Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

On Inauguration Day, President Trump launched his campaign of mass deportations. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested over 5,000 people. ICE raids have been launched with much hype and publicity across the country, including in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Houston, San Antonio, Tallahassee, Miami and Newark. CNN reported that ICE agents were told to be “camera-ready,” while Phil McGraw, the unlicensed psychologist and TV talk show host better known as “Dr. Phil,” “embedded” with ICE on a Chicago operation. Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem accompanied one arrest in New York City, live-tweeting it.

In the midst of this, Trump signed his first bill into law, H.R. 29, the Laken Riley Act, named after the 22-year-old nursing student murdered in Georgia in 2024 by an undocumented immigrant who was subsequently arrested and prosecuted. The law allows DHS to arrest non-citizens who have been charged – not convicted but simply charged – with burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.

Trump has also said tens of thousands of arrested migrants will be imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In addition to the notorious U.S. prison there that houses 9-11 suspects (many of them never charged), now numbering at most 15, the base also has a migrant detention area. At the height of its use in the 1990s, as many as 30,000 people, mostly Haitian, were held there behind barbed-wire, without charge, in a squalid camp.

But people aren’t just standing by amidst this intensifying, militarized attack on immigrants. Years of organizing, educating and empowering people to defend themselves from racist immigration policies are showing results. Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan appeared on CNN, lamenting the degree of organization among immigrant communities:

“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. And I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs. Here’s how you escape ice from arresting you, here’s what you need to do. They call it, ‘Know your rights.’ I call it ‘how to escape arrest.’ There’s a warrant for your arrest, and they tell you how to hide from ICE. Don’t open your door. Don’t answer questions.”

Harold Solis is the legal director of one of those organizations that Homan bemoaned, Make the Road New York. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour this week, Solis explained,

“There is no one single legal definition of what it means to be a sanctuary jurisdiction, but, essentially, many people agree that it means being a welcoming place, a place where the jurisdiction is not looking to do more harm, number one, to its residents.”

Fernando García is founder and executive director of the El Paso,Texas-based Border Network for Human Rights. He said on Democracy Now! “We’re just reminding people that the Constitution of the United States still exists, that under the Fourth Amendment, they only have to allow somebody into their property or house or workplace with a search warrant or the permission of the owner. Or, if they are confronted and being asked questions by law enforcement, that they have the right to remain silent.”

One of the first Trump raids took place in Newark, NJ. ICE did not have a warrant. One of the first people detained was an Army veteran from Puerto Rico–yes, a U.S. citizen. Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, explained on Democracy Now!:

“Unless an ICE officer produces a warrant with your name clearly and correctly spelled, and signed by a judge, you do not need to answer their questions. If you understand that, you can also develop an analysis that everything that ICE officers do outside of that warrant is a deception tactic, it’s manipulation, just like they use the theater of fear and panic to intimidate people into giving more information than they should.”

The U.S. Secret Service attempted to enter an elementary school in Chicago, but was denied entry.

While this nationwide, high-profile immigrant round-up is unfolding, Trump supporters convicted of participating in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol were pardoned by Trump on his first day in office, and now walk free.

“If this really was about public safety and legality, we would not have seen the 1,500 pardons of people that stormed the Capitol and committed violent crimes on police officers,” Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas in Chicago and a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, said on Democracy Now! “I believe that this is a very high media strategy that’s being used to elevate what this administration is trying to push, which is a white supremacist agenda.”

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

This year, the presidential inauguration took place on the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. President Trump fully exploited the opportunity, hijacking King’s memory to advance his agenda. In his inaugural address, Trump took immediate aim at diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. The bigotry embedded in Trump’s plans to “Make America Great Again” is stark–purging people of color and LGBTQIA people, not only from employment in the federal government, but from public life. But people have fought for too long, and too many have died, in the fight for equality.

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” refers to a system of policies and practices that promote fair treatment, full participation, and full access to employment and opportunities for all, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. Trump is, in effect, attempting with the stroke of a pen to undo over 60 years of hard-won progress in overcoming racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry.

“Today is Martin Luther King Day,” Trump said in his inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda, one of the only factually accurate statements he made. He went on, “In his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”

Moments later, though, he pledged,

“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

Following the speech, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders. Within hours, a form letter was emailed to federal departments, ordering the suspension, by end of day Wednesday, of any staff working on DEI initiatives, and giving remaining staff ten days to report any ongoing “disguised” DEI activity, ie, to rat out colleagues.

While Trump spoke at his inauguration, a different gathering was taking place just a few blocks from the White House. Hundreds packed into the historic Metropolitan AME Church, the storied Black church that abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended, and where his funeral took place. In 2005, after Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol, her casket was moved to Metropolitan AME, for a memorial service.

Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton was speaking at the same moment as Trump. Hearing that Trump had invoked King’s name in his speech, Sharpton responded:

“Donald Trump just said that he is going to end DEI this week, he’s gonna put out his executive orders. You have all these corporations that are saying they’re gonna back off DEI. Why do we have DEI? We have DEI because you denied us diversity, you denied us equity, you denied us inclusion. DEI was a remedy to the racial institutional bigotry practiced in academia and in these corporations. Now you want to put us back in the back of the bus? We’re going to do the Dr. King/Rosa Parks on you. We will call you out one by one, and we will shut you down.”

Later on King Day, Trump held a rally where he signed the first stack of executive orders, including a blanket rescission of many of President Biden’s executive orders, including at least 15 that advanced diversity, equity and inclusion. Later, Trump signed a much broader order calling for the termination of all “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government,” and to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.”

The “A” in DEIA stands for “accessible,” thus extending Trump’s war on fellow citizens to include the disabled.

Sharpton and other speakers invoked not only Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, but the whole sweep of history, from the first arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619, to Frederick Douglass, to the role of freed slaves fighting in the Civil War, through the protests in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.

Marc Morial, President of the National Urban League, convened an emergency “Demand Diversity” roundtable in Washington DC on Wednesday. While Trump was inaugurated on King Day, Morial pointed out that Trump is no king:

“These executive orders are unlawful, they are unconstitutional, and they seek to do what we always suspected. This is not a monarchy. You can’t rule by decree or edict. This is a constitutional democracy…we have to remember this as we go into this very important battle.”

Participants in the roundtable, representing over 20 national civil rights and human rights organizations, form the core of a coalition committed to fighting Trump’s agenda. The coalition is guided and inspired by the memory and the lessons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Organize, boycott, resist. These are the struggles, ultimately, that history will remember as great.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.