The Common Ground of the Climate and ‘ICE Out’ Movements

On a frigid Tuesday evening in lower Manhattan, a group of black t-shirt clad New Yorkers sat, shoulder-to-shoulder on the lobby floor of a Hilton, chanting in unison. Crowds swarmed the windows in solidarity as the activists shouted their demand: Hilton must end its contracts with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Eventually, each one was handcuffed by police and escorted away. 

The Jan. 27 sit-in, held in the wake of a second fatal shooting at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, was organized not solely by immigration advocates. Behind the event was a coalition that included the city’s chapters of the Sunrise Movement and Planet Over Profit, two organizations of youth environmentalists. 

Sunrise, which claims a presence in more than 100 U.S. cities, was founded in 2017 and quickly threw its weight behind the Green New Deal, a progressive policy slate that marries environmental and social justice objectives, including creating green jobs and reducing economic inequality.

But in September, 100-plus local Sunrise Movement hubs voted to add another cause to their mission — fighting authoritarianism. 

“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government,” executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept at the time. 

In the months since, organization chapters in Florida, Kansas and Chicago have staged rallies and sit-ins while national leaders have organized mass fake Hilton room bookings as part of a campaign called ICE OUT FOR GOOD. The group made waves in Minneapolis for organizing so-called wide-awakes — or noisy, sleep-deprivation-inducing overnight demonstrations outside of hotels housing ICE agents. 

Activists protest outside the New York Midtown Hilton in Manhattan on March 7. Photo: Audrey Carleton.

Amid these protests, a Hilton franchisee on the outskirts of Minneapolis refused to accept reservations for immigration agents. Facing criticism from the Trump administration, the franchisee then apologized, and Hilton announced it had removed that hotel from its system. 

Sunrise’s September mission expansion represents a subtle shift taking place across the progressive flank of the country’s environmental movement. 

Planet Over Profit, Sunrise’s partner in the January sit-in, has also homed in on immigration advocacy. Though founded in 2023 with the aim of addressing climate change by taking on racial capitalism, the group has spent the last year staging protests outside the offices of intelligence firm Palantir, which sells surveillance software to ICE. And in January, activists with Climate Defiance, a grassroots climate organization known for disruptive direct action, staged a demonstration at an event where Rep. Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat, spoke after he voted to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

The shift in strategy comes amid mounting environmental deregulation — there is an abundance of climate policy rollbacks on which these groups might normally focus — and a growing threat from the federal government to quash left-wing activism.

Yet, leaders within these groups say the moves are less a transformation than a natural extension of their existing aim to link the climate crisis to other social ills. Sunrise, for instance, was founded with the goal of achieving social equality through climate action. The moves are also strategic — leaders say addressing what they see as fascism is a necessary precondition to climate action. 

“We can’t really focus on the climate if there’s an immediate backsliding on democratic principles and civil liberties,” said Michael-Luca Natt, strategy and communications lead for the New York City chapter of the Sunrise Movement. 

Natt is firm that the chapter is still deeply engaged in local environmental work, such as lobbying for energy affordability in the state legislature. “It’s definitely been a balance,” he said. 

But more recently, the moral imperative of opposing ICE has grown louder. 

He recalled the hours after the fatal shooting by Customs and Border Protection agents of Alex Pretti, a nurse for the V.A., becoming the second U.S. citizen killed in Minneapolis by federal immigration officials in January. Though much of the Eastern U.S. was blanketed by snow and hit with freezing temperatures that might otherwise have discouraged a public demonstration, the gravity of the movement was never clearer to Natt. 

“The second murder … really reemphasized the urgency,” he said. “Concrete plans came together extremely quickly … in, like, 48 hours or less.” 

Roni Zahavi-Brunner, an organizer with Planet Over Profit in New York, said her colleagues were coordinating the protest through winter storm-related power outages and water shutoffs. Even so, she said she had “never seen so many people immediately respond enthusiastically and want to take on that type of risk,” a testament to “how much people were horrified in that moment.”  

In all, 66 people were arrested that evening at the lower Manhattan Hilton, which has since been acquired by another hotel chain. 

Anti-ICE protestors are arrested in the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn in New York City. Photo: Audrey Carleton.

Zahavi-Brunner said Planet Over Profit, or POP, has stepped outside traditional environmental lines since its founding three years ago. In the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, for instance, the group showed its support for Palestinian liberation.

“POP has always been, from its start, very much a group that is unapologetically rooted in solidarity and recognizing the intersection of all of these different struggles,” she said. “This has always been a core part of our work.” 

She noted that migration is slated to grow as parts of the world become unlivable; protecting immigrants’ rights will be essential to adapting to a changing climate. 

These groups are part of a broader shift within environmentalism as a whole to align direct action tactics more closely with the principles of environmental justice, said Joseph Brown, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 

Where mainstream environmentalism has historically focused on protecting ecosystems at the expense of considering marginalized communities, environmental justice aims to center on the latter. That Sunrise, POP and others are driving this shift is “a good thing,” Brown said. 

“I think that’s probably emerging from that intersectional spirit of wanting to center the margins and see different problems as stemming from the same roots,” he added.

Brown has spent years studying the radical environmental movement led by groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, which, while averting harm to people or animals, embraced arson, sabotage and other confrontational tactics in the late 20th century. This movement rose and fell, and today, what’s called “radical” looks closer to the disruptions of groups like Climate Defiance, but with a different ethos. Today, progressive environmentalism has embraced “using direct action in the pursuit of environmental justice,” he said.

For many years, the two were not so connected. The organizers of the radical environmental movement, who were mostly white, focused on defending animals and old growth forests without acknowledgement of human struggle. The environmental justice movement, established in the 1980s in North Carolina, pushed on without their assistance.

Thomas Zeitzoff, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, said that Sunrise and its colleagues are not the first to attempt to connect environmentalism with other issues. He cited Judi Bari, a radical environmentalist with Earth First in the 1990s, who sought to add feminism and labor organizing to her mission by unionizing and working with loggers to protect redwoods in Northern California. 

Chie Togami, assistant professor in environmental studies at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, noted that over the course of decades, environmental justice work has stressed the role of democracy, long preceding the Sunrise Movement’s shift in strategy. “You could think about this actually as a coming back to rather than a shift,” she said, citing the 1991 principles of environmental justice, passed at the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., which affirm the importance of “political … self-determination.” 

The organization is amplifying “this idea that climate change is a symptom of larger political, economic and ideological systems that prioritize short term gain over long term sustainability,” she said.

Lending a hand more explicitly to another cause is, in part, just a good strategy, Togami said. “People remember when you show up for their protest and when you are an ally and put your body on the line for ‘their cause,’” she said. 

The groups are also not the first to make these connections by going after a corporate entity like Hilton or Palantir. In the 1990s, radical environmentalists “saw big business, like big timber … Big Pharma testing labs as the enemy, and they targeted it,” Zeitzoff said. “Tech CEOs … I think they make easy targets too.”

Protesters rally outside the new Palantir headquarters on March 3 in Aventura, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Denae Ávila-Dickson, communications and political manager with the Sunrise Movement, said that’s exactly the organization’s aim: “Making the connection between what the federal government is doing and how corporations are enabling it.” 

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act, a nonprofit uniting older environmentalists, said his organization, too, has long been working from this axis. 

“Between protecting democracy and protecting the climate, we think they’re the things most at risk, and we think they’re interconnected,” he told Capital & Main in an email, referring to Third Act. “We can’t make decent climate policy without a working democracy; at the moment, we’re at the mercy of those who give Trump the most money, which is the oil industry.” 

And these organizations are working at a time when the stakes are high. In September, the administration issued an executive order designating antifa, a loose-knit, leaderless affiliation of mostly far-left activists, “a domestic terrorist organization.”

Three days later came another executive order launching a “national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence.” Reuters reported that the administration intended to focus on a handful of organizations that had planned protests, including a series of vandalism events at Tesla dealerships last year that former Attorney General Pamela Bondi deemed “nothing short of domestic terrorism.” 

That list of organizations also included billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which has donated $2 million to Sunrise, alongside other liberal causes, according to The Intercept. 

Sunrise told supporters in a September email that it feared it would become a target for its environmental work. That it is now taking on additional risk by pivoting to protesting ICE raids is not lost on Natt, the Sunrise organizer. “Our angle is always to be like climate as it connects to everything, obviously, but I’d say it’s harder when there’s a Gestapo force on the street,” he said. 

There is reason to be paranoid. In January FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency would investigate Signal chats associated with those tracking ICE officers. Reuters later reported that ICE was compiling a database of protestors. And, last month, a group of activists who demonstrated outside of a Texas ICE detention center over the summer were convicted of providing support for terrorism, and labeled “antifa” by prosecutors.

Meanwhile, in February, two FBI agents visited the home of a former organizer with Extinction Rebellion, a left-wing environmental group that has embraced direct action, sending a chill through groups like Sunrise. 

The environmental movement has a long history of battling with the government. The strategic arsons of early radical environmental groups were eventually designated acts of “eco-terrorism” and labeled a top domestic terror threat in the wake of 9/11, a time known to environmental groups as the “Green Scare.” Some activists were sent to prison, with several threatened with life sentences. 

In the years since, a growing number of states have passed laws that punish environmental protest by increasing the charges in areas deemed to be “critical infrastructure” from a misdemeanor to a felony. That legislation, which defines critical infrastructure as including ports, water, and energy and telecommunications sites that are surrounded by fencing or other barriers, has proliferated under the urging of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing lobbying group that drafts model bills for states. Today, 19 states have passed versions of critical infrastructure laws. 

Brown, the political science professor, witnessed how pushback from the government led to violence in Georgia when, in 2023, activists with the Stop Cop City movement took to the Weelaunee Forest in Georgia to block the construction of a police training camp.

“People we never could identify were just shooting guns into the forest from passing cars for a while,” he said. “We were actually speculating, grimly, how long is it going to be until police shoot someone?” In the wake of those protests, the Department of Homeland Security, under then-President Joe Biden, deemed the members of the decentralized movement “Domestic Violent Extremists.”

Yet, despite a slow hum of repression for decades, academics and environmentalists alike agree the movement is operating in a new era. 

Natt said Sunrise is not blind to the heightened risk. Even ahead of President Donald Trump’s second term, “We saw that Trump getting reelected was always going to be a threat to our organizing,” he said. The group has encouraged members without legal status in the U.S. not to put themselves at the front of direct actions, for instance. 

Yet, he sees the group’s willingness to confront this risk as an asset. As mainstream environmental organizations face federal funding cuts, and their nonprofit donors, heightened scrutiny, their work is slowed when it is most needed, he said. 

“I think the climate movement right now is at a crisis,” he said. “Big greens are … being targeted by the government for their sheer existence.” 

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