When an ICE surge swept through Minneapolis last fall, it exposed something most Americans had not thought much about: a third of the people who care for our elderly, our disabled, our most vulnerable — the home health aides, the nursing assistants, the housekeepers in assisted living facilities — are immigrants. Many of them stopped going to work. Not because they were detained, but because they were afraid. According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, by early 2026, 82 percent of Spanish-speaking domestic workers reported food scarcity in their households, 52 percent had missed a rent or mortgage payment, and 11 percent of those working fewer hours than they wanted said they simply did not feel safe enough to work more.
Ai-jen Poo has spent 25 years organizing that workforce. As president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, she won minimum wage protections for two million domestic workers across eleven states. But she has also made a different and unexpected bet: that the crisis of care in America is, at its root, a failure of the imagination. What organizing alone could not accomplish over twenty-five years, storytelling just might. Give Not Take Media, the production company she co-founded with producer Lydia Story, is backing films about caregiving, aging, and disability in Hollywood. Their first, Take Me Home, won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance this year. In this conversation, we talk about what is happening on the ground to immigrant caregivers right now, and why she believes the screen is the next frontier for the fight.
