Quick Take
Jenni Veitch-Olson, the chair of the Santa Cruz County Democratic Party, condemns recent federal immigration raids and the use of the military to control Los Angeles County protests. She supports the right to peaceably assemble and calls on the federal government to end fear-based enforcement. She urges members of the public to join local “No Kings” protests Saturday to stand up for democracy.
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The Santa Cruz County Democratic Party stands in solidarity with our friends, neighbors and relatives in Los Angeles County. The past week’s unlawful immigration enforcement actions by the federal government are a part of a larger pattern occurring across the country to instill fear and intimidate our most vulnerable communities, with dire consequences for many.
We desperately need immigration reform and more legal pathways to citizenship in this nation, but terrorizing the population, weakening local businesses and economies and ripping families apart is neither sane nor logical.
Additionally, we support the people’s right to peacefully assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights. We support the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the use of the military in enforcing laws on U.S. soil on U.S. residents and citizens. We support the U.S. Constitution, the role of the judicial system as a co-equal branch of government and their protections of habeas corpus, due process, assumption of innocence until proven guilty and the right to a fair and speedy trial.
Founding Father Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.” Hamilton viewed habeas corpus as one of the most important parts of the new Constitution. With increasing intensity over the past few days, Donald Trump has amped the drumbeat of fear by confronting initially peaceful protestors with military force, tear gas, batons and flash bangs, attempting to prompt a response.
He constantly calls the protestors – who have turned out to support the vulnerable – “insurrectionists.” We fear this is an attempt to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and further turn our once peaceful streets into battlefields.
TRUMP 2.0: Read more Lookout news and Community Voices coverage of the Santa Cruz County impact here
We must ensure humane treatment and due process for all, and the Trump administration must end its indiscriminate, racist and violent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, in which they are focused on quotas and numbers and not on the real legal status, years of effort to obtain residency, visas or citizenship and hard work of so many immigrants. Arresting women who have just given birth and ripping them away from their newborn children, tearing parents away from their children in front of them through the use of militarized force is cruel, trauma-inducing and unnecessary.
We also stand with our Service Employees International Union allies and are greatly relieved that California SEIU President David Huerta has been released on bond after his arrest at a peaceful protest. We call for the immediate release of those remaining unjustly detained from this week’s immigration protests and all those who have been unlawfully arrested, detained and deported, to home countries, El Salvador or Yemen. As of June 6, several ICE officers were imprisoned in a shipping container with their deportees in Djibouti.
The recent deployment of the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines (now in Los Angeles), any further attempts to escalate the situation, and Trump’s threat to arrest Gov. Gavin Newsom are a horrible affront to our democratic values as a nation.
We strongly support California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s use of National Guard troops as a trampling of our state’s sovereignty.
The chaotic power grab happening in our nation’s capital and throughout the United States hurts not just those who are directly targeted, but all of us. We are interconnected by family relations, by supply chains, by webs of relationship and dependence that we cannot even understand. An attack on one is an attack on all of us.
We encourage everyone to attend one of the three “No Kings” protests that are happening locally on Saturday, June 14. One will be along Central Avenue in Boulder Creek at 9 a.m., the next starts at the duck pond at San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz at 10 a.m., and the third is at Watsonville Plaza at noon. Let’s be in community together to engage in protecting our constitutional democracy in every way that we can.
Jenni Veitch-Olson is the chair of the Santa Cruz County Democratic Party.