Free America

On Feb. 8 there was an ICE raid on a manufacturer in Lindon, here in Utah County. There are some pretty draconian punishments being threatened in this case. Friday morning (Feb. 15) I submitted the following opinion piece to The Daily Herald, a local newspaper; I don’t know yet if they’re going to run it.

Immigration Enforcement Threatens American Liberties

The immigration raid on Lindon manufacturer Universal Industrial Sales earlier this month is symptomatic of the growing authoritarian spirit in this country. Over 100 armed men descended on the plant and arrested 57 workers. The human resources director is facing charges punishable by up to 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. The company itself has lost over half its employees and is facing a ruinous $5 million in fines. Numerous families have been deprived of their fathers and left without any income.

Yet nobody has answered one simple question: who is the victim? HR director Alex Urrutia-Garcia faces a possible prison term that is nearly twice the average sentence for rape and approaches the average sentence for murder, in addition to crushing, impossible-to-pay fines. For what? Not for any act of violence against another human being. Not for any act of theft. Not for defrauding another. His life is about to be ruined simply because Congress declared that he must serve as an unpaid immigration enforcer, and Federal officials are displeased with his performance in this capacity.

Put simply, Urrutia-Garcia is being punished for being insufficiently obedient to our masters in Washington.

The same holds for the 57 workers arrested. They came to this state looking for work, not for a handout. Many of them are responsible and caring fathers just trying to take care of their families. They were not arrested for any crime committed against an actual human being. They were arrested for failing to get government permission before exercising their natural rights to live wherever they can purchase or rent a domicile, and work for whomever wishes to pay them. They behaved as free men—and in today’s America there is no surer way to provoke the wrath of officialdom.

I have noticed a disturbingly authoritarian mind-set in many of the people who have commented on this case. They display great moral indignation against those who disobey the government’s edicts—as if government officials were deities whose pronouncements defined right and wrong. They cry that it matters not whether the law is good or bad, popular or unpopular—the law must be enforced!

Why?

What good came from this enforcement action? In what way has it improved the life of any human being? I see no benefits, only harms. Martin Snow, founder and owner of UIS, is seeing the work of 30 years destroyed. His customers are losing a supplier they describe as reliable, top-notch, and willing to go the extra mile. Alex Urrutia-Garcia may lose everything he owns and the next 20 years of his life. Fathers have been separated from their families. Families have lost their source of income and are being thrown onto the welfare rolls.

The bigger picture is that aggressive immigration enforcement is destroying the liberties of all Americans. It used to be that Americans didn’t need to prove they had government permission to work before they could get a job, but the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 changed that. The Real ID Act of 2005, aimed at controlling illegal immigration, is creating a de facto national ID card. Once in place it will enable routine tracking, monitoring, and regulation of Americans’ movements and activities. This is the kind of control that communist and fascist regimes have only dreamed of.

And don’t suppose that just because you’re a native of this country that you have nothing to fear from immigration authorities. Thomas Warziniack was imprisoned for weeks because officials thought he was an illegal Russian immigrant; it took intervention from a U.S. senator before his family was even allowed to prove he was born in Minnessota. Immigration lawyers report seeing increasing numbers of such cases. Those are the ones lucky enough to get a lawyer: prisoners accused of immigration violations don’t have a right to an attorney.

None of this should surprise anyone. Our country’s long borders and Mexico’s ailing economy make effective enforcement of immigration restrictions almost impossible. Nothing less than a police state could fully enforce U.S. immigration statutes. Is that what we want?

I’m currently seeing what the possibilities are for organizing some sort of protest in support of UIS, Alex Urrutia-Garcia, and the workers arrested.

You may have heard about the 70-year-old woman in Orem, Utah who was arrested and roughed up by a policeman because (1) she hadn’t watered her lawn for months, and (2) she refused to give her name when the policeman demanded it. I was reminded of the case on Monday, and found out that her trial on charges of interfering with an arrest and violating a zoning ordinance would be held this coming Monday, Feb. 11. I decided to take some action on this case and organize a protest activity in the prosecutor’s neighborhood. The plan was to circulate a flyer to the prosecutor’s neighbors before the trial, protesting his action in prosecuting Mrs. Perry, and calling on them to persuade him that what he was doing was wrong.

From news reports I found the prosecutor’s name: Andrew Peterson. While searching the web for his name I ran across a document that listed the salaries of Orem City public officials, which gave me his middle initial: Andrew F. Peterson. I also went to a Utah County government website that provides access to land records, and searched for his name. This gave me his address.

My initial attempt to verify the address was a bust: the listed address was slightly incorrect (the street name was incomplete), and I spent an hour or so trying to find an address that didn’t exist. I went back to the land record website and found another document that gave the full street name. I drove out to this location on my lunch break. I noted a nearby church parking lot where activists could park for the protest. I parked half a block from the address and walked to it. There was no name on the mailbox, so I went down a few doors and said I was looking for Andrew Peterson. The person there directed me to the house that matched the land records. At this point I was pretty confident I had the right house.

I then found every news story that the Deseret News and Daily Herald (two local newspapers) had written on the story, by searching their websites. I used this information to write the following one-page flyer:

It’s Not About the Lawn—
It’s About Keeping the Rabble in Line

Once America was known as the land of the free. Now it resembles a police state more each year. Your neighbor, Orem City prosecutor Andrew F. Peterson, is helping continue that trend.

You may have heard about 70-year-old “lawn lady” Betty Perry. Orem police officer Jim Flygare came to her door in July to cite her for not watering her lawn. He asked for her name, and she refused to tell him, as is her natural right. Then she tried to go back into her home to call her son for advice on how to handle the situation.

That’s when the **** hit the fan. Within moments Mrs. Perry was bruised, bleeding, and handcuffed, and soon the bewildered woman was sitting in a jail cell.

As Mrs. Perry later said, “Don’t ever say no when the police tell you to do something… You’ve got to do what they tell you or they will hurt you.” Mrs. Perry made the mistake of acting like a free woman. She didn’t realize that the code of today’s policeman is not to serve and protect; it is to command and control.

In yesterday’s America, Officer Flygare would simply have gotten Mrs. Perry’s name from the land records and mailed her a citation. There was no need to arrest her, as she was no danger to anyone. Even Orem Police Chief Mike Larsen concurs: “Clearly there were other options available. [The officer] should have taken those.”

And yet Andrew Peterson insists on prosecuting Mrs. Perry for interfering with an arrest; she faces up to 6 months in jail and a fine of $1000. Peterson has made it clear that her failure to obey is the main issue: “By far the more serious charge that she’s facing is interference with arrest…” But heaven forbid the jury should find out that the arrest was both unnecessary and unreasonable. Peterson has objected to proposed jury instructions that would include information about use-of-force protocols at the Orem Police Department and what kinds of options police officers have in certain situations.

As friends and neighbors of Mr. Peterson, please speak to him—politely—and express your concerns about this prosecution. Help him understand that he is contributing to the destruction of American freedom. Perhaps he will reconsider his actions. And perhaps we will take a small step back from the road to serfdom.

Just as I was finishing up the flyer, I got the news: Mrs. Perry and the prosecutor had reached a last-minute agreement in which he dropped the original charges and she plead guilty to the lesser charge of disorderly conduct and agreed not to sue Orem City. At this point the original protest became pointless, and so it was canceled.

Rather than let all that work go to waste, I have revised the flyer to use as a recruiting tool. I, and perhaps a few others, will be leaving copies in various places where free literature is distributed, and maybe passing some out door-to-door. Here is the revised flyer.

You’ve probably already heard about how Hope Steffey of Canton, Ohio called 911 for help after being assaulted, and instead of receiving aid was arrested and then assaulted by seven sheriff’s deputies who stripped her naked and left her without clothing for six hours.

Since I live far from Ohio, there’s not much I can do, but I have written two polite letters demanding that these deputies be arrested and tried for assault. One I have sent to the sheriff, the other to the county prosecutor.

Here is their contact info:

Timothy A. Swanson, Stark County Sheriff, 4500 Atlantic Blvd. NE, Canton, OH 44705-4374; phone: 330-430-3800.

John D. Ferrero, Stark County Prosecutor, 110 Central Plaza South, suite 510, Canton, OH 44702-1413; phone: 330-451-7897.

With any luck, someone living in or near Stark County, Ohio will take some direct action to agitate for the prosecution of the uniformed animals who assaulted Hope Steffey. In the meantime, Swanson and Ferrero at least need to know that we view these deputies as criminals.

Here is the text of my letter to the county prosecutor:

Mr. Ferrero,

By now I am sure that you have seen the horrific video of the Hope Steffey incident. I understand that you are reluctant to press charges against people you are used to thinking of as members of the same team, but if you are a man of honor—and I hope you are—then you will do your duty as county prosecutor and see that justice is done in this matter. If there were video of seven people not employed by the government doing to Hope Steffey what these sheriff’s deputies did, is there any doubt that they would at this moment be behind bars facing charges of assault? If you believe in rule of law, then it is clear what you must do: charge those seven deputies with assault and see that they face trial for their crime. Anything less amounts to a declaration that, in Stark County, “law enforcement” officers are above the law.

The next level below grand strategy in a prolonged struggle is strategy: the planning for a single phase or campaign for specific objectives. For a nonviolent struggle the first campaign must focus on building strength. This strength is measured in numbers of supporters and activists; their degree of training in nonviolent struggle; the resources and information at their disposal; and their ability to withstand repression.

This post presents some preliminary thoughts I have on strategy for this first campaign. What I have is incomplete and does not include detailed goals, but it is a start.

Since I live in Orem, Utah, my own goals for this first campaign include

• creating an active Free America movement within Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley;
• creating enough publicity that most people in these two areas have heard of the movement and have some notion of what it’s about;
• building solidarity within this movement;
• gaining experience in the practical application of nonviolent action; and
• raising awareness of the violent and savage nature of the state.

Over the next few weeks I will be recruiting local libertarians to join with me in creating a local activist group. How will we achieve the above goals? Where should we start? I advocate a strategy of focusing on specific victims of local, state, and federal governments in the Salt Lake and Utah valleys: people who are threatened with or have had property seized; people who are facing or currently suffering imprisonment for victimless”crimes”; victims of police brutality; and so on. Our activity should be focused on publicizing the wrong done these people; agitating for release of prisoners, return of seized property, restitution for harm done, etc.; and doing what we can to alleviate their suffering.

I favor this strategy for the following reasons:

• Glen Allport has pointed out the need to connect love and freedom (“The Road to Compassion and Freedom”). We need to make sure that our activism actually makes somebody’s life better.
• We will learn how to take care of our own who engage in civil disobedience.
• We will build solidarity.
• As discussed in the preceding post, we must not forget that what matters is the welfare of real, flesh-and-blood human beings.
• It fits in with the grand strategy of emphasizing the state’s violent and lawless nature.
• There may be opportunities to promote the idea that disputes involving the government should not be ruled on by an arm of the government itself, but by a truly independent arbiter.

I’m not sure yet how to locate these people and investigate their cases, but I do have a few ideas and leads:

• Public records. Are there public records of cases where property is being seized for failure to pay taxes, children are seized by by Family and Child “Services”, action is taken against property owners for zoning violations, etc.? Is there a public record of all arrests?
• Copwatch maintains a database of complaints filed against police.
• The November Coalition is a group of friends and families of prisoners of the War on Drugs. They have an manual on grass-roots activism that may be useful for freedom activists in general.
• Critical Resistance is a group that opposes the massive increase in the number of Americans imprisoned over the last few years, and seeks to end the Prison Industrial Complex.
• There are a variety of websites with information on government auctions of seized assets; protests could be aimed at these auctions, or perhaps investigating these auctions could provide some leads to the victims from whom the goods were seized. Here are some URLs: www.policeauctions.com, www.governmentauctions.org, www.car-auction.com/Seized_Cars.php, www.choosecars.com, and usgovernmentauctions.net.

I was reading the book A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, and came across a passage on p. 29 that sent ice water through my veins. Under discussion were the events of “Bloody Sundy” in St. Petersburg, Russia, in January 1905:

The march on the Winter Palace changed everything: The public’s acquiescence to autocracy was ruptured, and the country would soon begin the greatest convulsion of its history. In the eyes of the organizers, the march was a victory: The honor and legitimacy of the Tsar did, as they predicted, “drown in blood.” But the working men and women who marched that day had taken the meaning of their action at face value, as a humble request for justice, not as a deliberate act of conflict with their lives on the line. They had been drawn into a movement many were not aware of joining.

On a similar note, Saul Alinsky approvingly claims in Rules for Radicals (p. 96) that

… at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre [Samuel Adams] was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution…

What I find disturbing about both of these passages is the implied willingness of political agitators to sacrifice other people’s lives for the sake of their cause. It is one thing to ask people to participate in an act of resistance while being open about the dangers involved, and taking steps to mitigate the risks. It is quite another to lead people unknowingly into the lion’s den, and hope to provoke the beast to bloodshed. The latter puts the interests of an abstract cause above those of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. It relegates those human beings to the status of tools, means to an end; and such “end justifies the means” thinking led to the murders of at least 150 million people in the 20th century.

Human beings are people; they are ends in themselves; they are not things. This is something we must never lose sight of in our own struggle.

That’s the thesis of Melinda Pillsbury-Foster in her OpEd News article, “What Happened to Freedom? A Story You Need to Hear.” Speaking of the early days of the Libertarian Party, she writes, “We were well on the way to creating a real grassroots organization. What stopped us was people who decided we ‘needed to get organized.’ ”