In front of a packed crowd at Roxbury Community College, Rep. Ayanna Pressley joined constituents to present a vision for how she thinks the Democratic Party can push back against Republican control in both chambers of Congress and answer community questions in a tense political moment.
At a town hall event March 22, Pressley answered a host of community questions that covered some of the biggest headline topics coming out of Washington, D.C. She also presented a vision for the Democratic Party to push forward.
“We have endured indignity after indignity in the name of being the adults in the room,” Pressley said. “We need to match their energy.”
In a press gathering following the event, she pointed to actions like Democratic elected officials holding town hall events in districts where Republican leaders have chosen not to, or the nationwide “Stop the Oligarchy” tour led by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“We’re getting much more nimble in this communications ecosystem that we’re building,” Pressley told members of the media. “Democrats have found our footing, but we have to continue to do that and more.”
Community members fill the Roxbury Community College Auditorium, March 22, for a town hall event hosted by Rep. Ayanna Pressley. Pressley said the event attracted about 1,100 RSVPs as town halls nationwide attract increased attention. PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER
That work will be important in the coming years, said Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a local political strategist, as the country looks toward the midterms and the next presidential election in 2028. She said she thinks building a message that needs to be “absolutely stronger” will be key to winning back voters who historically vote Democrat but turned to Trump last year.
“The Democratic Party is not a lost cause,” Ferriabough Bolling said. “I think that they just have to grab back the party’s name.”
Pressley said she sees part of that as changing how the Democratic Party communicates with voters.
“We lost because the Republicans campaign in headlines and Democrats campaign in slide decks,” she said.
Pressley also described her vision as one of continuing to dream and presenting more policy than just an alternative to the Republican Party.
“At the end of the day, our argument can’t be just ‘we ain’t them,’” Pressley said in her remarks.
In that, she called for continuing to advocate things like universal child care, paid leave and Medicare for all.
“We want to do radical work, but we have to still radically dream,” Pressley said. “We still need a North Star.”
To media following the event, she said that vision is still supported by voters, as evidenced by the progressive ballot measures that won across the country in the 2024 election, even in states where Trump carried the popular vote.
An attendee holds a pro-democracy sign in line for a town hall event held by Rep. Ayanna Pressley at Roxbury Community College, March 22. At the event, Pressley criticized President Donald Trump and his attempts to limit programs that she said are important supports for Americans and accused his administration of leading a “extremist march to an authoritarian state.” PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER
For example, voters in Arizona, Montana, Missouri and Nevada approved state constitutional protections for abortion; and in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska, residents voted to expand workers’ ability to earn paid sick leave.
“I do not believe this is the time for us to moderate our aspirations,” Pressley said to members of the media. “I think we need to continue to advance solutions that are as bold and go as deep as the heart.”
Her event came as town halls have become a flashpoint across the country, with Republican congresspeople being officially instructed by congressional leadership to halt the events after receiving pushback from constituents about policies instituted by President Donald Trump and other officials in and affiliated with the administration, like billionaire Elon Musk. Republican lawmakers have blamed the pushback on alleged paid protesters, but evidence of such hired agitators has been scarce.
Pressley delivered her remarks to a full house at the school’s auditorium. Another overflow room was also full, she said, and others attended virtually on Zoom. In all, she said that her team received 1,100 RSVPs to the event and over 400 questions were submitted.
Another event hosted by the Boston Globe in Cambridge, March 18, attracted another estimated 400 attendees, she said. She, along with other speakers at the event like state Sen. Liz Miranda, framed attendance at events like those as an important first step for residents looking to push back on concerns they have with the Trump administration.
“There is power in these numbers,” Pressley said. “We have to activate all of you beyond this space but just know that you are still powerful in this moment.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley speaks with members of the media following a town hall event March 22 at Roxbury Community College. PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER
It was a well-received message for a crowd that had no shortage of questions about how to get involved and what community action is most effective.
One attendee, Pamela King from Jamaica Plain, said that she wasn’t attending with any one issue in mind. The Trump administration has done too much at once for her to have a single priority, she said. Instead, she wanted to hear how Pressley was planning to approach the moment and what community members like her could do.
“We need to think about how we can move forward and not always talk about the negative,” King said. “What can we do to keep ourselves up here, level and not allowing this to keep me from going forward?”
Pressley described that kind of desire to act as a necessary piece for community members opposed to the actions of Trump and his administration.
“When you’re in an extremist march to an authoritarian state, they want you to feel like it’s an inevitability,” she said during the town hall. In the opposition she advocated, she described outcry and outrage as “essential.”
Carol Rose, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who spoke before Pressley, voiced the same sentiment.
“Don’t give into despair,” Rose said. “That’s what the authoritarians want. They want us to despair — that’s the point of ‘flood the zone and all that’ and hope is a political act.”
Pressley spent much of the town hall event answering attendees’ questions. Community concerns focused on Trump’s effort to fire federal workers, the work of Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut federal programs and funding, as well as his attacks on immigrant communities and transgender Americans and his recent executive order dismantling the Department of Education.
Of the federal workers, Pressley commended the fired workforce.
“I can tell you, every federal worker that I’ve met who has had their job terminated — even though their own lives were completely upended and disrupted — their first priority and question was, ‘What of my unfinished work?’” she said.
She said she led a letter to the federal Office of Personnel Management, on which the whole Massachusetts delegation joined her, requesting data on the layoffs, firings and reductions in the workforce. She also highlighted a listening session she convened with terminated federal employees in the wake of the firing.
And of Musk and his efforts to cut government programs, she acknowledged that bureaucracy can complicate processes, but said that there’s a better way to make the government more efficient.
“It’s ok to have a conversation about ways that government should work more efficiently for the people, but this ain’t it,” she said. “Making people hungrier, poorer, and sicker is no kind of efficiency that I want.”
Of the Department of Education, which Trump took steps to try to dismantle March 20 through executive order, Pressley called it a small department with a “outsized influence.”
“It simply is affirming that every child has a right to education,” she said. “This is an assault on knowledge. This is an assault on our children. This is an assault on families. This is an assault on educators. This is an assault on our future.”
Trump has framed his dismantling of the department — which cannot be fully eliminated without Congressional approval — as a way of returning power over how students are educated to the state. Even prior to his signing the order, the power of structuring curriculums largely sat with states and school districts.
And Pressley highlighted the power of the courts in pushing back on the Trump administration.
“That is our first line in our defensive strategy to stave off the hurt and harm from this hostile administration in the midst of this hostile government takeover,” said Pressley, who described the courts as “one of the most essential tools we have to fight back” against the Trump administration.
It was a message that Rose, from the ACLU, dug in on as well.
So far, the ACLU of Massachusetts has filed more than 20 lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past 10 weeks of the administration — on federal actions ranging from Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship and removal of Temporary Protected status for Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants, to the limiting of documents like passports for trans Americans, to attempts to remove research articles from a government-run website to limit language around LGBTQ+ and trans health issues.
“Make no mistake: The courts still matter,” Rose said. “We won’t win every case, but we are slowing down that freight train.”
Prior to the election and Trump’s inauguration, concerns circled regarding his potential increased control over the judiciary — in his first term he appointed hundreds of federal judges, including the nomination of three Supreme Court justices. Now, there are additional concerns as Trump and his supporters have called for the impeachment of judges who rule against actions and executive orders by his administration.
Trump’s actions have earned him a rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who released a rare statement March 18, pushing back on Trump’s calls to impeach judges and, instead, calling for support of the established appellate process.
She ended her remarks by calling, again, on community members to get involved, but she grounded her message by encouraging each person to rely on their individual skills.
“Not only is the challenge before us overwhelming and daunting, you all feel like you have to fix everything. I know I feel that responsibility and that stressor as well,” Pressley said. “But all you have to do is bring what your unique gift is.”
