A number of the public speakers had to pause as they choked back tears and spoke of how terrified they and their neighbors felt to know that the federal military were “abducting people without warrants or wearing any self-identification.” For their safety, they asked the council to make the city a sanctuary, which would send the “powerful message that Goleta protects its own.”
Others spoke of how immigrants volunteered during the pandemic but now had to worry about dropping their kids off at school or going to work or even asking for help. “This is not safety,” Daisy Martinez said. “This is trauma. This is violence.” A parent at Brandon School noted that 65 percent of the student body were people of color. Her children’s school friends were terrified. “What’s the plan?” asked Sarah Pena.
Alethea Tyner Paradis, who teaches history at S.B. City College, said that California citizens hid Black and Brown people from slave catchers when it entered the Union as a free state. If local law enforcement failed to defend the community, her suggestion was to defund the Sheriff’s Office and use the money to support immigrant organizations in the community. “It may not be hyperbole to say we’ve entered a phase of white nationalist authoritarianism,” Tyner Paradis said…