[Francesca]
Sonali Kolhatkar, welcome to Writer's Voice. Thank you so much for having me. This is a terrific book with lots of wonderful stories, and I think storytelling is also part of what you say is so important in talking about Breaking ICE, community defense against state terror and mega-fascism.

You begin "Breaking ICE" with immigration enforcement, but I think the question underneath the whole book seems to be much larger. Let's start with one of the big questions, and that is, who's entitled to belong? You bring up the trope, America is a land of immigrants, and yet it's a land that was based on importing people under conditions of slavery, of disempowering, and taking the land of people who were here.

Every new group of immigrants seems to suffer the same kind of discrimination and prejudice that the last one did, until that fades away. And you yourself were born in a country where, being born there, there was no birthright citizenship. You came to the U.S. on a student visa. So actually, I want to first ask you a personal question. How did your own experience of migration and belonging shape the way you approached this book?

[Sonali]
Yeah, as you said, I've been a lifelong immigrant, which is kind of odd, because I didn't go anywhere as an infant. I was born into a country that would never see me as a citizen. Most countries in this world have birthright citizenship, a few don't, and one of them is the United Arab Emirates.

I was born in Dubai, and what I have realized over this past couple of years is that Donald Trump is seemingly trying to shape the United States in the model of the UAE, a country that doesn't have birthright citizenship, where actually the people who have full rights, who are citizens, are a small minority of the population, so it's minority rule, where there is no democracy, there is no freedom of speech, there is an exploited, very vulnerable labor population, many of whom are relegated into labor camps at the very bottom rung of the ladder, and then the sort of middle-income immigrants just form the fabric of the country, but never truly belong, because at any point, if they say or do the wrong thing, can be kicked out of the country. That is the vision that Trump is promising for the United States, and that is what I left behind, very deliberately left behind.

I was always uncomfortable with this notion that you could live in a country permanently as a guest and never actually feel safe, so this notion of who belongs and whether they are truly ever seen as part of a country is something that I felt very intimately, very personally my whole life, and it wasn't until 2009 that I got to be a citizen of this country. I had to sue the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security, because I was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, because I was caught in this dragnet that was the post-9-11 hysteria, racist hysteria, where George W. Bush, then president, had his government had essentially overseen thousands of people having their citizenship be delayed because of some vague notion of an FBI background check that we were all waiting to see completed, and that just never was completed.

We were in limbo for years, and so me and thousands of others like me, with the help of the ACLU, sued the federal government and, you know, had to force them to give me my citizenship. So for a few glorious years, I felt like I belonged until 2016, when I remember waking up the day after Trump's first election and feeling once again like I was in a country where maybe I wouldn't belong. So yeah, this notion of belonging is something that you would think that if you live in a country that calls itself democratic, that by definition everybody either belongs or has the chance to belong.

So this country has had a sort of national schizophrenia from the time of its origin, from the time the constitution was written, where they've grappled between having a nation, you know, multi-tiered nation with, you know, built on white supremacy, with white people on top and other people on the bottom competing to get to the top, while at the same time claiming to be a country that's by and for everybody.

Those two things aren't compatible, and over and over again we see the terrible impacts of that incompatibility, and we're in a very low point right now.

[Francesca]
You say that ICE should not be understood simply as an agency that's carrying out an extremely aggressive deportation campaign, but that you see it as the instrument of a much larger authoritarian project in which surveillance, detention, intimidation, and arbitrary state power that's used against undocumented immigrants now, and also many documented immigrants, can ultimately be turned against citizens as well.

So what did you see in the course of reporting this, these two struggles, immigrant rights and democratic rights?

[Sonali]
They are intimately connected, and this is something that people have a hard time, people who want desperately to believe that we live in a country where you have to have immigration laws, and so if you don't respect the immigration laws, you should be considered a criminal and kicked out, and we are a nation of laws, etc., etc. You see a lot of people kind of espousing this, and what they, you know, I think are now coming to realize is that you cannot have strict immigration enforcement of the kind we're seeing especially, and democracy. Having one leads to the erosion of the other, and by that I mean that the machinery that Trump has set up by its definition is violating due process rights.

The Constitution, the Supreme Court for years affirmed again and again that the Constitution applies to everybody who is on U.S. soil, not U.S. citizens, but everybody who is on U.S. soil, meaning that even an immigrant who might be arrested has the right to due process. So the minute you ask somebody if they're a citizen or not, you have violated their due process rights by asking them that as a precursor to whether they should be locked up or not, and so this configuration of the Supreme Court has decided that it's okay to racially profile people in the course of immigration enforcement because in Justice Kavanaugh's naive consideration, if they find out you're a citizen after they've detained you, they will simply let you go. Of course, we've seen case after case after case in the past few months prove him wrong, and so this idea that we can have harsh immigration enforcement while preserving democracy is a naive notion. We are seeing today a militia that is better funded than most armies in the world that is aimed squarely internally at us, we the people, and we should be asking ourselves why when about an estimated four percent of the country's population is undocumented, why we have spent so much money on a militia to root out, detain, and deport four percent of the population.

That is a small number, and we have stripped away food stamps and Medicaid and claimed there's no money for Medicare for all in order to do so, and that's because it's not really about four percent of the population, it's about a much larger percentage of the population. It's not just people without papers or people who might have committed a crime in their past now are seeking to become citizens, it's about anybody who is not part of the MAGA agenda and anybody who's a person of color, and so this is a reshaping of the demographics of the country. It is an attempt to turn back the clock from 2000, and I trace the current chapter of immigration enforcement we're in to about 25 years ago.

Obviously, it goes back to the origins of this country, but the latest chapter goes back to 25 years ago when the notion of immigration, immigrants as potential terrorists and waiting emerged from the post 9-11 racist hysteria, and so yeah, I think that it's really, really important for us to question that because right before the September 11th attacks, we got the results of the 2000 census showing the largest jump in foreign-born population in the United States in history, and that caused a lot of panic, and they've been trying to turn back the clock on that for 25 years, and it's kind of too late, but that's what they are fighting against, the brownification of the country.

[Francesca]
Say a little bit more just briefly about that. Why is it too late? What's different about this now in terms of creating the kind of heft of pushback that can succeed?

[Sonali]
So, you know, the United States has gone back and forth in being a country that's friendly to immigrants and not being a country friendly to immigrants. So, in moments when the United States had a little bit more orderliness in its immigration process than it does now, when some more doors were open than are now, people came looking for a better life, people like me, people like, you know, healthcare workers and nurses, physicians and doctors who were trained in other countries without being saddled by medical debt and came to the United States to share their medical talents with us, right? We have a shortage of doctors because it's so expensive to go to medical school here in the United States, and so we don't have as many native-born doctors, and so we have people from other countries who have been trained maybe in Europe or in their home countries, and then they want decent salaries because doctors get paid well here, and so they come here and we benefit from that, right? So, we've had this country, we've had the doors of the country propped open a little bit over the course of its history, enough to immigrants where immigrants have become enmeshed in our fabric, and nowhere is that more apparent than cities like L.A., where I live, or Chicago or New York, but actually it's becoming that way and has become that way even in rural America, in Maine, in Minnesota, in Georgia, in North Carolina. Immigrants are so deeply enmeshed into the fabric of the United States that today tacos are as American as hamburgers, and you have so many multi-generational mixed status families in Florida and California, right, where you have children who are U.S. citizens, aunts and uncles, mothers and grandfathers, who might be green card holders or even all the way undocumented because just never bothered, you know, putting in the paperwork, etc., and these mixed status families will be torn apart and, you know, Trump's goal is to tear them apart. You have enough immigrants here now where plenty of white Americans and U.S. citizens are falling in love with and marrying non-white immigrants, right, like my husband did with me, and our children are mixed race, you know, so that brownification is seeping in from our veins into the land here, and, you know, the notion of who is white and who is not is also deeply difficult to define. There are plenty of Arabs whose skin tone might be lighter than yours, and plenty of Latinos as well, white Latinos.

You wouldn't know they were Latino until you heard their name or maybe heard them speak, so are they white? Are they not white? Do they belong?

Do they not belong? And so there's no clear lines that we can draw anymore, and to have this immigration enforcement, this machinery, this ugly, harsh machinery go after a part of the population that is so deeply embedded into the fabric of the United States is resulting in a ripping of the entire fabric of the country, right? We are literally cutting off our nose to spite our face.

[Francesca]
Absolutely. In fact, one reason why people are talking more about Social Security going bankrupt now is because there are so—there's such a drop-off in contributions to the Social Security Fund because so many immigrants have been deported. But I want to move on to some of the wonderful examples that you give in your book.

One is Leonardo Martinez. ICE agents rammed his truck, arrested him while he was documenting their activity, but his dash cam footage contradicted the agent's version of what happened. What does his story tell us about why ordinary people armed with cell phones, cameras, and reliable information have become so important in confronting the state's power here?

[Sonali]
Leonardo is such a fantastic example of what people realized over the past year they needed to do, which was our own government is turning on us with weapons and violating our rights. Who do we turn to if our government is hurting us? Local law enforcement, even if they weren't cooperating with ICE, weren't coming to our rescue.

Well, that's a whole other story. They're part of the project of enforcement. City officials had their hands tied, really couldn't do very much about federal thugs coming in, masked agents coming in.

And so people really came to the realization nobody is coming to save us from this machinery. We have to do it ourselves. And so people organized, they banded together in very inspiring ways in stories that really didn't make it into the headlines of our newspapers.

They were told in bits and pieces and isolated incidents. And my goal with this book was to show the pattern, to show the bigger picture that this was happening all over the country. So Leonardo is in Ventura County, which is in Central California, just north of Los Angeles.

And it's not very densely populated like LA. It is also immigrant heavy, however. And he and his just fellow citizens organized, they got together in groups, they realized their neighbors, their friends were getting carted off.

And they came up with how they came up with ideas on how to confront nonviolently ICE agents. They're not stupid. They're not going to confront armed men and women, mostly men.

So they set up patrols, community patrols, where they would keep track of where ICE agents were staging operations and would follow them and would videotape them and came up with phone trees on if something happened to one of them, everybody would get alerted. They had dash cams installed because if they weren't able to videotape, the cameras would capture. They were so smart and have been so smart about keeping track of what ICE agents were doing and then alerting their fellow residents, there's ICE around, stay at home.

Something similar is playing out in LA where with bullhorns, when ICE agents showed up, community activists would make loud announcements. If you are vulnerable, do not leave your home, go back into your home right now and lock the door. If you are not vulnerable, join us as we stand shoulder to shoulder, arms held with one another and basically yell at these men and tell them to, you know, tell them to go away.

And it largely worked. It worked more often than I think we realized, knowing that they were being watched and not just watched, but recorded and having their license plates, their faces, their tactics videotaped and posted instantly to social media really deterred them. So Leonardo, who's a US citizen, was arrested.

They claimed that he resisted and beat them up or fought back or whatever. None of that happened. They roughed him up.

He had the wherewithal to insist on being taken to the hospital on his way to being taken to the detention center so that there would be some documentation of what was done to him. While he was being taken, his community stepped into action, mobilized, plastered social media with video and evidence of what had been done to him. And there was a huge to-do.

He was taken all the way down to Los Angeles to the detention center. So a couple of hours drive was in for a few hours. They took him to a different place than where immigrants were being held and eventually were forced to let him go.

Now, by the way, federal investigators in a story that hasn't been, didn't get a chance to tell in the book because it was more recent, federal investigators have targeted Leonardo Martinez, claiming that he is, you know, a potential terrorist kind of thing. Him and his fellow activists. So they've gone and they couldn't get him that way.

So they've gone another way to get him. But he and his fellow activists were very, very effective last year in staving off ICE terror.

[Francesca]
That's a great story. You talk about this concept of which he is such a good example as a community defense. But what struck me was that so much of it looks less like confrontation than ordinary acts of care, like groceries for a family whose breadwinner has been detained, rent money, childcare, rides to school, or the doctor.

Why do you consider that kind of mutual aid part of the resistance itself rather than simply humanitarian assistance after the fact?

[Sonali]
I think this notion that we depend on one another is an incredibly powerful notion because people realized nobody was coming to save them. They banded together. And I think in many parts of the country, people reactivated networks that had formed during the first Trump administration, during the COVID pandemic, during the 2020 racial justice uprising, during the kind of, like, for example, where I live, when we had the Eaton fire in Altadena, people came together and had, like, mutual aid networks built up.

And so people reactivated existing networks, expanded them, strengthened them, and realized that they could move faster than government aid could, local government aid, for example, right? So in the wake of ICE raids, if families were left behind with, you know, main breadwinners were detained, and you had another spouse who was too scared to go out to work, lest he or she be detained as well, and you had kids who needed to go to school, you know, these would be families in absolute crisis. And so neighbors were coming together and helping out, crowdfunding for groceries, taking kids to school.

This happened a lot in Minneapolis. And realizing that this family is part of our community, and if we don't stand up for them, nobody will. And we stand up for them because tomorrow they will stand up for us.

And this powerful notion is long overdue in the United States. The notion that our collective liberation is what is going to save us, that our liberation is bound up with everyone else's liberation, is an antidote to the individualist mindset that has marked American culture right from its origin. This false notion, and really destructive notion, that each of us are heroic individuals whose successes depend on our own actions, and that we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make our own destiny, never mind that we are standing on the shoulders of others, or walking on the paths paved by others, or using infrastructure that we have all contributed towards building, never mind any of that. We are self-made. And of course, those are all myths.

Myths that confirm or that keep, you know, building up this notion that capitalism is the way that everybody is going to be free and happy just by being selfish. It's of course the other way around. We have strength in numbers.

When we have, when we live in communities that are deeply enmeshed, where when you tear one of us out of that community, the whole community is, you know, upset and will do what it needs to do to restore harmony. That's where our strength lies. And we have some aspects of that still in the country, right?

We all pay into funds to have our children educated, right? Public schools, libraries. We understand that our collective resources help one another, but we also have so many other things we don't have, like Medicare for all.

Like we're all supposed to like figure out how to pay out for our own care when we might be struck with cancer. If we don't have a job that offers us employee healthcare, we're out of luck. Like that notion that you're, you know, looking out for yourself and no one's coming to help you has resulted in far too many Americans suffering and dying over the years.

And so, yeah, I think this idea that mutual aid is part of how we resist attacks from the government, that is part of community defense. I hope this culture continues, spreads, seeps out into this desire to see our resources, us sharing our resources for everybody, because we all benefit when we help one another, right? We don't just live in a country where just one person like Elon Musk or whatever benefits.

[Francesca]
And he benefits from all the rest of us. Yes. You know, there's also another wonderful story that shows how solidarity can build surprising connections.

There's a story from the aftermath of the Eaton fire when a MAGA supporter ended up working alongside socialists, democratic socialists, I assume, and immigrant rights activists who were helping their neighbors. Tell us about that experience and what it suggested to you about how solidarity can be created to bridge political divides.

[Sonali]
Yeah, so that was in the interview I did with Pablo Alvarado, who is one of the leaders of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. And just a couple of miles from where I live and where the Eaton fire devastated and destroyed the community of Altadena is the Pasadena Job Center. The Pasadena Job Center is a project of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and it's a safe space where workers, whether they're documented or not, can get freelance gigs, like small construction jobs or landscaping or whatever.

With the help of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, they have a base wage level and are there to mediate in case employers decide to screw over workers. And so it's a way for instead of standing at the street corner on the Home Depot parking lot, you can go to the Pasadena Job Center and get jobs through there. And individuals looking to hire workers can go to the Pasadena Job Center and hire, you know, a worker for the day to come and build a fence around your yard.

And everybody agrees to the wage. And it's just it's safety for everybody. It also ensures quality skills.

So what happened when the Eaton fire devastated Altadena was these workers were it was early twenty twenty five. The Trump administration was coming in. They knew they were going to get attacked by ice because he promised that they also had many of them lost jobs because many of the people employing them had lost homes.

Some of them had lost their own homes as well. And so these workers immediately decided to put their talents to use their skills to use and said, there's this huge need right here near where we live, where people are, you know, pushing through the rubble, have trees downed all into their in their yards and the city can't move fast enough. We have chainsaws and trucks.

And why don't we help? And so the day labor network mobilized their workers and then put out a call for volunteers saying we will train you if you come and help us clear the streets, clear people's backyards. And it happened in my own yard.

We saw these trucks in my neighborhood and they were young people, some of them like young white people who had driven in from Santa Monica. They were wearing masks. They had, you know, pitch forks and shovels and garbage bags and gloves.

And they were going on neighbors asking, do you need your yard cleaned? Because the winds were still rushing and we were all terrified that these downed trees would catch on fire and the existing homes would be burned. And so I remember saying yes, because I was like trying to figure out how to get my yard cleaned.

But we were all had evacuated. And so this group of young people who had been trained by the day labor organizing network came in within like half an hour, completely cleared out my yard so professionally. And, you know, Pablo tells a story of how he and others were clearing out like a public park area in Pasadena.

And yeah, the story where after they were done, the MAGA hat wearing guy was hugging him and they were hanging out with the socialists and they were all realizing their common humanity. Now, I don't want to be naive to suggest that, you know, if we were all to sort of sit and sit down and talk to one another, that we could have a better understanding. But there are people can be won over because over the past year and a half, I think a lot of Americans are realizing in spite of this mass deportation effort, they were promised mass deportations would result in a better life for them because somehow magically wages would go up and they would be able to afford groceries.

And they're realizing not only has that not happened, the opposite has happened. Actually, things have gotten harder. There was just a study by the ACLU and AFL-CIO showing that mass deportations have resulted in more depressed wages because companies have not turned to native-born Americans to offer jobs at higher wages.

They've simply closed up shop. Construction companies have simply closed up shop and moved away. And Americans are suffering even more now.

So I think there is, if we can start really talking to one another, bringing ourselves, you know, bringing people into the fold, we are the sea change. Public opinion has shifted dramatically on immigration enforcement, completely shifted. And so, yeah, there's some potential there, I hope, for us to find our common humanity.

[Francesca]
You mentioned labor, and your book shifts at a certain point to, expands from immigrant rights into labor rights. Christine Neumann-Ortiz talks about A Day Without Immigrants and Workers, which I remember well, that was a national kind of strike, to make clear how dependent we are on immigrants in our communities. And David Huerta, who is with SEIU, I believe, makes the point that immigrants are workers first and immigrants second.

And, just today, the Hyundai battery plant workers who were caught up in this raid, the South Korean workers, have sued the US government for a slew of harms, as we're talking today. What do these stories reveal about the relationship between immigration enforcement and the vulnerability of workers in general, and what might change if organized labor treated immigrant rights as fundamental to the labor struggle itself?

[Sonali]
Yeah, David Huerta is head of the SEIU in California, and he, in June of 2025, when he was speaking out in defense of an immigrant worker who was being targeted by ICE, was himself brutalized, thrown to the curb, hurt his head, arrested and detained for three days. And what ICE didn't realize when they did that was they kind of woke us, you know, this massive and provoked a massive response in LA. LA is an organized labor town.

We have, you know, union teachers, union, you know, writers and actors and directors in Hollywood. We have union members who are, you know, our janitorial workers are unionized, grocery workers unionized. And so what happened was that the day after he was arrested, a massive outpouring, a huge showing of immigrant, sorry, of union workers happened in downtown LA.

I was there. I took my camera and interviewed people. And then a few days later, Huerta was released.

And a few months after that, I had the chance to speak with him at Netroots Nation in New Orleans about his experience. And he made one really important point, which is that this is the great civil rights issue of our time, that immigrant rights are the civil rights issue of our time. And I'm so glad that he put it in those terms.

It's not just that immigrants are workers first and foremost. Immigrants are humans first and foremost, right? We are just humans.

And I have to keep bringing this idea up because it's so important. I didn't come up with the idea, but it's an important reminder that borders are imaginary and people are real. Borders are imaginary.

People are real. Your rights don't magically become, you know, your being doesn't magically become less vulnerable or more inviting of harm when you step on one side of the border or another, which shouldn't be that way, right? On these arbitrary lines that have been drawn on maps.

And so I think it's very important for us to realize that this country needs immigrants actually more than immigrants need us, right? We rely on immigrants for so much. We rely on immigrant labor for construction, agriculture, health care, et cetera, on and on and on.

Home health care. We have a population that's aging, that is living longer than ever. And who is there to take care of them?

Home health care workers, nursing home workers, disproportionately immigrant, disproportionately immigrant. They're doing the difficult work of elder care. They're doing the really difficult work of child care, child care workers, disproportionately immigrant women of color, right?

And so when you create a situation where this immigrant labor class is vulnerable, them living in fear doesn't make it good for all of us. It actually hurts all of us because if we can't count on them having their rights, then all our rights are in jeopardy. And so especially to those people who say the nativist, who say immigrants labor depresses wages.

Immigrants aren't setting wage scales. Corporations are depressing wages. They don't, immigrants aren't saying, oh no, no, no, please don't pay me $17 an hour.

I'm an immigrant. I'll take five bucks an hour. They're not the ones saying that.

So if you're worried about wages being depressed by immigrants, let's all work together to raise the minimum wage. Why is that not something that you're more interested in, right? And so we have to keep making those arguments that immigrants, immigrant workers aren't taking the jobs for lower wages because they'd like to be paid less than they are, you know, just waiting to bring all their family over to like take over your jobs and work for less.

They're working for less because corporations are paying less and corporations are paying less because they can pay less because no one's making them pay more. But we live in a democracy, supposedly. So let's make, let's force them to pay more and let's pay everybody more, regardless of their immigration status.

Let's respect everybody's rights, regardless of their immigration status. And we'll see that we live in a better country overall.

[Francesca]
Another link that you make in the book Breaking Ice, Sonali Kolhatkar, is the link to Black freedom struggles as well. You know, we can certainly think of how Minneapolis in 2020, the George Floyd protests set up the kind of mutual aid networks and networks of connection, solidarity that later became so important in the pushback against ICE this past year in Minneapolis. Yohuru Williams connects Minneapolis in 2026 with Minneapolis after George Floyd.

And Robin DG Kelly in your book argues that some white Americans are now encountering forms of state oppression that Black and brown communities have been warning about for generations. I mean, I just heard somebody the other day, say on radio, a Black voting activist who said, in response to a question about ICE at the polls, or basically the repressive forces of the state at the polls, she said, well, you know, that's nothing new for us when we went to the polls. What can the immigrant rights movement learn from Black struggles against policing and state violence?

And do you see the possibility of these experiences actually becoming the basis for a deeper multiracial solidarity?

[Sonali]
This is, I think, one of my most important points that I want to make in this book. The book that I wrote before, or put together before this one, was talking about abolition, a police-free world as possible, which was a collection of interviews with abolitionists, mostly Black abolitionists, but not entirely. And when I say abolitionist, I think it's important to define that because not everybody understands what that word means, because we associate that word with the abolition of slavery.

And, you know, you can say, well, slavery is over. Many people have pointed out over the years, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, et cetera, that our system of criminal justice is just an extension of slavery. Our prison industrial complex is just a new architecture of mass enslavement.

And they're right. We allow the Constitution to be violated if you are somebody who's, you know, been charged with a felony and convicted of a felony and have served prison time. And it's okay to pay you less than minimum wage when you're behind bars.

It's essentially slave labor. And the reason why all of this is important and relevant in a book about immigration is because the enforcement mechanism that feeds the criminal justice system and feeds the prison industrial complex is policing. And policing is, you know, seen by many abolitionists as the enforcers of racial capitalism in a system where you have the haves and have nots, which is what capitalism is.

Capitalism is not one where everybody benefits. It's only a few people rise to the top at the expense of the rest. Well, the rest is usually disproportionately people of color because we never truly addressed the origins of this nation built on stolen lands by stolen hands, right?

To quote my friends at the Bliss Collective who used that wonderful terminology. And so we have these systemic differences baked into our economy. Police enforce them along racial lines, enforce racial capitalism, feed our prisons with disproportionately Black and brown people.

And the abolition of that system is something that a lot of people have worked towards. And how to abolish that system, they have a very clear, elegant solution. We have to take money out of policing because policing costs a lot of money.

It eats up something like a quarter to a third of most city budgets. Take it out of the things that keep us, you know, that endanger us and put them into the things that actually address the committing of crimes, which is inequality. How do you reduce inequality?

You make sure people have access to affordable housing and healthcare and food and shelter and all those basic things, right? Job training and, you know, college education, et cetera. So that divesting from police and investing in the things that truly keep us safe was essentially the message of defund the police, which is essentially an abolitionist framework.

You can apply that exact same logic, and the Black abolitionists in Breaking ICE, to the ICE enforcement. Because what we have done is we have as a country, through the so-called one big beautiful bill, taken money out of Medicaid and food stamps and the things that actually helped people stay alive and, you know, live day to day. And we've put it into enforcement of essentially, you know, racial capitalism again.

Because ICE isn't going after wealthy people. I mean, it's going after a few, you know, like the Venezuelan fiance of a Trump supporter, but by and large, it's lower income people and low income people of color. And so, what we give up to have that enforcement is we give up, you know, millions of people kicked off food stamps, millions of people about to be kicked off of Medicaid.

And so, an abolitionist framework applied to the federal government's ICE enforcement says, take money out of the things that keep us unsafe, like ICE, and put them into the things that help us thrive. And then you can go even further, right? There's been the rallying cry of the anti-war movement for years, money for schools, not for war.

That is actually an abolitionist sentiment. Take money out of U.S. militarism. How much of our budget, our federal budget, that's our tax dollars, goes toward sustaining the U.S. military so that we, what, fight wars abroad, destabilize other countries, so that people from those other countries come here looking for a better life, and then we pour money into ICE to oppress them and send them back? Why? What a useless waste of our resources, right? What if we took the money out of U.S. military, out of ICE, out of policing, in all forms, start to divert that away from those structures into Medicare for all, into public higher education, into expanding affordable housing and cooperative housing and public housing, into all of the things that would actually keep us safe? We would see crime drop. We would see levels of immigration drop. We would see wages go up.

We would have no worries about how to pay for health care emergencies. We would start to thrive. And I'm simplifying it.

It wouldn't just be this magic bullet, and it would take time, but that's the direction we have to start going in. And so that's why in talking to Black abolitionists who have been on the front lines, who have been on the worst receiving ends of racial capitalism and the enforcement mechanisms to keep some people oppressed at the expense of other people, they have so much wisdom to offer us for how we start thinking about reversing this horrible place that we've ended up in. Because if we don't have a vision for the future we want, how do we know how to get out of this, right?

We need something to aim for. How do we, you know, we hear people saying another world is possible. Okay, well, what's the path to, what is that other world we want?

This is the other world we want, where we divest from these structures of disempowerment and enforcement and violence and into the things that help us all thrive.

[Francesca]
My final question is part of how we get there. You know, what are the paths? You're describing in this book, Breaking Ice, Sonali Kolhatkar, really a bottom-up movement of self-organizing.

Many people are also working an inside game, what they would talk about. For example, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Sona Mamdani, many people who are going into electoral politics to try to enact the kinds of policies that you've just been talking about or working toward them. Yet the book is deeply skeptical about relying too much on our electoral system in order to do that.

First of all, why? And second of all, what else is necessary in our work within elections to make sure that our demands just don't get trivialized away?

[Sonali]
I mean, I don't want to undermine our electoral system. I want us to be deeply skeptical of politicians and people who we elect. We need to change the dynamic between elected officials and us.

Right now, we have culturally approached elections as popularity contests. Who do I like most that I can get behind? That is the wrong approach.

The dynamic should be we set the agenda and who do the politicians feel they can get most support from and earn our votes, right? They are public servants. They answer to us.

So the minute somebody like Zoran Mamdani actually gets into office, it needs to be an oppositional relationship. We all need to be holding Mamdani accountable, meaning, okay, New Yorkers. He's seen as the people's mayor because so much of what he says resonates with so many of us and so much of what he's doing is resonant because he came from movements, right?

So his constituents need to hold him accountable. I'm a little bit disturbed by just how excited people continue to be, okay, he's in office now. You can stop putting him up on a pedestal.

Is he fulfilling the promises that he made? Yes and no. He is fulfilling some promises.

He's got a few others in the mind, but not too many. And so hopefully they're holding him accountable. And we need to do that as well.

I mean, Abdul El-Sayed, wonderfully charismatic. I am deeply disturbed by the fact that he's doubled down on calling himself a capitalist. I'm a capitalist, he says.

And I'm like, that's not reading the room, in my opinion. And so I'm very skeptical of that, but I'm really glad that he is very strong on Israel and Palestine, and he is a Medicare for all proponent, right? Like those two things are critical.

So he's like for a regulated capitalism. I'm like, fine, okay, but it rubs me the wrong way, right? Like, I'm not excited about a politician who proudly proclaims that they're capitalist, but other people might be, and that's fair.

So I think we need to see electoral politics as, which is what it is. It's a tool to keep our democracy alive. How do we use that tool?

We have to use it wisely. So every step of the way, we have to say, this is what we want from our democracy. Which candidate is most likely to deliver?

And from that, we will pick the person who is most likely to deliver and do it conditionally. Instead of seeing elections as popularity contests, we have to see them as job interviews. Here's a person who is doing a job interview.

And if we choose them, they're on probation for four years, and we're going to review their job every four years. And if they did not do what we elected them to do, kick him out and bring somebody else who will do the job right. And if we change our mindset about how we see politicians, and by that, I mean enough with the, I'm with her, I'm with him, language and mentality.

That's deeply destructive. It's very disempowering. It says to the politicians, we need you more than you need us.

No, they need us. They work for us. So instead of saying, I'm with her or whoever, we have to have politicians feel vulnerable enough to say, no, I'm with this group of, I'm with this mentality.

I'm with this agenda. This is what I stand for. I'm with the Medicare for all people.

I'm with the people who want to see an end to wars. I'm with the people who want to tax the rich. That's when we have a healthy democracy.

And how we do that is by keeping our movement strong during, before and after elections, and never caving to getting behind a politician. The politician needs to get behind us. So I think that that's really, really important.

So the minute you have somebody who is a democratic socialist get into office, it's not like, oh, we have a man or woman on the inside. No. Now that person works for us.

We hope they'll do what we trained them to do if they came from our movements. If they don't, they might have their reasons for not. It's irrelevant.

If they don't, we replace them with somebody who can. And when you change that dynamic, politicians are on notice and will find that they'll actually start doing their job more often when they realize that they're working for us. How do we get there is also, you know, it's important to do things like removing money out of politics, corporate money out of politics, right?

Because the reason they don't answer to us often is because we've flooded our electoral system with so much money that their true bosses are super PACs and the corporations and the rich people who funded them. And so there's ways out of that, right? We have been living in a post-Citizens United world for 20 years now.

How do we overturn Citizens United? Hawaii just did it. People haven't really been paying attention to that.

Hawaii became the first state in the nation just less than a year ago to rewrite the state charter for corporations so that they are not allowed to interfere in elections because states get to define what a corporation is. So if the Supreme Court won't stop corporations from flooding our electoral systems with money, states can and should just redefine what corporations are. This was the innovative idea of an activist in Montana who I've interviewed on my show, and Montanans are about to vote on something very similar.

Hawaii just did it through their legislative process and were able to do it faster. So there's ways for us to do this. There's a lot of hope, but we have to know about these mechanisms of restoring our democracy.

And how do we know about independent journalists? And so I'm going to do a shameless plug here. I do what's called solutions journalism, right?

My solutions journalism emphasizes Hawaii's victory and doesn't emphasize the losses because other mainstream news outlets cover the losses. And so we are awash in information of how we're losing. What about all the ways in which we're winning and can win?

And so that's why I wrote the book, to show how we won and helped save so many people from ISIS clutches. The war isn't over, that was one battle. And there are other things that we need to pay attention to.

So, you know, support independent journalists, please.

[Francesca]
Absolutely. And the book is Breaking ICE, Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. And as we go out, Sonali Kolhatkar, tell us what is the name of your show and where can people find it?

[Sonali]
Thank you so much. It is called Rising Up with Sonali. I've spent 25 years as a broadcast journalist and I do multimedia journalism and I run a sub stack like I'm now independent because journalism is failing every, you know, the magazine I used to work for closed down a year ago because they ran out of money.

And so I've joined the ranks of legions of independent journalists trying to make my own way and trying to create content that I hope and journalism that I hope people will directly subscribe to. So I have a subscription based platform that people can find at risingupwithsonali.com and each week for a mere four bucks a month, people can get access to the videos, audios and transcripts of all the Solutions Journalism interviews that I do. Yeah.

So please support independent journalism. If you don't support my platform, support someone else's independent journalistic platform. So it's risingupwithsonali.com.

[Francesca]
Oh, that's great. And thanks again.