Rebecca Solnit’s latest collection of essays, The Beginning Comes After the End, was published on Tuesday, arrived in my mailbox on Wednesday, and by the time my flight touched down in SLouis on Thursday,¹ I had consumed it. Writing and reading is often about timing, and the timing of this book coincides with what, in my own thinking, I have begun describing as something of a golden age of immigration data science that preceded the current Trump administration but has been rapidly accelerated by the willingness of Americans across the country to develop new localized, bottom-up strategies for documenting, exposing, and resisting mass deportation. I’d like to work out some of those meandering observations for you here in conversation with Solnit’s latest book, which I highly recommend.
The Beginning Comes After the End begins by situating our current period of what political scientists call “democratic backsliding” within the context of tremendous social and political progress. The cornerstone of this analysis is the idea embodied in a quote by Antonio Gramsci that some of you are surely familiar with: “The old world is dying. The new is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.” The national (and indeed, global) resurgence of authoritarianism and its corresponding destruction of laws, norms, and institutions should be understood, according to Solnit, not as the failure of progress but as a retaliatory backlash to progress. For the past year, it has been easy to focus on shadows rather than the light, because in a world of ever-multiplying monsters, sometimes defense is our only option. But Solnit’s characteristically undulating thesis is that, if we step back and look for it, evidence that we are living through a period of tremendous progress is all around.
I will tell you something that I typically only say to people I trust enough to forgive me for saying it: I generally abhor the idea of hope. I am unmoved by the notion that things will get inevitably better if we simply have a positive outlook and I am made uneasy by the obsession that we Americans seem to have with bypassing grief, refusing to sit with tragedy, and skipping toward a silver lining that promises to anesthetize us from reality. I am occasionally asked, “Where do you find hope in all the darkness?”—a question that actually makes very little sense to me, since the only hope I can muster is, by definition, not hope, but only praxis: grounded action in iterative dialogue with critical thought. This is not simply a philosophical position, but a conclusion informed by personal experience. Things may get better, but they may not. It feels more honest to me to embrace the multiplicity of future worlds rather than be surprised by it. No teleological arc of history bending inevitably toward justice for me, thank you. We have to do the work.
Rebecca Solnit has become a writer of hope in recent years. Not the kind of hope detached from work, but hope that comes into view when we understand the work that came before us and take responsibility for the work in front of us now. As I heard someone once say, the arc of history does not bend toward justice, but if we work together in solidarity, we may bend it. I am a fan of Solnit’s earlier and less recognized work. Her shorter essayistic series published by Haymarket will never quite compare to the genre-defying masterpiece of As Eve Said to the Serpent or the perfection of every single sentence in A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby. But what makes her recent books eminently inspiring and practical is her ability to bring a writerly perspective to diagnosing our contemporary problematics and to offer not a solitary solution or simplistic chant, but to bring readers into a chorus of ideas that open up new possibilities for thinking and for action. Solnit’s version of hope is potentiality without delusion—and that’s something I can get behind.
As I have said many times now, the main difference between the first Trump administration and the second, when it comes to immigration enforcement, primarily has to do with the surge in, shall we say, “politically creative” (and creatively cruel) enforcement projects that go far beyond simply intensifying the existing enforcement system. We knew there would more arrests; we could not have fully anticipated that two American citizens would be shot in the street by immigration officers. We knew there would be more detention; we could not have fully anticipated the repurposing of Amazon warehouses to hold upwards of 10,000 people like packages. We knew there would be more deportations; we could not have fully imagined that our government would disappear people into CECOT or deport so many people to countries they have never known. Trump’s disregard for the law is not new, but the wholesale disregard for federal court orders by federal agencies at this scale would have been difficult to fathom just a year ago.
Despite these shadows and the monsters that emerge from them, there is light in the world. Did you know that Nepal held elections yesterday? Just six months ago, Nepalese youth, frustrated with corruption, high unemployment, and draconian Internet controls, took to the streets in what was quickly branded as a Gen Z Revolution and successfully topped the country’s leaders in less than a week—but not before dozens of young people were killed by police firing into the crowds. The self-organized youth quickly chose Sushila Karki as the interim prime minister through an poll on online community platform Discord, then returned to the streets to help clean up the damage that had been caused by the uprising. Yesterday’s elections were a next step toward a more democratic Nepal—not the first and not the last, but sign of progress and a reminder that change is possible.
When we compare ourselves to an idealized version of the past written with the narrative benefits of hindsight, we forget that all change is incremental change. What happened in Nepal was one of the most astounding political transformations of my lifetime—yet it is doubtful that a single protest or a single election will undo the institutional arrangements that incentivize grift, fix an economy afloat in the turbulent seas of global capitalism, or foreclose all possibilities of digital oppression. What comes next—and I’m not just talking about Nepal—must be commitment to democratic vigilance, a willingness to return to the streets when needed, but also the largely invisible work of social and institutional change that doesn’t necessitate direct political action and all of the potential for latent violence that it can unleash.
Somewhere between the plane and the room in which I spoke at St. Louis University, I scratched into my notebook, “Things are worse than you know but more malleable than you imagine.” I intended to include it in my opening remarks to a talk that was mostly about the work that I and many others have been doing to expose the facts about immigration enforcement under this administration and all administrations before and after this one. Nepal is not the only country that struggles with corruption; recent investigations by Project Salt Box suggest that the reason the Trump administration paid $105 million for a warehouse in western Maryland to house immigrants, when that facility is only valued at $70 million, might have something to do with relationships between the investments firm that bought up the distressed property and people within the Trump administration itself.
Project Salt Box may not be in the streets, but they are part of an uprising just the same, an uprising of citizens across the country who are self-organizing to monitor, analyze, and expose the mundane mechanics of ICE’s dangerous immigrant detention system that has already claimed the lives of ten people this year. By carefully reading public records—mostly contracts, deeds, property documents, procurement orders—Project Salt Box has unearthed, like digital archeologists, information about ICE’s warehouse plans and produced a public tracker and quickly attracted well-deserved national attention for their work.
At an event at Red Emma’s Book Store in Baltimore the other day, their team of four sat in front of a packed house, holding the microphone like it was a grenade. They took turns apologizing for not being public speakers and emphasized that they are not experts, they are just normal people who wanted to do something and what they could do is use their skill sets, with some division of labor between them, and sort out this puzzle of ICE detention. What they have accomplished using digital sleuthing is making the government more transparent and empowering more Americans to understand what ICE is doing in their backyard. Incremental change, powered by a lot of boring work, contains the seeds of deeper systemic change if we take these lessons and demand new laws that force agencies like ICE to be more transparent.
Lucy Behrendt, founder of Abide in Love, told a similar story during a panel discussion last night hosted by the Ashrei Foundation. Lucy is not a lifelong organizer in the immigrant rights movement—she’s a math teacher who, a year ago, began providing direct support to the growing number of immigrants detained in Missouri. In April 2025, Brayan Garzón-Rayo was compelled to, and was somehow physically able to, take his own life while in ICE custody at Phelps County Jail. After this, Lucy decided that no one in Missouri should go through ICE detention alone. Soon, no one will. Abide in Love’s ballooning network of volunteers have nearly covered all of the facilities in the state, most of them in rural communities, so that people in detention can get connected to information, resources, attorneys, and their families, as well as care packages, money for phone calls, and often just someone to listen. Lucy described herself as an example of someone who “has no experience doing this,” but her story reinforces a quote by Mike Davis which Solnit includes in her book: “This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped with all the tools it needs. … I’ve seen social miracles in my life, the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle.”
One of the fundamental contradictions of justifying “mass deportation” as an attempt to protect “us” from “them,” “citizens” from “immigrants,” is that while some people apparently accept this imaginary distinction as true, many Americans reject this project entirely, as if to say, “we never asked for this false sense of protection in our name.” A recent viral debate on social media began with the question, “Would women feel safer finding themselves alone in the woods with a bear or a man?” An apparent majority of women quickly said “bear,” much to the predictable outrage of men who, ironically, proved the point by their response. Similarly, many citizens are now organizing for protection against the very force—ICE—that purports to protect citizens. Under the misapprehension that Americans everywhere have internalized Stephen Miller’s frightened, enfeebled, and resoundingly white view of the world, this administration seems shocked to find that, given the similar question—”Would you feel safer encountering an ICE officer or an immigrant”?—many Americans would choose the immigrant.
Mass deportation is only possible if people are convinced that it has nothing to do with them. This is part of a broader project that Solnit describes in a chapter on reactive forces that actively promote disconnection and isolationism. What climate denialism, resource extractivism, and mass consumerism all have in common is a refusal to accept the interconnectedness of our lives. The idea that how we produce, consume, and pollute might all affect other people—and therefore our behavior should be informed or even regulated with this information in mind—is at odds with the individualistic notion that I should get to do whatever I want, accrue all benefits to myself, and externalize the damage to other people in other places. The fact that detention centers are often located in rural areas is part of this project: it is easier to believe that we aren’t morally obligated to people we cannot see. But rural places are not uninhabited and the people who live there have their own agency. Lucy, and others like her across the country, are refusing to accept that mass deportation has nothing to do with her, especially when it means that a detention system that is killing two people a week on average is located in her community.
In the book that preceded her new one and with which it is intimately entangled, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit wrote, “a disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.” I don’t know if anything is possible, but I know that much is possible when we decide to step out and walk an untread path, pulled forward into the unknown by a sense of purpose, courage, and just enough visibility to take another step or two in what we hope will someday, retrospectively, be understood as the right direction.
A friend recently gave me a book by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, which included one of my favorite poems, Caminante no hay camino. Caminante is a simple yet elegant meditation on the fact that our life is not a path we follow, but a path we leave behind, and in one of those literary coincidences, Solnit mentions this poem in her opening chapter. Machado’s lesson feels applicable today: by the time we see the paths of our lives, we cannot revisit them or change them; we can only keep moving forward. English translations struggle to capture the resonances between caminante and camino in Machado’s title, forced to choose between “Traveler, There Is No Road” and “Wayfarer, There Is No Way”—both clunky and inelegant, but trying to capture the idea that we are all travelers without itineraries.
We are living in a time without playbooks or itineraries, but we are not without compasses. Solnit encourages us to rely on the compass that is our deep interconnection—interconnection between each other, between us and our environment, between our collective contemporary and our collective past—to make our way forward together. We are living through the end of many things, and I believe we should grieve those things lost. But we are also living through the birth of many new things, and if we work together, we might bring a new world not only into sharper focus but into reality. We are living through many ends, but each of those ends might also be another beginning.