Protesters outside Sessions speech to California police officials|
March 7: Today the Trump/Pence regime’s Attorney General went to California to declare to a convention of police chiefs, “California, we have a problem.”
The regime’s problem is that California is a state-wide sanctuary jurisdiction, with limits on how much police and other authorities can collaborate with ICE in terrorizing, rounding up and deporting immigrants. And that in this highly diverse state, there is broad support for immigrants among all kinds of people, widespread respect for diversity, and broad outrage and disgust at the Trump/Pence regime’s war on immigrants.
To a fascist regime, that’s a big problem.
Sessions struck back, declaring war on California. Practically foaming at the mouth, he – and this is the Attorney General of the United States who runs the FBI, who can spy on people, prosecute people, and lock them up – threatened Oakland mayor Libby Schaff as someone whose actions “support those who flout the law and boldly validate illegality.” He attacked the Lt. Governor of California for “encouraging the obstruction of our law enforcement.”
Sessions had the gall to compare ICE’s campaign of terror against immigrants to enforcement of workplace safety and environmental rules (as if the Trump/Pence regime wasn’t madly tearing up environmental and workplace safety regulations). Sessions is a hardcore, long time segregationist. In the past he “joked” that the only issue he had with the KKK was that they smoke pot, and he called the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights groups “un-American.” And Sessions, who represents a history of southern states defying Federal civil rights laws by claiming “states rights,” basically denounced California officials for claiming California had the right to pass sanctuary laws in defiance of the Federal Government.
Shaking in anger, Sessions railed: “So here’s my message… How dare you!?”
To which the answer of anyone who refuses to accept a society where immigrants are subjected to the most vicious genocidal ethnic cleansing must be: We DO dare defy you and we will drive out your whole regime through non-violent but determined mass protest.
Session’s speech is an ominous attack on sanctuary laws in California and elsewhere. Those laws don’t do nearly enough to protect immigrants from ICE terror, but they are in many cases the difference between life and death, between medical care and dying for lack of it, between being able to go to work, school, shopping or a park… or living completely in the shadows.
It is heartening that Sessions’ speech was met with hundreds of protesters. We need much more of that.Sanctuary policies and laws have to be defended, and not just in the courts that Trump and Pence are busy packing with fascist-enablers, but in the streets. And anytime one of Trump’s henchmen, frontmen, or enablers shows up anywhere, they must be confronted with defiant protest and RESISTANCE!
But BEYOND THAT, we have to confront fascism can absorb separate acts of resistance while continually throwing the opposition off balance by rapidly moving its agenda forward. Muslims are banned and demonized… Just-won basic rights for LGBTQ people are being ripped away… the danger of nuclear war hangs over the heads of humanity… civil liberties, the press, and dissent are under siege… and within that package, the war on immigrants that has been the battering ram and lynchpin of the Trump/Pence Regime.”
Everyone – people of all walks of life – must come together to stand up to the regime’s war on immigrants. It must be actively and effectively resisted in order to prevent the enormous suffering, terror, and advancement of actual genocide and ethnic cleansing against millions of immigrants and their families. And, this must be resisted in a way that strengthens the movement to drive out the whole fascist Trump/Pence Regime through mass, sustained, nonviolent political protest.
Read & spread: FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE MUSLIMS, THEN THEY CAME FOR THE IMMIGRANTS. Not This Time… Stand Up Now with the Immigrants! This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!