Portland Is Showing How Immigrant Solidarity Can Resist Trump’s Agenda

With the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant policies, community is more important than ever among migrant rights advocates.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, raids have ramped up across the country, and migrant communities have grown more fearful, many groups have shifted their efforts toward protection. One such group is the Asylum Seeker Solidarity Collective, or ASSC, in Portland, Oregon.

“The more immediate day-to-day priority is making sure that the people who we’ve been organizing with, asylum seekers over the past couple of years, know their rights and are prepared for what might happen,” said Natalie Lerner, an organizer with ASSC.

Hosting trainings has become a more common practice for ASSC, but understanding their own organizing capacity has been a challenge.

“We did a couple big know your rights trainings with asylum seekers in November,” Lerner said. Since then, ASSC has had many requests for more trainings, but it just don’t have the resources to run them.

Like many advocacy groups, it had to adapt to difficult, dynamic conditions. For example, ASSC shifted to other methods, such as train the trainer meetings, rather than directly hosting know your rights presentations over and over.

In the onslaught of anti-immigrant actions by the Trump administration, it can be challenging to decide what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to.

“It’s maybe the hardest thing to do as an organizer,” said Alaide Ibarra, another ASSC organizer. “The way that I’ve thought about it is really about strategy. If we have a strategy for it, then let’s say yes to it.”

With so much happening from the federal level down, the demands on community organizations can grow beyond what is possible to keep up with.

“Right now there is a lot of urgency and anxiety driving the train,” Ibarra said. “I’ve found over my years of organizing that that is not a long-term, sustainable strategy when you ground yourself only in the chaos, only in the anxiety, only in the fear. You have to find a way of grounding in the things that you want to build.”

Building Something Better

In spring 2024, ASSC pulled off a major organizing success, passing $1.2 million in funding from Multnomah County to shelter migrants.

At the time, dozens of families seeking asylum were coming into Portland every month and there were little resources to support them.

“We hit a breaking point around January of 2024,” Lerner said. “We were getting four or five families calling us a week and we had nothing to offer them except day-by-day hotel rooms through grassroots fundraising or sometimes a room in someone’s house. I would go almost daily to hotels to pay the night for families after we’d managed to crowdsource funds.”

Without work authorization, at least 20 of the asylum families were facing homelessness in March 2024. ASSC was meeting with asylum seekers every week to talk about the possibility of camping and making plans to camp with the families, but this was an insufficient solution.

“We were working on legislation with a coalition of organizations, but we knew that money wouldn’t come through fast enough,” Lerner said.

Knowing it needed funding fast, ASSC launched a powerful campaign in Multnomah County.

The group organized jointly with the International Migrants Alliance, held both larger group and one-on-one meetings with asylum seekers, and met with each of the Multnomah County Commissioners multiple times. On top of this, ASSC frequently testified in front of the board of commissioners and created a sign-on letter with over 75 community organizations in support of their budget ask.

The group’s efforts prevailed and the funding passed.

While the political situation is different now, ASSC picked up many lessons from its success.

Community-Based Organizing

“There was no big fancy policy person that was accompanying that process,” Ibarra said about the campaign. “It was us and the community. It was a moment of truth and pride. The story of that money passing in Portland was the story of so many people.”

Both Lerner and Ibarra stress the importance of organizing as equals in your community. Working with asylum seekers directly, asking what they needed at the moment, was crucial to the process.

“You really cannot organize people from a place of looking down on them or thinking that you know more than them,” Lerner said. “Obviously we all are little experts on our own issues. Do I know more about how the U.S. bureaucracy functions than some of the asylum seekers we’re organizing? Of course. But they also know more about their own things than I do.”

For ASSC, organizing with the asylum seeker community meant doing so horizontally and without hierarchy. It meant examining the group’s definition of community and working with those directly impacted, finding out what works for them. When migrants are connected through WhatsApp, they switch to using WhatsApp. When people aren’t learning well through reading, they shift to videos and in-person trainings.

ASSC may not have the structure of a nonprofit, but it does have the freedom to address concerns rapidly and as they come. This adaptability goes back to their roots in both organizing and mutual aid. The asylum seekers were at the table with them, figuring out what was next, which ultimately led to an action-oriented approach to issues.

“We all organized together for about a year before we decided maybe we needed a name and to stop just calling ourselves ‘people in Oregon who are at this meeting,’” Lerner said. “We all were mostly focused on just needing to get this thing done, [ignoring] the banner under which it’s happening.”

Organizing in this way was not without its challenges, though. Lerner and Ibarra knew they were agitating government officials at times, but this was part of the process. Even inside the community, things don’t always go smoothly.

“Especially during the Trump administration, we need to ground in real people, and real people are messy,” Ibarra said. “Maybe when we tell this story it sounds really clean, but in reality there were 50 things happening at the same time.”

Sometimes the messiness requires taking a step back to approach the situation in a less conventional way.

“In this moment when fear is the strategy, overwhelm is the strategy, isolation is the strategy … [we’re] doubling down in community,” Ibarra said. “We had a know your rights training, but also a party. We had a New Year’s know your rights training. At the end, a five-year-old was like ‘When is the next one?’ as he’s all pumped up on sugar and full of glitter. [We’re] at a time when the emotional things are also a strategy.”

Having parties or organizing meals for families might not lead to grandiose political outcomes, but it does keep people going.

“I really take inspiration, not just from big historical figures, but so many people across history who have fought their small fights to get some of the wins we’ve had,” Lerner said. “I don’t know that they were so exceptional, and I feel like I’m picking up that work from them.”

Doing the Unsexy Stuff

Ibarra got her start in organizing while defending her ability to go to college. She came to the U.S. when she was 14 years old, and like many young migrants, her undocumented status didn’t cross her mind often. That changed when the Kansas legislature considered repealing House Bill 2145, which allows undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas universities.

She remembers being told to hide her accent in her testimony, as there were vigilante Texas Minutemen in the courtroom. Opponents of the bill said things like “we shouldn’t be paying for these people who don’t even belong here.”

While Ibarra remembers the hate directed towards her, she also remembers successfully defending the bill and what that meant for future generations of undocumented youth. She carries that experience and shared struggle into her work in Portland.

At its core, ASSC is a group meeting people where they are at, grounded in trust and mutual respect. They don’t see their work as exceptional, but simply what should be done to help marginalized people in their community.

National movements like the Day Without Immigrants are helpful, but someone also needs to do the unsexy stuff, the community work, which comes with its own challenges.

Not being able to guarantee safety is one of the most difficult things for Lerner, Ibarra and others in ASSC. Those months before the funding in Multnomah County passed, thinking about toddlers sleeping in the cold, it could be hard to face people.

When the tasks seem insurmountable, Ibarra remembers “I won’t be able to fix it, but I can be there,” and sometimes being there is the most important thing.

“I think people that we work alongside have gotten to the U.S. and then in touch with ASSC due to the failure of so many systems that put making money over people’s lives,” Ibarra said. “Our organizing spaces are infused with humanness — laughter, crying, music, dancing. It’s a posture of refusing to let Trump or Musk or people in power be the ones who get to decide our worth. It reminds me of the world I want to build, not just the one I’m fighting against. And at the same time, I feel their vulnerability, and mine, to the system.”

For now, the community in Portland is gearing up for the worst. As of yet, there have been no official reports of ICE raids in the area, so ASSC plans to continue its education efforts while scaling up for possible difficulties ahead. If immigration enforcement ramps up, ASSC’s organizers know they will need to shift to more defensive tactics.

“Of course, we are ensuring that there are rapid response networks, community care and all strategies on the table to defend our people, but I think for what we are facing, we will need more than that,” Ibarra said. “We will need a shit ton of community power and people unwilling to comply to enact suffering. That’s what I hope every person is helping build in smaller ways, by organizing in their neighborhood, and bigger ways, like helping organize people across Portland, Oregon and the U.S.”