Arrigo initially returned to Taiwan in 1975 to continue work on her doctorate research by studying the marriage and labor issues of Taiwanese women entering the workplace.

[8] Working with these women and their families would lead her to see Taiwan from their point of view, and in the late 1970s she became active in human rights and opposition politics.

She became a part of the 1978 campaign coalition that later evolved into the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and in 1978 married Shih Ming-teh,[3] a former political prisoner.

[10] On 15 December 1979, she was deported[11] and then blacklisted from Taiwan by James Soong, then head of the Government Information Office, for her involvement in the Kaohsiung Incident.

[14] Seven other leading dissidents also received sentences of ten or more years for sedition,[13] and the mother and daughters of one, Provincial Assemblyman Lin Yi-hsiung, were murdered on February 28, 1980.

[4] Shih and Arrigo formally divorced in June 1995 after she accused him of violating human rights principles in the party's international relations.

Arrigo married for the third time in September 1999, to Ho Shu-yuan, a bus driver at a Taipei primary school that she met doing environmental volunteering; but the couple has long been separated.

[4] In 2001, she and Wang Feng-ying (Betty, 汪鳳英) accused Parris H. Chang, a Democratic Progressive Party legislator, of sexual harassment.