Immediate Demands To Fight For
- Defend our right to speak out and protest
- Free Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Korda, and all Palestine activists held by ICE for protesting
- Reinstate Grant Miner and all suspended and expelled students
- Drop the charges against the CUNY 8
- Stop the siege in Gaza, end U.S. support for Israel, and free Palestine
- ICE and cops off campus
- Divest our universities from Israel
- Fight anti-trans laws, anti-immigrant laws, and the attacks on federal employees
- Fight Trump’s attacks on Black studies, queer studies, and “DEI”
How We Will Fight
- We must organize with the principle: If they touch one of us, we all rise up!
- We need united actions across issues and sectors
- Unions must stand up against these attacks!
- We need democratic and deliberative assemblies
- Students, faculty, and staff together must unite to fight these attacks.
- Our movement must be independent from the Democratic Party, which co-opts and sells out struggles
We make these demands understanding that Trump is a symptom of a capitalist system in decline that has nothing to offer working-class and oppressed people. We fight Trump with the perspective of the working class and oppressed — building the strength, political organization, and party that can end this whole capitalist system.
We Demand and Fight for the Following Immediately!
We must stand strong and say clearly: Free Mahmoud Khalil and stop the persecution and deportation of all of those attacked for protesting,includingLeqaa Korda from Columbia University.
We must fight against repression on our university campuses, and fight to reinstate all suspended and expelled students, and to reinstate the diplomas of all those stripped of their degrees at Columbia, Barnard, and around the country.
We call to reinstate Grant Miner, the President of the Student Workers of Columbia. His expulsion is a direct attack not only on the movement for Palestine, but also on the labor movement. He was expelled just one day before bargaining began which is a violation of labor law.
There are still 8 members of our CUNY community facing felony charges. They are joined by 7 people from the University of Michigan, who also face felony charges. We demand that the charges be dropped immediately.
We fight for the right to protest without repression from police, university administrators, ICE, or any other disciplinary body. Protesting is not a crime!
The repression of the movement for Palestine is linked to recent escalations in Gaza, including the mass murder of over 400 Palestinians in one night. We demand an immediate end to the siege, an end to all U.S. arms to Israel, and a free Palestine.
We demand ICE and cops off campus and that every university become a sanctuary campus that does not allow ICE or cops on its grounds or in its buildings. Mahmoud Khalil was abducted from Columbia student housing. ICE has entered Columbia’s grounds with the intention of deporting other students as well. This is unacceptable. Universities should be safe spaces to learn, not grounds for deportations.
We demand an end to anti-immigrant policies, including an end to deportations. We demand the immediate return and freedom of immigrants held in El Salvador’s brutal prisons, in Panama, and in Guantánamo Bay. We demand the reinstatement of Dr. Rasha Alawieh of Brown University’s H1-B visa. We demand full rights to all immigrants and an end to border walls and the militarization of the border. We reject any travel ban on specific countries.
These demands are a step in the struggle to abolish ICE andfor open borders.
All of these attacks in the domestic sphere come as Trump escalates a brutal expansionist and imperialist program. We demand that the U.S. keep its hands off Yemen and for an immediate end to the bombings. We demand an end to funding the U.S. war machine. We also demand an end to economic imperialist policies, including an end to Trump’s tariffs and the immediate lifting of the debt on imperialized nations.
We demand an end to anti-trans policies and for free gender-affirming care — on demand and without apology for all who want it. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right that should also be extended to those under 18, who have as much right to transition as adults. We demand that trans women be allowed to play in women’s sports. We demand that educators and healthcare professionals be given training in how to best support trans students, colleagues, and patients.
We will fight Trump’s attempts to expand fossil fuel extraction and his ongoing destruction of the planet.
We demand an end to the attacks on federal workers and the gutting of the Department of Education. We demand an end to all of Trump’s cuts.
This includes an end to the attacks on universities, and in particular to studies of Black struggle, queer and trans issues, and Palestinian studies. We defend our right to study and learn about oppressed and exploited people at the university. We demand a fully funded university and are against all the cuts.
We fight to divest our university from Israel and support the resolutions passed by the Doctoral and Graduate Students Council and PSC-CUNY. We condemn the PSC’s decision to revoke its resolution.
In light of this escalation, students, faculty, and staff across universities must join together to fight back because an injury to one is an injury to all. We must unite the struggles for immigrants’ rights, for university funding, for Black lives, trans lives, for disabled people, for democratic rights, the right to protest, and and against cuts to the federal workforce and social programs.
How We Fight
We must organize with this principle: if they touch one of us, we all rise up!
This unity must be expressed in the movement. We need united actions because it is clear we are all under attack. Labor unions, the Palestine movement, the immigrants rights movement, the queer and trans movements, and other social movements must join together in struggle — together we are stronger!
University faculty, staff, and student worker unions have been at the forefront of union struggles in recent years. It is imperative that the leadership of all unions publicize the right wing’s attacks and bring people into the fight against Trump and against the complicity of university administrators.
Unions have a particular role to play because the working class runs everything and has the strategic power to bring the whole economy to its knees. And unions and academic workers are being frontally attacked: Mahmoud Khalil was a member of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) and the President of the SWC was expelled and fired the day before bargaining began. This is an outrage, and we need our union leaderships to break out of complacency and treat it as such! This is a direct attack against unions and workers, and we need fighting unions that treat it that way! The labor movement needs to use every tool in its arsenal, preparing, building, and going on strike to fight back against these attacks. We call on all workers to start organizing the fightback in their workplaces and unions.
We need the student movement to stand up as well — from student governments to student clubs, all must take an active role in the struggle against these attacks.
But this movement should not be organized from above as a coalition of group leaders. This movement must be organized from below. The movement must hold democratic and deliberative assemblies. An assembly is a meeting to discuss, decide, and vote steps forward for the movement. We should be organizing assemblies by department and by university campus. Students, faculty, and staff together must unite to fight these attacks.
The courts and elections will not save us. Trump is a symptom of a system in crisis and no one is coming to save us but us. The solution is to fight back.
While the Trump administration enacted these recent acts of repression, the Democrats opened the door and collaborated to lead us here. We must build a movement that is independent and does not support the Democrats!
University administrators have weaponized the police against students, suspended them for protesting, and fired faculty, all while enforcing a “Palestine exception” to free speech. These higher-ups have willingly aligned themselves with Trump’s agenda, even while he deliberately continues to damage the universities.
We need a free, public university for all run by the people who make the university function — not rich, out-of-touch presidents or chancellors. It should be run by and for faculty, staff, students, and the community. The knowledge produced at the university must be in the service of thevast majority of the population — workers, the oppressed, and the poor — rather than the interests of the elite.
This struggle to fight back against the Far Right should not end at our borders — the Right is rising internationally, and we must fight the Right on a global scale, while maintaining independence from all the pro-capitalist parties that have opened the door for them.
These are the immediate steps and struggles we need to put up against the urgent threat of Trump. But our goals are bigger since our perspective is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Our horizon is to fight for a socialist world, free of all exploitation and oppression.
Join Us in Building A CUNY-Wide Anti-Capitalist Zine
At CUNY, we need to find a way to reach workers and students with radical, socialist ideas.
Ideas to fill us with rage at the system, rage at the bosses and the capitalist parties;
Ideas to fill us with hope in the power of students and workers united;
Ideas about how to organize the way forward.
Left Voice and independent students are launching a CUNY-wide zine to uplift the voices of students, faculty, and staff — our art, poetry, and political writings. This zine will highlight our rage, our struggle, and our vision for a different kind of university and a different kind of society.
We want to discuss and expand the reach of the ideas outlined in this booklet on the way forward for our struggle. We see the struggle at our university as part of the struggle for liberation on the national and international scale.
Left Voice wants to collaborate with students and workers to build a radical publication that is based on the idea that we strive to end this system based on profit, not people — a system built on exploitation, war, and oppression. We seek to end the capitalist system and we fight for socialism. We stand against Trump and the Far Right. Through the zine, we will share examples of how his policies are impacting us, which will help us connect our struggles and unite to defeat Trump and the Right. At the same time, we don’t support the Democratic Party, which is also an imperialist, capitalist party that funded and armed the genocide in Palestine, opening the door to Trump’s repression of pro-Palestine activism. Those who collaborate on this zine want to fight for trans rights, for Black lives, for immigrants rights, and more. We are internationalists; we fight for a free Palestine and against the U.S. war machine. We stand with the working class and the oppressed all over the world, and our struggle is to end this rotten capitalist system and create a socialist society without exploitation or oppression.
We want to unite students, faculty, and staff in order to build a strong, democratic movement from below. We want a different kind of university — one that is free, public, and run by and for students, faculty, and staff, one that is open to the entire community. We want universities that are truly universal, where everyone can enroll, and we want universities that provide the means for students to do so. We fight for a university that produces knowledge to improve all aspects of the lives of the working class, the oppressed, and the poor; to fight climate change; and to take human knowledge to new heights that can only be reached in a society that does not tie research to profit.
We invite you to submit writing, art, and poetry to [email protected]. We would also love to welcome you to regular events to launch, celebrate, and discuss this CUNY-wide anti-capitalist zine.