When President Donald Trump launched a series of attacks in February against law firms he considered oppositional to his administration, many legal titans stayed quiet. Pressure mounted when nearly 2,000 Big Law associates signed an open letter opposing Trump’s actions and calling on their firms’ leadership to join them. Only one letter organizer went public: Rachel Cohen, then a finance associate at a major corporate firm.
After a targeted law firm capitulated to Trump, Cohen gave her bosses an ultimatum: Stand up to the White House or she would quit. Her conditional resignation letter, shared publicly, and subsequent resignation landed her on national news networks and in front of a Congressional committee investigating the President’s actions.
Riding a wave of virality, Cohen began posting informational, call-to-action videos about issues including Palestine, Trump’s National Guard deployment, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her videos from an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, have documented her own arrest for blocking an ICE vehicle, the deployment of tear gas and rubber bullets, and other violence from agents at the facility.
The Progressive spoke with Cohen in October about Broadview, resistance, and her new progressive policy platform. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Where do you think you fit within the broader political activism landscape?
Rachel Cohen: I have been really focused on continuing to explain what’s happening in the United States because of the veneer of credibility that Harvard and whiteness give to me when I get on the Internet and explain these things. There are so many Black, Latino, and Indigenous activists who for a very long time have been pointing out the failures of the American state and its racist use of violence. I am situated to uplift those arguments—as long as people listen to me, I’m going to continue to get that out.
I view my role as not just providing that education and analysis, but also going a step further and providing people with the tools they need to plug into activism in their own communities. A lot of people understandably think if you’re not out in the streets already, you’re never going to get there. That is not my theory of change. I think a lot of people want to do the right thing if they’re directed to the path to do the right thing.
Q: How did you become involved in anti-ICE organizing at Broadview?
Cohen: I often found myself on social media, sending volunteer opportunities and events back and forth in the same group messages and to the same people, and then never really going. My best friend and I decided, let’s do this exercise in self-accountability, where we go to these things that we’re sending to each other, and with the consent of the organizations, make little videos about what that experience was like.
One thing we really wanted to do was the autonomous court watch that sprung up outside of immigration court and the ICE asylum office in downtown Chicago. While I was there, people told me that most of the action with ICE moved to Broadview, because it’s very inconvenient to get to—it’s harder to mobilize rapid response, and it seemed like a lot of people in the city didn’t understand Broadview was being used as the central locus of ICE operations. In conversation with them, it felt like there was an opportunity to use the platform to channel attention to Broadview.
We hoped this action would get more eyes on the activism that was already happening, because Broadview has been a hub for community organizing for far longer than that.
Q: What have you seen on the ground at Broadview?
Cohen: As there have been more ICE agents sent to Broadview, state violence has escalated significantly. There’s been increased use of chemical weapons. For several weeks, people were being dramatically tear-gassed and hit with sponge grenades and pepper pellets and other things—even though people couldn’t even get close to the facility. There was no [physical] threat to any ICE agent. There was no way to characterize these as anything but peaceful—the protesters were separated from the facility and the agents that they were protesting.
The Broadview protests themselves have been very stressful, but also very joyful and community-oriented. People have come together to take care of each other. Songs for Liberation is an incredible organization that will come out and provide music at these protests. One of their members was shot through her guitar with a sponge grenade. There’s an autonomous group that has set up a supply tent that’s staffed 24/7.
The protesters are refusing to be stymied in the face of overwhelming state violence, because they know that the violence being levied against us is nothing compared to the violence of the state against families who are trying to live peacefully in our community and who we want in our community.
Q: What are people who are not on the ground at Broadview missing?
Cohen: There are a lot of people in this country who want a clean line delineated between “peaceful protest” that they view as the right form of protest and protest that is not peaceful.
When we try to dictate what protest is supposed to look like, we cede ground, implying that protest can be violent when there is conflict between ICE agents who are disappearing people off of our streets and concerned community members who are showing up to try to interrupt them from doing so. All of the violence that exists in that dynamic comes from the state—all of it. The focus has to be constantly on the underlying violence of a government that is disappearing people off of our streets for the crime of violating a civil ordinance about appropriate documentation while existing.
A lot of mainstream commenters refuse to recognize that there is space between calling for protests that involve property damage—which I am not doing—and saying that it is an unreasonable and violent response to actual violence by the state. That kind of false lens is really harmful. To lift from Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, a lot of people, when they’re talking about peace, are actually just talking about order in a system that is inherently violent.
Q: You’ve posted about the creative ways that people are resisting, like Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson issuing an ICE-free zone executive order, and community members using NIMBYism to fight the feds.
Cohen: People are getting creative because the government is running through and using extreme violence against traditional forms of protest. My takeaway is always that this is a citywide, nationwide, twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week need for protests. This is a nearly infinitely wide highway, and we need every single lane to be occupied.
Q: What about using legal avenues to protect people?
Cohen: The legal avenue is very necessary. I am quite left, but I am not so far left as to think that we need to move away entirely from forms of resistance that are very structural, by which I mean not just lawsuits, but also electoral strategy. When people on the left opt out of using those forms of resistance, we hand over control of those forms of resistance to ineffective centrist advocates who think that the best way to get Donald Trump out of office is to have a less effective version of his policy platform.
I understand a lot of the feelings of, “This is not a good use of time and energy, because the government is not going to follow these temporary restraining orders, they’re not going to listen to judges, and the Supreme Court is a compromised institution.” I agree with all those things, but how I have felt about electoral and legal strategy for some time is that it is not going to save us, but it is a delaying tactic to build out the structures that will actually ultimately save us. These are not just delaying tactics—they are people advocating in the ways that they are particularly well-suited to advocate. I understand why people are pessimistic about the utility of certain forms of advocacy, including legal challenges. I am just not, at the end of the day, a pessimist.
I think that it’s extremely defeatist and unproductive to say, “We have a strong case and lawyers who are motivated to bring the case, let’s just ignore that avenue, that lane, because we think the government isn’t going to follow it.” That’s the same thing as just giving the government carte blanche to do whatever it wants.
Q: Where does electoral strategy fit into resistance?
Cohen: People are disillusioned by the electoral system because they are rarely presented with options in our two-party system that offer an affirmative vision of the future that is exciting to them. When I think about Donald Trump’s electoral victory, it is inextricably linked to racism in the United States. It is also inextricably linked to the Democrats’ failure to present a vision that is anything other than, “We’re not that guy.” In the course of proving that they’re not that guy, they adopt some of his policies.
If this were a sports team, and they were losing this badly over and over again, the only proper thing for a fan to do would be to require that they fire the coaches. Because people have become so disillusioned, it’s been really challenging to believe that genuinely progressive policy focused on affordability, community care, and humanity for everybody is something that could ever come out of any major political party in the United States. We cede the ground if we don’t pick up the fight at all.
Q: You’ve co-launched a policy platform, American Demands.
Cohen: It’s a nonexhaustive platform that is independent from any political candidate—we thought that was really important, because every time somebody comes onto the scene with effective messaging, whether that’s Zohran [Mamdani], Bernie [Sanders], or AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], it becomes about that individual person rather than the policies they’re putting forth. You have all of these people who say, “Well, these ideas just don’t work,” when they have not only never been tried, but they have never actually been put forth in a way to be taken seriously. You cannot say Americans really want Trump’s vision when they’re not presented with any alternative. We’re really interested in funneling attention to races run by progressive candidates.
Everything on the American Demands platform can be done by Congressional action alone. It doesn’t require a presidency or Supreme Court turnover. That is intentional. If we as Democrats retake the House of Representatives and don’t fix the legitimate perception among the vast majority of Americans that Democrats don’t stand for anything, they only stand against things, we’re setting ourselves up for a third Trump term.
We hope we’ll get some really cool candidates signed on—and then those candidates will dramatically outperform establishment Democrats. Then we can have a real conversation going into 2028 about what that vision should look like and give people ways to plug into races that are centralized and focused on specific policy, as opposed to just whether somebody is a Democrat or not.
Q: You wrote about joy as resistance. What does that look like in your life?
Cohen: If you’re trying to build a better world, you have to do it rooted in a life and an existence that shows what that world can be. My life is very joyful, because I live in a community that doesn’t think that the way to be joyful is to log off, go to brunch, and not think about all the horrors happening in the world, but instead that coming together in community is going to include political conversations, strategy, and community organizing. Sometimes the way that you hang out with your friends is by going to Broadview. Sometimes you’re going to need to rest. But even in the course of that rest, the world doesn’t leave you.
Ta-Nehisi Coates had an excellent interview where he talked about how he doesn’t have apolitical friendships, because his life is richer when he is surrounded by people who understand the world in which we live. That doesn’t mean that you talk about politics every single day, all the time, with every single one of your friends. It just means building a community that is joyful and liberatory—that is joy as resistance.