In 2018, Rashida Tlaib was elected to Congress. Her election was extraordinary in many ways: she ran as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; she became the first Palestinian-American in Congress; and she was part of a crop of left-wing challengers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar whose victories shocked the Democratic establishment in Washington. And they’ve kept shocking them. Tlaib, along with Omar, has been the target of vicious attacks for her solidarity with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) and criticism of the state of Israel. House Democrats have not only opposed Tlaib on these counts; they’ve allowed Republicans’ bigoted attacks on Tlaib and Omar over these issues to go unchallenged.

Tlaib has also used her platform to not only support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, but to support the struggle for a Green New Deal specifically for Detroit. There, GM recently closed its Detroit-Poletown plant, part of a string of North American plant closures that will put fourteen-thousand people out of a job. In response, the Detroit Democratic Socialists of America has proposed “making Detroit the engine of a Green New Deal”: using the urgent need for ecological transition to create new jobs and support the victims of GM’s closures. Tlaib has vocally supported the proposal, leading rallies of hundreds of people in Detroit and tying it in to her other environmental proposals.

Here, The Dig’s Daniel Denvir talks to Tlaib on June 3 about how growing up in Detroit has informed her politics, what economic justice in Detroit — and cities across the United States — would really look like, her advocacy for justice in Israel and Palestine, and the urgency of addressing dirty energy’s impact on working-class people. You can subscribe to The Dig and all the Jacobin podcasts at Jacobin Radio. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.