“The thing about it is that I’m never actually sure if the things people are saying are actually true or if it was just something that Trump said at one point, and it isn’t actually happening,” Malak Eissa, ’26, said. “It’s really confusing because people don’t always know the facts.”

“In serious terms, I’m scared to go outside because I’m Mexican,” Kevin Zamora Valdez, ’25, said. “I’m a brown man, and I speak Spanish with my parents, so I’m scared to go outside [because] I could get arrested by ICE and be potentially deported, even though I was born here and I have a citizenship… so I get nightmares about it.”

“My grandmother [said], ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing the world go backwards,'” Ramiah Stokes, ’25, said. “She was born in 1942, she saw when MLK got assassinated, she saw the Civil Rights Act coming to pass, and she [said], ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do, I didn’t think I’d live this long to see it.’” 

“The congressional address was problematic in the fact that one of the congressmen got kicked out,” Spencer Brogen, ’29, said. “What I liked about it was that some of the women were wearing pink suits and held up signs [saying] ‘lies,’ or ‘Musk steals.’”