Winning high-stakes fights against powerful opponents like Avelo, an airline working with ICE, requires undermining their key pillars of support.
By Andrew Willis Garces and Christi Clark
On the surface, the pro-immigrant activists who took to the streets in Connecticut last month looked like every other recent march against Trump’s deportation machine: a multiracial crowd of all ages carrying witty signs and chanting. Their target was the commercial airline Avelo, which has proposed operating as an ICE subcontractor to carry out deportation flights.
What made this protest different, however, is what happened next: The group New Haven Immigrants Coalition and its allies went beyond protesting to directly attacking Avelo’s key “pillars of support” in Connecticut. Like any public company, Avelo is effectively a Jenga tower — if several key pillars upholding the company are removed, the tower falls.
For starters, they began working to undermine support for the company among elected officials. They called and met with lawmakers who had sponsored an airline fuel tax subsidy — worth around $150,000 annually to the company — to urge them to let it expire. They also worked with coalition partners to urge the state’s attorney general to consider investigating Avelo.
The TRUST Act Now Coalition advocated for stregthening the TRUST Act during a public hearing
on March 19. (Instagram/New Haven Immigrants Coalition)
Alongside other immigrant groups, they organized to update the state’s existing immigrant protection law, the TRUST Act, to penalize any company doing business with ICE. On May 27, the expanded TRUST Act passed the Connecticut State Senate, and is now heading to the governor’s desk. Meanwhile, the fuel tax subsidy has been left out of next year’s budget. These might be the first solid movement victories against a Trump-enabling corporation.
At the same time, Connecticut activists have worked to undermine other pillars as well, attacking the company’s public image with protests at other airports and an online petition earning local and national news coverage. Yet another obvious pillar — the company’s workforce — is also starting to withdraw its support. Avelo’s flight attendants have become important whistleblowers, serving as the primary sources on a ProPublica investigation into deportation flights. Their union has also openly opposed staffing ICE flights. They could demand the right to refuse to staff them as part of a new labor contract currently being negotiated with Avelo.
The success of this unfolding campaign against Avelo is a reminder that it’s time for movements to evolve their strategies — particularly against corporate and institutional targets like universities. Instead of channeling outrage, the goal should be to focus on creating a crisis for key decisionmakers. Campaigns that have won against the most “hardened” targets have almost always targeted multiple pillars of support in order to force decisionmakers to rethink their policies.
As just one example, starting in the 1980s, the SEIU launched the Justice for Janitors campaign against Fortune 500 real estate firms looking for the cheapest way to clean their downtown office towers. The company CEOs at the time acted as if only increasing their share price mattered, not paying living wages.
Since they did not respond to traditional protests, the campaign began to unionize the low-wage service workers employed by the cleaning contractors. Janitors also went after other pillars, including the property tax subsidies the companies received from local city councils. This caused their tax bills to go up.
When the companies wanted to remodel or construct new office buildings, they tried to interfere with building permits. They caused a scene at the social clubs and in the neighborhoods where the executives lived. If they belonged to a religious community, the group had religious leaders reach out to ask them to do better. And in cities like Washington, D.C., they waged public relations campaigns showing how paying poverty wages had an impact on the city’s safety net.
After decades of organizing, they won higher pay and benefits for over 150,000 janitors in cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Denver.
But we need not look only to past campaigns for lessons. Tesla Takedown is another clear highlight of the last three months. There aren’t any obvious examples of spontaneous mobilizations eroding so much shareholder value in a public company in so short a period of time.
Still, it’s worth asking: What if the campaign went beyond protests and targeted multiple pillars propping up Tesla? Local groups that have effectively “adopted” Tesla dealerships could ramp up the pressure by looking into state and local tax breaks and zoning rules, and calling for investigations into whether they are complying with labor, health, safety and other regulations. Organizers could also look into whether it’s possible for local governments and state legislatures to penalize auto manufacturers whose founders have advocated cutting federal contracts and facilities benefiting state residents.
Tesla already has powerful opponents in every state, particularly the existing car dealerships that have tried to stop them from selling direct to consumer. The dealers’ lobbies would almost certainly have an interest in partnering with local groups to further drive down their business, and could help identify the most moveable state and local lawmakers. Tesla also relies on property owners like grocery stores to host its charging stations — and they could be pressured to abandon their contracts with the company.
Tesla Takedown organizers have also started a new push to get city councils to divest from Tesla. Many cities being saddled with higher costs as a result of Musk’s DOGE cuts invest municipal funds in the company. Pulling those funds is another way of reducing support for the company’s stock price, which is a key pillar of support for Musk himself.
This principle isn’t only relevant to organizers with their sights set on corporate targets. Local activists looking to galvanize city councils and school boards into taking firmer action to protect vulnerable communities or offset the impact of canceled federal contracts can also think in terms of pillars, not just protests.
In Philadelphia’s recent #NoArenaInChinatown campaign, organizers built a powerful, yet unlikely, coalition that won its core demand: stopping the new 76ers arena development which would have displaced hundreds of Chinatown residents and businesses. With decades of experience resisting stadiums, casinos and other developments threatening their community, Chinatown activists and Asian American organizers knew the stakes. They had a history of using familiar tactics (like rallies, marches and city council testimony) to block development that would hurt Chinatown residents.
But the conditions of this campaign were different and required another approach. Organizers strategically brought in key allies from constituencies the mayor depended on for support: Black workers, clergy, small business owners and medical staff from the nearby hospital whose ambulance routes would be obstructed by game-day traffic. Together, they didn’t just oppose the project — they targeted the 76ers’ ownership directly, tarnishing their public image and making the arena politically and socially toxic. After two years of the coalition targeting key pillars of support for the mayor and the developers, the NBA withdrew its plans for the arena.
Identifying pillars of support takes practice, but it’s doable. That’s why our organizations — The Organizing Center and Training for Change — are offering a free virtual training for organizers next month.
Winning high-stakes fights requires more than moral arguments or the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics that everyone has come to expect. It demands a strategic offensive that targets multiple pillars of power — political, economic and social — forcing decisionmakers to weigh the full cost of siding against the community. By fracturing the coalition of support that decisionmakers rely on, organizers can reshape the political calculus. If we want to win lasting change, we have to understand that power doesn’t move unless it’s pressured from all sides.
Andrew Willis Garcés is a trainer with Training for Change’s Organizing Skills Institute, where he hosts the Craft of Campaigns podcast. He founded and led Siembra NC under the Trump Administration, and has worked with dozens of unions and grassroots community organizations over the last two decades as an organizer, strategist, communications consultant and trainer. You can read some of his writing at The Forge, Truthout, Waging Nonviolence, Convergence and In These Times.
Christi Clark is co-director and founder of The Organizing Center. She has built strong unions, won policy changes that decriminalized Black and brown high school youth, and led a campaign that won $100 million for affordable housing in Philadelphia. She believes people power is the only way to win and that another world is possible. When she is not nerding-out about organizing, she likes to hike in the woods, ride her bike and build Lego with her kids.
This article was published on May 28, 2025 at wagingnonviolence.