Feature Archives

This Halloween, Friday, Oct. 31, hundreds of Bay Area youth gathered with community members and families to denounce the atrocities committed against immigrant communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The action was a response to ICE attacks against immigrant communities in so-called “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco and to a presidential election season that has seen neither major candidate substantively address the issues facing immigrant families. BART police shut down at least three stations - Richmond, Fruitvale, and Coliseum - from which groups of protesters were gathering to commute to the protest in downtown San Francisco. At least three protesters were arrested in Richmond.

On Wednesday, Oct. 22, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security raided more than a dozen homes in San Francisco, South San Francisco, and Richmond. Victims of the attack included a San Francisco immigrant family, reportedly all US citizens. On Thursday, Oct. 23, community members gathered in front of the ICE office in San Francisco to protest the violent raids.

On October 18th, both exterior surveillance cameras at the McDonald's on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz were stolen. A post to Santa Cruz Indymedia says the action was a follow-up to a similar event in August and also states that, "McDonalds is a major sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics which are flooding the city of Vancouver with increased surveillance and police presence."

For almost two months, the teachers union in the Mexican state of Morelos rose up against the "Alliance for Quality Education", a neo-liberal plan akin to "No Child Left Behind" that would pave the way to the privatization of education, among other things. They were supported by the people of Morelos in their marches, encampments in public plazas, and blockades of interstate highways. On October 7, 8, and 9, the army and state and federal police were sent in to brutally smash the movement.

Several hundred protesters, mostly students, took to the streets of Tijuana, Mexico October 4 in remembrance of the 1968 massacre of leftist students in Tlatelolco Plaza. At that time hundreds, perhaps thousands of students were killed when troops opened fire on a demonstration protesting the Mexico City Olympics. In Tijuana, the demonstrators chanted “ni perdon, ni olvido” (no forgiveness, no forgetting).

The Director General of Police of the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, Vishwa Ranjan, faced intense questioning at a Conference on Indian Democracy: Justice and the Law held at the University of California, Berkeley. He admitted that arresting documentary filmmaker Ajay T.G. may have been a “mistake,” and signed a postcard supporting the release of imprisoned civil rights leader Dr. Binayak Sen.

Grand juries are one of the good intentions paving the road to our current legal system. Unlike a trial jury, which decides whether a suspect is guilty, a grand jury merely decides whether there’s probable cause to prosecute a suspect on felony charges. The goal was to create a filter to catch unjustified felony cases and stop them at an early stage, so that the suspect wouldn’t be wrongfully prosecuted (and have to spend unnecessary time in jail and unnecessary money on lawyers). But it all went very wrong.