February 15, 2018
California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue ‘anti-racist’ activists, documents show
Officers expressed sympathy with white supremacists and sought their help to target counter-protesters after a violent 2016 rally, according to court documents
California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue ‘anti-racist’ activists, documents show
Officers expressed sympathy with white supremacists and sought their help to target counter-protesters after a violent 2016 rally, according to court documents
California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with anti-racist beliefs, court documents show.
The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizers identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a cover-up and collusion with the fascists.
Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.
It is shocking and really angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis, said Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley teacher and anti-fascist organizer charged with assault and rioting after participating in the June 2016 Sacramento rally, where she said she was stabbed and bludgeoned in the head. The people who were victimized by the Nazis were then victimized by the police and the district attorneys.
Steve Grippi, chief deputy district attorney prosecuting the case in Sacramento, vehemently denied the claims of bias in an email to the Guardian, alleging that anti-fascist stabbing victims have been uncooperative and noting that his office has filed charges against one member of the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP), the neo-Nazi group that organized the rally.
Some California highway patrol (CHP) investigation records, however, raise questions about the polices investigative tactics and communication with the TWP.
Felarcas attorneys obtained numerous examples of CHP officers working directly with the TWP, often treating the white nationalist group as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects.
The TWP is intimately allied with neo-Nazi and other hardline racist organizations and advocates for racially pure nations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Its leaders have praised Trump, and the group claimed to bring more than 100 people to the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, where a counter-protester was killed.
In one phone call with Doug McCormack, identified by police as the TWP affiliate who acquired the permit for the Sacramento rally, CHP investigator Donovan Ayres warned him that police might have to release his name in response to a public records requests. The officer said he would try to protect McCormack.
Im gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something until this gets resolved, Ayres told McCormack, adding that he didnt know who had requested records of the permit and noting, If I did, I would tell you.
Ayress reports noted that McCormack was armed at the rally with a knife.
The officers write-up about an African American anti-fascist activist included a photo of him at the hospital after the rally and noted that he had been stabbed in the abdomen, chest and hand.
Ayres, however, treated the protester like a suspect in the investigation. The police investigator recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.
As evidence, Ayres provided Facebook photos of the man holding up his fist. The officer wrote that the mans Black Power salute and his support for anti-racist activism demonstrated his intent and motivation to violate the civil rights of the neo-Nazi group. He was ultimately not charged.
Ayress report also noted Felarcas political activism in great detail, referencing her activism on behalf of students of color and womens rights protests.
This is a textbook case of a political witch-hunt and selective prosecution, Shanta Driver, one of Felarcas attorneys, said in an interview.
Officers also worked with TWP member Derik Punneo to try to identify anti-fascist activists, recordings revealed. Officers interviewed Punneo in jail after he was arrested for an unrelated domestic violence charge. Audio recordings captured investigators saying they brought photos to show him, hoping he could help them identify anti-fascist activists.
The officers said, Were pretty much going after them, and assured him: Were looking at you as a victim.
Ayress report noted that Punneo was armed with a knife at the neo-Nazi rally and that one stabbing victim told officers he believed Punneo was responsible. Using video footage, Ayres also noted that Punneo was in the vicinity of another victim at the time he was injured, but the officer said the evidence ultimately wasnt clear.
Punneo and McCormack, who could not be reached for comment, were not charged. Ayress report included images and names of three other TWP-affiliated men who he said were armed with knives, but who also have faced no charges.
The CHP declined to comment.
In a response filed on Thursday, prosecutors said every assertion in the motion to dismiss is inaccurate or fabricated and accused Felarcas lawyers of using the filing to make a political statement. The response also repeatedly blamed the stabbing victims for ignoring the district attorneys inquiries: Despite the fact that we have not gained the cooperation of these victims, the investigation to hold their attackers responsible continues forward.
Prosecutors also said the charges were based on video evidence and argued that no one is beneath the protection of the law, no matter how repugnant his or her rhetoric or misguided his or her ideals.
Allegations of police bias and collusion with neo-Nazis have emerged in similar cases across the US. Last year, US prosecutors targeting anti-Trump protesters in Washington DC relied on video evidence from a far-right group with a record of deceptive tactics.
At an Oregon alt-right event, police allowed a member of a rightwing militia-style group to help officers arrest an anti-fascist activist.
Police in Charlottesville were widely accused of standing by as Nazis attacked protesters, and a black man who was badly beaten by white supremacists was later charged with a felony.
Sam Menefee-Libey, an activist who advocated for protesters charged for Inauguration Day rallies last year, said the government has repeatedly gone to great lengths to target anti-fascists: We have patterns of acknowledged and unacknowledged overlaps between the interest of ultra-right nationalist organizations and the police and prosecutors offices.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-police-white-supremacists-counter-protest
March 3, 2018
How migrant workers took on Ben & Jerry’s and won a historic agreement 0
by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: activism, Ice-cream and sorbet, protest, US immigration, US news
In Vermont, activists demanded better working conditions on dairy farms even as the threat of deportation loomed
On a windy afternoon in March 2017, protesters singing civil rights songs circled the steps of the Vermont state capitol. It was a classic Vermont rally. There were white-haired activists; Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim clergy; young adults; and children carrying signs that said: We All Belong Here. We Will Defend Each Other.
At the center was a small group of dairy workers from remote mountain villages in southern Mexico. They sang songs, then chanted: Ni una ms! Not one more deportation!
This was the third demonstration in four days to protest the arrest of three Vermont farmworker-activists – Enrique Kike Balcazar, Victoria Zully Palacios and Alex Carrillo-Sanchez. Detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the three faced deportation, swept up in a nationwide crackdown ordered by President Trump.
Even before Trumps election, farmworker organizers had been targeted and deported for years.
We are Mexicans and immigration is always chasing us, said Vermont dairy activist Maribel Lopes. She was arrested by Ice when she left her workplace to buy diapers for her baby.
If it werent for migrant workers, our dairy products and everything else would go up higher to the point where we couldnt afford it. So I say, let them do what they came here to do, which is to support their families, Lyle Deida, Carrillo-Sanchezs father-in-law, told the rally.
Carrillo-Sanchez, Balcazar, and Palacios are all activists with Migrant Justice, an organization that promotes worker-led social responsibility on Vermont dairy farms.
Last year, the National Education Association, the countrys largest union, awarded Migrant Justice the Cesar Chavez human and civil rights award. They have won the John Brown Freedom award. Senator Bernie Sanders hailed them as human rights defenders. Twenty-four-year-old Balcazar has been described as the face of undocumented labor in Vermont.
And thats the problem Migrant Justice activists are intentionally visible.
Balcazar moved to Vermont at 16 to find work. He considers it home. Asked by local news media if he feared deportation, he replied:
Im not scared at all. Weve been here as a community fighting for our rights to live free and dignified lives and we arent going back in the shadows.
When Vermont Ice let it be known that they planned to arrest and deport Balcazar, allies offered him sanctuary in their homes. He graciously refused.
Balcazar was tired of hiding. Just 19 when he became active in Migrant Justice, he felt trapped on the farm where he worked 78-hour weeks. The brutal schedule exhausted him. So did the stress of dodging immigration police.
Until 2013, undocumented Vermonters could not get drivers licenses. Farmers would drive their workers to shop. In rural Vermont, one of the countrys whitest regions, vans of Mexicans were easy pickings for Ice.
Migrant Justice led successful campaigns to ban racial profiling by state police and to enable undocumented Vermonters to get drivers licenses. But that victory came back to bite them.
Some department of motor vehicles (DMV) employees decided to send Ice copies of license applications with south-of-the-border names. Though against state law, the practice continued unrestrained.
Were going to have to make you an honorary Ice officer, an immigration agent wrote to one DMV employee.
The ACLU won a $40,000 settlement and DMV employees were warned by the state to stop the practice. But the case highlighted the impossible situation so many farmworkers find themselves in. Ice has continued targeting Migrant Justice activists.
In the summer of 2017, two were arrested after a 13-mile march from the Vermont State House to Ben & Jerrys headquarters.
The protest was part of Migrant Justices most ambitious campaign, Milk with Dignity, which aimed to bring to Vermonts dairy farms a system of worker-run labor inspections pioneered in 2011 by Florida tomato pickers.
The approach has been incredibly effective. In three years, worker-run inspections dramatically improved labor conditions on Florida tomato farms, which one federal judge had described as ground zero for modern slavery.
I heard about the campaign and I was anxious to bring it here, Balcazar says.
Floridas tomato and cane fields had long been infamous for inhumane labor practices. In 2011 a group of indigenous workers from Mexico and Central America, members of an alternative labor union called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), decided to apply pressure at the top of the supply chain on the fast food and retail grocery chains buying tomatoes in bulk.
To do this, they had to win the consumers support. The key was making the invisible visible through workers sharing their own stories on cross-country Truth Tours.
Field workers called on consumers, students, and clergy nationwide to pressure big tomato buyers to sign onto a Fair Food agreement. The strategy worked, and fast.
In three years, 14 major companies including McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King, Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and Walmart agreed to pay tomato growers a penny more per pound to increase worker salaries and fund inspections by an independent Fair Food Standards Council.
CIWs Fair Food program has since resolved hundreds of wage theft, sexual harassment, and verbal abuse cases and, by 2015, raised $14m through Fair Food premiums, bringing thousands of field workers above the poverty line. The program has also pioneered effective resistance to slave labor, including training workers to identify and report these abuses.
Balcazar thought the approach was perfect for Vermont dairy farms.
He knew that workers could not squeeze much out of hard-pressed dairy farmers struggling to survive in a time of corporate farming and falling milk prices. Still, migrant workers had leverage because dairy farming is a cold and dirty job that even unemployed Americans are loath to do.
Vermonts cows must be milked every twelve hours, 365 days a year, or they will die. And unlike other kinds of farms, dairy farmers are prohibited from using legal guest workers because, until now, the H-2A guest worker program has been limited to seasonal farm workers while dairy farmers need help year-round. (A bill to change that was introduced in October and is working its way through the House and Senate.) So undocumented dairy workers and the Vermont dairy industry are inextricably bound together.
In 2014, Balcazar began pressing Vermonts largest dairy buyers to demand improved labor conditions in their supply chains.
Ben & Jerrys is one of the biggest purchasers of milk in Vermont, Balcazar announced. Theyve made a powerful brand by advertising that their products are fair trade. Milk with Dignity will make sure that this trade is truly fair.
Despite its hippie origins, the famous ice-cream company was sold in 2000 to the multinational food conglomerate Unilever. Executives insisted that the companys corporate responsibility code protected workers well enough. Balcazar disagreed.
Migrant Justice activists protested outside Ben & Jerrys stores in 16 cities. On International Workers Day 2015, speakers at a rally outside Ben & Jerrys Vermont headquarters described working conditions in the companys supply chain.
One worker, Victor Diaz, told of injuries hed received when glass milk bottles exploded and chlorine (used to disinfect milking rooms) sprayed his eyes. Others spoke of sleep deprivation, because of midnight milking. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts, without a day off, are common. And workers have been housed in barns and unheated trailers through long, frigid Vermont winters.
Dairy work is dangerous and workers in Vermont were angry about risking life and limb. Migrant Justice itself was born of tragedy: in 2009, the 20-year-old Mayan dairy worker Jos Obeth Santiz-Cruz was strangled to death when his clothing caught in a farm machine.
Many of the workers come from small towns in Chiapas, the southern Mexico region that gave birth to, and has long sustained, the Zapatista rebellion. By 2014, they were ready to rise.
Milk with Dignity was Vermont dairy workers bid for a brighter future, and Balcazar thought that Ben & Jerrys should be more than willing to give it to them.
Ben & Jerrys has stood up for cows (no RGBH), for chickens (cage-free agreement with Humane Society), and for international farmers (fair trade), Balcazar argued. Theyve pledged support for climate justice, for Occupy Wall Street … So, after four years of us educating them about farmworker human rights abuses in its supply chain, its time Ben & Jerrys stands up for the rights of the same farmworkers who put the cream in ice cream.
In June 2015, Ben & Jerrys agreed to adopt Migrant Justices Milk with Dignity program. But then the foot-dragging began.
Migrant Justice activists went on tour again, partnering with student groups to protest at ice cream shops and college campuses. CIW workers came to Vermont to strategize.
When the Ben & Jerrys CEO, Jostein Solheim, spoke at Stanford, students chanted: Hey, Ben & Jerrys, can I get some Milk with Dignity in my Cherry Garcia?
Solheim was conciliatory. He agreed that worker-led safety codes were the best way to improve labor conditions. He patted his pocket and swore that he had a Milk with Dignity contract that I hope Im going to sign next week. More than two years later, he had not signed.
On 17 June 2017, activists marched 13 miles from the Vermont State House to Ben & Jerrys headquarters, where Solheim announced that he was ready to go.
Ten days later, Presbyterian congregations across the US sent a joint letter urging him to not delay any longer … and sign in fact what you have already agreed to in principle. Methodists sent one too, urged him to continue Ben & Jerrys legacy of justice-seeking … and fulfill your promise to workers, farmers, and consumers. And Will Allen, Vermont organic pioneer, led organic farmers in challenging Ben & Jerrys, along with Cabot Creamery, owned by Agri-Mark, to stop running sweatshop dairies that abuse farmworkers, exhaust cows, and bankrupt small farmers.
On 27 March 2017, hundreds circled in a chill rain near the JFK Federal Building in Boston, where deportation hearings were under way for Balcazar, Palacios, and Carrillo-Sanchez.
The crowd included activists from Cosecha (Harvest) – a nationwide movement led by and for undocumented workers. Migrant Justice came with 10,000 signatures calling on the judge to free the Vermont Three.
Fifty activists went into the courtroom to let the detainees know that they are not alone. Estamos en la lucha. We are fighting.
Outside, protesters sang a 1930s union song, The Rich Mans House, revived in the 1990s by activists seeking to build an international economic human rights movement, which has become an anthem of undocumented workers. I went down to the courthouse and I took back what they stole from me / I took back my humanity / I took back my dignity / Now its under my feet / Aint gonna let nobody walk all over me, they sang.
That evening, citing letters from Vermonts senators, an immigration judge freed Balcazar and Palacios on bail, though the threat of deportation still loomed.
But the judge looked straight at my daughter and me and denied bail, said Lymarie Deida, Alex Carrillo-Sanchezs wife. Its OK. We are going to keep fighting.
Carrillo-Sanchez was deported on 7 May 2017, leaving behind his wife and daughter, who are US citizens. Im angry, he said. But theres no other way. He has applied for a marriage visa and began an indefinite wait.
On 30 June 2017, Migrant Justice won the release of activists arrested at the Ben & Jerrys protest.
Then, on 3 October, came a sweet, hard-won victory. Ben & Jerrys finally signed the Milk with Dignity agreement, giving dairy workers in their supply chain a full day off each week, Vermont minimum wage ($10 per hour), at least eight hours between shifts, and a guarantee that housing will include a real bed (not straw piles), electricity, and clean running water.
Jostein Solheim, Ben & Jerrys CEO, lauded the companys leadership: We love to be part of innovation. We believe in worker-led movements.
Balcazar spoke to a jubilant crowd in Burlington, Vermont: This is a historic moment for dairy workers. We have worked tirelessly to get here and now we move forward towards a new day in the industry.
Adapted from We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck (Beacon Press, 2018). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/25/ben-jerrys-migrant-workers-dairy-farms