A woke Vermont representative who endorsed Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign came under fire after she posted a call for violence toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on her personal Facebook account just days before announcing that she was resigning and moving to Canada.
For context, Rep. Mari Cordes, a Democratic state representative from Bristol, Vermont, uploaded a post on her personal Facebook page on June 14, 2025, calling for her state’s residents to “act up” and “fight back” after claiming that and ICE agent had forcefully removed an 18-year-old out of their car. When an X user uploaded a screenshot of the post, commenters called the state representative a hypocrite and called for her arrest.
Cordes’ post was a picture of a makeshift sign that read “ICE OUT OF VT NOW” with the caption, “Today ICE ripped an 18-year-old who had just graduated high school out of her car, in Milton. Act up! Fight back!” When the Vermonster X account shared a screenshot of the post, commenters fiercely criticized Cordes, with one X user saying, “She needs to be arrested and removed immediately!”
In addition, dozens of other commenters reacted to the post, including the user Joey802, who wrote, “If true….I voted for illegals to be deported. I don’t care how old or young. Out the friggin’ door and I am OK with them coming right back in, legally.” Another user chimed in, “I will make them a deal— any dem can be deported in the place of any immigrant.”
Furthermore, according to coverage from VT Digger, on June 16, 2025, Cordes announced that she was resigning from her position and moving to Nova Scotia, Canada. VT Digger’s Charlotte Oliver described Cordes as “a queer person, a senior and a nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center.” In an interview with Oliver, Cordes said of her resignation, “It’s the day of my own independence.”
In addition, in an interview with the Boston Globe, Cordes said that she was resigning to take a job at a hospital, adding, “It’s heartbreaking,” but clarifying, “I’m relieved, too.” Furthermore, Cordes told the Globe that she had faced death threats and had begun carrying a gun since the election of President Trump. The representative said, “I do feel unsafe. I don’t feel comfortable freely being myself…the tenor of tolerance in our culture now is so bad.”
Moreover, the state representative told the Globe that she was also moving because she was struggling to make ends meet in Vermont. She said that President Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid would cause major problems for her, saying, “Things are not going to get better — in our health care system or any other part of our culture, any part of our governance.”
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Continuing, Cordes painted an extremely bleak picture of the future, telling the Globe, “I think our society is in entropic freefall and I don’t know where the bottom is.” She added, “I do have hope that it will turn around, but I believe it will get much worse before that happens.”
Watch Mari Cordes Endorse Bernie Sanders:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video