Some people may want to take a kind of vengeful stance about how people were misled about Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations, but it is genuinely heartbreaking.
There are millions of people in this country — and I was one of them — working two to three shifts a day to try to make ends meet. You’re not reading the newspaper every morning with a cup of coffee.
It’s not to say that people are uneducated or not informed. This is real life. You’ve got a baby on your hip, you’ve got three shifts that day. You have such an overwhelm of information.
Something that I think is different about this moment than after 2020 or 2016, is that the day after, people immediately came to me and said, “He’s not actually going to do that, right?”
Something I learned: I asked folks who voted for Donald Trump and me where they got their news from, where they take in information.
And one of the things that they said is that one of their primary trusted sources of information was “you” — as in me. That means they rely on me as their elected official for information directly. That also means that they are listening to him directly for information.
And so I think people that believe what he says, when he says “We’re only going after criminals,” they think that he’s going after somebody else. Meanwhile the Republican Party, the Trump campaign, people like Stephen Miller — they believe that being undocumented means you are a criminal.
I’m not here to sugarcoat what we all are about to collectively experience.
What we can do to prepare is build community, which is one of the most powerful and radical things you can do in an environment like this.
Regimes and autocracies are taken down by millions of drops of small actions that would otherwise be invisible by masses of people.
In solidarity,
Alexandria
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