On the campaign trail in 2024, Pramila Jayapal got the feeling that the country was about to experience a second term of President Trump. “I can’t tell you that it feels at all better to have known,” she says. In her fifth term as the congressperson representing Seattle, Jayapal has emerged as a progressive leader who uses her activist background to craft Resistance Lab classes on effective opposition. She’s not only the first South Asian American woman elected to the House but is also an immigrant. As she argues against deportations and revocations of student visas, she says her own memories of arriving from India as a 16-year-old to study in the US remind her what it feels like to be vulnerable. While she’s ineligible to ever be president—and is personally uninterested in the role—she’s annoyed by the constitutional provision that disqualifies naturalized citizens. “We have every bit of claim to this country as anyone else,” she says. “Well, these days, nobody seems to be listening to the Constitution, so maybe I should just run anyway.”

The speed and the fury [of Trump’s second administration], and the cruelty with which it’s happened, and the open racism, the dictatorial nature of everything—that has been shocking.

I really see myself as trying to help bring that resistance, to be most strategic and most effective.

What I tell people all the time is that we have checks and balances built into the Constitution, but guess what? When you don’t have two parties that actually believe that they should fight back, then those checks and balances are not going to work.

If you have a dictator that doesn’t listen to the courts, then that means that it really is upon the people to launch our own resistance.

Giving $7 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest is not possible unless he distracts us from that—by going after so-called culture war issues like bullying of trans kids or deporting, without due process, immigrants.

If he can do it to them, he can do it to you.

I’ve been honest about being an immigrant, being a woman of color. Being the mom of a trans kid.

Bernie Sanders described me as relentless, and thanked my husband for keeping up.

We were the first state to tie minimum wage to inflation, first major city in the country to pass a $15 minimum wage.

We invested in childcare. We invested in Apple Health care for everybody. We’ve protected immigrants, we passed gun safety reform.

There’s just so many things about Washington state that are about standing up for what every person—white, black, or brown, rural, urban, whatever class you’re in—every person needs to thrive.

I had a Republican come up to me and say, “You know why you’re so damn difficult to fight against, Pramila? Because you’re so earnest. People actually believe that you believe what you say.”

I still always have this [feeling] of, Are they still going to come after me? Because I was not born here. Despite the fact that I’m a US citizen and a member of Congress.

The most triumphant day [of my career] was the passage of the Build Back Better bill through the House.

We went back to my apartment with a couple of my close women colleagues—Veronica Escobar, Lisa Blunt Rochester—and we just put on Prince and other incredible music and just danced. 

I call this “Washington.” I call that “DC.”

I’m very snobby about fish [in DC]. I really don’t tend to eat it very much, because it just cannot compare to Seattle.

As an organizer, I understand very deeply, through my work, that powerlessness and helplessness are tools of the oppressor.

I want everybody to understand that if they feel fear, that’s OK.

Courage is not acting when you’re not afraid, it’s acting in spite of your fear.

I also think my job right now is to show people that we’re not going to back down.

My superpower is that nobody expects me to be as tough as I actually am.