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Talking Points for Fighting Fascism

This is the first in a series of urgent updates–Talking Points for Fighting Fascism–from The Wren Collective tracking the rapid erosion of democratic norms under President Trump’s second term. It is clear that the Trump administration is trying to overwhelm Americans, but fighting back requires keeping abreast of what is happening and then communicating the truth about this administration’s actions to the public. This messaging guidance, which will be delivered regularly, will provide you with critical background information on the changes coming out of the White House, effective messaging guidance, and concrete resources to help combat these concerning developments. This edition’s focus: the administration’s expansive use of executive power to transform immigration enforcement and bypass democratic processes.

In an alarming escalation of executive power, President Trump has spent much of his first month back in office attempting to unlawfully expand federal authority to attack immigrants and their communities.

Trump is using a “shock and awe” strategy to sow fear in immigrant communities, even threatening military action. His actions are both cruel and unlawful. The administration has eliminated “sensitive location” protections, allowing enforcement at schools, hospitals, courts, and places of worship and threatened ICE raids. There are reports of people terrified of sending their children to school.

He has attempted to end birthright citizenship by executive order – though temporarily blocked by courts – demonstrating a total disregard for the Constitution and in particular, the 14th Amendment. Similarly, the suspension of refugee admissions and cancellation of humanitarian programs affecting over 500,000 people has upended organizations and demonstrates how quickly he is willing to use executive action to dismantle established protections, bypassing congressional oversight and democratic deliberation.

Below, we provide background information on the worst attacks and suggestions on how to talk about some of the administration’s worst immigration policies:

Trump’s Punitive Immigration Policies Are Harmful to Everyone

In his first days back in office, President Trump unleashed a barrage of reckless executive orders that attempt to blatantly upend U.S. immigration policy with fear-mongering tactics. These orders not only threaten to ramp up deportations, detentions, and the militarization of local law enforcement but also shut down vital legal pathways for asylum and refugee admissions. Simultaneously, his administration is coercing sanctuary cities into dropping protections through lawsuits, criminal threats, and the threatened withholding of federal funds, forcing local jurisdictions into a dangerous subservience to his authoritarian agenda.

  • These policies aren’t about catching “serious criminals,” Notwithstanding a few propaganda videos, Trump and ICE are targeting ordinary people, mostly people of color, inflicting unnecessary suffering.
  • On the first Sunday after Trump’s inauguration, 48% of arrests made by ICE were for people with no criminal history. His bravado doesn’t match the reality.
  • Trump sent 200 people to Colombia. None of them had  criminal history, but twenty of them were children and two of them were pregnant women.
  • His policies are also disrupting neighborhoods and families. Adults and their children are afraid to go to school, to work, and to doctor’s appointments.
  • His policies are making people less safe because they are afraid to report crimes. Who would go to the police when deportation is a possibility?
  • Trump is jeopardizing our economy. These policies will cripple vital industries like agriculture and healthcare, which rely on immigrants to fill important jobs.  There are already reports of workers staying home because they are afraid of raids.
  • Tanking the economy isn’t hypothetical – when deportation actions have gone up in the past, the economy goes down.
  • These so-called policies are not solutions but showy, punitive measures with devastating real-life consequences for countless innocent lives and really, for everyone who lives here.
  • And his actions are illegal, and are part of Trump’s strategy to test the boundaries of the courts and the law.
These policies are cruel and target people fleeing violence and persecution who are seeking safety in the United States:
  • As already stated- Trump isn’t targeting criminals. Despite videos with Dr. Phil and members of his cabinet, Trump is arresting people with no criminal history, cuffing them, and putting them on planes for show.
  • In another video, the Director of Homeland Security donned border gear and cheered ICE’s arrest of 20 “dirtbag” criminals.  Eight of the people arrested had no criminal record at all.
  • They aren’t stopping or even prioritizing serious violence. They are harming ordinary people.
  • His other policies also fail to target violence.
  • Trump canceled the CBP One app, which left 270,000 asylum seekers, including children, stranded without any legal way to request protection, facing hunger and deprived of  medical care.
    • These are families often fleeing life-threatening violence or persecution with no other options, facing incredibly dangerous and traumatic treks to get to the US-Mexico border.
  • Trump canceled flights for 1,660 already-vetted Afghan refugees who the U.S. Government had been promised safety.
    • Hundreds of Afghan families are stranded in countries like Pakistan. It is unclear where they can live and be safe.
  • People from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela are under threat of losing their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) overnight. TPS provides a temporary and legal status for immigrants who cannot safely return to their home countries due to catastrophic events.
    • The program protects approximately 360,000 U.S. citizen children whose parents have TPS.
    • TPS helps prevent family separation and allows parents to legally work to support their children.
  • Trump is attempting to fast-track deportations by expanding expedited removal.
    • Expedited removal is a process through which Trump wants to deport our neighbors without any legal process, any opportunity to talk with an attorney, or any chance to even present evidence that they should not be deported.
    • Deporting people en masse without any legal process is cruel, unjust, and fundamentally at odds with our values of dignity, equity, and human rights.
  • And he is trying to revive the use of Guantanamo Bay, a symbol of torture and indefinite detention. The only reason to do this is to be cruel.
    • Detention at Guantanamo costs taxpayers five times more than the average immigration detention bed.
    • Military facilities are not designed for civilian detention or families.
    • Limited access to legal counsel makes it nearly impossible for people to argue their asylum cases.
These policies are designed to stoke fear:
  • Trump rescinded the “sensitive location” policy, which protected schools, courts, hospitals, and places of worship from most ICE activity.
  • Allowing ICE to enter schools will traumatize students, disrupt education, and make parents fear taking their children to school.
  • Parents are afraid to send their kids to school. Kids are afraid to go. Teachers are afraid to come and teach. That’s not how elementary schools or daycares or any other school should work.
  • Allowing ICE to enter hospitals deters people from seeking medical care.
  • ICE can now even go into shelters and relief centers, threatening vulnerable people seeking help.
Trump’s immigration agenda will tank our economy:
  • Deporting millions of people devastates industries like healthcare, education, and food production—harming all of us in the process.
  • The undocumented population accounts for almost 5 percent of the US workforce and comprises a huge share of the agricultural, construction, and hospitality workforce.
  • Our food supply is threatened because farmworkers are not showing up to work in fear of being arrested and deported.
  • Workers are not going to work at their restaurant jobs out of fear of ICE raids.
  • And the idea that American-born people are going to start filling in many of those jobs is misguided– we’ve had mass deportations before and U.S. citizens have not filled the unglamorous jobs of most undocumented people. Instead, industries are crippled and American-born people in that industry actually lose their jobs.
  • Widespread deportations could significantly decrease tax revenue at all government levels, as immigrants – regardless of documentation status – contribute substantial tax payments that help fund healthcare services for native-born Americans.  In 2022, undocumented people paid 96.7 billion dollars in taxes.
  • Creating the infrastructure and personnel needed for large-scale deportation operations would require major government spending and potentially new funding from Congress. Deporting 1 million people a year – that’s an 88 billion dollar price tag.
Trump’s immigration agenda makes us all less safe:
  • To do its job, local law enforcement needs people to trust it. When immigrant communities think police and other elected officials are working to deport them, they won’t report crimes– even when they are the victims. That’s horrible for safety.
  • Immigrants fearing ICE and deportation become easy targets for people who know they won’t report crimes. This creates a dangerous cycle where undocumented people can’t safely report when they’re victims of theft, car theft, domestic violence, or other crimes – making them especially vulnerable to repeat victimization and unable to escape abusive situations.
  • People can target immigrant-owned businesses and immigrant communities with near impunity, knowing their victims will likely stay silent rather than risk deportation.
  • These policies divert badly needed resources. Police chiefs and sheriffs across the country oppose forced cooperation with ICE because it diverts limited resources away from the important work of fighting serious crimes.
  • Local law enforcement needs to be able to solve serious crimes like murders and rapes. They already are stretched thin. Forcing them to divert attention and resources from solving crimes to rounding up people just because of their immigration status does not promote public safety.  
Trump’s plans are racist:
  • Trump’s immigration agenda is an extension of a racist immigration system, amplifying existing systemic racism that exists in the U.S.
    • His rhetoric dehumanizes immigrants. Referring to them as “animals”, and stating that illegal immigration is “poisoning the blood” of our country, is language that echoes white supremacist ideologies.
    • His administration has implemented measures that disproportionately target immigrants from non-white countries, such as suspending asylum claims and cutting funding for legal aid to asylum-seekers.
    • These actions perpetuate and intensify the racial biases entrenched in the U.S. immigration system.
  • To enforce it, ICE is engaging in racial profiling.
  • And that racial profiling has led them, for example, to wrongfully detain U.S. citizens of color, including a member of the Navajo Nation and a man from Puerto Rico.
  • It is clear, too, that Trump simply wants people who look a certain way to be kept out of America. While Trump has stopped all refugee resettlement, he signed an EO offering refuge to Afrikaners from South Africa.

Targeting Sanctuary Jurisdictions is Wrong

President Trump’s policy of targeting sanctuary cities is not only an unconstitutional power grab from local control, it is wrong. His administration threatens to harm millions of Americans, including U.S. citizens.  The Federal government should stay in its lane and let local jurisdictions protect the values of their constituents.

Trump’s Claims About Sanctuary Cities as “Hotbeds of Crime” Are Wrong:
  • It’s not true that sanctuary policies lead to increased crime. Many sanctuary cities have lower crime rates and stronger economies than non-sanctuary jurisdictions.
Harmful Impact of Cutting Federal Funding:
  • Cutting federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions will harm millions of residents, including U.S. Citizens. Sanctuary cities often rely on federal funds to support essential public services, such as healthcare, housing, education, and other programs. Stripping sanctuary cities of these resources will hurt our communities and undermine public safety.
    • For example, Los Angeles is relying on billions of dollars of federal aid to help them rebuild from the devastating firestorms that ravaged the county last month. But President Trump wants to condition wildfire aid on California adopting a Voter ID requirement, which would require voters to prove they are U.S. citizens before being permitted to vote.
Trump’s Attack on Local Policies Are Illegal:
  • President Trump’s threats to predicate federal funding on cooperation with immigration enforcement is not only a power grab, it’s illegal.
  • Under the Constitution, Congress has the “power of the purse,” not the President. The legislature decides how federal funds are spent, and the President cannot unilaterally withhold federal funding or change funding conditions.
  • Trump’s immigration policy asks elected officials to engage in illegal practices–like holding people in jail who have no pending charges or who have already been released by a judge. That violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Stay in your lane, and we’ll stay in ours:
  • Sanctuary policies reflect the local values and priorities of its residents. The federal government should not impose its “one size fits all” approach to immigration enforcement.
  • ICE and other federal agencies already have the resources and authority to enforce immigration laws. They shouldn’t need to force local governments to do their jobs for them.
  • Cities and counties should have the freedom to set their own immigration enforcement policies and priorities without fear of losing federal funding for essential and completely unrelated programs.

Resources and How People Are Fighting Back

Immigration Organizations:
  • Immigrant Defense Project – The Immigrant Defense Project offers a free hotline with expert legal advice on how criminal charges affect immigration status, helping to prevent deportations and keep families together by catching legal issues early. IDP also has a wealth of information about immigration and “crimmigration” law, policy, and other information their website.
  • Immigrant Legal Resource Center – The Immigrant Legal Resource Center trains attorneys, advocates for fair policies, and provides legal resources, including red know your rights cards, which help people assert their rights and defend themselves in many situations, such as when ICE agents go to a home.
  • United We Dream – United We Dream is the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country.
Local Jurisdictions Fight Back:

Several legal challenges have been filed in response to President Trump’s immigration policies.

  • 22 states joined in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship, claiming that it violates the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.
    • Thus far, Trump’s order has been blocked by federal courts in Maryland, Seattle, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. And on February 19, 2025, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied an emergency request to lift Seattle’s injunction, which marks the first time an appellate court has weighed in on the order.
  • Cities and counties have already begun fighting back by suing the Trump administration for illegally targeting them for being sanctuary cities.  These cities include San Francisco, Santa Clara County, King County in Washington, Portland, Oregon, and New Haven, Connecticut, and argue that the Trump administration’s orders violate the Constitution’s due process clause, the 10th Amendment, and the separation of powers.