Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07)
The Congresswoman, who was joined by Massachusetts State Senator Liz Miranda and ACLU of Massachusetts Executive Director Carol Rose, took questions and discussed her support for our federal workers and immigrant neighbors, her defense of essential programs like Medicaid and Social Security, and more.
Congresswoman Pressley also outlined the key ingredients essential to any successful movement: imagination, strategy, and stamina.
A transcript with highlights from the Congresswoman’s remarks are available below (edited lightly for clarity), and video is available here.
Transcript: At Roxbury Town Hall, Pressley Offers Message of Hope, Vision for Fighting Cruel Musk-Trump Agenda
Roxbury Community College
March 22, 2025
From Rep. Pressley’s Opening Remarks:
It’s good to be home. Look, y’all don’t know how to be anybody else but me, so let me just be transparent and a little vulnerable. As much as I have been looking forward to today to come in here and to be here in community with all of you, I’ve also been unsettled. Unsettled in my spirit, because these are deeply unsettling times, and because I know that so many of you are carrying with you into this room, fear, uncertainty, fear for your children, for your neighbors, for yourselves.
I feel that too in my own life and in my own family, and although it is a deep blessing and honor to be your Congresswoman. It is a tremendous responsibility as well, and as I thought about sharing the space before you today, in light of what we’re facing, I was worried that what I would offer would fall woefully short of what you actually need in this moment, because the people of this district demand and deserve the very best, truly you do.
I wake up every day humbled to serve in Congress in this role. I wake up every day pressing through adversity to do everything I can to do right by this district in ways big and small. I continue, in the midst of the chaos and the cruelty, to choose community, which is why we’re here today.
Now we’re dealing with a hostile administration that seeks to divide us and impose wholesale harm. Daily, there is an executive order or horrifying headline and attacks on vulnerable and marginalized people, some days attacks that reverberate in the lives of every person who calls this country home, but I keep returning to the words of Dr King. “Where do we go from here? Chaos or Community?”
Donald Trump has made it clear that this election was never about improving your quality of life or lowering the cost of your groceries, your rent or your pursuit of higher education. It was always about one thing: power. Gaining power, wielding power, abusing power, and ripping away our hard-won civil rights, our economic freedoms.
They are coming after Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
They are coming after our neighbors in the LGBTQ+ community.
Black folks, they are coming after us. This administration is anti-Blackness on steroids.
They are coming after our immigrant neighbors, undocumented or not.
They are coming after our bodily autonomy.
They are coming after our federal workers who administer essential services to our communities.
Hell, Donald Trump is attacking everything but the one thing he said he would, and that’s the high cost of groceries.
Massachusetts 7th, these are unprecedented times. I don’t know about y’all, I’m ready for some precedented times, but these are unprecedented times in our nation’s history. Because, yes, our democracy is at stake.
Republicans in Congress do not care about how this will hurt the American people, and they are co-conspirators, complicit in the harm.
As your Congresswoman, I promise to continue to fight like hell, because my district and our country depend on it, and you deserve it.
Now, look, I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll work hard every day to find them.
Let me be clear about what we do next. Democrats need to exhaust every lever and tool that is available to us when we have it. I believe we lost this election for so many reasons, but one of the reasons we’re in this situation is because the Democrats move with scared power. When we have it, we don’t use it.
We cannot allow elected officials to squander moments like the leverage we had in the Senate on that government funding vote.
We have to fight with everything we have, and while daunting, we are winning in the courts, and that is why I asked Carol Rose to be here today to relay how essential a tool that is in our resistance and in our defensive strategy.
When an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, is raiding the private information of the American public—that doesn’t sound like a democracy to me.
As a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Republicans have blocked our request to have Elon testify in front of our committee for accountability and transparency—that doesn’t sound like justice to me.
They are more concerned with dragging Democratic mayors to Washington to make a spectacle and instead it reaffirmed what we already knew, that Boston is one of the safest cities in the country, and our mayor is doing us proud.
When Trump is sending ICE to Chelsea, East Boston or Mattapan, demanding our neighbors prove they are in our country legally, and detaining people like Mahmoud Khalil for exercising his first amendment right to protest—that doesn’t sound like freedom to me.
When Trump calls for impeaching a sitting federal judge because one of his executive orders violated the law—that doesn’t sound like democracy to me.
These are instead the acts of a dictator. And what do you meet a dictator with? Defiance.
So indeed, I have been and I will continue to fight back.
From Rep. Pressley’s Closing Remarks
In determining how to go forward, I keep looking back, because we are still very much in the Civil Rights Movement. And so I keep going back to a blueprint laid out for us in the early chapter of the Civil Rights Movement.
And in every successful movement, you need three things, imagination. So we want to do radical work, but we have to still radically dream. We still need a North Star. People were saying to me, why are you still talking about reparations? Why are you still talking about universal childcare? Why are you still talking about paid leave? Why are you still talking about Medicare for All? Because at the end of the day, our argument cannot be just “we ain’t them.”
While we are doing the work of blunting the harms of this hostile administration, in the midst of this hostile government takeover, we still need to advance an affirmative vision for the more equitable and just world we all believe is possible.
So that is why you all need to stay informed and engaged. Before radical work, there is a radical dream. We still need a North Star. So you need imagination.
The second thing you need is strategy. And we have to be innovative and nimble, and look, the rhetoric is hitting different, the policies are hitting different, we have to move different. We have to be disruptive of the status quo way of things that we’ve always done. So we have to be nimble and innovative in our strategy.
And this is no easy task y’all, because the Republicans have this massive communications ecosystem that billionaires are funding. So we are out-matched. We are trying to build it in real time, but social media is the new news. So we have to get into all of these spaces.
So imagination, strategy, and here’s the hardest essential ingredient to a successful movement, stamina. I need stamina from all of you, and I know that is challenging when you are fearful, when you are worried, when you are overwhelmed, when faith is shallow and boycotts are short lived, but we need stamina.
So those are the three things I would ask you to keep with you. And get involved. Look, get to know your neighbors, y’all. These are going to be some challenging times. You don’t know who you’re going need to borrow toilet tissue from. Or food or anything else.
I’m serious. A number of people are starting to initiate having, you know, old school conversations in living rooms and organizing in that way, that’s what we’re going to have to do in this moment.
And then finally, I would say this, not only is the challenge before us overwhelming and daunting, y’all feel like you have to fix everything. I know I feel that responsibility and that stressor as well, but all you have to do is bring what your unique gift is.
Some people are going to pick up a microphone, some people are going to pick up a lawmaking pen. Some people are going to spit a rhyme or a bone. Some people are going to lead the march. Some people are going to make the signs for the people in the march. Some people are going to pack the food and make the food for people in the march. Somebody’s going to be doing the production and effect so we can make sure we’re reaching more people.
All you have to do is bring your unique gift to this moment. But you have to bring it. You have to bring it, because we are not going to get out of this just with 436 people that have a comma and a title after their name.
It’s going to take all of us, and I’ll close here. Cecile Richards, I don’t know if all of you know who that is. A personal shero of mine, daughter of the great Texas governor, Ann Richards, former head of Planned Parenthood, an incredible champion and leader in the work of reproductive rights and freedom.
She recently died from brain cancer, and when she was in the midst of that fight, she was still showing up. She was still resisting, she was still agitating, she was still organizing. And someone came up to her and said, what are you doing here?
And she said, the question will be asked in the future, what did you do? What did you do when everything was at stake for our country? And the only acceptable answer is everything that I could.
Thank you everyone for being here today.