fraught and tortured history with immigration policy. For decades the consensus had been that Democrats should emphasize security and enforcement to avoid looking “weak” on immigration. If Democrats proved they were tough on border security, the thinking went, that would open up room to negotiate with Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform.
For much of his first term, President Obama followed this line of thought, steadily increasing the overall number of people detained and deported by ICE. He shifted his approach in the latter part of his second term, after it became clear that no amount of appeasement would get Republicans on board for legislative reform.
For immigrant advocates, Democrats were unquestionably the more sympathetic party. But that didn’t mean congressional Democratic leadership would be champions without consistent pressure. After all, Obama ultimately created DACA less than five months before his reelection in 2012, but only after Dreamers organized an inside-outside strategy that included protests outside Senate Democratic offices and hunger strikes at Obama reelection campaign offices.
As Trump rose, powered by explicit xenophobia, Democrats often still tried to stick to vague platitudes. They liked immigrants; they said America was a nation of immigrants; they wanted to protect Dreamers. But they still worried about being seen as weak on immigration enforcement and border security.
In the wake of the DACA decision, Democrats were at least saying the right things. They were reaching out to Dreamers. They were issuing outraged press releases. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the decision a “deeply shameful act of political cowardice and a despicable assault on innocent young people in communities across America.” Former president Obama described the attack on DACA as “wrong,” “self-defeating,” and “cruel.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even changed his official Twitter background page to a stark banner that read, “I stand with DREAMERS.”
But it remained to be seen whether the Democratic response to Trump was just words, or a real commitment to action. Public statements were one thing. Putting real political capital on the lines was another. And less than twenty-four hours after Trump rescinded DACA, when the Democratic congressional leadership went to the Oval Office to negotiate a deal on the must-pass funding bill, there was a chance to use that capital. Their votes were needed, so they had leverage—they could insist on a fix for DACA.
No dice. Democrats emerged from the Oval Office with a deal to fund the government for three months. They’d cut out Republican congressional leadership to negotiate directly with Trump—which constituted a major political win in their eyes. They had not asked for or received anything related to DACA in the deal that would now go to Congress for a vote.
Leadership was proud of their dealmaking. They soaked up media praise for their smart negotiating skills. USA Today was part of the chorus of national news organizations reporting how handily the Democratic leadership had outmaneuvered Republicans. It described a photo taken during the negotiations that showed Trump smiling and embracing Schumer “after giving Democrats pretty much everything they wanted.” But that “everything” did not include protections for Dreamers.
Our partners in the immigrant rights community were horrified. Trump had set off a massive humanitarian crisis and Democrats were treating it like business as usual. Democratic leaders’ explanation—that they didn’t need to negotiate DACA in this package, that they could move a new Dream Act on its own, and that it would be popular enough that Republicans would have to pass it—belied everything we knew about the Republican Congress. If they actually believed it, they were shockingly naïve.
Indivisible joined with our partners United We Dream and the National Immigration Law Center to publicly oppose the deal. We issued a joint letter criticizing how the proposed deal left out Dreamers: “At a time of great urgency, the message Schumer and Pelosi sent to immigrant youth was, ‘wait’… Time and time again, Democratic leaders tell immigrants that relief from deportation would come someday down the road—and that someday never comes. We are tired of waiting.”
Senate and House Democratic leadership weren’t happy. We were stepping on their great news cycle by pointing out that their deal had left Dreamers in the cold. They called an emergency meeting to make the case for their plan—and to convince all of us to stop making such a fuss. In the meeting at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer talked down to the handful of Dreamer advocates in the room—people who themselves risked deportation and whose families were under threat:11
“You’re spreading fear among Dreamers that they’re in danger.”
“You’ve got to think with your heads, not your hearts.”
“Trust us. We know what we’re doing. We’ve been doing this a while.”
In the meeting, Greisa Martinez Rosas of United We Dream calmly rejected their rationale and insisted that the congressional leaders explain their plan on how they’d actually win protection for Dreamers like herself. But in response the congressional leadership offered little more than platitudes about how much they cared for Dreamers. We backed Greisa up and told Schumer in front of everybody that he wasn’t answering her reasonable concerns or strategic arguments. Schumer was not amused. His office banned Indivisible from future leadership meetings for the next year or so.12
Even before that meeting, the die was cast. Once there’s bipartisan agreement and congressional leadership has signed on to a deal, it’s very hard to stop. Within days the deal passed the House and Senate and went to Trump’s desk for his signature. Democratic leadership’s only concession to immigrant rights advocates and allies was a promise to use their political capital to pass Dreamer protections ahead of the next funding deadline, three months later.
It was only the first inside-D.C. skirmish in what would become a sustained, grassroots nationwide campaign to enact protections for undocumented youth. Young immigrants and allies flooded the Capitol again and again over the course of fall 2017, taking over the Capitol Rotunda and camping out in Democratic and Republican offices alike. Even business leaders and corporations rallied in favor of DACA. Support was overwhelming across American society.
Leading up to the funding deadline in December, the ask for Democratic leadership was simple: Include a “clean” Dream Act in the budget. The “clean” part was critical. All too often, legislation on immigration involved pitting the rights and safety of one group of immigrants against another. The Trump administration, having destroyed the DACA program, was now demanding additional wins for their nativist agenda in exchange for a legislative fix for DACA: changes to family-based immigration; more money for interior enforcement that would lead to more detentions and deportations; an end to the diversity visa program, which would have a disproportionate impact on immigrants from certain African countries; and funding for Trump’s proposed border wall.
Immigrant leaders refused to be used as bargaining chips against their communities. Cristina Jiménez of United We Dream put it plainly: “My brother has DACA and my parents are undocumented… Would you cut a deal which would result in your own mother being chased down and locked into a detention camp to be tormented and abused?”
Indivisibles all over the country joined the fight for a clean Dream Act. In red states and districts, Indivisibles pressured their Republican representatives. Indivisible Midlands of South Carolina hosted a series of in-state actions before heading to D.C. to join United We Dream’s protests at the U.S. Capitol, while Indivisible MN03 relentlessly pressured their Republican representative Erik Paulsen to take a stand. In blue states, Indivisibles pushed Democrats to use their political capital. Indivisible Nation BK in Brooklyn partnered with Make the Road New York to support rallies and calls for a Clean Dream—and to turn up the heat on Chuck Schumer. Indivisible SF hosted a rally and lined up 122 pairs of shoes outside Nancy Pelosi’s district office in San Francisco—a striking visual representation of the number of DACA recipients who could expect to lose status every day going forward.14 In Virginia, Roanoke Indivisible staged events where hundreds of handmade butterflies representing the DACA recipients were given to their Democratic senators and to Republican representative Bob Goodlatte.
At every stage in the process, Indivisible was just a part of a wave led by immigrant activists. Our job was to show that we had their backs—that this was important to everyone, not just those directly impacted. This was about Dreamers, but it was also a fight about who belongs in America. It was critical that nonimmigrant communities show up for that fight. The same impulse that led Indivisibles to storm the airports in response to the Muslim ban drove them to “We Stand with Dreamers” rallies across the country.
All through fall, the pressure built. But we still faced the fundamental problem: getting to a vote on the Dream Act. Every Democrat and the majority of Republicans had agreed to support some form of protection for Dreamers. But there was still no real plan for how to get a vote on the bill without the support of Republican leadership, and they showed no signs of moving.
When they had caved in September, Democratic leadership promised to use their political capital for this fight, and to get it done by December—but they were carefully vague about the actual strategy. We and our partners wanted clarity: Did that mean this would be their top negotiating priority? Did it mean they’d refuse to vote for a budget if necessary? They didn’t give clear answers, and they continued to just point the finger at the Republicans.15
When December rolled around, Democrats blew through their own self-imposed deadline. They declined to negotiate over the Dream Act as they voted once again to pass a monthlong government funding bill. The pain and betrayal of advocates was intense. Democratic congressional leadership had spent the past three months promising that they had a plan—that if advocates trusted them and focused their fire on Republicans, they’d find a way to move the Dream Act by the end of the year. The time for action had come and gone, and Democrats had punted yet again.
The backlash was significant. Immigrant rights groups that had been holding their fire let loose on the failure of Democratic leadership. In New York, Make the Road New York and Indivisible allies from across the city descended once again on Schumer’s house in protest. Recriminations began. Representative Steny Hoyer, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House after Pelosi, said, “I think we should’ve frankly been more assertive in September.” Yes, that’s what the immigrant rights groups and their allies thought too.
The backlash spooked Democrat congressional leadership.16 By January, as yet another funding deadline approached, we got word that the Democrats might finally be finding their spines. At the very last minute, Democrats had committed to blocking any budget bill that did not include protections for Dreamers. If that meant the government shut down, then so be it.
It was a huge, historic development: the power of the coalition that had come together to lobby for DACA had changed the political landscape. It had convinced Democrats to fight.
It was a stunning moment. It was also short-lived. The government shut down at midnight on Friday. The next day Trump was up on the airwaves, targeting Democratic senators with a viciously anti-immigrant ad. Even as public opinion polls showed Democrats winning the messaging fight and millions of people, including Indivisibles, flooded the streets of major American cities for the second annual Women’s March, the Democratic caucus’s will was crumbling. By Monday it was over: Democratic senators were running for the exits. Schumer signed on to a bill reopening the government with the fig leaf of a concession on DACA: a promise to hold an immigration vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. “Big win for Republicans as Democrats cave on Shutdown,” tweeted President Trump.
Schumer attempted to frame this as progress, but no one was fooled. Once again, Democrats were trading real leverage now for the hazy promise of future action. And the fact that they had collapsed midway through this last gambit meant that Republicans would have no hesitation about calling their bluff in the future. The path forward was bleak.
In the end, there was no final political showdown over DACA. The fight ended with a whimper rather than a bang. In January a federal judge ruled that Trump’s administration had possibly violated the law in rescinding DACA, and he paused the rollback until the matter could be more carefully considered. In February the Supreme Court declined Trump’s request to expedite the process; it would have to slowly work its way through the courts. As a result, Dreamers were temporarily protected, and, with the pressure off, neither Republicans nor Democrats attempted to address DACA again that year. It was an easy political out for electeds of both parties. No one—neither Democrat nor Republican—had to admit defeat; they could all just throw their hands up and say that it was up to the courts. For now, the legislative fight was over.
Why tell this story of a fight over congressional strategy that ultimately ended in a stalemate? And why spend so much time focusing on what Democrats should have done differently? After all, Trump and Republicans are the ones who ended DACA and continue to launch assaults on American immigrants. Why not focus on them?
We focus on Democrats not because they’re worse than Trump—obviously they aren’t—but because the first step in building a political coalition based in solidarity is getting our own progressive house in order. Change doesn’t happen if your friends aren’t willing to fight for it. And sometimes your friends aren’t willing to fight for it unless you push them.
There will always be reasons why it’s “strategic” to avoid taking a stand with a marginalized community. There will always be seemingly reasonable people who make the political calculation that we’ll be better off if we delay the fight a bit longer. As our partners noted in the letter opposing the funding deal with Trump in September 2017, the message to communities under threat is almost always “Wait.”
This is not a new phenomenon. More than five decades ago, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
It will never be the right time, unless we—all of us—demand it. Unless we recognize, as Indivisibles did, that whether we’re immigrants or not, whether our civil rights are under attack or not, this is our fight too.
In his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro recounts one particularly telling story about how the president thought about political power. Shortly after Johnson became president, there was a heated debate among his political advisors about whether to push for the long-shot civil rights bill. One of the “wise and practical people around the table” argued that “the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this.” To which Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
Whether it’s presidential power or constituent power, if you care about justice, you don’t build power to keep it. You build power to spend it. Which is to say, you build power not for power’s sake but to make change.
Doing this depends on choosing sides in times of disagreement among friends. When the political outcome is uncertain, we’ll often find marginalized groups excluded from the table where some of us are welcomed. Wise and practical people will always advise Indivisibles to hush up and go along. We’ll face risks and losses when we push our friends. We’ll spark fights within our own network about when and how hard to push. It’s precisely in these moments that it matters for folks with privilege to throw in with something more than sympathetic words. Risking our own standing and power does not guarantee victory. Sometimes you lose the fight. But it’s possible, in losing, to set the precedent for the next fight. It’s possible to keep building toward something better.
While Indivisible was not able to help achieve passage of the Dream Act in 2017 or 2018, we established where we’d stand in future fights when immigrant Americans were under attack. And unfortunately there would be no shortage of such attacks.
Trump’s administration oversaw the separation of thousands of child refugees from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. His border security officers fired tear gas at men, women, and children fleeing violence in Central America. He cheered as the Supreme Court upheld his Muslim travel ban in June 2018. As the midterms neared, with polls looking ominous for Republicans, Trump fabricated a “crisis” at the border, casting a caravan of families and children seeking safety as an “invasion.”17 It was the classic Trump playbook, but when Election Day rolled around, it failed miserably.
A few months into the new Congress, the now Democratic House passed an expansive version of the clean Dream Act for the first time in history, with the strong support of immigrant advocates and allies like Indivisible. This legislation advanced protections not only for Dreamers but also for hundreds of thousands of “temporary protected status” and “deferred enforcement departure” recipients, visa holders from countries that had suffered from war or natural disasters. In appraising the ambition of the House bill, Greisa from United We Dream said, “We showed the country that it is possible to pass legislation that protects people without hurting [others].” The bill passed with the support of every voting Democratic member, as well as a handful of Republicans.
This isn’t a story of immigrant advocates achieving any sort of final, complete victory. Nor is the story one of Democrats lining up behind a bold alternative to anti-immigrant Trumpism. As we write this, Dreamers still lack permanent protections: Senate Republicans refuse to even hold a vote on the House-passed Dream Act. Trump still rattles his saber at the southern border. Many Democrats still approach our broken immigration system from a permanent defensive crouch. Over the strong opposition of immigrant rights groups in 2019, House Democratic leadership embraced a funding bill giving Trump billions more for his deportation machine. And the idea of compassionate immigration reform—a decades-old goal to fix our cruel and absurdly dysfunctional system—remains a far-off aspiration. We’ve got more work to do with both our adversaries and our friends.
On a near-daily basis, news breaks of a horrifying violation of immigrant families’ rights and dignity by our government. The truth is that over the years we have built—with support from both political parties—an immigration enforcement system so massive, so heartless, and so unaccountable that it’s capable of almost anything. Trump didn’t create this system, but he removed any checks that might have previously constrained it. Long before Trump became president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been getting away with appalling violations of human rights. They ripped families apart, terrorized immigrant communities, and allowed federal agents to carry out sexual assault and abuse on a wide scale. They faced opposition from immigrant rights advocates—but far too little public outrage or oversight.
We know there’s more to come. Trump launched his campaign in 2015 rooted in anti-immigrant hate. He made immigration a focus of the 2016 election. His first acts as president were to attack immigrants. When courts intervened, he found other ways to go on the offense. While many things are uncertain in the Trump era, there’s one thing we can be sure about: immigration will be a defining feature of the 2020 presidential contest, because Trump will insist on it. And we know that after he’s gone, that virulent strain of xenophobia at the heart of Trumpism will remain.
But we also know that, immigrant or not, undocumented or not, this is our fight too. This is about our democracy. Indivisibles across the country at this very moment are building their power. They’re holding their meetings in bars and churches. They’re marching to their congressional district offices. They’re endorsing candidates and registering voters. And they’re following the lead of those directly impacted, standing indivisible against hate, bigotry, and oppression. That’s how we build and use power the Indivisible way through the politics of solidarity. That’s how we’ll build a democracy that represents all our people.
1. The original Tea Party was literally a group of white people who dressed up as American Indians to get away with causing mayhem in support of businesses. So actually it was a pretty good fit for an Obama-era white grievance movement!
2. Intersectionality, a concept developed by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the recognition that our various identities—race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and more—intersect with each other to shape our experiences with systems of power and oppression.
3. You’ll also notice that we talk about privilege in this chapter in a privileged-people-talking-to-other-privileged-people sort of way. That’s intentional! We’re white people who drew on a ton of privilege to build up a new organization in a nonprofit sector that has historically devalued and underfunded the leadership of communities of color—a complicated reality that we think about every day and that shapes every part of how we show up in the world. We generally find that our biggest contribution is talking to people with privilege about how we can all do better, so that’s where we’re going to dig in.
4. This is of course an homage to the great Shirley Chisholm’s saying: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
5. This one is not just on Senate Republicans. The Senate could have successfully passed the bill in 2010 if all the Democrats had held together in support of the Dream Act. They didn’t.
6. We can’t help but note that his very name is practically a relitigation of the “War of Northern Aggression” (known as the American Civil War outside neo-Confederate enclaves). Jefferson is from Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Beauregard is from P. G. T. Beauregard, a leading Confederate general who oversaw the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter.
7. The 2013 effort was prompted in part by the wide-scale losses of Republicans in the 2012 elections. The official election autopsy report released by the Republican National Committee blamed its stance on immigration for the loss of Hispanic votes and asserted that “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” It turned out to be a pretty good prediction.
8. You may remember Brat from Chapter 3, where he was last seen complaining about all the new lady protestors in his district.
9. This serves as a helpful reminder that Trumpism is not just Trump. Here we have Republican attorneys general from across the country threatening to sue Trump if he didn’t move more quickly to end protections for Dreamers.
10. Leah: In a great example of how not to be a good ally, I burst into tears while trying to talk to our team immediately after the press conference. I still regret it: there were members of our team present who were much more directly impacted by Trump’s war on immigrants, and I should have been creating space for them, not taking up space with my (not-directly-impacted) feelings.
11. Ezra: I took notes during the meeting and wrote them up afterward. These aren’t verbatim quotes, but they’re close. I was gobsmacked at how these Democratic leaders were speaking to the civil rights leaders in the room.
12. This would have been a really devastating move to pull on any group whose power comes from inside D.C.: it means you don’t have access to insider info on strategy. We were pretty unfazed; we’d made it through our first months without any access, and besides, our other partners just went ahead and looped us in anyway because they wanted to coordinate with us. It’s hard to ice out your field for very long.
13. You could call this “measurable” or “verifiable,” but neither of those words starts with an alliterative s, now, do they?
14. Ezra: In the midst of all this grassroots pressure focused on Democrats caving, Representative Joe Crowley reached out to us. Crowley was a Pelosi lieutenant. As the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, he was widely seen as a likely future Speaker of the House. At a meeting in his office on Capitol Hill, Crowley told us that he thought Pelosi had been smart to cut a deal with Trump in September—and he believed that Democrats could use their leverage in December to protect the Dreamers. A few months later he’d lose his primary to an inspiring young leader named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
15. This is a pretty common situation when pressuring Democrats. They will argue that congressional Republicans are the real culprits and that all grassroots pressure should focus on them instead. It’s an alluring argument, because they’re usually right that congressional Republicans are terrible. But the problem is it doesn’t matter if Democrats hold the right policy position if they’re not willing to fight for it. That’s why pressure on Democrats is also critical.
16. So we heard. As previously mentioned, they weren’t really talking to us at this point.
17. Trump personally rejected a proposed focus on the economy, and instead his team aired a campaign ad that focused on anti-immigrant fearmongering. The ad was so universally recognized as racist that CNN, NBC, and even the Republican propaganda network Fox News refused to run it.