solidarity and to push for progress.
NOT Business As Usual. NEA Community Organizing Kit.
NEA Toolkit: https://www.nea.org/mayday-toolkit.
substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?
https://superpower-suicide?open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?
A step toward unity.
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Friday, May 1 @10am: NorCal Resist 20th Anniversary of A Day Without Immigrants march and rally. Gather at Southside Park at 10 am. The event will include a rally at Southside Park, a march to the John Moss Building, as well as an art action with community speakers, musical performances, and food and beverages with NO ICE!
Call them detention centers or concentration camps -- whatever you call them, they’re inhumane, morally bankrupt, and political liabilities. Trump's trying to expedite construction of new camps, but because of the public outcry, he’s hoping to keep the whole business out of the headlines.
So let’s get loud about it. Let’s start with some facts and context.
Detention expansion is key to Trump’s goal of one million deportations. Last week, we finally got the Department of Homeland Security’s 161-page 2027 budget proposal. In it, DHS brags about a record-breaking 440,000 deportations last year, and promises to more than double that to one million of our neighbors deported annually.
Deportation camps are central to how they get there. DHS itself says the new camps are “critical to meeting…[the] tasked goal of arresting and removing one million aliens per year.” Detention Watch Network’s toolkit explains that the agency is looking to construct a couple dozen to house upwards of 10,000 people each, often for months on end in cramped and horrific conditions.
These camps are moral abominations. Since Senator Jon Ossoff started an investigation into ICE’s camps last year, he's received more than a thousand “credible reports of human rights abuses": mistreatment of pregnant women, separation of children from parents, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. One grim statistic captures the scale of this horror: The death rate in ICE detention is increasing. In 2026, we’re seeing an average of more than one death every week.
These camps are also a political liability for Trump and his allies. The regime is trying to keep the escalation quiet because the more people hear about these camps, the more they oppose them. That backlash is a real problem for the GOP.
The peak number of detentions in US history came on January 24, the same day DHS agents murdered Alex Pretti for exercising his First Amendment rights to defend his neighbors. Public opposition exploded, the political winds shifted, and Trump made a tactical retreat. After their defeat in the Twin Cities, the White House advised Republicans to stop talking about mass deportations, and the number of detainees has dropped -- but the DHS budget proposal makes clear the regime still plans a massive escalation.
Grassroots activists are throwing sand in the gears, though, successfully rallying public opposition to the camps, including in red states. We’ve seen successful grassroots and legal campaigns in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Michigan -- in Tennessee, the opposition of GOP candidates for governor and two dozen local GOP officials successfully killed a project.
On April 25, we're making a big stink. On Saturday, we’re joining Detention Watch Network and other partners on a national day of action against these camps. The regime can try to dramatically increase construction, but they can’t make us be quiet. As long as we have First Amendment rights, we intend to use them in defense of our neighbors. Read on for more ways to stand Indivisible with your community.
In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible
I had conversations with high schoolers and retirees alike who were looking to get into organizing for the first time. There was urgency in those conversations. There was clarity, and resolve — but also hope, and joy. A sense that it is we, together, who make our futures. That no one is coming to save us, and that this is not a cause for despair, but for action. We alone are responsible for our democracy. We alone can build a future of dignity, peace, and abundance for all the people of this city and state.
No Kings was not the struggle. It was a place to meet, to count ourselves, to feel in our bones that we are not alone. The struggle is what comes next: in your union, in your neighborhood association, in your DSA chapter, in your school board meeting, in the conversations you have with your coworkers about why things are the way they are and how they could be different.
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Heather Cox Richardson. Letter from an American.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-10-2026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
There is a great deal of important organizing in defense of democracy going on including the mass marches and hundreds of local actions of March 28. The next mass national action is scheduled for May 1, 2026. These events offer opportunities to connect with new people and groups, to deepen their engagement, to advance the advocacy for democracy within these movements and to build cooperative relationships between national and local resistance.
Last fall, Donald Trump signed a terrifying presidential directive called NSPM-7, ordering the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and disrupt progressive organizations and activists as potential “domestic terrorists.”
Now Trump is asking Congress to provide a huge increase in funding to ramp up the NSPM-7 crackdown.
This comes after the New York Times reported that the IRS and FBI have formed a joint task force under NSPM-7 to “attack the funding” of progressive groups, and leaked emails from inside the FBI indicate that state and local police are being enlisted to target progressive groups as well.
Friends, this is one of the biggest threats to democracy that almost no one is talking about.
The corporate media are so cowed by Trump’s bullying that they’ve barely even mentioned NSPM-7, so Inequality Media Civic Action is using our massive following across social media to sound the alarm and demand that Congress reject funding for these attacks on our First Amendment rights.
Under NSPM-7, the Justice Department is directed to create a secret list of organizations and individuals who hold any one of a long list of vaguely defined left-of-center views, including “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Americanism,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” or opposition to “traditional American views on family.”
Trump’s budget proposal further states that counterterrorism funding will be used to target progressives who “exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications.”
In other words, if you’re on the internet and oppose Trump’s agenda in any way, you could be on Trump’s secret domestic terrorist blacklist and get a knock on the door from the FBI.
These are the actions of an unhinged authoritarian dictator, and Trump must be stopped.
Unfortunately, the corporate media has been utterly silent about the threat of NSPM-7, so we’re ramping up our public education campaign and mobilizing opposition to Trump’s massive new funding request to implement this draconian assault on speech.
Robert Reich,
Teachers: Work Together to Defend Democracy.
As pressures on faculty from the Trump regime increase,
I am working on a project Defend Democracy using Google doc to assist teachers and faculty to work together standing up in support public education and our constitutional rights and responsibilities.
There is a great deal of important organizing going on.
We are gathering materials, resources, and lessons plans for teachers and faculty to assist in presenting knowledge, skills and attitudes which engage in and promote democracy. For example, there are important materials on the role of immigrants in the U.S. and how to support immigrant students during the current political assault are available. At times this part of the approach to promotion of democracy has been known as civic education.
Example of existing policy on dealing with Immigration Enforcement, Twin Rivers Unified School District. Sacramento, California.
Immigrants and Immigration Resources and Lesson Plans.
Association of California School Administrators.
https://content.acsa.org/immigrants-immigration-resource-guide/
Many more in the Google doc. Including Share my lesson plans from the American Federation of Teachers.
A first step is to consider: How are students understanding the current political/economy and the political forces advancing the authoritarian agenda in this age of AI and social media dominating more balanced news coverage.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CrLpHJXDvu87NS5VrwqUuvidD8dtVlNshImkg6ikrIE/edit?usp=sharing
If readers know of additional sources, please post links in the comments area of this blog.
In our defense of democracy, there is no neutral ground.
Teachers. Don’t give up on democracy.
Your participation is needed In this crisis of democracy. Lets work together.
Posted by D.Campbell
