VIDEO: Pressley, Community Leaders Call for Shift in National Priorities: Away from War, Toward Our Families 

Transcript: Pressley, Community Leaders Call for Shift in National Priorities: Away from War, Toward Our Families

August 12, 2026

Boston, MA

For those of you who don’t know me well, quickly, I represent the Massachusetts 7th Congressional District. I’ve been in Congress now for eight years.

I represent a district that is vibrant, diverse, and dynamic, and deeply unequal. And it is addressing those inequities and disparities that drives my work every single day to improve the legacy and change the outcomes of this district, where in a three-mile radius from Cambridge to Roxbury, life expectancy drops by 30 years, and median household income by $50,000.

That is the question that is at the core of my work every single day. I am also a lover of poetry, and so I’ll begin my remarks with the words of the great immortal poet Tupac Shakur, “they got money for wars, can’t feed the poor.”

And so that’s what brings us here today, because every day I’m hearing from community members about how they’re struggling to make ends meet, to afford rent, to keep food on the table, you know, they’re rationing inhalers and rationing insulin.

And not only do these choices that are forced upon our neighbors infuriate me, but what really upsets me is that these injustices are not naturally occurring. They are man-made. They are manufactured. They are the results of intentional policy and budgetary choices.

And so, when we say equality is the point, we mean it. Because yeah, we get it, elections have consequences, but the fact that this is what you choose to do with your power and your authority and a governing majority. This is what you choose to do: to kick people off of health care, to deny hungry people food?

You know, Coretta Scott King said, “Starving a child is violence. Medical neglect is violence. Contempt for the working man is violence.” This is violence. These choices are violent.

Today, thanks to Trump’s Big Betrayal of a Bill, nearly 175,000 of our most vulnerable neighbors in Massachusetts have lost access to SNAP benefits. We’re just talking about $6 a day, $2 per meal, and then over 320,000 of our neighbors are estimated to lose their health insurance.

So we’re here today in condemnation of this, in rejection of this, in resistance of this. We’re here in solidarity with our neighbors and in defiance of these policies, and we must be defiant.

Donald Trump is a dictator, and history has shown us that appeasement does not work. The only way to be a dictator is with defiance.

And so, again, you could have been anywhere else today. I thank you for your defiance in showing up here today. You know, in the midst of what is a war of choice, it is a manufactured illegal war unauthorized by the Congress that has destabilized a region, impacting over a dozen countries.

This war has claimed at least the lives of 18 American service members, hundreds of innocent Iranian children. This is state-sponsored terror and a complete failure.

And moreover, even people who voted for Donald Trump didn’t vote for this. He said he was going to be a president of peace. He’s renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. He’s out here making reckless decisions that this is some sort of video game and not people’s real lives.

He continues to peddle chaos and fear to distract us from his incompetent leadership.

It is much easier instead for this man to scapegoat immigrants, to vilify our neighbors, than to make good on his promises.

It’s much easier to inflate the military budget to $1.5 trillion and throw our country deeper into an endless war with Iran than to create lasting peace.

It is much easier to strong arm Republicans in Congress to authorize a no-strings-attached $70 billion check for rogue, murderous agencies abducting our immigrant neighbors than to fix our broken immigration system.

Now, let me also just say this: two sides of the same evil for-profit coin. Whether you’re talking about the incentivizing, for-profit incentivizing of criminalizing and incarcerating low-income and Black folks and our mass incarceration system—the same corporations are motivated and benefit by mass deportation, mass kidnapping, mass detainment.

So if you care about mass incarceration, you should also care about mass kidnappings. That’s what they are, because it’s a complete violation of constitutional rights. Mass detainment and deportation. This is a for-profit system, two evil sides of the same coin.

Today, Trump has spent over $260 billion in this mass deportation campaign. Your money, your tax dollars, are being used to harass, abduct, abuse, and to murder law-abiding people, most of whom have no criminal record and have lived in the United States for decades and contributed to our communities.

When I have visited these detention facilities, these concentration camps, I’ve met people that were disappeared, kidnapped on their way to church, on their way to work, on their way to exercise, on their way school shopping.

They were roofers, landscapers, delivery drivers, daycare providers, Dreamers, undocumented workers, TPS holders from Haiti, Nepal, El Salvador, and Venezuela.

So these are our neighbors, the people that we love, the people that we live with, and work and worship with.

The same folks who care for our elders, build our homes, and are the backbone of our economy.

And that’s why we can’t stand idly by.

And that’s why I’m here, not just as a neighbor, not just as your Congresswoman, but just as a human being who gives a damn about other human beings.

And I’m so grateful to Massachusetts Peace Action, to the various advocates for justice, who believe another and a better world is possible-one that is war-free.

And that is also why I was proud to vote yes on the War Powers Resolution to stop Trump’s war on Iran and upon the constitutional power of Congress to authorize a war.

That is also why I was proud to partner and to work with all of you to pass my bill to extend TPS for Haiti, even in a Republican majority.

And that is exactly why I’ll continue holding the Trump Administration accountable to end this illegal war, to protect our communities from chaos and harm of an authoritarian administration.

So again, thank you all for making it easier for me to practice the discipline of hope.

Thank you all for being the light in the midst of so much darkness.

And I also want to thank you, not only for your partnership, but I thank you for holding me accountable.

I thank many of you in this room for being teachers to me in this broader movement and the work of peace.

Thank you.