An illustration with an image of a climate protest as the background and a photo of a woman in the foreground

(Image credit: Background photo by Mark Dixon / CC BY 2.0 / Photo of Aru Shiney-Ajay via Sunrise Movement)

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.

For those who may wonder why a climate justice group was getting involved in the fight to melt a very different kind of ICE, Shiney-Ajay has no problem drawing a clear line between the two. “The long-term goal is climate legislation,” Aru Shiney-Ajay explained in a conversation with Yale Climate Connection. But as she sees it, in order to get to that point, organizers need to defeat an authoritarian presidential administration first.

In late 2025, Sunrise Movement members voted to expand its mission to include an explicit new goal: taking down Trump’s authoritarian government. As our conversation with Shiney-Ajay makes clear, defending our communities — and protecting the planet — is nothing if not a long-term project. It’s a big ask, but so is saving the world, and Shiney-Ajay and the Sunrise Movement aren’t backing down from either.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

YCC: Minneapolis has been in the headlines since January. How are things going now?

Shiney-Ajay: It’s going pretty good. I’ve calmed down a little after it being really, really hectic here in Minneapolis, so yeah, a little easier now. I’ve been really in local organizing for the last few months, so I’m slowly extricating myself from that and focusing back nationally.

YCC: How did Sunrise become so involved in the anti-ICE actions? Was it ever a question of, “Oh, is this really our lane?” Could you explain the connection?

Shiney-Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. So this was part of a deliberate strategic shift that we decided to make last fall.

Last year, we were running a Make Polluters Pay campaign calling for polluters to pay for the effects of climate disasters. We zoomed out a little, and I was like, OK, look, if Trump is destroying elections in this country, and we may not have a free and fair election in 2028, is this Make Polluters Pay campaign actually setting us up in any serious way to win federal climate legislation? And the answer was pretty obviously no. It was a good campaign, but it was not a campaign that was able to meet the moment around authoritarianism.

So we reevaluated. We actually think that as a youth movement and as a climate movement, the most important thing we could be doing right now is building power to be able to kick Donald Trump out of office and also to win structural political changes. It’s very frequent in competitive authoritarian regimes to move towards a democracy but to not solve any structural problems and slide back into authoritarianism. What happened from 2020 to 2024 was a perfect case study.

And I think for us as a group that campaigned really hard on winning the Inflation Reduction Act [a 2022 federal law that sought to lower inflation and invest heavily in renewable energy] — or were obviously campaigning on a bigger version of that, but ended up winning the Inflation Reduction Act — we were like, it’s very essential for the sake of climate that we not only kick Trump out, but actually win structural reforms so that we can pass not just another IRA, but actually several Build Back Better-esque bills. So last summer, last fall, we took a step back, and we were like, we’re not on track for this. We need to be building the political power so that we can actually get to the scale of climate legislation we wanted. And that’s basically how we reoriented a lot of our hubs. You need to be prepared to respond in your cities, and you need to be training everyone who walks into your door. We are trying to eventually win back governing power and win a democracy and economy that works for all of us. That’s still the North Star, and climate is the No. 1 goal, but the way there is a little different.

YCC: It seems like a lot of other organizations have not quite caught up to that reality yet.

Shiney-Ajay: It was kind of a scary decision. We were like, “Everyone’s gonna think we’re abandoning our role or not being in our lane,” but my honest thought is that I don’t think this is really the time for lanes. It’s not a very realistic assessment of how the next few years are going to go to say that everyone should just stick in their issue lane.

YCC: Once you guys got really involved in organizing and in militant action in Minneapolis, how did other folks in the movement react?

Shiney-Ajay: I think in the local ecology it made sense — everyone’s jumping in. We made that decision to shift last September, which meant that ICE response in January was probably the first really major thing that we did under a new strategy. We’ve definitely gotten questions about it. It’s been a good opportunity to explain our analysis of the moment. Our base [of Sunrise members] wanted to go in this direction, which is the most important thing.

YCC: What does that shift in perspective from, “My city is under attack, I have to do something about this immediately” to, “OK, there’s this bigger fight that’s national, that’s global, there’s international” look like?

Shiney-Ajay: It’s kind of hard, honestly. It’s hard on an emotional level more than anything else, partially because ICE is obviously still here. The surge is over, but there are still 200 or so [ICE] officers here, and you still get alerts about what they’re doing, so it feels hard to pull myself away from what’s going on locally. It’s just a different pace.

There were probably seven weeks straight where I was working for 14 hours every day, and to be back to not doing that is really nice, but pretty weird. I’m like, “Am I supposed to be doing more?”

YCC: What did you learn in terms of tactics and operations and organizing? What will you be taking from that experience as you move forward as an organization?

Shiney-Ajay: One is to be much more clear-eyed about tactics and their effectiveness. And I think there’s been this sense — especially from young people who’ve grown up in an era of like March for Our Lives and the Women’s March and the climate strikes and the uprisings for Black lives, that was basically our formative teenage and early 20s years for a lot of us — of, oh, well, if you could march on the street that often and yet we slide back into fascism a few years later, what does marching really do? I think what Minneapolis really showed is that it actually wasn’t necessarily a skepticism of protest or change in general. It’s a skepticism of tactics that don’t seem like they’re working, which I actually think is a really healthy and helpful skepticism.

In a functional democracy, it kind of makes sense that if you do a few mass marches and you convince your politicians that the public is on one side of an issue, then your politicians will move and they’ll be like, “Well, I want to be where the public is.” And that just isn’t the situation right now, so it makes a lot more sense to explore tactics like what we were doing, like hotel noise demonstrations, where you wake people up in the middle of the night. That sort of tactic certainly starts to make more sense, and also it begins to bring in a lot more people who were skeptical of marches or calling their senator again, who are more interested when it seems like it could concretely, logistically get in the way of ICE’s operations, which is the core logic of non-cooperation that we’re trying to arc towards.

So the question we’re now asking all around the country is: How do we scale this to happen in every city? One thing here that is key is that it’s not even always illegal direct actions. When we think of direct actions, we think of road blockades or office sit-ins or occupations, and those are great. And also, I think part of what we’re looking at are some of the subtle, small ways, like I’m thinking about how in Chile under Pinochet, they did a big worker slowdown where all the cars drove at three miles an hour. Or similarly, we’ve been like, should we organize gas station workers so that when they see ICE roll up in their vehicles, they just cut the gas to certain pumps, which is again, not illegal? That’s within the purview of gas station workers. So it’s both about direct actions, which are key, but also not cooperating in daily ways.

YCC: I’m so glad you mentioned the gas station workers as an example. There have been points of tension between the organized labor movement and the climate movement, so I’m curious about what your relationship is like with organized labor now, and how do you see it continuing or changing or intensifying as you go forward in this newer chapter of the org?

Shiney-Ajay: Organized labor has just always been a key part of how Sunrise has thought about climate policy. It’s part of the intervention we were trying to make with the Green New Deal, of having a labor-forward way to look at how to build climate policy. We talked a lot about climate policy as an attempt to create millions of good-paying, unionized jobs, and the amount of work that it’s actually going to take to decarbonize. I think that remains true, and frankly, as AI takes more and more jobs, being able to articulate the vision of a climate future that has good-paying jobs becomes more and more important. So that’s just one part of the forward-looking vision. I think we can really easily work with a lot of different segments of labor to say, “Look at all the jobs that are gonna be created in this new economy.” That’s one piece.

In terms of organized labor in opposition to authoritarianism and Trump, obviously, different unions are different. In general, what I’ve noticed and what tends to be true historically is it really is often true that students are the leading edge of mass protests and mass strikes because they create the permission structure for other people to follow them. So that’s how we think about it, like, let’s work especially with labor unions that are in relationship with students and young people. The structure of student life, in particular, allows us to often go on student strikes before labor unions are able to organize labor strikes.

I think one of the lessons in Minneapolis is certainly that we have some great, fantastic labor unions here. It also was the momentum of the moment that allowed us to pull off something like the January 23 [mass day of action in Minnesota], and without that momentum, I don’t think it would’ve happened.

YCC: Can I ask how long you have been involved with Sunrise?

Shiney-Ajay: I joined when I was 19, so back in 2017. I became executive director two and a half years ago. I’ve been at it for nine years, which is crazy, but I’m not 30 yet. I and one other person, our political director, are the two who have been around the longest.

YCC: I’m so interested in how your perspective and your political analysis have changed for you since you started. You’ve lived through every Trump era and are still trying to fight against it. How has that impacted you as an activist, as an organizer, as a human?

Shiney-Ajay: Yeah. The moment that Trump was reelected was really difficult, I think, for a lot of us. We felt like we had poured eight years of our life into defeating him once, starting to sort of win some reforms (although they were very imperfect and we knew how much further we had to go, especially on climate). And it just felt so brutal, honestly, to have everything that I had worked for for eight years and like had poured my whole life into be snatched away.

Sunrise has always understood that we need massive transformations of the economy in order to stop the climate crisis. I think that the effort to pass climate legislation under the Biden administration, to me, and I think to a lot of Sunrise, made us realize that we not only need a reworking of our economy, but we also need a reworking of our political system. That, actually, it’s ridiculous that there’s legislation that has like 70, 80% [public] support and we have to fight tooth and nail to get it passed.

I’m like, “That’s just not how democracy is supposed to work.” And I think that felt really, really, really stark. The combination of those two things has made the path out of this moment clearer. We can’t just run a rerun of 2016 through 2020, try and get back to a Democratic trifecta where we’re going to pass one small piece of legislation, and then be back here in four more years.

I really feel very clear-eyed on the level of structural political reform that’s needed to get us out of this. I feel in some ways it makes a lot of sense that a movement of people who were radicalized around climate change decided to tackle authoritarianism, because I think it just is full of the type of people who look at the greatest crisis facing humanity and say like, “OK, we can try and think of a solution to this.” It’s very much in Sunrise’s DNA, you know? We are just like young people who look at a crazy problem and say, “Let’s try and tackle it.”

YCC: What has the reaction been among your membership to this shift in addressing authoritarianism? Are they into the idea of, “OK, we have to think a little bit beyond our original target”?

Shiney-Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. I think if anything, it’s made people engage more with what we are doing. It felt at different points we had to convince people and jump through hoops to explain our campaigns in the last year before we made this shift, and right now it doesn’t feel like that at all. People are knocking down the door trying to join.

I think if anything, talking about political system change as one of the things we need to do after kicking Trump out, the broader structural shifts, has made people want to give more to Sunrise and see the unique value add that Sunrise has because of our focus on climate legislation.

YCC: Given all of this, the brutality of it all, and the beauty of what you saw and are continuing to see in Minneapolis, as the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, what gives you hope to keep doing this work? What keeps you going?

Shiney-Ajay: I really believe that looking back in history, we will look at Minneapolis as a turning point of people realizing how they can beat back the Trump administration in ways that are beyond just marches in the street. Those are important, but not enough. Being part of that historical moment has been really beautiful.

I think people are really brave, and I get struck by that every time I meet new organizers.

Our Sunrise Twin Cities hub started around eight months ago, and it’s run almost entirely by people who have organized for less than a year or less than eight months, and it’s just incredible how hungry they are to learn, how much they’re willing to do things out of their comfort zone, purely motivated out of love for our neighbors and our city and each other and the world we wanna build. When I see how much people are willing to give when they feel like they have a shot at winning, I just am like, “Oh, well, of course I wanna just give my whole life to this.”

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Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in In These Times, The Nation, Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, and many... More by Kim Kelly