With U.S. President Donald Trump deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador in defiance of the Supreme Court, and ICE actively detaining immigrants and asylum seekers in Greater Pittsburgh, current and former elected leaders used town hall events Wednesday to urge the community to rally together as neighbors.
“Our country is facing the biggest crisis that we’ve ever had, a constitutional crisis, a democracy crisis, a crisis that is actually getting to the heart of whether or not or how this nation will exist into the future,” U.S. Rep. Summer Lee told a crowd of community organizers, media, and SEIU Local BJ32 members at the union’s headquarters downtown. Lee later described a need for a “guerrilla warfare” approach combining legislation, community organizing, and grassroots advocacy.
“The reason why [Trump] has come after labor unions, the reason why he’s come after education, all of these institutions, is because that is the greatest check on someone who is moving to authoritarianism,” Lee said.
Joining Lee was Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey. He said his administration had been in close contact with local groups such as Casa San José, whose community defense organizer Jaime Martinez gave remarks and distributed a petition; and Trans YOUniting, whose founder and executive director Dena Stanley addressed the worsening situation for trans and queer Americans. SEIU members emceed and spoke, and audience members asked several questions during the hour-and-a-half-long event.
“If we don’t stand up [against Trump], it’s not about what they’ll do … It’s about what we will allow them to do,” Gainey said, blasting Elon Musk as an “appointed president from South Africa.” Gainey, Lee, and SEIU members each highlighted the way Musk’s putative Department of Government Efficiency had already had negative impacts locally by freezing research budgets and upending the SEIU’s bargaining process with the University of Pittsburgh. Martinez, meanwhile, spoke of the direct impact of ICE detentions on local families.
“When somebody is detained, they end up at the ICE office on the South Side,” Martinez said. “Then they will transport them to a place called Moshannon Valley Processing Center … And, if you do a quick Google search, you’ll figure out that this place has documented human rights violations.”
Stanley said staff members at Trans YOUniting had been harassed and assaulted in recent weeks, and she decried UPMC’s recent denial of young people’s gender-affirming care. “We the People want to make sure that we protect our country, and how we’re going to do that is by unifying,” Stanley said. “They may be starting with us, right? But understand [that], while they are telling you it’s for a trans person, behind that, it’s for Black people, immigrants, women, and everybody in between.”
Martinez and Gainey both invoked the spirit of Fred Rogers, calling for people to better know their neighbors, and Martinez urged audience members to “hold yourself accountable to the people around you, because that’s how you build power.”
Gainey said the City of Pittsburgh had taken steps to ensure resiliency and push back on Trump’s agenda and reiterated his stance against working with ICE. In a release, the Mayor’s Office highlighted his administration’s formation of the Office of Equal Protection; the signing of several amicus briefs, including a Washington state lawsuit against Trump; as well as the city’s work independently and with the county on immigrant supports and housing equity, such as a citywide order aimed at ensuring landlord and developer compliance with local non-discrimination laws.
Gainey and Lee urged audience members to reach out to their neighbors. “In times like this, we need unprecedented unity,” Gainey said. “We need a type of unity where we’ve got each other’s back, and it starts right on your block.”
Later, Indivisible and Mondays without McCormick Pittsburgh held an empty chair town hall in Swissvale with former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and Pa. Rep. Lindsay Powell. Lamb, who has been issuing broadsides against his former primary opponent and incumbent U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, fielded questions with Powell from a church hall full of angry Fetterman and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick constituents. Both town hall events were representative of growing anger as alarm mounts about Trump’s defiance of courts and economic whipsawing.
Lee said she was doing everything in her power, including leveraging her committee appointments and talking with Trump appointees, to meet constituents’ needs. But she said mutual aid, demonstrations, and community organizing were also essential to prevent the permanent undermining of democracy.
“The real check and balance in our system is not going to be the House … It’s not going to be the Senate. It ain’t going to be the White House; it ain’t going to be the courts,” Lee said. “It’s going to be the people, as it has always been.”
Editor’s Note: A sentence was updated to better reflect who organized the town hall event with Lamb and Powell. A forthcoming print version of the story will reflect this change.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2025.
