A Happier Mother's Day for *Every* Mother (5/8/26)
Bail them out and help them feed their kids. Plus: a De-ICE Citizens day of action announcement, Congress comes back, letting Democratic leaders know we're serious and more
☎️ We’re going to shake up the Senate - phonebank this weekend for Graham Platner tonight, James Talarico tomorrow or Dan Osborn Sunday! Plus make calls for the Georgia Supreme Court all weekend! ☎️
TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ
Get moms out on bail, help families in Dilley get clean drinking water, write cards to mothers in detention, demand Congress not cut nutrition aid for women and children this Mother’s Day
De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition calls for protests at branches nationwide June 6th
Help defeat the Maryland Senate president who saved a Republican congressional seat
Join an organizing call on pressuring sheriffs Monday at 7PM ET, check out new tools for engaging these officials
Congress’ agenda for May: Trump’s ballroom and billions for ICE and CBP, plus more debate on the surveillance state
If you have questions, comments, and especially submissions for actions, please email us at roganslisttips@gmail.com!
The folks at Blue Turn Indivisible submitted this reel from their May Day protest in Mountain View, California. We love to see this sort of energy! Please keep sending submissions to roganslisttips@gmail.com.
FREE AND FEED AMERICA’S MOMS THIS MOTHER’S DAY
Mother’s Day 2026 is almost upon us – if you haven’t gotten a present and card yet, consider yourself reminded. But while a lot of us will be celebrating with our own wonderful mothers (love you Mom!), for entirely too many families this is going to be a very bitter holiday. Countless moms are going to spend this day locked away from their children, and many more will be striving for normalcy while locked up with them in places like the concentration camp at Dilley. Let’s do what we can to honor them this Mother’s Day, too. Some ideas include:
Helping moms caught up in our criminal justice system and too poor to get out on bail reunite with their kids. Since 2017, the National Bailout Fund, a collective of abolitionist organizations and activists who focus on pretrial detention and mass incarceration, has celebrated this day with a #FreeBlackMamas fundraiser. They’ve helped bring over 1,000 moms and caregivers home to their loved ones. 💵🫱🏻🫲🏿 Let’s join the cause and consider making a donation here. We can also check out this year’s partner organizations to see if there is one local to us that we can get more involved in, so we can expand our support beyond Mother’s Day. 💵🫱🏾🫲🏼
Helping moms in Dilley get their kids safe drinking water. Families detained at our nation’s concentration camp for kids are struggling to meet basic survival needs. The water is contaminated, the kids are getting sick, and they’re not able to get proper medical care. Moms can buy bottled water at commissary – for $30 a case. 💵🚼 The folks at Each Step Home are holding a Mother’s Day fundraiser to fill commissary accounts of the Dilley moms so they can access clean water, food their kids will actually eat, medicine, toiletries, and phone calls to lawyers and loved ones. Let’s do our part and chip in here. 💵🚼
Make sure Dilley moms know we see them even if we can’t contribute. For those of us not in a position to donate, the folks at Children’s Rights have a simpler action – collecting cards to share with those locked up so they know the world has not forgotten them. They’re aiming to gather at least 1,200 by Sunday. ✍️ We can send or upload a letter, card, poem, lyric we love, a drawing, or just some kind words here and the Children’s Rights attorneys will make sure our words reach the moms inside. ✍️
Fight against cuts to food assistance for expectant and new mothers and their kids. Republicans will be tripping over themselves to pay tribute to America’s moms this weekend and hope no one notices that they’re actively trying to stop them from getting fruits and vegetables. They’ve proposed a $200 million cut to WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) which would slash food assistance for 5.4 million pregnant women, mothers of newborns and their children. 🗣️ Let’s send them a message using this email tool letting them know a real happy Mother’s Day would include full funding for food on the table.🗣️
NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION AGAINST CONCENTRATION CAMP BANKER JUNE 6TH
More than half the immigrants currently in ICE detention are being held in facilities run by CoreCivic and The GEO Group, and they’re disproportionately targeted with violence by staff. Nine of America’s largest financial institutions have chosen not to do business with them . Citizens Bank has instead deepened their relationship with the private prison companies, providing them with half-a-billion in financing… each.
A growing movement is emerging to draw attention to the bank’s complicity and urge depositors to close their accounts. The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition has already gotten more than $1.5 million pulled from Citizens from institutional actors, and they’re ramping up their pressure. 🪧 On Saturday, June 6th, they’re holding a national day of action with protests at Citizens branches across the country. Let’s join a protest near us here or consider organizing one of our own using this toolkit. 🪧
We can also find more information here and more ways to get involved in this fight here.
THE “MOST HATED DEMOCRAT IN AMERICA” COST US A HOUSE SEAT
Just eight days after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Tennessee took advantage of the lack of safeguards against racially discriminatory gerrymandering and passed a new congressional map. They’ve eliminated the only remaining Black majority district, splitting the city of Memphis three ways and connecting Shelby County with rural areas hundreds of miles to the east. Not a single Republican bothered to speak in defense of these lines, which are intended to give the state a 9-0 GOP House delegation.
This sort of speed and ruthlessness is damaging for our democracy. It also provides the forces of authoritarianism and white nationalism a crucial advantage is securing power, and we need to take it away from them. Unfortunately, not every Democratic leader understands that. In Maryland, despite pressure from Governor Wes Moore, his House counterparts and a wide group of his caucus, Senate President Bill Ferguson refused to even bring a new map up for a vote. In the process, he saved the seat of Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, recently spotted insisting that cutting food aid to expectant mothers and newborns was necessary for deficit reduction.
Ferguson’s stonewalling against the new political reality has earned him a primary challenge from veteran, former teacher and small business owner Bobby LaPin. In addition to holding the Senate president accountable for his failures on redistricting and his long stall of a ban on 287(g) agreements, LaPin is also running a people-powered campaign, focusing on fair wages, affordability and quality public services and not taking a single corporate dime. On June 23rd, we have a chance to help Bobby unseat “the most hated Democrat in America” and send a clear message to our elected officials that a refusal to fight will not be tolerated. 🗳️ Let’s do what we can to support him! We can sign up to volunteer for his campaign here, consider a donation here, or help boost him on Facebook or Instagram. 🗳️
If we live in one of the eight blue states where we could potential redistricting Republicans out of the House, let’s also be sure to reach out to our party leaders and urge them to do whatever is legally necessary to rebalance power, ASAP. We can find calls and email language here.
SHERIFFS ARE A PRESSURE POINT IN THE DEPORTATION MACHINE
Right now, the Trump administration is leaning hard on sheriffs across the country to become force multipliers for ICE – renting out jail beds to hold detained immigrants, following 48-hour “detainer” requests that have no basis in civil law, and signing 287(g) agreements that turn local deputies into de facto immigration agents. Most sheriffs are going along with it. But they don’t have to.
Many sheriffs are elected officials, and as such they respond to constituent pressure just like other elected officials – except with fewer constituents, it takes fewer of us to have influence.
Folks at the Workers Circle are encouraging us to build up the pressure on our sheriffs not to cooperate with ICE. They’re holding a call at 7PM ET Monday to talk about how best to successfully move these folks, with updates from community leaders who’ve succeeded in doing so and a new organizer toolkit – including strategies for escalation with unresponsive electeds - we can check out here. Let’s sign up to join them!
WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU CONGRESS IS COMING BACK
Our elected officials will be back from recess next week and will return to the hard work of… whatever it is Mike Johnson and John Thune think they’re doing right now. Their immediate priorities will look familiar to regular readers, but it may be worthwhile to welcome them back to D.C. with full inboxes and voicemails.
At the top of the agenda for the rest of this month will be the budget reconciliation bill, where they will be attempting to fund ICE and CBP for the first of Trump’s term. Late Monday night the key Senate committees released their first stab at the text, which will cost $72 billion. It’s $38.2 billion for ICE and $26 billion for the CBP… on top of what remains of the slush fund from the MAGA Murder Budget. They’ve also included $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” to the Secret Service, which senators insisted was NOT for Trump’s ballroom project and the White House immediately made clear they were planning to spend on Trump’s ballroom project. We Build Progress has a quick guide to the process here, and they are anticipating committee work this week and a full Senate vote the week of May 18th or 25th. The goal remains getting this done by the self-imposed deadline of June 1st.
🗣️ Democrats are planning on forcing a floor vote on the ballroom funds during the amendment process, as long as the Senate parliamentarian doesn’t strip it out first. We can find scripts from 5Calls to demand Congress keep our money from going to Trump’s vanity project here. 🗣️
🗣️ Even amidst the continual revelations of ICE violence in the camps and on our streets, it will be a tough lift getting enough Republican votes on board to stop another massive injection of cash into the deportation machine without a single restraints on Trump’s masked thugs. Let’s put in the fight regardless. We can find call tools for GOP senators here and GOP reps here, plus an email tool here and one for Dems here. 🗣️
Also on the agenda: after the first fully partisan Banking Committee vote on a Federal Reserve nominee in their history, Trump’s puppet Kevin Warsh is likely to get a confirmation vote to be chairman this coming week. With Thom Tillis’ wildly naïve surrender in response to the DoJ’s pinky promise to stop criminalizing opposition to interest rate cuts, the GOP likely has the votes to get him through. 🗣️ But if we have a GOP senator (or John Fetterman) and haven’t registered our opposition yet, let’s take this last chance to do so – scripts and language here or send this message by texting SIGN PWOQTZ to 50409. 🗣️
Congress has given itself another extension of warrantless wiretapping authority (“Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”), this time until June 12th. The House’s effort to preserve it for three years without warrant requirements on backdoor searches or closing the data center loophole, shamefully advanced with the help of 42 Democrats, included language banning the Federal Reserve from establishing a “central bank digital currency” to keep right wingers on board, and the Senate was unwilling to accept it. Negotiations will continue, and we’ll continue to demand they rein in the surveillance state. 🗣️ We can use this script from Jess Craven, especially if we’re repped by one of those 42 Dems. 🗣️
The Farm Bill has advanced to the Senate without the Cancer Gag Act but with the cuts to food assistance still preserved. We do not anticipate action soon on this legislation, and senators will have changes. But this legislation could have been stopped in the House if every Democrat had stood firm in demanding SNAP be restored – and 14 of them didn’t. 🗣️ Let’s make sure we’re all informing our senators we want to see a no vote on the Farm Bill without provisions to put food on the table for millions of Americans – we can find scripts here. 🗣️
Lastly, Democrats are continuing to tee up war powers votes on Iran in both houses. Multiple Republicans who had fallen in line behind Trump on the Iran War had indicated they might reconsider their position after the 60-day mark, and Susan Collins actually moved in the last debate before recess. We’re going to make them put up or shut up. 🗣️ Let’s demand an end to this pointless, failed war – we can find language and an email tool to use here, and text SIGN PRWMIS to 50409 to send this message directly via Resistbot.
👀 KEEPING AN EYE ON… 👀
NEWS: Kamala Harris reportedly supports release of DNC autopsy on 2024 election - tell the DNC we do too
NEWS: Heatmap reports at least 20 data center projects canceled due to public pushback in first quarter of 2026 - organizing guide to take them on here
NEWS: Trump’s deportation forces harmed at least 79 children with tear gas, pepper spray
NEWS: LA Taco tracks every death linked to immigration enforcement under Trump
NEWS: Hantavirus outbreak raises concerns about impact of Trump cuts on pandemic readiness
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick unable to explain reasons for visit to Epstein’s island - tell Congress to demand he resign or be removed
The Supreme Court has paused Fifth Circuit ruling attempting to cut off access to mifepristone by mail - let’s keep countering the disinformation and ensuring everyone knows how to exercise their reproductive rights
Looking for ways to get engaged in the midterms? Here’s a full list!
We can’t let anyone forget the kids in Dilley - join the #ReadThemHome campaign and organize a stuffed animal drop-off May 20th
Public Citizen identifies 446 hospitals at risk thanks to the MAGA murder budget, let’s make sure folks in our community know we’re in danger and who’s to blame
Solidarity with striking workers in Independence as they enter Week Five on the picket line, push local lawmakers to stand with them
The first rent strike in almost five decades is underway in Montana - donate to support their strike fund