Standing up to power

[A final reminder that Wednesday, June 11, at noon, I’ll be part of a conversation on “Concentration Camps and the Machinery of Repression: Lessons for Saving Democracy,” hosted by Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. It’s free, but registration is required.]

Demonstrators in Los Angeles have for the last week resisted the targeting of immigrants in ICE raids. Federal law enforcement countered by attacking protesters, and “border czar” Tom Homan made vague threats to arrest the Governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles. Soon, the administration moved to deploy California National Guard troops, then Marines to the city via actions destined to be contested in the courts.

Meanwhile, at the start of this work week, more than three hundred people still employed in one capacity or another at the National Institutes of Health submitted the Bethesda Declaration, a public letter to NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, calling attention to the destruction of US medical research expertise and partnerships and laying out the toll the administration’s decisions are already having on medical science through the “harmful measures” that leadership is working to implement.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to interview one of the signatories, a program officer and program director, about what these NIH employees hope to accomplish and to get his personal thoughts on where the country is at as he weighed his participation in this collaborative statement.

I’ll include parts of our conversation in the second half of this episode. My sense is that the letter is a tremendously revealing tool to talk about what’s happening to a major part of the federal government, and that the personal decisions made by those involved are illuminating and can help all of us weigh when and how to take action.

So today, I’ll explore events in LA and DC—two very different models for action. I’ll address the kinds of risk countless people are taking every day for their own communities and for the whole country.

At the end, I’ll include ways to get involved. June 14, No Kings Day, is coming up this weekend, and it offers a huge array of opportunities to stand with those already trying to build a country and a world we all might be able to live in together.

ICE in Los Angeles

Let’s start with California. Events have tripped so quickly from one to the next, I want to at least give you a simple (if incomplete) timeline. In the first days of June, reports emerged of immigrants showing up for regular court appearances at the Edward Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles, only to be detained by ICE. By the end of the week, outlets reported that hundreds were being held in the basement of the building, in inhumane conditions.

Last Friday, ICE raids appeared to be underway in several locations in greater Los Angeles. Workers at a warehouse in the Fashion District were targeted. David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union California, was injured and arrested protesting these actions.

Demonstrators headed to the Roybal Building, where it was said those arrested were being taken. Federal law enforcement began targeting the protestors who gathered outside. Officers used tear gas and foam bullets. The LAPD was called in to respond. Individual protesters were isolated and beaten in various locations. In one video, a mounted officer appeared to force his horse to trample a suspect lying on the ground.

After a recent call from presidential advisor Stephen Miller for ICE to target immigrants outside Home Depots in order to meet arrest quotas, an operation appeared imminent at one Home Depot south of Los Angeles, in Paramount, California.

Demonstrators began to gather, with the protest expanding into nearby Compton. Saturday night, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that despite the situation having largely settled, President Trump was planning to federalize California National Guard members and deploy them to the region.

Newsom’s response at first was disappointing and incomplete, at least to me. He denounced what the federal government was doing, but hours passed before he provided more information or explained how he would take action.

This halting response has not been unusual among elected Democrats, as the overall engagement with Trump’s aggression and lawlessness has tended to be reactive rather than proactive. Where was the communication to residents about what would come next and how the state would oppose this overreach by the federal government, I wondered. Where were the reminders to members of the Guard about their legal role and responsibilities?

Later that evening, Newsom began to address some of these issues. And on Sunday, he called the decision to deploy the Guard actions “unlawful.” By late Sunday night, the governor dared Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Tom Homan to carry through on veiled threats to arrest him. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Newsom announced legal action seeking to nullify the president’s use of the National Guard—even as Trump moved to deploy Marines from nearby Twenty-nine Palms.

David Huerta remained detained for days as other unions and supporters began demonstrating around the country in his name. Monday, he was released and charged with a felony, for allegedly interfering with federal authorities. Meanwhile, demonstrations continued at various locations.

In Pasadena, protesters discovered ICE was staying at a nearby hotel, and possibly intimidating staff there. They demonstrated outside the building, and in the end, hotel management asked ICE to leave. When word came down that Marines were preparing to be deployed, veterans and others demonstrated at Camp Pendleton, opposing the use of troops against city residents.

The move to involve the National Guard and now the Marines is a grim turn, not only because the invocations appear to be done through an irregular and possibly illegal process, but also because there is no crisis at hand. The unrest was created by ICE and law enforcement themselves. Violence has been limited and manageable, and largely subsided before troops were called in.

This is a big test for Trump’s control over the military, because during his first administration, he didn’t have top brass on board with him for the most part, and never got to test whether the rank and file might follow illegal orders executed domestically against US residents and citizens. In a second administration, now populated by sycophants and grifters, there will likely be less resistance to illegal orders. Despite his popularity with many servicemembers, it is not yet clear that the troops will carry out illegal orders against Americans in his name. But we may soon find out.

All these events make this particular moment a critical one to show public resistance to abuses of presidential authority. Actions against these abuses can happen in the streets, offices, houses of worship, and homes everywhere, and will unfold in countless ways.

Meanwhile in DC

Monday on the other side of the country, NIH employees similarly stood up for what was right, albeit in a different way. Their Bethesda Declaration pointed out the damage being done to NIH funding and research, and the current, catastrophic effects of the second Trump administration.

By calling their letter a declaration, NIH workers were responding to Bhattacharya’s own involvement with the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a broadly discredited effort from 2020 to take issue with Covid responses such as social distancing and business and school closures to promote a (subsequently discovered-to-be-unachievable) “herd immunity” in the population. Without endorsing any of that 2020 Declaration, signatories echoed the importance of the right to dissent, noting that Bhattacharya himself had promised in April to “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the NIH.”

Their statement about what is happening now? “We dissent.”

Since Trump’s return to the White House, NIH is ending some 2,100 grants worth over $12 billion. More than three hundred NIH current workers signed the letter, with employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers expressing support for the document. Nearly 100 of them did so publicly using their names.

The authors focused on five immediate issues, not speculating on future damage but focusing on harms already underway. The signers accused Bhattacharya of politicizing research, interrupting global collaboration, undermining peer review, imposing a blanket 15% cap on indirect costs for grants, and firing essential NIH personnel—all of which they say is destructive to the mission of the National Institutes of Health. The letter further denounces the failure “to use congressionally-appropriated funds for critical NIH research.”

Last weekend, I had a chance to talk to Rui Carlos Sá, one of the public signatories, and found both the aim of the letter and his personal decision to go public powerful examples of the kinds of things we can all be doing in the current crisis.

Speaking out

I first met Rui back in February on Presidents Day at the No Kings protest in DC. He’d come with his family. His wife carried a poster about today’s research being tomorrow’s cure.

The couple recognized me from the podcast, and Rui introduced me to others who had come to the demonstration, including at least one person at NIH in a very precarious situation, who was risking a lot by even showing up.

This weekend, Rui reached out to me, telling me the about the NIH letter and letting me know publication was imminent. He said he was willing to talk on the record about the declaration and his involvement, while emphasizing that he didn’t want to glamorize his role or imply that any larger set of opinions he has outside the letter are shared by all the signatories.

Rui referenced described the collaborative nature of NIH and explained how that nature was reflected in the way the declaration came together. An original core group conceived of the idea and then invited others, Rui among them, to participate. In the end, colleagues were invited to sign anonymously or publicly, and could change their minds up until the last minute. The letter went live Monday at 8am.

Along with the issues brought up in the declaration, which deliberately focuses on the immediate, measurable harms underway at NIH, Rui also answered my questions about his personal concerns about the future of the institution, which he loves. His answers are lightly edited for length and clarity.

“America has built an entire biomedical ecosystem on this partnership with universities,” he said. “And now the Trump administration is using that as a weapon… to obtain subjugation or some degree of control over universities like Columbia and Harvard. These are the two most spoken of; there there are a bunch more. What’s that’s doing is destroying the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. And there will be a time when the destruction will be such that it’s not repairable anymore, that we’ll cross a threshold.”

One of the challenges under this administration—and in any crisis of authoritarian overreach, really—is figuring out when work discreetly and quietly might still be useful, and when it’s imperative to take a public stand. Knowing that people like Rui can still help defend grants and keep money flowing to valid work as long as possible, I wondered how he weighed the decision to speak out, given that dissent has not been tolerated in either Trump administration, but seems especially unwelcome since January 20.

He had several comments that I found moving, so I want to share more of his words—especially those about standing up to power—at length here. On speaking out, he said,

“It’s an individual choice, because every action you take today has a higher risk than it had a year ago. And what I did is certainly not possible for some of my colleagues. And that’s also why I do it. I do it because I can. My wife makes more money than me, and I can afford to be fired for a few months. And I work in an area that has high employability, so if I leave the government, this is my choice, but I can find a job.”

He emphasized that people shouldn’t disparage themselves when they’re unable to do something. “There are people who shouldn’t be out in the street and shouldn’t be out demonstrating because they are targets, and they are at risk in the current environment… The risk assessment has to be a lot more detailed depending on your circumstances.”

Yet, where possible, he encouraged people to speak up. “We still can demonstrate, we can still show numbers. We can still call our congresspeople our senators and do something. What I’ve emphasized, and that comes a lot from you—and maybe I gravitated toward your podcast also because of that—but the emphasis is on community, on talking to your neighbors, on building that big tent, on making them understand, even if they have different views, especially if they have different views, that a lot is going on.”

‘It’s by no means dumbing down. It’s our duty to actually make what we have to say intelligible to others, so they understand what’s going on, so they understand the impact tomorrow and five years from now. One of problems at NIH is that the impact of cutting NIH today won’t be felt tomorrow. It will be felt in five years. It will be felt in ten years. And it will be really catastrophic in twenty.”

Noting that showing up in your community allows you to support those who are suffering from the consequences of the crises unleashed on the country, Rui also pointed out that by acting close to home, “you’re allowing others to see your point of view and your different perspective on what’s going on.”

“Maybe,” he suggests, “you’ll change a couple minds.”

Ways to act now

What Rui and the other signatories of the Bethesda Declaration did Monday is another form of what the greater Los Angeles community has been up to in the last week, and even before that. In both cases, people assessed the situation and decided to take action to correct a wrong they were witnessing. The effort in D.C. was planned strategically as a response to actions that have been unfolding for months. The LA examples of resistance were in most cases responding to a fast-moving crisis that required immediate action (though certainly an even longer-term national crisis underlying those events).

In each situation, elected leadership was lagging or absent initially, and people with much less power stepped in. During our conversation, Rui noted that lack of leadership was “one of the reasons we’re standing up. The leaders are not, so we need to. That’s true for the Democratic party, and it’s true within NIH.”

He noted the impossibility of ever really being sure that you’ve chosen the exact right moral moment to speak up. “A lot of people have this idea,” Rui said, “that ‘If I get kicked out I’ll be replaced by someone worse,’ which is probably true. But if that leads you to not stand up, then you’re useless, too.”

What can the rest of us do? Like the protesters over the weekend, you can find out if ICE is staying at a local hotel, and demonstrate in front of it or press the management about whether they’re hosting agents. You can figure out if your local community has ICE partnerships, and work to block law enforcement or other groups cooperating with them. You can volunteer with immigrant support groups helping families with loved ones in detention.

If you’re someone with means who can’t get out to protest because of disability or risk or other obligations, you can give money to bail funds to support those who are able to show up. You can also give money to bond funds (like this one, organized by the Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice in Los Angeles).

And in preparation for this Saturday, June 14—No Kings Day in the US—you can pore over this lovely map of events. It shows a range of happenings you can attend with information and contacts for each one. I found community gatherings planned in Falls Church, Virginia, where I now live, as well as the city where I was born several hundred miles north of here, and a dozen events planned in West Virginia, where I grew up. Every state has multiple options—and a few of them around the country will hold key protests you should get to if you can: Philly, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, and Chicago.

Organizers are encouraging people to stay away from D.C. during Trump’s birthday parade. (The hoopla is ostensibly for the Army’s birthday, but oddly enough, there are no presidential parades planned on anniversaries for other branches whose 250th anniversary is later this year but not on a day that is also Donald Trump’s birthday.)

Between LA and DC in the last week, we have so many examples of what to do. Mess things up. Slow fascists down. File official complaints. Weigh your risk and act where you can. Recognize when you can speak up more safely than others. Put a wrench in the gears. Thousands of young men died on Omaha Beach 81 years ago this month, and they died to save strangers—to save us—from Nazis.

Very few of us today in the US will be asked to make that kind of sacrifice for freedom. And unlike those soldiers, we’re for the most able to free to engage on our own terms.

Detainees who were put in camps all over the world in the 20th century still managed to resist, as did Civil Rights protesters when they were faced with hostile law enforcement, firehoses, and dogs. I’ve mentioned before that people who put themselves on the line in the George Floyd protests made a measurable difference in the trajectory of the 2020 election. All these people have left us a legacy. It’s up to us to care as much about the world, the country, our communities, and each other, as they did.

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