Publications

Note to Readers: Exciting news! This year the Wren Collective has moved our newsletters to Substack, creating an opportunity for you to more easily find and engage with them. This week, we’ve included an explainer interview with Jess Pishko on the Insurrection Act. Please subscribe here. Sixteen days into January, and there are already too…

“One thing is clear: in the years to come, we will see a lot of horrible things happen. We will see our undocumented friends deported, political prosecutions increase, and surveillance over dissenters grow at an alarming pace.” — The Wren Collective Newsletter, December 2024 One challenge of being alive and paying attention in 2025 is…

As immigration raids sweep across the country, many of us are watching ICE and CBP agents act like a shadow police force.  Agents appear free to harass anyone who happens to have the wrong skin color or accent. They are allowed to smash windows and tear down doors; beat, tear gas and shoot at any…

As recently as last year, the death penalty was in serious decline in the United States. Federal and state executions were at an all time low and public support for the practice had plummeted. While President Biden fell short of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to end the federal death penalty, he commuted the sentences…

In this newsletter, we explore how the Trump administration and state leaders are criminalizing dissent by weaponizing the DOJ, ICE, and other law enforcement tools at their disposal. We highlight some of the more high profile attacks – on George Soros, James Comey, and Letitia James – but also discuss how for every high profile…

Normally, our newsletters explore how states function as laboratories for authoritarian forms of government and the federal government’s utilization of those ideas in its own power grab. Today, we take a break to focus on the President’s totally fact-free attack on pretrial justice, which, if successful, will make communities more dangerous, harm the voices of…

One thing is certain about the redistricting battle now unfolding in Texas: the Texas GOP’s midterm effort to further eke out unfair advantage from the state’s already unfair congressional map is not politics-as-usual; nor is their mission, as Trump insists, a “simple redrawing.” Just to recap, Trump’s DOJ sent a letter to Texas Governor Greg…

Trump Attacks Elections by Targeting Election Officials In 2020, state and local election workers faced an unprecedented wave of hostility, threats, and violence because of Trump’s big lie about the presidential election results. Trump’s repeated claims of fraud and stolen votes spurred vigilantism across the country, which often went unchecked by law enforcement. Given this increased…

“People die in ICE custody. People die in county jails. People die in state prisons.” That is how Border Czar Tom Homan responded to the death of Isidro Pérez in ICE custody in Miami. Pérez, a 75-year-old father ostensibly detained because of two drug convictions from the 1980s, is the fifth person to die in…

The headlines keep circling back to Trump—but we’re missing the bigger picture. This week, we’re zooming in on recent attacks on reproductive care at every level. As we’ve emphasized throughout our newsletter series, fascism isn’t just about an authoritarian President in Washington, nor does its reach only extend to the courts and Congress. Fascism also…