We are not surprised. We are prepared.
I grew up under a military dictatorship in Brazil. I know how authoritarianism consolidates power by controlling our bodies, our communities, our movements—always starting with the most vulnerable. What many call an unprecedented moment, we recognize as an old pattern made visible.
For nearly 50 years, Women’s Foundation California has worked alongside Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer movement-builders who have never had the luxury of surprise.
From the fields of Kern County, to MacArthur park in Los Angeles, to Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, and now to the streets of Minneapolis, these federal immigration raids are the natural progression of state violence. A violence that has always been present in detention centers, in prisons, in foster systems, on the streets of our country, without the luxury of attention of the mainstream media. Their target is just getting bigger.
This is not simply democracy under attack. This is American democracy functioning as it was designed, now visible to those who have had the privilege of looking away.
The Gender Structure of Authoritarian Power
Our struggles are connected. Immigrant rights, reproductive justice, environmental destruction, criminalization of Black and Brown youth, attacks on trans people—these are not separate issues. They exist within the same system of control, a system that inherently relies on a narrow and oppressive gender structure.
Control over women’s bodies, movements, and reproduction is not a side effect of authoritarianism, it is the foundation. I see this in Brazil. The state doesn’t need to attack everyone at once. It just needs to control women, especially poor women, Black women, Indigenous women. Control their labor, their health, their ability to organize and resist. When you embed that control into everyday life, into workplaces and healthcare systems, into discriminatory decisions about which families are allowed to stay together—authoritarianism doesn’t announce itself like a coup. It moves steadily through culture, through policy.
But here is what I also know: authoritarianism works when we are afraid to act. It needs us to look away when our neighbors are taken. It needs us to be scared to film ICE brutality, too isolated to protect and stand witness, too paralyzed by fear to act.
Who Has Been Building the Infrastructure
Our grant partners are not responding to this moment—they have been building for it.
Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project didn’t wait for raids to escalate. They have been building immigrant defense infrastructure for years, led by those most targeted. Parent Voices has been fighting family separation through the foster system long before ICE made it headline news—same violence, different agency.
El/La Para Translatinas and The Translatin@ Coalition understand that attacks on trans and gender-expansive people are never just about identity—they are about destroying communities that model different ways of being, different structures of care and survival.
Young Women’s Freedom Center knows that criminalization of young women and gender-expansive youth is the testing ground for broader state repression. Khmer Girls in Action connects the dots between refugee communities, detention systems, and the long arc of how this country has always policed who belongs.
We resource this work. We are accountable to movement makers who saw this coming, who have been building survival and resistance all along. But folks on the ground haven’t just been resisting, they have been building, dreaming, and creating our feminist future that is irresistible.
Call to Action
We have survived worse. For nearly 50 years, we have learned from Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer movement makers that survival is not passive—it is strategic, collective, and built on the knowledge that our fates are tied together.
An Indigenous organizer said it clearly: Hope is a privilege. Whether you have it or not doesn’t matter. What matters is action.
This week, we ask you to act:
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Fund the ones doing the work. Support our grant partners—Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), California Domestic Workers Coalition, El/La Para Translatinas, Líderes Campesinas, Majdal Community Center, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, Southeast Asian Resource Action Center (SEARAC), United Women of East Africa, VietRISE and dozens more who have been building defense networks and protection infrastructure for decades. They are not waiting for permission. Resource them.
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Understand how we got here. Read ERASED to trace how patriarchy built this country’s power structure and operates in this moment.
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Join the National Shutdown Tomorrow, Friday, January 30th. No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE. This is not symbolic—it is collective refusal to participate in the machinery of our own oppression.
Film the raids. Stand witness. Protect your neighbors. Organize with your local community grassroots organizations. Disrupt business as usual.
If one of us is not safe, none of us are safe. This is not a metaphor. This is a survival strategy.
The question is not whether authoritarianism is here. The question is: now that you can see it, what will you do?