You don’t get exactly the same feeling of solidarity when you wave at each other from the driver’s seat, but the horn makes up a lot of the difference.

The BTV Clean Up Crew began as an idea in August 2019, when I was looking for a clever way of removing fascist propaganda that had been cropping up in Burlington. At the time, I had just come across a large poster for the neo-Nazi group the Patriot Front, plastered on the window of Memorial Auditorium, urging Burlington residents to call ICE on their immigrant neighbors.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the Burlington City Council passed a resolution calling for a halt to Vermont Air Guard F-35 bomber practice flights. Perri Freeman, Progressive Party City Councilor and Champlain Valley DSA member, introduced the resolution in response to ramped up flight training of the newly deployed F-35s from the city’s airport.

We are forming a local socialist response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are looking for people that want to get involved, even if they are not members of DSA.

We interviewed Dave Van Deusen, DSA member and President of the Vermont AFL-CIO, on workplace and union responses to the Covid-19 crisis. With 70 local affiliates representing 10,000 workers in Vermont, the AFL-CIO advocates for a stronger role for unions in responding to the crisis and forging a worker led Green New Deal in the future.

The federal government’s hypocrisy and cruelty toward undocumented immigrants in our state and throughout the country is on full display. Amidst the pandemic, the Trump administration has continued its war on migrants, deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Custom and Border Protection (CBP) to arrest, detain, and deport them.

In a recent op-ed in VTDigger, Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen argued against climate policies that hurt workers. Case in point is the proposed Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI) supported by Vermont Climate Solutions Caucus. TCI is a carbon cap and trade system that depends on a regressive fuel tax that will be passed down to workers at the pump.

While racism and xenophobia are nothing new, it is undeniable that we have seen a dramatic increase in their expression as hate crimes. Even so, it is a mistake to attribute the lion’s share to Trump. In fact, ICE terrorism of immigrant and particularly Latinx workers was a staple of the Obama administration, which deported more immigrant workers than any other previous administration in history–including more than every other administration of the 20th Century combined.