As President Donald Trump declared that America is in “a turnaround for the ages” during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Connecticut Democrats offered a vastly different assessment of the country during his first year back in office.
Many of them did so outside of the House chamber, choosing to instead boycott the annual address at a time when the government is in its third partial shutdown in the last five months.
Speaking against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol on a brisk night to a crowd of a few hundred, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., kicked off the “People’s State of the Union” on the National Mall an hour before Trump entered the building to deliver a nearly 2-hour speech.
Murphy’s remarks sought to set the tone for the hours-long rally, also broadcast on MoveOn.org Civic Action’s YouTube channel, that featured speeches from nearly three dozen Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District, and U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District.
“You are going to hear attack over attack. You are going to see grandstanding. The true state of the union is this: This union is in crisis right now. Our cities are under attack by lawless law enforcement. Our democracy is wilting under ceaseless attack from a president who wants to be a despot,” Murphy said.
“But by being here for the People’s State of the Union, you’re going to hear the real story of America, a story of an America that is under siege, but a story of America that is not going to take it, that is going to fight back,” he continued.
Murphy was briefly interrupted as a protester stormed the stage and shouted, “Go Trump!” The senator remained calm and waited for him to be escorted off the stage by officers.
While his speech was broad, Murphy reiterated his position that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won’t get “one more dime until they start following the law,” remarks that earned him loud cheers while a few in the crowd shouted, “Abolish ICE.”
Larson has been one of the only members of Connecticut’s delegation to publicly call for getting rid of and replacing ICE. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, remains shut down amid a lapse in funding as Democrats demand reforms to the enforcement agency.
The “People’s State of the Union” sought to put a spotlight on Americans affected by various Trump administration policies.
Murphy’s guest to the rally was Fereshteh Ganjavi, the founder and executive director of Elena’s Light, a Connecticut nonprofit that supports refugee women. She arrived in the U.S. as a refugee herself in 2011 and has since educated more than 7,000 refugees.
But she noted that the work of her organization and other advocacy groups has shifted over the last year, particularly on immigration. Ganjavi said they focus more on “know your rights” training and helping families with rapid-response needs.
“Since the recent election, my phone has not stopped ringing. Mothers have called me asking if it’s safe to go to my child’s appointment. Women have asked if they should cancel English classes,” Ganjavi said. “Afghan families and many immigrant families are confused about their legal status and [are] afraid to travel for work, even within their own states.”
Larson was joined in Washington by Moises Ricardo, a Cuban immigrant who lives in Bristol, and his son, Marlon Ricardo Camejo.
Ricardo was scheduled to take a citizenship test earlier this year, the final step in the process for him. But he said he received a letter in late December from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that the appointment was cancelled. That was shortly after the administration paused immigration from more than a dozen countries, including Cuba.
Ricardo said he came to the U.S. by boat 17 years ago and has lived in Connecticut with his son since 2023. The two of them don’t have any other family in America, and Ricardo has a young daughter who still lives in Cuba. He recently got his green card renewed.
Speaking in Spanish that was translated by his son, Ricardo grew emotional about the hurdles he now faces to gain citizenship.
“Everybody’s able to see what’s going on, what we’re seeing in his term. It makes me so sad that this country is dealing with what it’s dealing with right now with this guy in the presidency. It’s so sad. This country has worked so hard to offer people the freedom, the rights,” Ricardo said.
Camejo said things remains in limbo, describing a crushing process trying to realize his father’s “biggest dream to become a citizen.” He attended the “People’s State of the Union” alongside Larson.
“I think that’s the perfect name because everything that is done here, signed here, or signed in the White House, affects American people, American taxpayers, what we all are,” Camejo said. “No matter if you’re a resident, you’re a citizen, you’re on the legal pathway here … you’re a taxpayer. We need to hear from these people.”
While many of the speeches focused on immigration, Himes focused his remarks on housing affordability.
“You can’t do much in this country if you can’t afford a home, if you can’t pay the rent. Too many of my constituents have given up on the idea that their kids might live in the communities in which they grew up,” Himes said at the rally, noting that the U.S. needs to build 5 million units of housing to help making things more affordable.
Less than half a mile away in the U.S. Capitol, Trump painted a very different picture of America a little over a year into his second term.
Trump boasted during Tuesday’s State of the Union that “we’re winning so much,” saying he’d sparked a jobs and manufacturing boom at home while imposing a new world order abroad — hoping that offering a long list of his accomplishments can counter approval ratings that have been falling.
He tried to appeal to bipartisan patriotic sentiments, dramatically inviting the Olympic gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team into the House chamber to applause.
“Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore,” Trump said before introducing the team.
The Connecticut Republican Party echoed that sentiment.
“The President’s message tonight was not just about recovery; it was about renewal. It was about restoring pride in our country, rebuilding our economy from the ground up, and ensuring that our children and grandchildren inherit an America that is stronger and more robust, with greater freedoms than existed just over one year ago,” CT GOP chairman Ben Proto said in a statement. “The turnaround we are witnessing did not happen by accident.”
Only three Connecticut members watched the speech from the House chamber: U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
As they have in the past, members of Congress typically bring a guest to reflect a certain theme or make a statement.
Blumenthal’s guest, Nicole Russo, owns Microboard Processing, Inc., an electronics manufacturing service provider based in Seymour. Tariffs increased the costs for printed circuit board assemblies. Just days before the State of the Union, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s tariff policies.
Courtney brought Mystic resident Lee Burdette Williams, whose household was affected by the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits.
This year, Williams and her wife, who both work for nonprofit organizations, saw a monthly increase in their two-person health care premiums. Their high-deductible Bronze plan purchased through the exchanges would go from about $750 a month to more than $3,000 a month this year. Because of that steep increase, they opted to go on a plan through her wife’s company where they pay the full price without any employer contributions. They now pay about $2,500 a month.
“We are fortunate but we’re still really feeling the pinch. That’s a big portion of our monthly take home pay. So the things that we would normally spend money on, we don’t have that disposable income anymore because we’re making this big payment,” Williams said. “We have always been insured, and so the option of going without insurance was not even on the table for us.”
Williams said she was skeptical Trump would bring up the expiration of the enhanced subsidies but hoped there would be “some acknowledgement that there are millions of people who, starting Jan. 1, were not insured and are that one disaster away from a crushing economic situation.”
During the speech, Trump addressed health care, taking aim at the Affordable Care Act and touting his own plan that focuses more on the expansion of health savings accounts, also known as HSAs.
Lawmakers in Connecticut still see it as the defining affordability issue, with the hopes that a renewal of the federal subsidies can still happen.
“There’s a lot of other affordability issues with tariffs and new housing and new cars,” Courtney said in an interview prior to Trump’s address. “But health care is still the dominant affordability crisis for this country and unwillingness to just take what the House passed and just take this off the table.”
The Connecticut Mirror/Connecticut Public Radio federal policy reporter position is made possible, in part, by funding from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
