Call to Action
On April 26th at the First and Summerfield Church in New Haven, activists and community members came together to build a fightback in defense of democratic rights.
Union leaders, rank-and-file workers, faith leaders and community members put together this civil liberties defense meeting whose purpose was to organize deeply rooted mass action in defense of our basic rights.
Through democratic voting, proposals for mass actions were discussed, amended, and approved by a two-thirds majority. Scroll down to read detailed descriptions of each approved proposal.
This mass assembly called for building Labor-Civil Liberties Contingents at Pride events including Middletown and Norwalk Pride, a June 8th Labor-Community Civil Liberties Defense Mobilization, and a September Civil Liberties Educational Mass Rally/Meeting.
Ongoing planning meetings will be open to participation by all who understand the importance of grassroots movements working together to defend our civil liberties.
We are looking for collaborators to help organize, build, promote, and endorse this effort! Email us at ct.cld2025@pm.me or contact us here to get involved!
THE CONTEXT
Our civil liberties are clearly under attack. The Trump Administration is kidnapping activists, doxxing people of color, and leading a rapidly escalating war on our most basic rights in order to silence its critics.
On March 8, plain clothes ICE agents - without a warrant - abducted Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card-holder married to a U.S. citizen who was 8 months pregnant at the time.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and other officials admit that Khalil has committed no crime and is targeted solely because the administration disagrees with the political content of his speech - a direct and open attack on first Amendment rights.
Officials call for the mass deportation of student activists - even demanding that universities hand over names and nationalities of students who have protested - and begin by abducting Badar Khan Suri in Virginia and Rumeysa Ozturk in Massachusetts.
Venezuelans taken without charges, trial, or any due process, are sent - in direct violation of a judge’s orders - to a prison camp in El Salvador.
After ICE took Khalil to a Louisiana jail, Columbia university expelled Grant Miner, President of the UAW Columbia grad employees chapter, one day before bargaining was set to begin. The UAW national chapter has decried the anti-democratic firing of their chapter president by the Columbia administration.
The federal government is confiscating transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people’s passports, denying their right to travel and do anything that requires passports as identification. The Department of Homeland Security has revoked policies that previously prohibited it from investigating people based solely on their sexuality or gender identity. This means the technologies currently used to help kidnap student activists and immigrants can more readily be used against the LGBTQIA+ community. All this comes as lawmakers wage a historic offensive against queer and trans people, hard-fought gains are rolled back, and hate crimes escalate.
Now more than ever, the links between our labor rights and free speech are clear: when speech is no longer protected, the government is free to target union advocates and disrupt bargaining.
Now more than ever, the links between immigrant rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, rights to free speech, rights to due process, and rights to organize are crystal clear.
We are at a crossroads. We can hunker down, watching as our neighbors and co-workers are terrorized into silence and inaction. Or we can take this moment to create new connections with each other and strengthen old ones to build a movement capable of turning back this wave of repression.
“Our opponents have an ideological commitment to ending the labor movement, and any efforts that allow them to stifle dissent and organizing have to be met with forceful pushback.”
— Jimmy Williams Jr., President of International Union of Painters and Allied Trades