Local power

This week, federal agents intensified their attacks on immigrants and people attempting to protect them. In Southern California, media captured images of police and protesters clashing, as federal agents unleashed chemical weapons for crowd control. In the end, in the midst of terror and turmoil, agents detained 10 children, 8 of whom were not accompanied by adults.

These overmilitarized, masked, macho raids are completely without justification. No one was being harmed by these young people who were working to support themselves and their families. No great national security issues are at stake in the cannabis fields of southern California. The only disruption to public safety was caused by the invasion of federal agents, out to fulfill their bounty.

Such scenes are provoking challenges from local and state leaders. In Los Angeles, immigrant rights groups filed suit to halt “unlawful enforcement actions in Southern California that include racial profiling, warrantless arrests, and denying access to counsel to people held in a ‘dungeonlike’ facility.”

Additionally, individuals are seeking redress.

“Job Garcia, an American citizen, said federal officers in Los Angeles tackled and wrongfully detained him for more than 24 hours after he recorded masked border agents conducting a raid. He is seeking $1 million in damages for economic losses and personal injury.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed  a suit accusing the Trump administration of unleashing “indiscriminate immigration operations that have ensnared day laborers, carwash workers, farm workers, caregivers and others described as the lifeblood of communities across Southern California.”

The ACLU explained, “Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.” 

Meanwhile, lawmakers and activists are beginning to focus attention on the now standard practice of federal agents to operate with masks and without any form of identification. 

It’s obvious that while these are tactics designed to promote cruelty and terror, they are extremely dangerous. Masked people, detaining another person, look very much like folks engaging in criminal acts. Disrupting such behaviors and refusing to comply with such tactics are natural and honorable responses. 

In California state, lawmakers introduced a measure that would prevent officials at all levels from covering their faces on the job and require them to wear uniforms with clear identification. State and city officials in New York are pursuing a similar initiative, targeting immigration authorities, “especially those who occupy the hallways of courthouses waiting to take immigrants into custody.”

Local efforts to control the tactics of federal agents raise fundamental questions about the nature of civic life and the control of our communities.  Do people, collectively, have the right and responsibility to establish the basic framework governing our daily life? What does it mean to be a citizen of a community, a town, a village? Are the only rights of a citizen those held at a federal level, or can we exercise meaningful power in determining the course of our daily lives at the community level?

This administration is acting as though citizenship rests with pleasing the president. He, and he alone, gets to determine who can live on this land, in this community. By executive order, he would end the centuries of law intended to protect liberty, life, and freedom of movement.

Most people reject the idea that our lives are lived at the whim of one person.  But this is precisely the question we face today. We have the responsibility to redefine the role of the citizen beginning at the local level. Efforts to decentralized power, to create ways of living that respect what is closest to us, most directly under our control, and most effected by our actions, enables us to counter the control of oligarchs. 

By organizing locally, creating collective actions, and defining what we require of ourselves and each other, we are creating new forms of political power. It is the power that flows from trusted relationships, establishing values that protect life and dignity. These actions are the source of a more human future.