Join us for our upcoming statewide meeting on December 13!
Babies, Budget Cuts and Bold-Faced Racism: The Resurrection of Eugenics Before Our Eyes
Why are tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel obsessed with babies, IQ, gender and race? How has an ideological system as disgraced as Eugenics returned to mainstream discourse? What role does it play in the rise of authoritarianism? How far does it go, and how do we fight it?
Hear from speaker Professor Johnny Eric Williams, Professor of Sociology at Trinity College and author of Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics
Forum will be followed by a meeting to discuss and vote on upcoming actions including local door-to-door canvassing walks to build the movement to defend our rights in CT.
What: Monthly Statewide CT CLDC Forum and Meeting
Where: Elmwood Community Center, Laurel Hall - 1106 New Britain Ave. West Hartford, CT 06110
When: Saturday, December 13th at 2PM
Email ct.cld2025@pm.me for link to join virtually!
Can’t make it on December 13th?
Stayed tuned for a new forum followed by a meeting to vote on action steps every month of 2026!
The people decided
On November 8th, 2025, in Hartford, over 200 people came together to learn from each other, collaborate and connect, and decide on our priorities for 2026.
Ratified Action Proposals:
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Mr. Isma’il Abdus Sabur remains incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.
While the justice system is imagined as an instrument of good, it oftentimes falters. The Innocence Project - a leading group in rectifying wrongful convictions - states that over 20 individuals have been exonerated in Connecticut due to new evidence or DNA testing. However, Connecticut's legal system recently introduced a “newly discovered evidence” prong that complicates the process of proving actual innocence.
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To accomplish our plan of growing capacity, we ratified the following:
Holding monthly statewide meetings with virtual option.
Upcoming meeting Dec 13.Hold monthly local meetings for training, discussion, and door-knocking prep.
Start local weekly door-knocking.
Continue building defense campaigns, including ongoing campaigns for Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Tom Alter.
Rush hour pickets for defense campaigns.
Build civil liberties contingents at larger demonstrations.
Organize toward May Day 2026.
Free Abdus
Mr. Isma’il Abdus Sabur is a father, son, husband, and hard-working community member whose life was upended by a wrongful conviction in 2014.
He attended a gathering where a conflict broke out after the victim’s sons arrived and started a fight. Mr. Abdus Sabur did not take part in that altercation. After the fight ended, the victim’s sons went to get their father and returned to the scene armed with knives, a machete, and swords. In the chaos that followed, an attempted home invasion occurred, and the victim was fatally wounded.
A few days later, a warrant was issued for Mr. Abdus Sabur’s arrest. He voluntarily turned himself in and was later wrongfully convicted after trial.
After serving more than a decade in prison, Mr. Abdus Sabur sought post-conviction relief through a habeas corpus petition, presenting new and credible proof that he was not responsible for the incident—including a full confession from the actual perpetrator, which was corroborated and deemed credible by the habeas court.
Despite meeting two parts of the three-prong test for actual innocence—
- Clear and convincing evidence -MET
- Evidence that would have changed the outcome of trial -MET
- Newly discovered
Mr. Abdus Sabur remains incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.
Join the Campaign to Defend Tom Alter
On November 20th, Kelly Damphousse, President of the Texas State University and The Texas State Board of Regents, unanimously voted to fire Tom Alter, a highly respected, tenured Labor Historian!!
Why? Because Tom dared to his use his supposedly protected Constitutional Rights to Free Speech! We have to stand with Tom because he’s standing up for all of us!
What happened?
Tom spoke at a conference regarding socialist politics on his own time, from his own home, on a Sunday morning. The decision to dismiss him was based solely on false accusations made by a self declared fascist. He spoke September 7th and was summarily fired three days later suddenly leaving him with no income or benefits. He received no due process. Tom is a tenured professor who has fought for social justice his whole life. Like many other professors across the US he’s being censored for using his First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Why is Tom Alter’s case an important one to form a defense campaign around?
Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse is carrying out a politically motivated attack on a socialist and a union member. This follows Damphousse’s racist and Islamophobic actions on campus. Damphousse’s language in his public firing of Tom Alter of “inciting violence and criminal activity” mirrors the language used by Trump and other far-right politicians around the world in going after left-wing and even some liberal organizations. Alter was a tenured professor who was summarily fired with no due process through a social media post. His firing ignored Texas State guidelines for removing tenured faculty, 85 years of academic norms established by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), broke Texas law governing tenure, and violated federal Constitutional rights guaranteed in the 1st and 14th Amendment.
Allowing Damphousse to get away with this firing weakens and chips away at two of our most important Constitutional Amendments whose significance goes way beyond the interests of professors and affects us all, especially the most vulnerable sections of society. We must stand the line and defend our basic democratic rights and prevent further inroads on these rights.
How can one case affect all of us?
As Tom Alter has said from the beginning of this campaign, “This did not start with me and it does not end with me.” Instead of picking off an individual, Damphousse has ignited a movement for free speech. Membership in the Texas State Chapters of AAUP and the Texas State Employees Union has doubled since Alter’s firing as workers unite to defend academic freedom and democratic rights across the state.
We are currently living in a time when history has called upon us to stand up for our democratic rights or lose them to an ever-creeping fascist current in today’s political reality. However, there is joy in resistance. The support that Alter’s public campaign has garnered from unions, democratic rights organization, and concerned people and activists around the world, demonstrates that we must and can win this struggle for a truly democratic and egalitarian society. Through love and solidarity, we will win.
What can I do to help?
Share information about Tom Alter’s Campaign with your family, union members, community members and friends. Plan to attend Tom Alter’s speeches when he tours in 2026 to promote this campaign to defend free speech and fight back against all current repression of activists, organizers, union members, and our communities!
Donate today! Tom and his family need our financial support as he fights to be reinstated after this wrongful termination. The campaign must raise the remainder of its funding goals before the end of 2025 in order to continue this fight.
Give what you can to make this important defense campaign a model for every civil liberty fight that is being waged in this country. Please help us help Tom as he fights to pay his family’s basic monthly living expenses, housing, health insurance and groceries. Additionally the battle to win Tom’s professorship back will take time. He has committed to spearheading the Movement For Free Speech, not just for himself, but for all of us!
WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN!
WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN!
UPDATE: Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago is FREE! On October 1st after a national campaign to protect and defend her rights, Xóchitl walked out of ICE Detention in Texas. To learn more click here.
What happened?
Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, a beloved community member, DACA recipient and long-time community organizer, was detained by Border Patrol on Sunday August 3, 2025 at an airport in El Paso, TX.
Xóchitl was confronted by two Border Patrol agents around 4:00 AM MST as she was about to board a domestic flight for work. Despite presenting a valid DACA work authorization card (offering proof of her protection from deportation), Border Patrol abducted and detained her without warrant or cause.
She has been transferred to a processing center in El Paso—and we must demand her immediate release! Xóchitl is a lifelong community organizer who has fought for the dignity and respect of the immigrant community for over a decade. She has made a profound impact on her loved ones and community members from Florida to Texas and beyond. Now, we need to show up for her!
Xóchitl's detention is the latest example of the Trump administration's escalating, inhumane attacks against immigrant communities.
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URGENTE: Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, miembro querida de la comunidad, beneficiaria del programa DACA y organizadora comunitaria desde hace muchos años, fue detenida por ICE el domingo 3 de agosto de 2025 en el aeropuerto de El Paso, Texas.
Xóchitl fue cuestionada por dos agentes fronterizos alrededor de las 4:00 AM MST cuando se disponía a abordar un vuelo nacional para ir a trabajar. A pesar de presentar una tarjeta de autorización de trabajo DACA válida que la protege contra la deportación en los Estados Unidos, agentes fronterizos la secuestraron y detuvieron sin orden judicial ni causa justificada.
Xóchitl ha sido trasladada a un centro de procesamiento en El Paso- ¡Necesitamos demandar su liberación! Xóchitl lleva más de una década trabajando por la dignidad y el respeto de la comunidad inmigrante. Ha tenido un impacto profundo y poderoso en muchos amigos y miembros de la comunidad, desde Florida hasta Texas y más allá. ¡Ahora, tenemos que apoyarla!
La detención de Xochitl es solo el ejemplo más reciente de los ataques inhumanos de la administración de Trump en contra de nuestras comunidades inmigrantes.
Highlighting individual cases like Xochitl Santiago’s, Mahmoud Khalil’s, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s can help focus our resistance to attacks on immigrant communities and our protected civil liberties.
Click photos for updates. We must continue to fight for each and every one of us.
AN INJURY TO ONE IS
AN INJURY TO ALL
Now is the time to fight back and stand up for our rights.
The Trump administration is waging an escalating war on our most basic rights in order to silence its critics and turn back more than a century of gains made by working and oppressed people.
In a mere 6 months the federal government has:
Abducted, jailed and/or deported an unknown number of students for exercising free speech rights
Begun confiscating passports held by trans, non-binary and intersex people
Sent 238 immigrants - at least 50 of whom have visas - to an overseas concentration camp without trials, hearings or charges
Stripped unionization rights from over 1 million union workers
Requested 20,000 national guard troops to conduct mass deportations, and proposed suspending habeas corpus
We are at a crossroads. We can hunker down, watching as our neighbors and co-workers are terrorized into silence and inaction, hoping this will somehow be the wiser choice. Or we can take this moment to create new connections with each other and strengthen old ones to build a movement capable of turning back this wave of repression - a movement that draws on labor’s ageless maxim: