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Marcelina Pedraza at a UAW strike in 2025 (Oscar Sanchez, SETF)
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The People Who Built Chicago Deserve to Breathe
Feb 07, 2026
As union electricians, we wire this city. My siblings in the trades pour the concrete, hoist the steel, lay the pipe and keep the lights on. We build Chicago block by block, shift after shift. We go home to the neighborhoods we help create.
I live on the Southeast Side with my family. My great-grandparents immigrated from Mexico and taught me to work hard, be loyal and kind and show up for my neighbors. I’m proud of those roots. I want my child to inherit a home that’s safe, not a ZIP code that shortens their lives, like most Latino communities in Chicago.
That’s why I support the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance.
Union folks know this: a contract isn’t just about wages. It covers safety rules, training, PPE, healthcare and a say in how the job gets done. We don’t accept “trust us” from a boss who wants to cut corners. We negotiate standards and enforce them.
Our neighborhoods deserve the same deal.
For too long, the City of Chicago has allowed heavy industry to accumulate in communities of color like mine. Each new facility gets evaluated by city agencies reviewing the application on its own, as if it operates in a vacuum. Meanwhile, Black and brown residents from these communities breathe the combined pollution from trucks, stacks, dust and debris.
One permit for a new industrial facility might look fine on paper. Ten new heavy industrial facilities together in one area of Chicago can be a disaster to our health.
We see the results of these inhaled toxins every day: inhalers on classroom desks and asthma vans outside the schools, neighbors with cancers that don’t run in the family,the “closed windows today” warnings that come with every strong wind and kids not being able to play in their own yards out of fear of exposure to toxic metals.
This is not how you treat the people who built your city.
The Hazel M. Johnson ordinance is simple and long overdue. Before major new industrial facilities move into a neighborhood that’s already carrying a heavy load from the pollution emitted by those facilities, the city has to consider the cumulative health impacts. Not just what one facility emits, but what all the stacks, trucks and sites together will mean for the lungs and lives of the people downwind and next door.
This approach is not radical, it’s common sense. It’s the union way– look at the whole job, set the standard and hold everyone to it.
Critics will say this threatens jobs. I don’t buy it. Workers know a false choice when we hear one. We can build things the right way, in the right places, with rules that protect both paychecks and people. Strong standards create better jobs – skilled, safe, long-term work that doesn’t leave a toxic tab for the neighborhood.
This is about playing by the rules. If you want to profit here, they must meet the same expectations workers face on the job. If a project can’t clear that bar, it’s not a good project for Chicago.
Labor belongs at the front of this fight. Our movements rise and fall together. A safe job site doesn’t mean much if the block you go home to is making your kid(s) sick. Wages matter. Work conditions matter. Living conditions matter. They’re part of the same fight, dignity for working people. We shouldn’t have to choose between a job and our health and safety.
Hazel Johnson – the Mother of Environmental Justice – started that fight right here on the Southeast Side. She organized so her neighbors could breathe. She stood up to power and demanded fairness. This ordinance carries that legacy forward. It says the city must count what counts: our health.
I want fellow union members to see themselves in this. We take pride in the quality of our craft. We don’t slap together junk and call it a day. We fix what’s broken. We plan. We prevent it. We protect our own. Supporting this ordinance follows the same ethic, after the whistle blows and we head home.
Chicago has a chance to lead with a standard that’s basic and just: before piling more industry into one area, measure the full burden and protect the people who live there. Make decisions with all the facts, not just the narrow slice that looks neat on a permitting form.
I’ve been a union electrician for 26 years. I love my city. I’m proud of my ancestors’ sacrifices and the life we’ve built here. I want all of our kids to grow up in a neighborhood where “progress” doesn’t mean more inhalers and less time outside.
Pass the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance. Because the people who build Chicago deserve to breathe in it. Nothing about us, without us!
Op-Ed: The People Who Built Chicago Deserve to Breathe was first published on Illinois Latino News, an affiliate of the Latino News Network, and was republished with permission.
Marcelina Pedraza is a fourth-generation union electrician and member of UAW Local 551 at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant. She is a Southeast Side Chicago community leader focused on labor and environmental justice.
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Why Greenland and ICE Could Spell the End of U.S. Empire
Feb 06, 2026
Since the late 15th century, the Americas have been colonized by the Spanish, French, British, Portuguese, and the United States, among others. This begs the question: how do we determine the right to citizenship over land that has been stolen or seized? Should we, as United States citizens today, condone the use of violence and force to remove, deport, and detain Indigenous Peoples from the Americas, including Native American and Indigenous Peoples with origins in Latin America? I argue that Greenland and ICE represent the tipping point for the legitimacy of the U.S. as a weakening world power that is losing credibility at home and abroad.
On January 9th, the BBC reported that President Trump, during a press briefing about his desire to “own” Greenland, stated that, “Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases. And we'll have to defend Greenland," Trump told reporters on Friday, in response to a question from the BBC. The US will do it "the easy way" or "the hard way", he said. During this same press briefing, Trump stated, “The fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn't mean that they own the land.”
For millions of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and other Indigenous Peoples from the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and Greenland, this comment was not only ironic but registers to us as a form of blindness to U.S. imperialism, genocide, and land theft. It is a troubling reminder of U.S. and other European boats and ships that arrived on these shores to steal Indigenous lands and to then turn around and criminalize the people and Indigenous nations that already lived here. Now Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) by many accounts has been weaponized against U.S. citizens, including citizens of federally recognized American Indian nations, against Indigenous Peoples from Latin Americas as well as against U.S. citizens who are simply exercising their legal rights to protest the use of ICE to abduct, kidnap, and detain people based on of race, color, language and accent.
There have been recent reports that document the abduction of American Indian people from Minneapolis that are sparking outrage across Indian country. I ask readers to consider, if American Indians from the United States are the original peoples of this land, how should we account for Latinos immigrating from Latin America to the United States, who are overwhelmingly Indigenous and who lived in this territory long before the United States existed?
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 led Mexico to cede over 55% of its territory to the United States, including the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, most of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming. Mexico also gave up title to Texas. Prior to this Treaty, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in 1803 led to the acquisition of 15 current U.S. States that were previously colonized and controlled by France and Spain. It is crucial to point out that those 15 states, as well as the states ceded by Mexico, were not there to give. Indigenous peoples from present-day Mexico and the United States were never fully consulted on these transactions, and one could argue this was all done by force and has never been addressed. Mexico was created from a colonial government much like the United States. Spain and Britain colonized and illegally occupied the Americas without Indigenous consent. I contend that the people of Mexico of Indigenous descent should, by default, have U.S. citizenship by birthright. A false border was created to disenfranchise them.
Today a similar process of invasion and illegal land seizure or an attempt to purchase Greenland would be yet another example of United States’ brutality and illegal global action. Greenland’s Indigenous people are Inuit. 89% of Greenland’s population is Greenlandic Inuit, who comprise three primary ethnic/tribal groups: the Kalaallit, the Tunumiit, and the Inughuit. Yet here we see history repeating itself. Denmark, like Spain, Mexico, and France, which stole and then ceded Indigenous lands to the United States, is in no position to determine the rights of the Inuit Peoples of Greenland, who have made it clear they don’t want the United States in their country.
According to El País International, 85% of the people of Greenland voted no to U.S. annexation, “In Greenland, the U.S. threat has been strongly opposed by the people. In January 2025, when Trump began talking about his intention to buy or invade the Arctic Island at any cost, a poll was conducted to gauge Greenlanders' sentiment.
Aqqaluk Lynge, the former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, critiques Trump’s push for control in the El País article, asking, “If they do this to us, who will be next?”
The threat of an attack on Greenland is causing a global crisis as great as the domestic crisis being caused by ICE as they wage war on the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Political Scientists argue that if President Trump invades Greenland, it could signal the end of the NATO Alliance and the selling of U.S. bonds that would cripple our economy, leading to devastating economic and social consequences. Selling off $10 trillion in U.S. bonds held by Europe too quickly could permanently destabilize our economy.
My call to action includes the following 7-point plan:
- A global boycott and complete embargo of United States products (imports and exports) by nations around the world, and a travel ban on tourism and business to the United States until all illegally held immigrants, permanent legal residents, U.S. citizens, and detainees are released and reunited with their families, followed by a full legal investigation.
- A global boycott of complicit organizations and corporations (including major news corporations and businesses) controlled by allies of the current U.S. federal administration and Donald Trump.
- A public meeting of all blue states led by governors, senators, congressional leaders, non-profit and social justice movement leaders, and grassroots organizers, to form a pact and alliance to protect themselves and their citizens/communities from federal tyranny and to refuse taxation without representation.
- A U.N. (United Nations) Declaration on the Rights to Citizenship and Free Movement of Indigenous Peoples Across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, which would issue entry passports to Indigenous Peoples from any of these three nations to the other countries. These passports should also be provided to other Indigenous Peoples from Oceania, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Arctic, and Indigenous Peoples of Europe for entry and legal residency across international borders.
- The immediate arrest and prosecution of all federal administration officials and ICE officers who have committed crimes against humanity, broken federal, state, local, or international laws.
- Abolish ICE and halt all funding related to ICE activities.
- Return complete control of Greenland to the Inuit Peoples.
The time is now to organize and fight back before we reach the point of no return, and all our rights are dismantled under an authoritarian dictator leading a White Nationalist, racist, and fascist regime of terror! Protest, boycott, vote, organize, donate…do anything in your power to end this threat to humanity.
Andrew J. Jolivétte, is Professor of Sociology and Indigenous Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Adjunct Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. His latest book, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change was published by Policy Press.
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High school students in Temecula, Calif., leave campus in protest of the district's ban of critical race theory curriculum in December 2022.
Watchara Phomicinda/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images
Gen Z: A Generation Asked to Repair What It Didn’t Break
Feb 06, 2026
The Trump administration recently announced changes within the Department of Education that would reclassify several graduate degrees as non-professional, limiting access to federal loans and institutional support. As a Gen Z student pursuing a Master of Public Health in Healthcare Management, to me, this serves as another reminder of how often the ground shifts beneath our feet.
For many of us in this generation, this is what coming of age has looked like: navigating urgency layered on top of fatigue and responsibility paired with diminishing support. I was in my second year of college in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit — watching the world shut down while still being expected to keep producing, achieving, and adapting. That was my life for the following three years. Now, the pursuit of higher education, including graduate degrees, which are increasingly the baseline for upward mobility, can be destabilized mid-stream. Gen Z is inheriting the compounding effects of accelerated policy decisions and is becoming the “cleanup generation” expected to absorb the fallout while the foundation is still being pulled out from under us.
Trump’s second term has made something very clear. Policies enacted quickly and without regard for long-term consequences leave damage that will take generations to undo. Executive orders, funding shifts, and rollbacks may feel temporary in the moment, but their cultural and systemic effects are long-term. This phenomenon has repeatedly been proven over the course of history. For example, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included the three-strikes rule, further increased recidivism and mass incarceration in communities of color, which ultimately reshaped Black families and communities for decades. Long after the administration that passed it left office, we still see the effects of this bill today. The lesson is simple but often ignored: policy outlives presidents, and culture outlives policy. What’s being set in motion now will shape the economic, educational, and social realities Gen Z and future generations inherit long after this administration ends.
Ultimately, this is setting up Gen Z to be the “cleanup generation”. Those of us born between the late 90s and the early 2000s inherited a blueprint: get an education, start a career, buy a home, build a family, create generational wealth, contribute to your community, and leave the world better than you found it. And we believed in it and, so far, we’ve shown up. Gen Z has been one of the most progressive, civically engaged generations — leading calls for racial justice and social and political accountability here in the United States and abroad. We’ve planned to be on the right side of history and have dreams and goals of our own while at it. But the generations that have come before us hold the power, and these policies are making it more difficult for us to reach a baseline of stability. We are carrying the responsibility of environmental collapse, generational debt, institutional racism, and a political climate unraveling in real time. Yet the systems that claim to need us keep pulling away the tools required to meet the moment. The blueprint was handed to us, yet the foundation keeps shifting.
We are like the invisible middle child. We are situated between institutional collapse and forced responsibility, too economically unanchored to have stability, and definitely too old to be spared the consequences, yet we are still blamed for our positioning. This isn’t about claiming hardship as a competition, but about naming the conditions under which a generation is coming of age and what those conditions demand of us. For us, instability is normalized, and the rules change mid-game. We are hyper-focused on just reaching a point of stability, which in 2026 is not met with grace but with criticism and being told to work harder and do better.
And so, as a member of Gen Z, I’m not too focused on homeownership, marriage, or building a family, and not because those aspirations don’t matter, but because long-term stability has become the priority for me. My peers share the same sentiments.
And if we are truly concerned about future generations, the work cannot stop with Gen Z. The conditions we normalize now, such as instability, shrinking pathways, and constant recalibration, will become the baseline for those coming after us. Whether the next generation inherits insecurity or stability depends on whether we choose to address these structural failures now, rather than passing them down. We need to prioritize not only promising but sustaining a future in which they can dream big and have stability as a baseline rather than a luxury.
If Gen Z is expected to inherit the consequences of today’s policy decisions, then those decisions must be made with our realities in mind. That means governing with generational awareness, recognizing that stability, education, housing, and career pathways no longer function the way they once did. It also means creating real space for younger voices in the rooms where long-term decisions are made, not as tokens, but as stakeholders in the future being designed. Because you cannot expect a generation to clean up systemic damage while denying its influence over the systems themselves.
Gen Z is one of the most progressive generations by far. We have shown up in the streets and at the polls, we are politically active, socially conscious, and deeply invested in building a future that is more equitable than the one we inherited. But we are also the generation currently being asked to do the most with the least.
Gen Z will show up; we always do. But we need systems that show up for us, too.
Beverley Waithaka is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute. She writes about the intersections of public health, beauty, digital culture, and the impacts on early childhood.
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Anti-choice lawmakers are working to gut voter-approved amendments protecting abortion access.
Trials Show Successful Ballot Initiatives Are Only the Beginning of Restoring Abortion Access
Feb 06, 2026
The outcome of two trials in the coming weeks could shape what it will look like when voters overturn state abortion bans through future ballot initiatives.
Arizona and Missouri voters in November 2024 struck down their respective near-total abortion bans. Both states added abortion access up to fetal viability as a right in their constitutions, although Arizonans approved the amendment by a much wider margin than Missouri voters.
That was just the beginning of protracted legal battles.
Amy Myrick, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said ballot measures are a powerful and important step in returning abortion access to a state, but success on Election Day doesn’t mean the fight is over.
“State constitutions don’t automatically repeal laws,” Myrick said. “Sometimes, even if the state isn’t doing it, other groups or legislators will jump in to try to retain these restrictions.”
The trial over Arizona’s abortion restrictions wrapped up this week, Arizona Mirror reported. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gregory Como seemed unconvinced of the argument that certain laws around how abortion medication can be prescribed, waiting periods, and bans on abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities should remain enforceable.
A similar trial in Missouri will wrap up on Jan. 26 after hours of testimony about more than a dozen abortion restrictions state officials are seeking to preserve. The Republican supermajority state legislature is also putting a countermeasure to reinstate the abortion ban on the ballot in November, paired with a ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Arizona and Missouri have what are known by abortion-rights advocates as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws passed by legislatures before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Even states without bans, like Connecticut, Maryland, and Rhode Island, have statutes in place that the Guttmacher Institute considers TRAP laws. Abortion providers are subject to state licensing and other medical requirements, but as of December 2025, 25 states still have laws that impose additional regulations for clinics, according to Guttmacher, such as facility size and transfer agreement requirements, or admitting privileges at local hospitals within 30 miles.
Officials and legislators usually argue in the statehouse and in court that the extra parameters increase the safety of abortion procedures, but the safety record is strong under existing medical requirements and is safer than childbirth, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Studies show the risk of maternal death associated with childbirth is about 14 times higher than the risk associated with abortion.
But there are also other laws that advocates say are meant to discourage or frustrate those seeking abortion care, such as mandatory vaginal exams, waiting periods, or a requirement that the same physician must see an abortion medication patient over two subsequent visits. Some of those laws were passed over decades and helped drive abortion providers away, including in Missouri.
As a result, even though Missourians overturned the ban, abortion care remains difficult to obtain, and many are still leaving the state to get it, according to Missouri Independent.
“Because constitutional amendments don’t overturn conflicting laws, people can still experience injuries under these laws,” said Prachi Dave, senior managing legal and policy director at If/When/How, a reproductive rights legal services and advocacy organization. “For example, if a waiting period is interfering with my ability to access the care I am guaranteed under the newly passed amendment, then I would ask a judge to affirm that the law is getting in the way of my right. In doing so, lawsuits give practical effect to constitutional amendments.”
In a Michigan lawsuit led by advocacy groups, a judge ruled in May that a mandatory waiting period was unconstitutional after voters approved an initiative codifying reproductive rights.
Wendy Heipt, attorney for advocacy organization Legal Voice in Washington, said even if some laws were ruled unconstitutional, they may have to be litigated again because the basis for the unconstitutional argument relied on the Roe v. Wade case that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned almost four years ago.
Heipt frequently works on cases in Idaho, where many lawsuits over the state’s near-total abortion ban have taken place in the past three years. Though still in effect, there is an effort to overturn the ban via ballot in November.
The initiative is different from those approved in Arizona and Missouri because people in Idaho cannot submit constitutional amendments—only proposed state laws—for ballot consideration directly.
Melanie Folwell, lead organizer of the reproductive rights initiative in Idaho, said even if successful, it’s only one leg of a long race in restoring access. The initiative group, Idahoans United for Women and Families, drafted a bill that would have repealed existing abortion laws, but it was too long and legally complicated for the ballot. Instead, what they’ve come up with for voters is meant to establish a right to reproductive health privacy without undue government interference and override existing laws.
The outcome of Missouri’s trial could be instructive for Idaho abortion-rights advocates, because the political environments are similar. Idaho has a lengthy list of its own waiting periods for abortion care, mandatory counseling, and ultrasound requirements, and elected officials in the Republican-led state have repeatedly signaled their opposition to abortion access, including the attorney general. The legislature also has a Republican supermajority.
And since it can’t be a constitutional amendment, any new law may be more vulnerable to legal challenges.
“There are things to learn from every one of the states that have reproductive access on the ballot, which is 17 states at this point,” Folwell said. “It is always instructive for us to see what plays out in that state’s legislature, what plays out with their courts.”
Myrick said the legal battles can feel discouraging, but voters shouldn’t let it stop them from using their voices to make their policy preferences known.
“Ballot measures are not the silver bullet. We need a lot of follow-up to make these rights real. And the attempts to keep these restrictions after the voters have spoken are blatantly anti-democratic, but they’re still happening,” Myrick said.
Trials Show Successful Ballot Initiatives Are Only the Beginning of Restoring Abortion Access was originally reported by Kelcie Moseley-Morris for News From the States, published on Rewire News Group, and is republished with permission.
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Why does the Trump family always get a pass?