Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative print and audio journalist. In 2015, she received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism for her role in creating a women-only climate…
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In this week’s episode Alleen Brown speaks with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of The Sunrise Movement about being infiltrated by the feds, why fighting authoritarianism is a climate fight, and more.
Pushkin.
00:21
Speaker 2
Hello and welcome to The Spill, a new weekly show brought to you by the team at Drilled. I'm Aline Brown, a senior editor at Drilled. Remember the ice crackdown in Minneapolis last winter? Well, believe it or not, a climate organization, the Sunrise Movement, was one of the groups organizing protests designed to stop ice from abducting people off the streets. And in the last few weeks, new details have emerged about how the Department of Homeland Security investigated and surveilled the organization. I spoke to Sunrise's executive director, Aru Shiny Ajay, about all that and what it was like to enter the climate movement at the height of the youth climate movement and watch it transform through racial justice uprisings, genocide, and rising authoritarianism. You can tune into The Spill every Friday between Drilled's narrative seasons. We've got all kinds of interviews lined up in the weeks ahead with journalists, researchers, activists, and people on the front lines of the climate crisis. Here's my conversation with Aru.
01:27
Speaker 3
Hi, Aru.
01:28
Speaker 2
Welcome to The Spill.
01:29
Speaker 4
Thank you so much for having me on.
01:33
Speaker 2
I'm so excited to be talking to you. I'm from Minnesota, from the Twin Cities. Oh, you are. I love hearing that. Yeah. And like ever since I saw Sunrise get involved with the anti-ice protests, I've been like, oh my gosh, I really need to talk to Aru and find out what's going on there. So I'm really glad we finally got to connect.
01:52
Speaker 3
I know. I'm really excited for you. It was a crazy time this winter. And yeah, but excited to be able to chat now.
01:57
Speaker 2
Awesome. Well, there is a lot to talk about, and I want to start with kind of a big question, and then we'll reel back and talk about how you've experienced the climate movement transforming over the past decade of your work. and eventually get back to Minneapolis. But first, this like big question. I'm curious what you think of the idea that the climate movement is in retreat right now. You know, 350.org, I think it was the fall of 2025, announced it was suspending its U.S. operations. Greenpeace has had its resources drained via energy transfers, lawsuit blaming them for the Standing Rock movement. Sierra Club isn't seeing the winds it once did. And, you know, parts of the youth movement have really been criminalized, including for activism around the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. You know, and it was, of course, just revealed that your organization, the Sunrise Movement, was investigated for its involvement in anti-ice protests and was even infiltrated by undercovers. So I'm just curious if all this means that the climate movement has lost steam or gone quiet as climate disasters spiral. How do you think about that? Yeah.
03:11
Speaker 3
I mean, I think the reality is like fascism is on the rise right now. And that means that every movement that is against fascism is sort of inherently in retreat in many ways. You know, like we are seeing just these dramatic attacks on every single part of our society, including climate. From my experience in the climate movement, I think there is certainly some truth to the fact that there was a huge surge of climate energy, and then a lot of it deflated during the Biden years, when I think people saw the drawn-out fight around the climate bill. If they were paying attention, they saw the drawn-out fight. If they weren't paying attention, all they really saw was, I thought we'd do something on climate change, and it doesn't seem like we did. And obviously, I know that we actually did pass a very big climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. But It was a fraction of the law that I think Sunrise wanted to pass. And I think it was certainly a fraction of how effective we would have wanted it to be at actually reaching people's everyday lives and showing the ways in which we were addressing the climate crisis. So I don't think that it is that people are less concerned about climate change.
04:19
Speaker 2
But I do think there's been a rise.
04:21
Speaker 3
In this, what I'd call almost climate dumerism of there's nothing we can do about it.
04:25
Speaker 2
We missed our window. We're too late. The government will never listen. Like, that's what I hear.
04:30
Speaker 3
It's people saying, I really care about this, but I don't really know how to direct it in the middle of everything else that's going on.
04:37
Speaker 2
You know, growing up in Minnesota, how did... you become conscious of the climate crisis? Was there a moment or something that happened where you were like, oh shit, like this is it. This is the thing.
04:50
Speaker 3
Yeah, there were a few moments and it was around in high school.
04:55
Speaker 2
A couple of things happened at once.
04:58
Speaker 3
One thing was that there were these record breaking floods in Chennai in India. And I have some family who lives there. And I remember learning about the floods and I had family members who were like, weren't able to go down to their courtyard for several days. And they were like in an apartment building and they couldn't go down.
05:19
Speaker 2
You know, they were trapped. And that really hit me hard.
05:23
Speaker 3
I was like, this is, up until that point, I had thought about climate as a issue that was important, but, you know, about the polar bears and the penguins. And that was my moment, I guess, over 10 years ago now, where I was like, oh, this is actually about And then the other thing that happened at around the same time was I actually I was doing like refugee aid work for Syrian refugees. I was like volunteering in like kitchens and stuff like that as a high schooler.
05:53
Speaker 2
And I learned about.
05:53
Speaker 3
The ways in which the Syrian refugee crisis was connected to drought and climate disaster. And, you know, my parents are immigrants from India. We came here before I was born. And I just really started to wrap my head around the mass violence. global migration that's going to happen if we don't.
06:15
Speaker 2
Put a stop to climate change?
06:16
Speaker 3
Like how many people are just going to lose their homes and how many wars are going to be started? And I started to understand it as a climate issue, but also just something that was fundamentally about peace and stability for people's lives.
06:29
Speaker 2
Interesting. Okay. So yeah, the idea that immigration is closely connected with the climate crisis was really at the foundation of your consciousness around this, it sounds like.
06:40
Speaker 3
I mean, it was the first way I experienced it, you know, which I think sometimes it's explained as this abstract thing.
06:46
Speaker 2
It's interesting.
06:46
Speaker 3
People sometimes talk about climate as a white issue, but it's actually, it turns out that Latino people support climate action in some of the highest rates. And sometimes I wonder if that is tied at all to sort of the sense of like, I know what it's like to see my home destabilized and what that would create. I think it's a really felt issue for a lot of people.
07:04
Speaker 2
Totally. Totally. So I'm curious to hear about your involvement with the Sunrise Movement. You know, the Sunrise Movement came into wide public awareness from what I know in around November 2018. There was a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office. It was all over the Internet. Sunrise, you know, youth were demanding action on the Green New Deal. So this was the same year that Greta Thunberg broke out with these school sit-ins. And it was a moment where people were really leaning on youth leadership for an answer to the climate crisis. So, you know, my understanding is you were involved with Sunrise by then. And I'm really curious what that moment felt like for you as one of these youths that was supposed to figure all this out.
07:49
Speaker 3
Yeah, I was I think I was 19 or 20 at the time.
07:53
Speaker 4
I must have just turned 20, actually. And I was there at that sit-in.
07:58
Speaker 3
And I remember it was the first time I'd ever risked arrest for anything. I remember going into the office, sitting there. AOC came and spoke with us. It felt really exhilarating. And I remember it was one of the first times I felt privileged. powerful as a young person honestly I was like I am sitting here in the speaker of the house's office and we're going to make her do something and you know when we that day we actually didn't know how far it would go we were like okay that was a good action and I went to bed that night and I woke up we were like all crammed into this tiny Airbnb there were probably like 50 of us And so I was sleeping inside of a closet, physically inside, curled up. And I woke up to someone like knocking on the door of the closet, being like, wake up, wake up. We have like, I think it was like Washington Post or something. We have Washington Post on the line and they want to talk to someone who was there. So I just roll out of the closet, pick up the phone. I'm like ready for my interview. So that's what I remember.
08:55
Speaker 2
It was really exhilarating. It was a little bit scary too.
08:59
Speaker 1
Like, oh God.
09:00
Speaker 2
I guess nobody has a plan.
09:02
Speaker 3
And that means when we come in with a plan, everyone's willing to say, okay, what's the plan? And that was definitely a little scary, but mostly exhilarating. And I loved it so much that I ended up dropping out of college. after that semester to organize full-time with Sunrise.
09:15
Speaker 2
I'm curious about how you saw things evolve in the years after that. Between then and now, we've had these defining moments, the George Floyd protests, also set in Minneapolis, the COVID pandemic, and then genocide in Gaza. I'm curious how you saw the movement and your relationship to it over the course of these monumental events and how you're thinking about the climate crisis and how to address it strategically changed.
09:46
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, I think when I joined Sunrise, I really believe that the recipe to change could be pretty straightforward, that we could create mass protests, pressure politicians, elect the right people, and we would get wins. And I think what we've seen, what a lot of my generation has seen, is that it's actually.
10:11
Speaker 2
I really believe in mass movements.
10:12
Speaker 3
And I've also really seen the enormous corrupting influence of money in politics in particular, and the enormous lengths to which the political establishment will go to avoid creating change sometimes because they're often beholden to that money. I think that's been my biggest lesson over those multiple things that you named. I don't think our democracy works for everyday people. That doesn't mean that mass movements aren't necessary. In fact, I think mass movements are perhaps the only thing that can force a democracy to start working. But it means that the way that we talk about climate action these days is not just about how do we actually pass the climate legislation. It's also about how do we actually stop fascism and build the political system that can pass the climate legislation in the first place. And that's not like we have to do like a 50-year plan to rebuild our democracy. It's just actually recognizing that you know, Joe Manchin was a literal fossil fuel baron who, Senator from West Virginia, repeatedly vetoed the most ambitious versions of a climate plan. And there's literally records of Exxon lobbyists saying, yeah, he does that because we tell him to. That is on the record, publicly, huge scandal when it came out, didn't change and everything. So I think for a lot of young people, there's a kind of this A lot of the broadening of the climate movement, I think sometimes it's reported on as like people don't care about climate. I think about it actually as a strategic reckoning with how broken our democracy is, how unresponsive it is to public opinion and people actually seeing organizing against fascism and organizing for democracy as part of a climate fight, part of expecting your government to be responsive to you on any list of issues that have mass popular support.
11:56
Speaker 2
You say, you know, you had this idea of a more linear pathway to meaningful climate action to be taken by our government. Were there specific places along the way where that was disrupted and you were like, oh, our democracy doesn't work? And, you know, what were those moments?
12:16
Speaker 3
The moment that I remember the most clearly was in the fall of 2021 when we'd been campaigning all year on a climate bill and several friends of mine in Sunrise went on hunger strike on the White House steps to the degree that one of them had to be hospitalized and others had to be like forcibly taken off the hunger strike in order to not, to not die from, from starving themselves. And to have that happen and for Joe Manchin to still sort of basically be driving around in a Maserati, getting in his yacht and have reports coming out about how he was just doing it because he was getting money.
13:01
Speaker 2
That was like one of the biggest pieces to me.
13:04
Speaker 3
I was like, money and politics is absolutely majorly corrupting our ability to do anything. And yes, Mass movements can out-organize that. I think we see that in the string of electoral victories that we're seeing this year. But we also need to stop this corrupting influence altogether.
13:19
Speaker 2
Another big question here. I'm curious what you think. Is the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza a climate issue?
13:30
Speaker 4
And if so, why? Yeah, I think there's two pieces to this.
13:35
Speaker 3
There is a climate analysis about why war is bad for the climate crisis.
13:41
Speaker 2
There's stuff about emissions, all of that.
13:44
Speaker 3
My honest answer is that the people who want to stop the climate crisis care about everyone across the world having stable homes to live in, food to eat, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe. And it's actually just like a very humanitarian impulse to say, hey, I actually don't think that we should destroy the ecosystem of literally everyone on this planet. And when I think about the enormous support that The youth climate movement loaned towards and in fact became a lot of the youth movement against the genocide. I don't think it was as much like, well, war causes emissions. And it was much more like the same humanitarian impulse driving both of those. That being said, I do absolutely think that in a world of climate change, we're going to face so much more war. so much more destruction. I think most people are not wrapping their heads around the scale of catastrophe that we might be seeing if we don't really seriously respond domestically and internationally to the climate crisis.
14:42
Speaker 2
I'm also curious how you have seen the question of Palestine be used to divide and disrupt the climate movement. Again, I think of Greta Thunberg because I associate her as the symbol of the youth movement. It was kind of this like, darling, everybody is like, oh, yes, our moral compass. Here she is. But then she started speaking out on Palestine and that kind of started to shift and she was sort of recast as this radical and And even as a terrorist in some camps. And, you know, I think that's reflective of something that's happened much more broadly. You know, support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel has been used really widely to criminalize, especially youth movements around the world. So I guess I'm curious how you've seen the issue of Gaza kind of transform the youth climate movement and the climate movement more broadly. And I'm curious what you think about the way that The climate movement broadly has responded to that crisis.
15:44
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, what I've seen is actually that the youth climate movement broadly responded in pretty similar ways to the crisis, which is that this is an emergency. This is a humanitarian crisis. We don't think this is right. Our tax dollars should not be going to this. In 2024, we were running like a fund climate, not genocide pressure campaign campaign. on Biden calling on him to declare a climate emergency and stop like sending money for wars, for the genocide abroad. So I saw the movement actually respond with a lot of consistency. Who didn't respond that way were honestly political pundits and sort of the chattering class who I think saw it as a sign of radicalism to be anti-genocide. And I think if we've seen anything in the midterm election cycle, I think they were really wrong. Actually, the majority of people in the United States do not think that we should be funding a genocide abroad. The majority of people in the world don't think that. It's actually only a pretty small class of politicians who... are often bought out by AIPAC money who have decided to play political covers. So when we made the decision to vocally oppose the genocide, it was right after things started escalating sometime early October, we made the decision. We did lose some funder support. We didn't have a single member of our base really come out saying this is the wrong decision. And that is remarkable to me. It just wasn't the challenge we were facing. I think they've been proven wrong now. I think we're going to need to continue to show that this is an issue that has mass popular support. And we were sort of painted as like radicals for going in this direction.
17:24
Speaker 2
I think that wasn't true. Right. Totally. I want to talk about Trump a little bit. He came into office in the winter of 2025. And I'm curious about the months leading up to the ICE crackdown. You know, what were you experiencing in your movement between January 2025 and January 2026 when ICE really invaded the Twin Cities?
18:08
Speaker 3
So January 2025, I don't know if you remember, but it was right as the L.A. fires were happening in So that's what I really remember about that January. It was both inauguration and this vivid climate disaster. I think the thing that I'll say is that 2025 for me, and I think for a lot of our movement, was a year of realizing just how far Trump was going to go with the power that he had. And in some ways, we knew it was going to happen. We had read Project 2025. We had seen what he was going to say. But there was something different about actually seeing it happen in front of our own eyes. I remember his absolute gutting of climate programs, being really, really furious about that, his giving away huge amounts of.
18:53
Speaker 2
Contracts to fossil fuel billionaires.
18:55
Speaker 3
I also remember, I think it was in May of 2025, there was a grad student in the University of Minnesota who got grabbed by ICE, who I actually had gone to high school with. And so that was like my first moment of, wait, I know this person. He was legally here on a student visa. They grabbed him because many years ago, he had some sort of like driving ticket of some sort. And that was a real moment for me of like, oh my God, I.
19:25
Speaker 2
Knew this would happen.
19:26
Speaker 3
I knew it was happening, but it's still different when it's your place and your home and your people.
19:31
Speaker 2
So I felt really aware of that.
19:33
Speaker 3
And I think that type of thing was just starting to happen all around the country. And it became hard for us to organize. We were going to be running state level climate campaigns. We were actually running polluters pay campaigns and we realized that the Trump administration was preempting that federally and was basically passing legislation to stop states from passing climate laws, essentially, especially that villainize fossil fuels.
20:00
Speaker 2
We were just like, this is silly. It's silly to.
20:03
Speaker 3
Be running state-level climate campaigns while the federal government is actively being weaponized against our movements, against the campaigns that we're running. We actually just need to stop this authoritarian administration. We need to make sure that he can't rig elections so much that we can't win. We need to make sure that he stops kidnapping people off the streets. It became increasingly clear that it was just actually just bad strategy to ignore what was happening federally. You just actually have to go at the root of what's happening. So that's how I think about it. I don't think about it as a retreat. I actually think about it as like, let's stop the immediate bleeding so that we can strike at the type of legislation we need.
20:44
Speaker 2
Right. I think you said in one piece that you wrote that it was like pulling teeth to get people to engage with those polluters pay campaigns because of what you're talking about. People are literally getting kidnapped off the streets and having these really immediate crises. Yeah.
20:59
Speaker 3
And I think it's important to say that that doesn't necessarily mean that people don't care about the climate crisis, but in fact, that people want to do things that are impactful and.
21:10
Speaker 2
Big and that they can see matter.
21:13
Speaker 3
And I think people actually have an innate sense that passing the state level climate legislation while Trump is doing X, Y, Z to the climate actually has limited impact. We always say people can smell bullshit. Like if your strategy is bad, people know. If you're telling people you're going to win when you're not, people know. And I think that if we win back the House and certainly if we win the House and Senate, we're going to see a huge jump in interest in climate legislation and climate campaigning because people will start to feel like, oh, maybe.
21:43
Speaker 4
We could actually pass things. But in the absence of that, it was really, really hard to get people doing that.
21:49
Speaker 2
Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me about this ice crackdown. How did it feel in Minneapolis as this started to unfold? I know it was a lot. Yeah, it was really.
22:05
Speaker 2
It was very intense.
22:07
Speaker 3
Our Sunrise Twin Cities chapter actually did some scenario planning in November. And we were like, what are the potential things that could happen? We use something called the red line framework. And it's basically like predicting extremely high impact events that could happen that would either create a mass response or you could use as a movement to create a mass response. And we listed a couple of things and, you know, we listed Ilhan Omar gets grabbed by ICE. And one of the things we listed was an American citizen gets.
22:41
Speaker 2
Shot by ICE. Wow.
22:44
Speaker 3
And so in some ways, like, yeah, starting in November, we were starting to be like, this is a thing that could happen. Yeah.
22:52
Speaker 4
Operation Metro Surge was announced in December.
22:55
Speaker 3
We jumped into gear because we had basically done the planning beforehand. We'd already done research into... hotels that might be housing ice. So we basically like had an operation ready.
23:06
Speaker 2
To get up and go.
23:07
Speaker 3
The feeling on the ground was both really scary in a lot of ways. Like I carried my passport around while I was driving. I It felt like living under an occupied city, I think. I would take my dog for walks and I'd like see ICE vehicles. Several times I'd tie her up around a tree so that I could go closer and film because I didn't want, I don't.
23:32
Speaker 4
Know, I didn't want a dog running around in the middle of an ICE confrontation.
23:36
Speaker 3
It was really in your everyday life, which I think is maybe the thing that is most missed. Like you couldn't walk around doing your thing without encountering ICE.
23:47
Speaker 2
But in other ways, it was also very beautiful.
23:51
Speaker 3
I have never felt that level of solidarity with the whole city before.
23:56
Speaker 4
It really felt like everyone was on my team.
23:59
Speaker 3
I could go outside and I was under attack that I could blow a whistle and people would come to help me. That's what I really remember. I think I saw more bravery that month or those months later. It's really remarkable to me that Renee Good was out there patrolling for ICE and recording ICE agents and she got shot for doing it. And then tens of thousands of people went and decided, I'm going to do exactly that thing that someone got shot for because they shouldn't get shot for doing that. I think that's really, I think it's really brave and really impressive. And I felt very proud to be a Minnesotan. I'm very proud of my city.
24:39
Speaker 2
Yeah, I was totally, I mean, you know, A version of this, I guess, happened during the George Floyd protests. People like really showed up in a way that I did not expect. But what happened this winter, I just, people that I never would have imagined were like really taking meaningful and direct action to confront ICE agents and to help their neighbors who were having to go into hiding. It really, I don't know. Did you expect that out of Minnesota, having grown up there? That's a good question. Yes and no.
25:12
Speaker 3
I think in some ways I know how neighborly we are and I know how much we will.
25:19
Speaker 2
Help each other.
25:20
Speaker 3
But there was, yeah, I mean, in some way, I guess I did expect it in some ways, but it was just like so much going above and beyond. People were just like very kind and very generous and very brave. I think over time there has been a real solid multiracial solidarity that has been built in Minnesota. that is more there now, I would say, than there was when I was growing up as a young kid. And I think that contributed a lot to our ability to respond.
25:49
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I'm really curious about how Sunrise got involved. Obviously, you were involved as a resident of this community that was under attack, but you work and worked for an organization. At that point, I think you guys were still more overtly climate focused. So again, maybe this is like the wrong question, but I'm just curious, why was this a climate issue that Sunrise was going to engage in? And how did that begin?
26:18
Speaker 3
So the timeline is actually that the September and October before the surge is when Sunrise nationally decided that we needed to take on authoritarianism.
26:27
Speaker 2
And we had given that directive.
26:29
Speaker 3
To all of our hubs, and we were supporting our hubs to do redline planning, to be like, what are the moments that you can take advantage of that might happen in the next few months to actually capture a movement and direct it against authoritarianism? And so it was sort of like part of that deliberate strategy pivot. I think Totally understandably, most people actually realized that we had made that pivot once we started doing the organizing, not once we like, I don't know, sent a memo to our base.
26:56
Speaker 2
Yeah, because that's how the real world works. But that's why we were thinking about it as an anti-authoritarian issue.
27:03
Speaker 3
And at the root of it, I think we were just like, we cannot be a climate movement if democracy is not functioning. And that is what the ICE crackdown is a precursor to. Yes, it's about immigration, but they were grabbing American citizens. They were using it as a way to spy on movements. And we ourselves got infiltrated. I think we had a sense that ICE was sort of a testing ground of how far can I push a military occupation of a city? What can I do before there is pushback? And I think it would be foolish to look at it as only an immigration issue.
27:36
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, completely. I mean, tell me about that surveillance. What do you now know about the infiltration of the Sunrise Movement?
27:45
Speaker 3
So from the beginning, throughout all the stuff that the Twin Cities Hub did, everyone was very clear that infiltration was entirely possible. I remember a lot of meetings that people would run. People would say things like, we think there are federal agents in this room. Hi, if you are there, we're not doing anything wrong. Like that was a normal thing to say at meetings. which is kind of crazy. So in some ways we anticipated it. And our general line is that, you know, we are a nonviolent movement. We are exercising our First Amendment protected rights to protest. And if they want to come infiltrate us and watch us do that, I guess you can.
28:24
Speaker 2
Thanks for making the crowds a little bigger, you know?
28:26
Speaker 3
It obviously is a violation of our privacy, of our rights to be surveilling groups in that way.
28:32
Speaker 4
I think it's absolutely ridiculous. I also think it's a.
28:35
Speaker 3
Sign that they're scared and that they're looking for weak links to be able to target, pick off. I think this administration is currently testing How far can they criminalize different people? They're testing criminalizing individuals. Now they're going to test organizations. I think they're just like seeing how far they can go right now. So it's ridiculous. It's totally unacceptable. It also is a little like, to me, a sign of our power as well. Like you don't surveil someone if you don't think they are a threat to what you are trying to do.
29:07
Speaker 2
Right, right. And I mean, what were you doing? What kinds of actions was Sunrise taking the lead on?
29:15
Speaker 3
If you saw any of those videos of people making noise outside of hotels, that's the key stuff we were doing. We were like banging pots and pans, playing rock concerts. On a very technical level, I guess we were breaking some noise ordinances, but usually if we were told that by the cops, people would just leave. So that is a thing that we were getting surveillance by Homeland Security as a potential act of terrorism for banging.
29:42
Speaker 2
Pots and pans and playing music outside. Yikes. And why were you doing that? Well, we were doing that.
29:48
Speaker 3
Sorry, I should have said that. We were doing that at the hotels. There were ICE agents who were staying. And the idea is we were basically making it important for them to get rest. And we were asking hotels to refuse to house them. There was a huge number of them in the city.
30:01
Speaker 4
They don't have enough housing to actually all work.
30:04
Speaker 2
Stay somewhere.
30:05
Speaker 3
And we did get a lot of hotels starting to refuse ICE. We had hotels publicly refuse them. We had hotels pretend to start construction so they could like have excuses to kick them out. We had people like say their hotel was full, so refused to book. We also did this mass book and cancel campaign. So any hotel that housed ICE, we would direct people to book a stay at the hotel and then cancel it before the stay came up.
30:30
Speaker 2
And I think through that calculation, we lost.
30:35
Speaker 3
Hilton, which is one of the main companies that was hosting ice agents. I think we lost them like 30 to $ 40 million through our booking and canceling.
30:44
Speaker 2
That's incredible. Well, everyone was doing it.
30:46
Speaker 3
It was like a really easy thing you could do anywhere is let me book some hotels in Minneapolis and get them off.
30:51
Speaker 2
My credit card. It's so easy.
30:52
Speaker 3
You know, that was a real thing that the hotels were upset at us for. And it certainly made a lot of hotel managers see that when you do the cost benefit analysis of do I want ice agents here?
31:03
Speaker 2
Or do I want to potentially.
31:04
Speaker 3
Lose millions of dollars for my hotel? It's a much easier calculation to choose the right side if you have that economic pressure.
31:11
Speaker 2
Right. And how were you drawing on infrastructure or strategies that had been used more explicitly to fight the climate crisis in the past? Organizing is organizing.
31:23
Speaker 3
When you have a lot of momentum, you host a mass meeting, you train people, you do one-on-ones with them, you give them the basics of an action. You're like, okay, here's how we make banners. Here's how we like take good photos and make videos. Maybe what was on the banners and the specific tactics changed, but the bulk of our organizing infrastructure is pretty flexible and able to be applied to a lot of different topics. So I think we actually found that we were able to make the pivot pretty successfully.
31:49
Speaker 2
And how did this crackdown on protests continue after the protests ended? And how has that translated into attacks on organizations like Sunrise? You know, I'm curious to hear your perspective on this Homeland Security investigation, the details of which have been revealed kind of lately.
32:07
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, I think what was happening is that they were humiliated and scared by what happened in Minnesota, and they wanted to make sure other people didn't do it again. And so they picked out 15 people, the Minnesota 15, to charge and surveil and isolate. And I'm really proud of how Minnesota has responded, organizations being like, there are no 15.
32:32
Speaker 2
You can talk to all.
32:33
Speaker 3
Tens of thousands of us if you want, but you don't get to just isolate these people and call them domestic terrorists or charge them with any of this stuff.
32:41
Speaker 2
To me, they were really.
32:42
Speaker 3
Trying to lay the legal infrastructure for future attacks on movements and test the grounds for how far they can go. I think they did something similar, I believe in like Vermont or something. I don't remember the exact details, but a similar case where they were going after a woman for recording something. They're really trying to push the legal bounds of what they can do to movements because they're scared of movements and because they actually effectively saw, whether it's like a smaller version, Jimmy Kimmel getting forced off ABC and forced back on through a Disney boycott, whether it's campus protests, basically pushing campuses to refuse to sign Trump's compact, or whether It's the refusal to let ICE occupy Minneapolis. Like movements have actually consistently been able to push back on some of Trump's most egregious overreaches. And I think they see that and they're trying to eliminate powerful movements.
33:34
Speaker 2
And can you just explain a little bit more about who the Minnesota 15 are and what all of that had to do with the Sunrise Movement? My understanding is that you all were subpoenaed. Yeah.
33:45
Speaker 3
So a few months ago, there was a case put forward where 15 people who were union members, teachers, like all types of jobs were basically charged with obstructing federal agents. And as part of that charge, it was revealed recently, a few weeks ago that that there was this mass surveillance effort where they went into churches and union halls, they came to sunrise meetings, basically trying to find whatever they could to pin on whoever they could in order to weaken movements. And what you see when you look at those is huge overreaches of constitutional rights and rights around privacy. People were like, in our meetings and in like, you know, we were just like in churches talking about how to make noise outside of hotels. It's absolutely ridiculous that that would be surveilled in any way. So that's what that effort was. Sunrise ended up having our financial records subpoenaed, not directly through us. We didn't receive any record of that. The first that I heard about it was when a journalist asked me about it. They also subpoenaed the records of CWA and I believe the SEIU as well. So it wasn't just Sunrise. I think they were really looking for how can we try and use what went on in Minnesota to to take down some of the major national players that are opposing our administration.
35:11
Speaker 2
And I think that's why they.
35:11
Speaker 4
Went after Sunrise and CWA and SEAU.
35:15
Speaker 2
All of this dovetails with this National Security Presidential Memo 7, which the Trump administration put out as basically like a directive for investigators, law enforcement agencies at all levels to go after what are basically left-leaning organizations of all stripes, especially Antifa, which, as we know, is not an organization. It's a pretty wide-ranging movement. But this memo says, seems to have led directly into Sunrise being targeted. Are there ways that this has worked? What is this about? And how has this actually impacted the day-to-day work of someone like yourself?
35:56
Speaker 3
I think the biggest thing to remember is that the goal of a lot of this stuff is to stop organizing and And the most important thing in our response is that we don't let it stop organizing. And that can happen in a lot of ways. It can happen because people are too scared to organize. It can happen because you suddenly put in new security measures that make it logistically harder to organize. It can happen because your leadership team is spending so much time worrying about this that they're not thinking about organizing. And you actually just need to be very vigilant on all of these friends that you will not let this scare people. You will not let this... create fear among each other and you will not let this distract you from your focus. So my answer is actually mostly like it hasn't changed the day to day of my work that much. And I think it's very important that it doesn't. We're taking appropriate precautions and all of that. But in general, we have to be laser focused on how do we build up to mass non-cooperation with this authoritarian regime and build up the mass amounts of people power that we need to topple it and to actually elect politicians who will stand up for everyday people. All of that, that's what we need to be laser focused on. So it hasn't changed that much in the day to day. We are, you know, doing trainings for our base about how to actually think about infiltration. We obviously are like talked with lawyers about it. We've taken appropriate precautions, but in general, I think the thing we are most training our base about and most saying publicly is do not let this stop you from organizing. Hmm.
37:26
Speaker 2
So to close out, I'm curious, what are the fights that are grabbing your attention right now and in the immediate future? Yeah.
37:38
Speaker 3
Well, I think that the midterm elections are going to matter for a lot of reasons. Obviously, on the most basic level, I think that it's important that we stop Trump from having trifecta control of the federal government. That would allow us to reduce ICE funding. It would allow us to rein in a lot of the worst effects of what Trump is doing. I also think specifically in this midterm election, Trump is testing in what ways he can rig the electoral system, including by not mailing out mail-in ballots, by saying that he'll send ICE agents or masked agents to the polls. And so I think it's not only important that we have high turnout, but actually extra important that we have organized presence at the polls and before to help people actually certify the elections, make sure that in early January, that people are actually seated. This stuff often makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if there's anything I learned from the planning that we did last year and accurately assessing that we might have someone get shot in the streets, it's like this type of planning is actually very important and not that unrealistic. Trump is publicly saying he will do this stuff. I think sometimes taking him at his word is actually a good thing and allows you to plan for the worst eventualities.
38:51
Speaker 4
So I have a lot of my eyes towards that.
38:54
Speaker 3
I've also been really excited by the wave of congressional victories that we've seen in the primaries. Sunrise's co-founder, Will Lawrence, is running in Michigan's 7th in a competitive district in the same state as Abdul El-Sayed. So there's also, I think, one of the best things I've seen happen this year is the reaction to Trump creating a real new generation of politicians who are actually willing to stand up to fascism, fight for working people, and refuse money in politics. And I think that class of politicians is is going to be absolutely essential for the next stage of the climate movement.
39:29
Speaker 2
Well, it's been so great talking with you. You know, is there anything that you want to add before we say goodbye?
39:34
Speaker 3
Sure.
39:37
Speaker 2
I think I'd just.
39:38
Speaker 3
Add that I actually think that climate is going to become really important again, and that is absolutely Sunrise's mission. If we're able to curb Trump's most authoritarian impulses, either in the midterms or otherwise, we are so fully ready to be campaigning on an updated Green New Deal, one that talks about data centers and AI, one that talks about how we need to have a functional democracy to stop climate change. And I absolutely think there are many more people in Congress now who support that.
40:09
Speaker 4
We've been making sure of that all cycle.
40:11
Speaker 3
And I think there's actually a far way that we could go to that. It's the most existential crisis in humanity right now. So I think we are likely to see a revival of a new climate movement in the next year or so.
40:24
Speaker 2
Well, here's hoping. Aru, thank you again for joining us today. I really appreciate it. It was so great talking with you.
40:30
Speaker 1
The Spill is a regularly recurring segment of the Drilled podcast. It comes out every Friday when we're not in the middle of a narrative season. If you have ideas for folks you'd like to see us interview on here, let us know. We're at Drilled Media on all social media platforms, or you can email me at amy at drilled.media. Links to all the stories we mentioned and to pre-order my book are in the show notes. The Spill is produced by Peter Duff. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Fournone. Artwork by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. of the First Amendment Project. You can find transcripts of The Spill online at drilled.media. Like the rest of Drilled, The Spill is distributed by Pushkin Industries. The team there is Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Shreberneck, and Jake Flanagan.
41:44
Speaker 3
Thank you.
The Host
