We are one family

It’s Tuesday, June 17th, and 64-year-old Francisco Urizar is at his job, delivering Mission-brand tortillas and other products to grocery stores in the L.A. area. Immigration agents dressed in camouflage, helmets, and flak jackets, their faces covered, and wearing sunglasses and gloves and holding rifles, detain Mr. Urizar in mid-delivery. He leaves his dolly loaded with boxes of food in front of a mini-mart and is escorted to a white SUV.  

We know the story of Kilmar Albrego Garcia, one of the earliest to be arrested in the government’s brutal immigration crackdown. He is among a number of university students arrested in March for the crime of exercising their right to free speech. Albrego Garcia is flown to El Salvador and incarcerated in the notorious CECOT mega-prison for over two months before finally being returned a week ago. But he’s not free, oh no—he’s now in a prison in Tennessee, awaiting further legal action by the Administration on new trumped-up charges.

Mandana Kashanian, a 64-year-old Iranian wife and mother in New Orleans living in the US since 1978, is arrested in the front yard of her own home. Her American husband and her American daughter find out only because a neighbor calls them.

Seventeen-year-old Kevin Robles, a US citizen, is handcuffed along with his fourteen-year-old sister Raquel, also a citizen, by heavily armed officers who have come to arrest their father, breaking windows of their family home and setting off flashbangs. Both are eventually released but they are traumatized.

Yesterday, Narciso Barranco was arrested while working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Santa Ana. Video shows seven masked federal agents forcing Barranco to the ground, twisting his arms, and repeatedly punching him in the head before pushing him into an unmarked vehicle. The agents showed him no warrant. Barranco has lived in the US for more than thirty years. He has three sons who have served in the US military—two active Marines and one Marine veteran.

Brenda Valencia, a hotel housekeeper arriving at work in Mission Valley, CA the other morning, was thrown to the ground in the hotel’s parking lot and handcuffed by two men dressed in plain clothes. Like thousands of others, no warrant, no explanation.

There have been tens of thousands of such kidnappings across the country under Gestapo chief Stephen Miller, who is aiming for one million in 2025.  No state has been spared these raids. As of yesterday, there have been almost 6,000 ICE arrests in California, 620 in Washington state, and over 20,000 in Texas. Less than half of those taken have ever broken any law—mostly immigration or traffic violations. This is despite Trump’s promise to target the ‘worst of the worst’ for arrest and deportation.

Here's what Sherrilyn Ifill wrote yesterday: “At this point, we have all seen the videos. Men dressed in plaid shirts, jeans and boots descending on construction sites, chasing migrants in fields, lurking in hallways at courthouses, knocking on doors of homes, and surrounding cars. We see them wrestling men and women to the ground. Beating them in some instances. Chasing them. Surrounding unarmed women. Pointing their guns and demanding that people exit their cars. They have shown up at elementary schools demanding to see children of migrants. They purport to be working for the Department of Homeland Security. They are ICE agents, we surmise. But often we don’t know. Because these men, for the most part, display no badges or names.    And they are masked…  Perhaps the anonymity offered by the mask also encourages these agents to obscure their own humanity from each other and from themselves.”

We should add: this wearing of masks unmistakably recalls the Klansmen who terrorized Black southerners for decades after the Civil War, showing up masked and covered in sheets, accusing someone of the slightest affront, and shooting them or hanging them publicly from trees. As Ifill says, “This form of racial terror is part of our national DNA.”

How about our supposed haven of Kitsap County? There has indeed been ICE activity – an arrest on Bond Road, threats here, violence there, the detaining of a Port Orchard man after he reported in to the immigration officials. Two vehicles full of ICE agents were spotted at the Poulsbo Walmart one evening last week.

ICE is here, not just on the national news on your TV. The terror is of course paralyzing our brown neighbors—and brings out the ugliness in some of our white neighbors. On Thursday in Bremerton, a woman driver with two small kids in the back seat couldn’t stop in time when a dog ran out into the street. Her car hit the dog (although it wasn’t hurt). Soon she was surrounded by people shouting at her. Two cars moved to block her car so she couldn’t leave, and the angry group demanded that she cough up $500 or else they’d report her to ICE. Fortunately, a Bremerton police officer showed up, assessed the situation, chastised the harassers for their attempted extortion, and told the woman she’d done nothing wrong and let her go. But just put yourself in the shoes of that woman, unable to understand the insults being hurled at you, your precious children witnessing in confusion, and being boxed in by a lynch mob.

As immigrants are disappeared and the hate builds up thanks to Trump’s increasingly murderous rhetoric, so does the strength of communities. In L.A., an organization called the Uniòn del Barrio now patrols neighborhoods, maintains a tip line, and has more than 300,000 followers on Facebook. And last week when ICE arrested a twenty-year-old US citizen named Adrien Martinez in Pico Rivera, California--again with no warrant--and whisked him off somewhere, many hundreds in the community responded, showed up with signs, and created massive traffic of honking cars, everyone chanting “ICE out of Pico.” We’re hearing more and more stories of Americans standing up in numbers and driving the thugs out.

In L.A., protest signs and social media posts read “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo,” or, “only the people can save the people.”

Kitsap, what are you going to do to save the people? To save our immigrant brothers and sisters, and to save ourselves from the impunity of this police state that’s now arresting mayors, the comptroller of New York City, a judge in Wisconsin, and who knows who’s next? This police state that’s on the eve of cutting $1.7 trillion from Medicaid, women’s health care, vaccine development, scientific research, school programs, universities, NPR and PBS, national parks, foreign aid, the arts—and obscenely giving trillions in tax breaks to the ultra-rich and exploding the national debt?

Our friend Danielle sent us this:

As he was going to be executed, the last Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc said: “Our Sun is now hidden from view. The face of our Sun has disappeared, and has left us in complete darkness. But we know it will return again, that it will rise again, and it will begin to illuminate us anew.  But while our Sun is away, and remains in the residence of silence, we must swiftly join together and embrace.”

So join together with me:

Wwho are we?  ONE FAMILY. 

Who are we? ONE FAMILY.

Who are we?  ONE FAMILY.

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