Google credited an odd arrangement of organizations for helping them with the decision, including the Essie Justice Group, a collective of women seeking to end mass incarceration, and Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate run by the richest oil tycoons in the country.

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Facebook announced later that day that it would also ban bail bond ads, but that the details were “still being worked out.”

Aside from predictable backlash from bail bond providers, the joint decision has been relatively uncontroversial. The bail bond industry is, truthfully, about as scummy as it gets. Bail bondsmen require clients who can’t afford bail to pay a non-refundable portion of the bail they owe (usually about 10 percent), and even after they meet all their court appearances and the money is returned, the clients get nothing back—and they’re often charged loan fees that accrue after their case is resolved, pushing them further into debt. The practice is so despised that the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that even allow for-profit bail businesses to exist.

It’s not yet clear how effective blocking these ads will be. However, Google and Facebook’s decision is significant not for the effect it’ll have, but for what it represents: The movement to end cash bail has built enough momentum to get two of the largest companies in the world on its side. Behind the tech giants’ decision is an army of grassroots groups leading local movements to end bail—and their weird, cutting-edge, creative methods of gaining popular support.

*           *           *

One of the most persistent myths about America’s justice system is that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. In practice, the opposite is true: Defendants are assumed guilty, jailed, and only released before trial if they can afford to pay their bail.

Around 70 percent of the more than 700,000 prisoners in America’s jails have not been convicted of a crime. Most are in jail because they can’t afford to pay for their freedom, and they weren’t lucky enough to be released on “recognizance,” or without bail. In New York, only 1 in 10 defendants can afford to pay bail at arraignment. The rest are forced to await their trial behind bars, which can sometimes last years.

Even just one or two days in jail can have life-altering consequences. Ezra Ritchin, director of operations at The Bail Project and the former director of the Bronx Freedom Fund, an organization that pays bail for New Yorkers who can’t afford it, says, “A lot of the things you see in our justice system happen in those first few days.” If people don’t show up for work the next day, they could lose their job. If they’re homeless and don’t sign in for a shelter, they could lose their housing—and if just one family member doesn’t sign in because they’re in jail, their whole family could be living on the street. The first few days are also when people are most likely to die in jail, including by suicide, and it’s when inmates are most likely to be the victim of physical and sexual abuse.

Prosecutors use the threat of jail to force people into accepting plea deals, even if they’re innocent. More than 90 percent of New Yorkers who can’t afford bail will end up pleading guilty, even if they didn’t commit a crime, simply because they want to go home.

“You’re sitting in jail, and you’re told that if you maintain your innocence, then you have to stay in jail and wait it out,” explains Ritchin. “But if you plead guilty, you get to go home to your family and your community.”

Like all instruments of mass incarceration, bail takes the heaviest toll on black and brown communities. Black people are already much more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts for the same crime—up to 15 times more likely for certain low-level offenses like marijuana possession. They’re also less likely to be able to afford to pay for their freedom. The median bail for felony convictions is around $10,000, which is more than what most black women who can’t pay their bail made in the entire year before they were incarcerated. But even smaller bonds for misdemeanors are out of reach for most defendants: A 2012 report found that even when bail was set below $500, a majority of New York City defendants—almost 90 percent of whom are black or Hispanic—couldn’t afford it.

The Bronx Freedom Fund started out of the Bronx Defender’s Office in 2007, where public defenders witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of a system that incarcerates people for not having enough money. The Freedom Fund pays bail for people accused of misdemeanors so they can stay in their communities while they stand trial. In 2017, the fund bailed out almost 1,000 people, and more than 50 percent of them had their cases dismissed entirely.

Now, a growing number of people are recognizing the power of bail funds to directly fight against systemic racism. Ritchin says that a large part of the Freedom Fund’s donations come from people who “read some articles, see the website, and are looking to make a direct contribution to the fight against mass incarceration.”

“One really beautiful thing about a bail fund,” says Ritchin, “is that you get to say, ‘I’m interested in pushing back against mass incarceration, and now there’s one less person who’s sitting in jail.’” And bail fund money is revolving, so once someone meets all their court dates—as 96 percent of the Freedom Fund’s clients do—the money is returned and can be used to bail out someone else.

*           *           *

Aside from Koch Industries and the Essie Justice Group, Google also credited another organization for influencing its decision to block bail bond ads: Color of Change. Color of Change is the country’s largest online racial justice organization, and a major partner of National Bail Out, a collective of black organizers working to end pretrial detention and mass incarceration. Last year, Color of Change worked with National Bail Out to raise money for Black Mama’s Bail Out Day, a campaign to bail out incarcerated mothers on Mother’s Day.

“Our ultimate goal is to end money bail,” said Clarice McCants, Color of Change’s criminal justice campaign director.

Last year, National Bail Out bailed out more than 120 mothers for Mother’s Day. This year, they bailed out mothers in 16 cities, saying “We will bail out mama’s in all of our varieties. Queer, trans, young, elder, and immigrant.”

National Bail Out has paid more than $600,000 in bail to a network of dozens of community bail funds that includes the Bronx Freedom Fund. As this network has grown in recent years, so, too has its methods of collecting donations. One of National Bail Out’s largest sources of funding is Appolition, an app that allows people to donate spare change from credit card purchases to help end mass incarceration. In its first five months, Appolition raised $130,000.

Another funding source that has sprung out of this movement is Bail Bloc, an app that runs in the background of your computer, mines cryptocurrency, sells it, and donates the funds to Bronx Freedom Fund.

“Bail is a form of currency mining,” explains Maya Binyam, editor at The New Inquiry and one of Bail Bloc’s co-leaders. She says that cryptocurrency mining bears a “rhetorical relation” to bail. “The state incarcerates people before they’ve been convicted of anything and then forces them to pay for their own release. Bail Bloc allows you to offer your computer as the target for that mining in their stead.”

The app uses about as much energy as running a YouTube video. If you have it open during business hours from Monday to Friday, it’ll up your electricity bill a few dollars per month, and generate roughly an equivalent amount of the cryptocurrency Monero—essentially shifting the burden of the donation from you to whoever pays for the electricity that you’re using.

On Christmas day, after three months of mining from roughly 1,000 daily users, Bail Bloc donated $3,333.77 to the Freedom Fund.

“We want this technology to be available to people who don’t have $100 to donate to a bail fund, but nevertheless use electricity at the institutions they move through—schools or gentrifying coffee shops,” explains Binyam. This is one of her favorite parts of the project. “I worked at a day job where I was one of the only people of color, and there were a bunch of racist people in the office. And I just downloaded it on a bunch of work computers, and it felt kind of like a good ‘fuck you.’”

The most common critique they’ve heard is that there are more efficient ways to donate toward ending mass incarceration than mining Monero—which Binyam sees as positive.  “Instead of saying, ‘Why are we donating money toward bail?’ people are saying, ‘There’s way more efficient ways to donate money toward bail,’” she says. “Which is kind of amazing.”

Binyam says that Bail Bloc was designed to court public opinion and lift up the work of activists leading the fight against cash bail, like National Bail Out and the Bronx Freedom Fund. Grayson Earl, one of the creators of Bail Bloc, says he was also inspired by Black Mama’s Bail Out—a common refrain in these types of movements. One campaign will inspire another, which inspires would-be organizers to start their own community group, then artists and techno-utopians add their own ironic twist, and pretty soon the movement has become so massive and culturally relevant that Google, Facebook, and Koch Industries are trying to get a piece of it.

“The system is unjust enough that it requires organizations to be attacking it from every angle,” says Ritchin. There may be plenty of groups that have joined the fight against mass incarceration, he says, “but there’s even more groups jailing people.”

It is reminiscent of the campaign Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began developing in 1967, five months prior to his assassination. King made his intention clear in his last sermon: “We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses … We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty.”

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More than 50 years later, the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is coming to Washington. But it will be taking action in 39 states across the country, too. The first phase will be 40 days of direct actions, teach-ins, cultural events, and more.  The campaign will then transition into voter registration and mobilization.

Many people are familiar with campaign co-chair Reverend Dr. William Barber II, through his leadership of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina. Less well known is his co-chair, the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis. Theoharis is the co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.  She has worked as an organizer with people in poverty for the past two decades, collaborating with groups like the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

I spoke with Rev. Theoharis about how poverty is viewed in America, the contours of the campaign, the role of the media, and what organizers hope to achieve in the first 40 days and beyond. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Kaufmann: Is this campaign trying to tell a different story about poverty in America?

Rev. Liz Theoharis: Yes; we are showing the deep reality of poverty where there are 140 million people who are poor or low-income in this country—where poverty affects close to half the U.S. population. It affects people across all races, nationalities, ethnicities, geographies, genders, sexualities, ages, and religions.

[We need] to break through the current narrative in our society. That narrative is one that blames poor people for their poverty, pits us against each other, and claims that there’s scarcity when we’re really living in a society and world of abundance. We are going to do a sustained season of organizing [for 40 days]; it’s both to connect up, and wake people up, and say that you’re not alone and there is a movement to join—and also to shift the narrative in our country right now.

And what does that narrative shift look like? What is a more authentic narrative?

I think what needs to happen first is for people to deal with the reality of the injustices that are happening, and the intersections of those injustices in people’s lives. And to see that coming out of deep pain and suffering are people who have a set of demands and a program of resolutions to the problems in their communities: we need single payer universal healthcare, we need full voting rights, we need decent housing for everyone, we need education that is equitable for our kids, we need higher education that’s free and available to anyone that wants it.

The story that we want to get out there is that right now there are 140 million people who are poor or low-income—that’s 43.5 percent of the population. So we’re not talking about some little group of people over there, and there is no small bandaid to fix it. We need a national discussion and national action in terms of policies that will lift people out of poverty, curb systemic racism, shift our war economy to a peace economy, and save the planet and everything living in it.

Have you run into any resistance to the word “poor?” In terms of people with low-incomes not wanting to identify as “poor,” or a feeling that it’s the wrong frame for a broad-based movement?  

It hasn’t been an issue among poor people who are calling for this campaign. But sometimes progressive religious folks, or people associated with colleges and universities worry about this. Our response is that the idea of a Poor People’s Campaign and a National Call for a Moral Revival is coming from poor people ourselves. Also, there is a rich history in terms of poor people organizing across color lines in the ’68 Campaign, and in other moments in U.S. history.

If we go back to our sacred texts and traditions—the bible is a form of mass media that talks more about uplifting the poor than any other topic. This 40 to 50 year attack on poor people, of blaming poor people for their and everyone’s problems—how you counter that isn’t by throwing out the word poor, or only talking about the middle class, only talking about economic insecurity, without naming the reality that almost half the population in the United States is experiencing.

A big part of this campaign is about people hearing their names and hearing their condition and coming forward and saying, “This doesn’t have to be and I’m going to stand up with other people and fight for justice.” If you look at our demands, some of them are about broadening our understanding of who is poor and why people are poor. Because right now in part due to how the media has portrayed poor people, a lot of times there is shame and blame associated with it. But as one of the steering committee leaders said, “I don’t feel ashamed that I’m poor—I grew up in the poorest census district in the country. I think our society should feel ashamed about the kind of deep poverty that exists and I had to live through.”

The Poor People’s Campaign intentionally didn’t reach out to national organizations until late in the organizing effort.  Can you talk about the reasons for that?

We believe this campaign is only going to be successful if it is a deep and wide organizing drive of poor people, of moral leaders, of all people of conscience, who think that these issues are a problem. And it has to come from the bottom-up. And so we really started with grassroots leaders who had been doing work for a long time in their communities, or had just emerged because certain struggles were happening in their communities so they stepped forward to respond. We built very diverse coordinating committees in 39 states. It really is being led by people who are most impacted.

After we launched officially on December 4, 2017, national organizations came forward wanting to endorse. We have more than 100 now—and it’s a meaningful endorsement. We see national not as doing work in D.C. or having a P.O. Box in D.C., but as nationalizing state-based movements.

Can you walk us through the launch and the 40-day “season of organizing?”

Sunday we had a Mass Meeting—Rev. Barber and I led it—and some local D.C. folks were involved, and we livestreamed it nationally.  We’ll have these Mass Meetings on Sundays weekly. For 40 days, [direct] actions will continue to be on Mondays. On Tuesdays we’ll livestream teach-ins, on Thursdays we’ll nationally broadcast cultural events, and on [weekends] we’re in houses of worship and places of worship, where people will focus on weekly themes and get people involved. On June 23, we’ll launch the next stage in terms of people coming to D.C. for a massive mobilization and then going back to their homes to do organizing that is connected to voter registration and voter mobilization and education.

What can you tell me about what today—this first day of direct action—looks like ideally?

We will head from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church to the U.S. Capitol for a call to action, where leaders from different struggles around the country will have a chance to speak to why we’re building the campaign and what they campaign is calling for.  Then Rev. Barber and I will explain how the action will take place, and then throughout the afternoon people will have a chance to continue to make connections with others that are there. So the actions are happening at the U.S. Capitol and then simultaneously happening in more than 30 states.

What do you do to sustain the movement beyond these 40 days of action?

This is why the coordinating committees in the states have been set up for months now. The committees have connected with teams of lawyers, with teams that do non-violent direct action training, they’ve been doing a political education process amongst their own leadership so that folks understand not just how to do this but why we’re doing this and what is going to be needed for the long haul. And also identifying cultural leaders, and singers, and songwriters—components for what a state-based movement of people across all the different lines that divide us need in order to be successful.

Will the campaign be addressing some of the legislative fights going on right now—such as the proposed SNAP cuts and additional work requirements in the Farm Bill, Medicaid work requirements, and other issues that impact people’s basic needs?

We have posted a preliminary agenda and demands on the website, and they are a mix of federal and state policies. Some of them are reactive to current fights that are going on—from not cutting SNAP, not cutting [heating assistance], not having these work requirements. But then there are things that are more proactive—like single-payer universal health care, and automatic voter registration at the age of 18. So we are trying to be relevant and connected to the current fights that the people in this campaign are having to fight. Like currently in Michigan there is a water crisis, so if there is anything that can help people immediately, we have to take up that fight. But we also have to not just react—to put out visionary and necessary demands that would translate into making everybody’s lives better.

While the heart of the campaign is clearly consistent with Dr. King’s Poor People’s campaign—in looking at poverty, ecological destruction, militarism, and systemic racism—are there some key differences as well?

Yes. What Dr. King was talking about was bringing 3,000 of the poorest citizens from about 10 communities across the country to Washington, D.C. and staying there until people’s demands were met. It’s really important for us not to just have people come to D.C. but have people doing actions and organizing in their states. Also, we called for this 40 days, so we’re not staying until everything is met.

We’re doing something historic—historians have told us that there’s never been this kind of direct action at state capitols in a coordinated way for a sustained period of time.  And we’ve never had so many people go into the U.S. Capitol and engage in non-violent direct action, and then keep on returning. So, it’s not a one-off mobilization.

Dr. King called for a Poor People’s Campaign in December of ’67, and was killed in April of ’68.  The first meeting of the 25 different organizations and leaders—Native Americans, white Appalachians, Latino folks—it was two, maybe three weeks before King was killed.  So we also hope that we have more time to keep building these bonds across lines that divide us—especially race, geography, issue, gender and sexuality—and that we can mature in terms of a movement. 

The campaign is very clear that it is non-partisan—that the problems and solutions are not the domain of any single party.  That said, have you had conservatives turn out and participate?

Yes. Of the more than 1,000 people who have been engaged in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and gotten arrested, more than 11 percent of those folks were registered, active Republicans. In some of the homeless organizing and welfare rights organizing I come out of, we’ve had people from all kind of political beliefs who are impacted by poverty come forward and play leadership roles. And we’ve definitely experienced that in communities where Trump won by a lot, or where Mitch McConnell has dominated politics forever, people in those communities are saying, “We need this.  These issues have been going on for far too long, and people are being impacted, and dying because they don’t have healthcare.” It isn’t just uniting progressive people but instead uniting people around what’s right and wrong.

Anything I’ve not asked you about that you want people to know heading into May 14?

It’s really important to see the grassroots nature of this work and pay attention to the leaders in the more than 30 states across the country and in the District of Columbia who wake up every day thinking, “How do we build a poor people’s campaign?  How do we pull off a moral revival in this nation?” People like those in Lowndes County, Alabama who have raw sewage in their yards, and in El Paso, Texas who get four minutes—once every 15 years—to hug their relative in the Rio Grande. Or folks living in Grays Harbor, Washington in a homeless encampment of predominantly poor, white millennials.

Out of those struggles people are uniting and organizing and calling for real systemic change. It reminds me of this quote from Dr. King, when he said: “The poor of this nation live in a cruelly unjust society. If they could be helped to take action together they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” And I think this new and unsettling force of poor people across race, geography, religion, gender, and sexuality—are rising in this non-violent army. I think something big is happening, and we need everyone to be a part of it.

Author’s note: To get involved, go to the website and sign up to connect with coordinating committee leaders in your state. Or check out the interactive map of where actions are taking place.

This interview was originally published on TheNation.com.

This resistance extends beyond the nucleus of individuals organizing: Entire cities like Philadelphia are confronting threats to racial and socioeconomic justice, and showing us what bolder movements to end poverty, water insecurity, and mass incarceration look like at the local level.

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I spoke with Councilmember At-Large Helen Gym, one of Philadelphia’s vanguard leaders in the city’s social justice movement, to learn more about her work.

Rejane Frederick: What does it mean to be a social justice legislator, especially in a nation that is struggling to find its moral footing?

Councilmember Helen Gym: I come out of immigrant rights work and public education work, and an Asian American movement that tried to center multi-racial coalition building. What we’re seeing right now is a merging of a lot of issues that are bringing a lot of different groups of people together—connecting interwoven systems that bring together housing, schools, criminal justice, immigrant rights, women’s issues.

For me, what it means in this moment is not that our work has changed or that the issues have changed. They’ve become more heightened. And the failure to unify across many different coalitions will be the progressive movement’s failure to win in a moment when we should unite. But we can’t do it if we are siloed, if we don’t build these multi-racial coalitions.

RF: Regarding unifying across coalitions, in 2016 you said, “Poverty and inequality are the crippling injustices that lie at the heart of the justice struggle.” Can you say more about that?

HG: For me, the indifference to poverty is incredibly profound. It’s deeply rooted in racism. It’s deeply rooted in othering. It’s deeply rooted in judgment and condemnation. And it’s deeply rooted in America’s tendency to be hyper-individualized, to focus on individual people’s problems, and not look at the broader systems that profit from poverty—not just allow poverty to continue, but actually profit from it. When we keep schools down and we fund other schools to excess. When we fail to invest in housing, when we abandon public spaces and we keep our minimum wage at their lowest levels. When we don’t fight to diversify our unions and the few paths that people of color have to living wages, all those kinds of things.

Of course, when you deal with poverty and inequality, you’re dealing with people who are in desperate circumstances. They’re going to lose their school. They’re going to lose their home. They could lose their children. These are not people who have the luxury of saying “I’ll fix this in 10 years.” You’ve got to be there in a moment of crisis and we’ve got to move people through a moment of crisis and then build for broader things.

Since I come out of grassroots movements I feel strongly about people’s development. My hope is that I pass the torch. That is the goal. To build and strengthen a bigger, broader movement. You take and occupy a moment in time, in political office—it is one lever, but not the ultimate lever.

It’s great to see people being excited about elected office, but I need to know what you’re going to do when you get in there. Who are you going to bring in there with you? What are you going to champion, and how will communities be better off when you leave?

I’m interested in how we move systems toward significant change. You’re just one small piece, and the power really lies in the grassroots movement-building that will sustain that work far beyond anyone’s term in office.

RF: You’ve talked about the ways being a community organizer has informed your work on the city council, and you’ve also talked about your theory of change. How does real change happen?

HG: We’re dealing with systems that have massive amounts of dysfunction, large failures, gaps, long-term instability, and people in power who try to patch it up, bandage it, repackage it, and rebrand it, all that kind of stuff. So I’m thoughtful about how the people who live the consequences of the policies that we create are the people who experience the most pain, but they also have a lot of solutions about what this looks like.

The really profound stuff for me comes out of some of the experiences I’ve had around public education, when the state and elected officials and civic actors and many people who had money, titles, and the power to fix something, simply walked away. They abandoned the public schools in Philadelphia, largely in the state of Pennsylvania as well. We closed down 24 schools and laid off thousands of staff. We left kids without nurses and counselors. We shut down their school libraries, abandoned them in classrooms of 60 or more, and then we said, “I wonder how they’ll do? Let’s test the hell out of them.”

I’ve always thought that was a very sick social experiment hoisted upon black, brown, and immigrant kids who live those consequences. And that, to me, is the definition of what racism is. It’s purposeful. I don’t care about intent. Racism is not about just your intent. It’s about the effect that you have on other people. Who picked up the pieces of that? It wasn’t the superintendent, the mayors, the governors, and the school board. The people who pushed hardest for the solutions were the parents, educators, organized student groups, immigrant families who had no other choice but to go to their public schools. And their work was powerful. It was moving; it was rooted outside of the halls of the School Reform Commission (SRC), and maybe outside of city halls.

Those get formed in your school yards, your backyard barbeques, when they marry with real policy, data, and information. You start working on organizing, you get groups and foundations to fund organizing. Then you start to see real movement for change. And the reality is that, yeah, it took us 17 years but I can point to so many more parents that can speak so clearly about what’s been happening that when Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education, they could take things on in that moment. They’re not surprised, they’ve heard this before, and they know to challenge it.

RF: I’m thinking about what you’ve mentioned in Philadelphia, with the charter schools and privatization movement, and the very real questions about authentic investments in public institutions. What do they look like? Why do they matter? Why is it important to continue to invest in our public institutions even when they deliver sometimes disappointing results?

HG: I don’t think people should allow dysfunctional public institutions to operate on autopilot just for the sake of saying that they support it. The reason why public institutions get targeted is because they don’t serve people as well as they should. They create or reinforce systems of inequity, whether by intent or not. So I support all these groups and people who tackle our public institutions with a fervor to hold it accountable, to see change, to diversify that institution, and to help it evolve.

But privatization is a different thing. It’s saying “I give up on the public space and I will go private.” Private is money, capital, and the power to be able to own a previously public thing. That’s an enormous amount of privilege. And the overwhelming majority of those folks are not going to look like the people they serve. There’s no obligation to serve diverse communities, marginalized communities—they’re more expensive, so if you’re running on a profit margin, don’t expect to profit off serving low-income youth, and immigrants, and helping them learn English, or helping special needs students get to a point of full capacity.

When we closed down 24 public schools in Philadelphia, we probably saw the largest transfer of public land into private hands that we had seen in the city of Philadelphia. It’s a really profound thing for government to say to those that they are charged to serve, especially when they are the most vulnerable—when those communities don’t have a lot of public institutions—to say “Sorry, I simply give up. I’m passing the buck to someone else.” It’s absolutely unacceptable and we should fight against it with every bit of our body because those private institutions take our dollars, they take our children, they purport that they are smarter, more powerful, wealthier, are more efficient to do the job better. And overwhelmingly what we find is that communities become more stratified, more marginalized, less likely to have voice and exercise their voice within those privatized structures.

When public institutions are starved into dysfunction and private capital moves in, that is not helping the situation. It’s exploiting and profiting off public distress. And it overwhelmingly harms the people that are already deeply impacted.

RF: What other safeguards do we have to put into place to protect these targeted communities and ensure that any gains aren’t clawed back?

HG: Our communities are under assault daily. I’d love to say “look at all the great stuff we’re doing.” But the reality is it pales in comparison based on the kinds of assaults that communities endure, and they are really deeply traumatic. They break apart people’s ability to conceive of ways to fight back, or to think about other groups other than yourself, because you’re struggling at the moment with housing, you’re struggling at the moment because you’re terrified that your child may not come home because they’re black. You’re terrified of police monitoring the streets, terrified of a criminal conviction coming up time and time again every time you seek a job.

RF: Or immigrant parents with citizen children afraid to access the resources and programs that they need because they’re afraid that ICE might be there to swoop them up.

HG: Today there was an incredible story about how Philadelphia’s ICE office outranks every single office nationwide in terms of sweeping up people with absolutely no criminal history. In 2013, 33 percent of people swept up by ICE had no criminal record history, and now 70 percent do. And people are seeking political gain by scapegoating immigrants, by trying to pacify people and say “I’m going to send people to jail.” This dictator-like and fascist mentality around incarceration, oppression, repression of mostly black, brown, and immigrant people is really terrifying.

The thing that we have to build out right now is a way to connect these struggles together. If you care about mass incarceration, then take a look at how immigrant communities are being funneled into the for-profit private prison industry that allows rampant physical abuses. Similarly, immigrant communities who are terrified for themselves, scared of the police, scared of judges and the courts, should care about the criminal justice reform movement that has been working on this for a very long time. You can’t divorce these two movements from one another.

RF: You’ve said in the past that the backbone of the progressive movement lies in local organizing. So what is it that national advocacy organizations, think tanks, funders should do to better support the local activism, or the campaigns for justice on the ground?

HG: One, they have to recognize the importance of diversifying their own boards and staff to make sure that there are people of color, women in particular, who are listening to groups, and evaluating not just based on a numbers game—like number of people served, bang for your buck, whatever metrics people use—but also take a look at just the quality of the outcome. What is really moving things? Think tanks and policymakers need to be more cognizant of on-the-ground movement, but that doesn’t happen by sitting in Washington, D.C., or in New York City in an executive suite and tower. It really happens by being connected with people; then they can understand how to evaluate this stuff. If you see movement, go into it.

RF: Thank you Councilmember Gym, it has been such an honor having this conversation with you.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.