Aru Shiney-Ajay spends a lot of time thinking about climate change. For one thing, it’s her job. The 29-year-old is the executive director of Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate justice political action organization formed in 2017; she was tapped for the top job in 2023 after spending several years as the organization’s national training director. Before that, she was involved in a fossil fuel divestment campaign at her school, Swarthmore College, and took time off from her studies to throw herself into the fight for climate justice. Ever since President Donald Trump returned to office, though, Shiney-Ajay, who now lives in Minneapolis, has increasingly focused her energies on another pressing issue: combating authoritarianism. As she sees it, the two crises are inextricable from one another.
In early January, people across Minnesota were shocked when the Trump administration flooded their towns and cities with thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (commonly known as ICE), border control agents, and other federal personnel. The administration insisted that the heavily militarized deployment was a crackdown on crime and rampant fraud, a claim that state officials dismissed as a “manufactured crisis.” The result was to sow terror among immigrant communities and inspired Minnesotans to launch a massive public response to the threat. Among the many grassroots organizations, labor unions, religious institutions, and mutual aid groups that came together to fight off ICE’s occupation, Sunrise Movement emerged as an especially creative participant. Shiney-Ajay organized neighborhood patrols, protests, and direct actions aimed at emphasizing just how unwelcome ICE was in the city.
