Here in Vermont, we have a responsibility to demonstrate at the ICE and DHS offices in Williston. They help Trump carry out repression in our state and across the country. Community Voices for Immigrant Rights already staged an emergency action in Burlington and will soon announce plans for a protest in Williston.

Last week, Burlington acting Chief of Police, Jon Murad, was allowed to address a 1,000-person Black Lives Matter rally in Burlington. Faced with pressure from hundreds of residents at public hearings demanding the City defund the police and remove 30% of cops from the street, Murad gave a skillful, liberal defense of expansive policing and the large budgets this requires. The affect of this was not exactly clear (he wasn’t booed off the stage), but the message did conflict with popular chants to abolish the police later on the march.

Our nation is experiencing collective trauma right now. Trauma happens when what we individually assume to be true about the world or ourselves is challenged, making it hard to cope and impossible to go back to how things were before. We will all be changed forever by this pandemic. That is trauma.

After endless messages thanking us for our hard work and dedication during these challenging times, last week the administration at the University of Vermont announced budget cut plans that show nothing but callous disrespect for the lives and work of faculty.

The working class of Vermont has scored an initial victory against a tidal wave of austerity measures that Governor Phil Scott is threatening. But no one should be under any illusions that the state colleges are safe; the Governor made clear that he wants the legislature to pass a budget with devastating cuts to our public institutions.

The BTV Clean Up Crew began as an idea in August 2019, when I was looking for a clever way of removing fascist propaganda that had been cropping up in Burlington. At the time, I had just come across a large poster for the neo-Nazi group the Patriot Front, plastered on the window of Memorial Auditorium, urging Burlington residents to call ICE on their immigrant neighbors.

The federal government’s hypocrisy and cruelty toward undocumented immigrants in our state and throughout the country is on full display. Amidst the pandemic, the Trump administration has continued its war on migrants, deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Custom and Border Protection (CBP) to arrest, detain, and deport them.

In a recent op-ed in VTDigger, Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen argued against climate policies that hurt workers. Case in point is the proposed Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI) supported by Vermont Climate Solutions Caucus. TCI is a carbon cap and trade system that depends on a regressive fuel tax that will be passed down to workers at the pump.