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FEATURING GABRIELLE OLIVEIRA - Donald Trump’s second term agenda is centered on the criminalization, scapegoating, incarceration, and disappearance of nonwhite immigrants. And although many Americans seem to have forgotten it, his first term was also marked by the same. 

A new book called Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, follows the stories of 16 migrant families from Latin America who were victims of harsh government enforcement through 2018 and 2019, and how their stories distill the deeply-politicized issue of immigration through a much-needed human lens.

The book's author, Gabrielle Oliveira, is Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar recently about it.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, as I mentioned, a lot of folks forgot the family separation scandal, the horrific kind of human tragedy that unfolded in the years 2016 to 2020. And far too many Americans decided that they could cast their vote for Trump, including people from mixed-status immigrant families. And now we're seeing, I think in escalation even it seems of what happened in the first term. 

So, tell me about these families you profiled and why you wrote this book. These were families that were victimized, criminalized and, really traumatized in 2018 and 2019. Why them? 

Gabrielle Oliveira: Right. So, I was doing work, you know, at the time I was doing work in schools here in Massachusetts that had bilingual programs, which meant that, you know, children were learning in Portuguese and in Spanish. And that has been, you know, some of the work that I've been doing for my own trajectory, my own career. 

And I started hearing during these interviews with families, families describing what had happened to them at the border, either being detained and separated, or detained together. And those stories just seem that, you know, the families were very much still thinking about those stories. The children were bringing those stories to the schools, and the teachers didn't really know what to do with, you know, the stories that were being brought to the school. 

So, for me, it was really important to try to capture in real time what was happening and to hear from the families that had just gone through those separations and detentions, either together right, or being sent to different places in the United States. 

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FEATURING OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE - The latest United Nations climate conference, COP30, is taking place in Belem, Brazil where nations are still attempting, after decades, to comprehensively tackle climate change and its impacts head on. 

While much mainstream American discourse on climate justice is centered on preserving humanity and human lives, a new brief by the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) brings to the forefront a critically important tool for climate justice: the rights of nature, an all-encompassing legal approach to preserving all life.

Osprey Orielle Lake is the Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). She sits on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about WECAN's new report.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: The place that I have heard the rights of nature really come up. and, you know, and I think folks who are engaged in the climate justice movement know of Ecuador's case in 2008, I believe it was, that Ecuador essentially changed its Constitution to encompass, to uphold and to preserve the rights of nature. 

Using that, using Ecuador as an example, how do you explain what it means when you say the rights of nature?

Osprey Orielle Lake: Well, it's really an important country where rights of nature, as you said, put in 2008 rights of nature to the Constitution. And it's been a growing movement for many years. in the seventies, there was a professor Christopher Stone who put out a document called “If Trees Had Standing,” which in essence basically said, could we have a form of jurisprudence, a way of law that recognized that the natural world could have its own rights? 

And it's a really important activity, philosophy, and action for the climate justice movement because, right now, nature does not have standing in a court of law. And so, in the new systems that we have since colonialism, people own property. And so, you have to have the property owner represent a river or a mountain or a forest. 

And what rights of nature laws do is they really turn this inside out and upside down, and say, no, we actually are living in a time in which the rivers and the mountains and all of the animals need their own rights to be represented and have their own voice in court of law. 

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FEATURING YASHICA DUTT - Zohran Mamdani, the unlikely 34-year old Uganda-born, South Asian, Muslim, immigrant is New York City’s new mayor.

Journalist Yashica Dutt, who has closely followed his campaign described last Tuesday’s election this way: “against all odds, Mamdani — through his gifted political acumen, a brilliant team of 30-something managers, and his exceptional hold over his own narrative and messaging — carved his own space in the political mainstream while the establishment was intent on not giving him an inch.”

How did he do it? Were there missed opportunities? What are lessons we can learn from his campaign and candidacy?

Yashica Dutt is a Dalit journalist and author of the award-winning book on caste, Coming Out as Dalit. She has been covering New York's Mayoral election since April and was the first journalist to extensively cover the South Asian mobilization for the Zohran Mamdani campaign. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the campaign got right and where it could have done better.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, was it surprising for you? I mean, polls showed that he looked like he was going to win. It would've been shocking if he hadn't, it seems. And still it felt, at least for those of us watching from far off, quite unreal. What was that like on election night? What was the atmosphere in the city? 

Yashica Dutt: The atmosphere in the city, not just on election night, but in the weeks before the election was absolutely electric. I have been reporting, like you mentioned, since April, and there was such a stark difference in what we saw during the primary. 

Even before the primary election in New York, there was a sense that Mandani could win. As somebody who had been attending all these events and seeing the response from people change towards him in such a dramatic way. I remember I attended this event in Ozone Park, which is a Bangladeshi majority neighborhood here in Queens in New York City, and he literally got mobbed by Desi folks, a lot of people who wanted to get photos clicked with him. 

People saw on their Instagram stories that he was there, and they just rushed to see him, to get a glimpse of him. And that was before the primary. So, you can imagine after months of excitement and the polls that really showed him way ahead of Andrew Cuomo, and also the events that he had done. 

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FEATURING NOURBESE FLINT - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week our guest is Nourbese Flint, President of All* Above All, and All* In Action Fund, leading their work to build political power and achieve reproductive justice for all.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: What does All above All mean? I get that it's a reproductive justice organization, but that name, I think, an explanation of it can help people understand where you're coming from. 

Nourbese Flint: Yeah. So, it's actually a part of our origin story. All above All was created right after the Affordable Care Act passing I think it was in 2008, 2009?

Kolhatkar: 2010, I think. 

Flint: Yeah. Whew, I’m like dating myself. But, when it got passed, the kind of compromise was abortion access. So, we still didn't have any federal coverage of abortion. And we had to segment in state coverage for abortion access. And so, some of us got together and kind of had a conversation like we can no longer have and leverage abortion access, particularly abortion access that really impacts folks who are living at the margins, as a tool anymore. 

And so, All Above All really leaned into when people say “All,” it's usually with an asterisk, and it's not really all, it's well ‘all accept women of color or all accept LGBT folks or all accept young people.’ And so, we wanted to lean into the All. And when we say All it means all, so All* Above All with the asterisk saying that we are actually putting first the folks that usually are the asterisk at the bottom. 

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FEATURING JEAN SU - A massive push for data centers around the nation threatens to undermine progress in combating climate change. Our voracious appetite for cloud storage, search engines, and especially artificial intelligence has a serious real-world impact–one that threatens our very existence. 

A new report by the Center for Biological Diversity outlines this threat and how it can be addressed. Jean Su is the energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Washington, DC and she shared the report's recommendations with Sonali Kolhatkar.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, of course we've dealt with or lived with, I should say, issues around what powers search engines and cloud storage, and that, in and of itself has been a concern. But just in the last few years, the incredible reliance on artificial intelligence seems to have hypercharged, I think, this impact, particularly as we're seeing Wall Street, you know, new startups, hedge fund investors you know, all of these ventures, including government support being thrown behind this technology that uses massive amounts of energy. How serious is the fossil fuel impact of AI data centers? 

Jean Su: So, the fossil fuel impact of data centers is extremely grave and serious. Just to give you a comparison, web services, search engines, all of those things you just mentioned are one 10th of the electricity that's needed to actually fuel AI, artificial intelligence. So that's a huge difference. 

What we did was that, we calculated the projected carbon emissions of this surge in an AI boom, and we found the carbon emissions from a primarily fracked gas-powered expansion are incredibly large, and they're so large that they could undermine our national climate target for 2035 by 60% in, in the sense that other sectors would have to actually cut an extra 60% for us to even meet our climate goal of trying to limit greenhouse gases to a livable planet. 

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Unlock this video and the full transcript of this inspiring story of how Montana is going to undo Citizens United.

FEATURING TOM MOORE - Ask most ordinary Americans what is the biggest source of corruption in elections and many would say “money in politics,” or, if they were really well-informed, “dark money,” or “the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision.” For a long time we’ve accepted the assumption that the only way to undo that 2010 Supreme Court ruling was for Congress to pass legislation doing so or for the court itself to change its mind–both, extremely unlikely scenarios. 

Now, voters in Montana are gearing up to ban corporate dark money in their state in 2026 by using a simple and innovative redefinition of what a corporation is. If they succeed, it could open the door for all states to do the same.

Watch Sonali Kolhatkar's post-election analysis on Disinfo Detox with Nolan Higdon.

Tom Moore is a senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. His white paper on the topic has become the basis for Montana's effort. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his idea.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about what it was that the ruling itself said. The Supreme Court made this ruling on its own in 2010. It came, seemingly at that time, out of nowhere, caught a lot of folks off guard and has completely changed or worsened, or exacerbated our political system in terms of the influence of money. 

What was it that the Supreme Court actually said was now possible starting in 2010? 

Tom Moore: Sure. What it said was that if you spend independently in elections without coordinating with the candidate, without talking to them, without plotting any strategy or anything like that, if you do that, then that money can't be corrupting. 

So, an unlimited amount of it wouldn't be corrupting either. You know, candidate contributions are okay, you can only give, you know, $3,000, to this campaign or so forth if you're giving directly to a candidate. But if you do it independently, an independent expenditure cannot be corrupting. And so, it can't be regulated. And the court had held in 1976 that really the only reason that we can regulate campaign spending is if it creates corruption or the appearance of corruption. 

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FEATURING GUILLAUME LONG - For months now, the Trump administration has been building up military hardware in and around the Caribbean and making inflammatory statements implying an impending war with Venezuela. US airstrikes on ships in the region have killed dozens of people under the dubious claim of illegal narcotics shipments. But, in a recent CBS interview, Trump claimed it was unlikely he would launch a war on Venezuela. 

Guillaume Long is a senior research fellow at Center for Economic and Policy Research. He has held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently, he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about why the US is bombing ships in the Caribbean and whether Trump will launch a war on Venezuela.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I feel as though, looking at what Trump is doing in Venezuela, we really need to go back to the very beginning of his term this January, where he signed an executive order declaring drug traffickers to be effectively foreign terrorist: “Designating cartels and other organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, and specially-designated global terrorists.” That was the name of his executive order. Is this what he is drawing from, as far as you can tell, in terms of creating his own authority to, to drop bombs and to make threats against Venezuela? 

Guillaume Long: Yeah, I think there's… we have to differentiate a few things. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, naming cartels ‘terrorist organizations’ and, and sort of doubling down on the war on drugs and really sort of heightening and raising the tone of the whole war on drugs, and making that parallel between ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror,’ which is not the first time it's been done. 

The word ‘narcoterrorism’ goes back now, a couple of decades. It was done under the Bush administration as well. But, doing all this, has been one of the aspects of the Trump administration in the Western Hemisphere, and it's in the US policy towards Latin America. And it's part and parcel of a return to Latin America under a security guise, right? 

We are really seeing the United States ‘securitizing,’ I don't really like that verb, but, you know, making security the big deal of the US' approach towards Latin America. It is all about security. Which essentially means US policy towards Latin America right now is all about ‘big stick,’ right? It's about security. It's about, now we're, we're gonna be talking about it. It's about gunboat diplomacy. It's about wielding a big stick and there's not much carrot. It's all about, you know, ‘do this or else.’ 

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FEATURING ELIEL CRUZ - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, my guest is Eliel Cruz. He is an award-winning organizer, speaker, and writer and co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, an organization working towards bodily autonomy and self-determination for all. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Eliel Cruz: Thank you for having me. I love the ‘bigots and billionaires’ line. They are few, we are many. I’m going to use that…

Sonali Kolhatkar: And that's the point I think for us to cast a focus on social justice organizations that I think a lot of people around the country, you know, think, ‘well, what can I do?’ And it turns out there's a lot of things people can do. There's a lot of organizations out there, but not everyone's aware that they're out there, or have heard of them. So, this is our way of profiling groups like yours. 

Let's talk about Gender Liberation Movement. How do you summarize the work that your organization does? I mean, the title is pretty revealing, but it is broad. What are the main issues that you work on? 

Cruz: Well, the title is broad, purposefully so. So, we are building a lens that's expansive, purposefully, where we can touch on a variety of different issues that gender is a through line for all these issues, whether it be economic justice, climate justice, Palestinian liberation, immigrant justice, reproductive care, gender affirming care, et cetera. 

We see our work as a glue between all these various movements. But our work in particular, we do three areas of work. We do direct action and cultural work, media work, and policy work, all responding to these escalating attacks on gender across the spectrum. 

Our praxis is trans-centered. we don't consider ourselves a trans advocacy organization. My co-founder, Raquel Willis, is a Black trans activist and writer and media strategist. I'm not trans myself but I have been in LGBTQ spaces doing work for a very long time as a queer person. 

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FEATURING HAMZA WALKER - A powerful new art exhibit features pieces that are old. So old that many Americans during the 2020 racial justice uprising felt they had no place being revered in public spaces. More than 140 statues and monuments to the Confederacy, and by extension its legacy of white supremacy, slavery, and racism, were toppled between 2015 and 2020. Hundreds more remain standing. 

Now, a Los Angeles museum is displaying several of these toppled monuments, some still sporting the graffiti of rage, and one, chopped up and reassembled in a grotesque manner by acclaimed artist Kara Walker.

Hamza Walker is the director of The Brick and co-curator of the MONUMENTS exhibition, now on view at The Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the exhibit and what led to it.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's talk first about this whole controversy around these Confederate era… no, confederate monuments. I wanna clarify, they weren't created or built in during the actual Confederacy. They were built, I understand many of them, of course, they're varied and there's hundreds all over the country, but many of them came up after the Confederacy as a way to keep alive the legacy. And it took many decades then for there to be this national conversation around why we still have these monuments around the country. Is that relatively accurate? 

Hamza Walker: Yes, yes. Yes. They went up I mean, part of the narrative is how did they have a journey, right? In the wake of the Civil War, how did these statues make the journey from the cemetery to public spaces? And how did the men that they celebrate and honor go from being traitors to the union to becoming heroes and paragons of virtue? So that's the kind of story of, or trajectory of these confederate monuments in many cases. 

But the lion's share of them were built in the late 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. So between, you know, you could say 1890, you know, 1880, 1980 to 1925, 1930. 

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FEATURING FRANK TAMBORELLO - Citing the federal government shutdown as an excuse, President Donald Trump is allowing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to expire. This means about 40 million low income Americans nationwide will lose access to food stamps in November. 

Donald Trump’s Department of Agriculture is falsely claiming in a banner at the top of its website, “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry.” 

Meanwhile, as states, counties, municipalities, and food pantries scramble to feed millions, advocates and activists declared Tuesday October 28 a SNAP Day of Action. 

Frank Tamborello is co-founder and executive director of Hunger Action Los Angeles, whose mission to end hunger and promote healthy eating in Los Angeles County. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what's at stake as food stamps dry up.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: First, let's talk about where there is money. We have 40-42 , million Americans relying on food stamps, which on average works out to less than $200 worth of vouchers that they can redeem for food at grocery stores, sometimes farmer's markets, et cetera. And that is going to get cut off in November. The government is claiming there's no money, but there are emergency funds that are available and that have traditionally, during shutdowns, been mobilized to ensure that there is no cut in funding. What is happening this time around? Why are people gonna lose food stamps in November unless Trump takes action? 

Frank Tamborello: So, as you mentioned there's a contingency fund. It's about $5 billion and a month of SNAP benefits for the country is about $9 billion. So, they could at least do a partial allotment for people. 

And besides that, we all know that especially this president is very proud of his ability to take executive actions. And so, there are probably numerous other avenues that could be taken to avoid people going hungry. But basically, a political game of chicken is being played and Trump is betting that people will blame the Democrats for the shutdown.

And you pointed out the banner on the USDA website, which is a clear violation of the Hatch Act. In other words, you're not supposed to use your political office for grandstanding in a partisan way, and that's exactly what's happening. So, it's not giving the full story of what the government shutdown is about. 

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