I was already busy enough for the past 15 years reporting on and becoming a nonviolent direct-action activist in the climate movement, resulting in more than a dozen arrests and ongoing organizing.

Then Oct. 7, 2023, happened, when Hamas invaded Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,200 people and the taking of 250 hostages. It must also be said that Israel had been committing war crimes against the Palestinians for decades. Having been to the West Bank and Israel, and having friends in both places, I was moved to raise my voice against the killing of civilians in Israel and then, for the past two years, against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the accelerated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. I helped organize a 25-mile Walk for Gaza, a New Haven Freedom Flotilla, speaking engagements, and fundraising to feed starving Palestinians.

And then Trump came back to power, legitimized by winning the popular vote and turbocharged by Project 2025 – which he claimed to have no knowledge of – to systematically destroy our democracy, focusing as he has from the beginning of his first run for president on immigrants, whom he has described as “criminals, rapists, vermin, scum.” Speaking Spanish, having traveled in several Latin American countries, and having worked alongside immigrants for many years, I began reporting on the immigrants’ rights movement in Connecticut and was drawn to providing support where I could.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and it could be said that I was spreading myself way too thin, being ineffective as I tried to cover too many bases. Yet, another way to look at it is that these three issues – climate, Palestine, and immigration – are closely linked, and it’s critical to lift up those connections.

The climate is changing faster in some parts of the world than others. Among the hardest hit countries are those in the Northern Triangle of Central America – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – where climate-supercharged hurricanes have devastated the region and ongoing drought has destroyed subsistence farming. When I was on the U.S./Mexico border in 2019, I met many immigrants who told me it was flee or starve. The U.S., as the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has played a direct role in this scenario, and those three countries have made an outsized contribution to the flow of immigrants at the southern border.

As for Palestine, war has the most concentrated impact on the climate of all human activities. A recent study on greenhouse gas emissions from the war in Gaza shows that “The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of a hundred individual countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the huge civilian death toll.” And, of course, the war has gone on an additional nine months, with even more intense bombing as Israel aims to flatten every building in Gaza. It’s not only genocide, but ecocide, as wells are destroyed and all living things suffer and die and the ecosystem itself is being irreparably damaged under the millions of tons of crushed concrete and dust.

What about the connection between Palestine and immigration? Of course, people in Gaza can’t leave now, but Israeli leader and official war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu would like to push them, as well as Palestinians in the West Bank, off their land to some unknown destination. They are determined to stay, although they are paying an enormous price.

Their tragic dilemma just highlights the agony of migrants everywhere, most of whom want to stay in their own countries and only start moving through the push of necessity. Another connection is that Palestinian immigrants – like Columbia University activists Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi – have been caught up in Trump’s illegal prosecution and attempted deportation of legal residents (green card holders), encouraging solidarity between immigrants and Palestine activists.

The ”poster girl,” as it were, for the unity of these issues is Greta Thunberg, who gained worldwide fame as a teenager demanding climate action from world leaders. She has now stepped into the role of human rights campaigner (although clearly climate action is also part of the fight for human rights). She was arrested by Israel and deported for her role in an earlier Freedom Flotilla, trying to bring material aid to Gaza by sea. She later became part of the Global Sumud (“steadfastness” in Arabic) Flotilla of 47 small boats with crew from 45 countries which again tried, unsuccessfully, to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Time is short, and these three interconnected issues will determine what the future of humankind looks like.  Even though things often look hopeless – especially since Trump took office – I won’t give him the satisfaction of giving up. My goal is to make things a little less horrible and extend our window of survivability for as long as possible.

Melinda Tuhus lives in New Haven.