Hope sits in the trenches,
the last one standing,
its teeth cracked,
its knuckles bruised,
its body broken;
but its eyes are still gleaming
with the light of a million lamps.
Its heart is still beating
Because even here,
Even now,
It knows that a better world
Is worth fighting for.
-Nikita Gill
From Executive Director Erik Schlenker-Goodrich:
We are in the midst of a crisis that demands, above all, that the people rise to defend American freedoms and democracy—that we embrace Nikita Gill’s truth that a “a better world is worth fighting for.”
The United States was forged by waves of immigrants from across the world and the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples. These complex demographics have inspired both conflict and cooperation channeled through a constitutional system grounded in the Declaration of Independence’s unequivocal if aspirational statement that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This founding declaration is now in peril and the constitutional system that grew from it at risk of collapse. None of this is a surprise.
In March 2023, Donald Trump ominously proclaimed to his supporters that “I am your retribution,” revealing his intent to betray his oath of office and responsibility to the whole American public. A year into his second term, his regime has repeatedly laid siege to American cities with heavily armed paramilitary forces. On January 7th, as the New Year dawned, the regime’s provocations reached new levels in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent killed Renée Good, a 37-year mother, wife, poet, and American citizen.
After her killing, the Trump regime only inflamed tensions. It declined to investigate the ICE officer who perpetrated that horrific event, falsely claimed Renée Good was a “domestic terrorist,” threatened to invoke the 1792 Insurrection Act, opened transparently political federal investigations into Minnesota public officials including the governor, attorney general, and Minneapolis mayor, as well as Renée Good’s widow, and intensified its campaign of terror against the people of Minneapolis. On January 21st, for example, ICE agents detained a 5-year-old boy after he arrived home from preschool and used him as bait to detain his father, sending both far from home to a detention facility in Texas. That same day, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, asserted the sweeping power to break into homes without a judicial warrant, contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and judicial precedent. On January 24th, the logic of this entire strategy further unspooled with the killing of Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis—a human being, we note, who cared deeply for his neighbors, stood against the regime’s oppressive tactics in Minneapolis, and shared our love for the natural world.
Meanwhile, on the global stage, the administration ruptured the longstanding post-World War II international rules-based order. On January 4th, the regime brazenly abducted Venezuela’s president, seized its oil resources, and liquidated those resources, depositing the proceeds into an offshore bank account located in Qatar. Emboldened, the regime reignited its long-simmering desire to seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, and rattled its military and tariff sabers against several other countries, including Cuba, Denmark, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These events have created vast uncertainty, anxiety, and instability.
Remarkably, every event in the preceding paragraphs transpired over the course of just the past three weeks. They add to an ever-growing list of cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes that number in the hundreds, all tied together by a grotesque pathology of domination that seeks to subordinate anything and everything that stands in the regime’s way to its corrosive will. Premised on Trump’s fragile ego, a Machiavellian and violent approach to power, and an abject lack of empathy and morality, this pathology is a clear and present threat to global security as well as our country’s freedoms, social cohesion, economic vitality, and ecological integrity. He has rejected any boundaries on his authority, claiming, instead, that he is bound solely by his “own morality,” an alarming contention weaponized by a complicit Supreme Court who has elevated Trump above the rule of law. We wake each day, time and again, wondering what new horror this regime has engineered.
As conceived and applied, the Trump regime is a grave threat to our vision: A just and thriving U.S. West, abundant with protected and interconnected ecosystems, powered by renewable energy, and cared for by communities brought together in an ecology of kinship. It is this threat—to people, to country, to the world around us—that compels us to urge society-wide public action. It is this threat we oppose.
The coming months—culminating in mid-term elections—will prove decisive to the country’s trajectory, presenting us, as a people and country, with a stark choice: To acquiesce to the regime’s pathology of domination, or to recommit ourselves to our country’s founding principle of freedom and repair, revitalize, and strengthen our constitutional system. To be clear, once this regime ends, there is no return to what once was, only the promise of what may be if we work together: a country, echoing the words of President Abraham Lincoln, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It is this promise, one rich with possibility, that motivates us just as much, if not more, as the urgency compelled by the Trump regime’s transgressions.
We urge that each person—based on their ability—consider four categories of action to bring this promise to life:
- Resolute, peaceful protest. The regime seeks to inflame chaos as a pretext to oppress people and communities with paramilitary forces. We must peacefully stand with conviction in defiance of these actions, asserting our freedoms of speech and assembly and right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Courage is contagious.
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- Mutual aid and solidarity. Respect your neighbors. Stand with your neighbors. Provide aid to your neighbors. And do so regardless of whether they are a citizen or immigrant because we are all in this together. We say this in full light of the courage we have witnessed in Minnesotans over the past days and weeks. To provide immediate support, we recommend Stand with Minnesota, which provides a vetted directory of organizations and opportunities seeking donations. As demonstrated by Minnesota, building networks of mutual aid and solidarity in your community creates the conditions for collective resilience to the regime’s otherwise inexorable descent into authoritarianism and efforts to deprive us of our freedoms. As you do, work to scale local action by connecting it to regional and national networks, supporting organizations and institutions that serve as a coordinating bulwark against the regime’s actions. This all serves as an antidote to the failure of political and economic elites and creates the conditions necessary for the sustained defense of constitutional freedoms.
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- Accountability. We cannot move forward absent a reckoning with those who have designed, led, and executed the regime’s agenda. This includes fair and transparent criminal and civil investigations into the regime’s transgressions. We must also reject the policy logic that gave rise to the security state ostensibly intended to shield the United States from foreign terrorism but that this regime has now weaponized against the people and communities who have made their home in this country.
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- National imagination. We must fight with an eye to the future—a day when this regime’s transgressions and atrocities have ceased—and we have an opportunity to rethink and revitalize American democracy. The institutions and systems that we once assumed would shield us from the rise of tyranny in the United States have proven fallible. These institutions and systems must therefore be rethought and revitalized and, in some instances such as ICE, dismantled altogether. In the domain of environmental law, we are doing just that with our Emergent Horizons campaign, an effort designed to spark society-wide climate and conservation action fit for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century and beyond.
The coming months will test us, presenting challenges that appear too immense to confront, opportunities too daunting to seize. There will be times when you need to step away, whether to grieve or to handle the mundane realities of life. We understand this. But we are heartened by the people of Minneapolis and across this still-great country who have held true to that fire kindled by the Declaration of Independence so many years ago—a fire that still burns fierce and bright.
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