Side Quest: July 6 Know Your Rights & Extended Rapid Response

Working Class Unity Side-Quests
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Side-Quest Proposals (you must vote on each one)

ONCE YOU ARE READY TO VOTE, PLEASE VOTE YES/NO ON PROPOSAL A AND/OR B. I believe quorum was still six, so we need 7 Yes votes for each with maximum 3 coming from Steering.

A: July 6th Know Your Rights Event

This proposal is for a one time event at Victory Park on July 6th. This should be a family friendly event with food/games for kids. The goal is to get families to attend, learn, and feel like there is a broader network looking out for them, not so much to demonstrate protest capacity. The overall agenda for the event would be to briefly go over our political analysis of what is currently happening with immigration and ICE; a know your rights presentation, that includes playing out different scenarios; having Valley Watch Network present what their role is; we present our extended response network (if we are that far by then); and finally we try to recruit more members/volunteers/help them get signed up for alerts (if we have those ready).

B: Extended Rapid Response Network

This proposal is to extend the current Rapid Response Network, at least in San Joaquin County (we can ask if NCVDSA want to partner with us to extend it further down the valley). There are a few goals here:

  • Create some sort of alternative notification system so that social media posts are not the only way for people to learn about confirmed reports of ICE
  • If ICE is engaging, then have a wider network of people who are able to go out to record, but also speak with the impacted family, connect them with a lawyer, follow up with whoever ICE has taken
  • Continue working with Luis and others to develop online resources that they confirm will be usable

In terms of the alternative notification system, we could send out alerts via SMS for people who sign up, post them on a plaintext website, or whatever else. If we are able to work with Valley Watch Network, we could ask them to send us confirmed ICE sightings and we could have our own Rapid Response Network after that. In terms of lawyers willing to help anyone ICE does pick up, there are a couple of orgs we could reach out to, or we could see if there are lawyers willing to do this work for a very small fee. This proposal is a bit more ambitious and depending on how it goes, may need to changed into a focus campaign if the workload is too high.

For both proposals, we need to break out of our current bubble and bring together any local leaders from the various workplaces being impacted, church leaders, and union rank and file. There is a possibility we could merge movements together, but that means getting people who care about one issue to join first, not just collect the 30 leftists who care about everything because being a leftist is their religion (guilty of that myself).

Comments

I spoke with Luis a few times about this. I’ll summarize here:

  • Reducing public panic: One big concern for his is the spread of false rumors as it really disrupts people’s lives for no reason. Right now, he was not even aware of the Valley Watch Network and he didn’t think anyone else was either. He doesn’t think social media alerts are the best way to go about getting the word out.
  • Better literature: A lot of the literature out there seems to be more targeted at organizers than anyone else. He said what people should do in certain situations needs to be clearly spelled out in an easy to follow way. Ince we are just producing literature for people locally, it should also have local details: here’s the specific number to call, here’s the intake facility, here’s where the person might be moved to. etc.
  • He has been trying to get the city to hold know your rights events, but so far they have not followed through (and he does not think they will). He wants people to better understand the local context (that what is happening out of state is not what will happen here; what services people should feel safe continuing to use). Even though the Mayor does not want to be the face of this kind of outreach, there are probably people in her office who are likely to at least help us clarify those things for us.
  • He thinks the Democrats are trying to hijack this moment: He’s not a fan of the Democratic Party and he thinks the Dems are trying to take and redirect blame about ICE / overall immigration status solely towards Trump for their own purposes. He has been through this a few (many) times at this point, and imo he’s right.

Some non-profits are stepping up to fill a void because their staff are generally progressive, but also because this issue has grant funding and is also not off limits like Palestine. Personally, I think we should do our best to push out the nonprofits as much as possible because they will always end up betraying working people in the end just due to their role/funding sources, no matter where their staff’s hearts are at. If we are not upfront about those limitations, then we will also lose any trust we might build with people who have been betrayed by both parties over and over again.

At the same time, I know we have our own limitations, especially in terms of capacity. So the level of NGO/Dem involvement is something we should discuss, if we chose to move forward with either or both of these.

But also, like I mentioned above, the Democrats and NGO world is actively trying to put their claws into this moment. However we end up working with other groups, we should make that determination now before we proceed because later on, the temptation to compromise for the “greater good” will be strong.

Deliverables:

  • 5x7 Flyers (or smaller?) New easy to understand and consume Know Your Rights cards + information on how to use the Rapid Response Networks.
  • 10x16 Flyers: Can include the following information: Rapid Response phone number, links to our Know Your Rights materials, our Tenant Union materials. The key components should be either how to use the rapid response network or the kinds of information we have available (if ice is at your home, work, etc.). These would be to hang up at businesses or around town.
  • An alternative alert system(s) for confirmed ICE reports
  • A video demonstration of what to do if ICE comes to your home/work/stops you in the street/etc.

Finally, there is a tendency on the left to do something on behalf of people, without actually consulting those people or thinking we know better than them about what they need. We are doing some of that here, since admittedly, this is based on what one community leader is saying. But we should do our best to get input from as many people as we can throughout this, and then serve the role of helping them achieve their goals (and that can include trying to give them our socialist political analysis to help them make better (in our opinion) decisions). I do not think we have done the best job of that so far in WCU’s history.

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A vote for yes on A, and another for B!

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I vote in favor of both A & B

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As a steering member i vote to approve both A and B of this sidequest

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Yes to both a and b

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I am so in favor of this.

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I vote in favor for both A and B!

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I vote in favor of both A and B

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I vote in favor of A and B!

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okay, approved! Thanks everyone for voting.

I’ll send a link for us to schedule a meeting so we can nail down specifics next week!

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The forces of abundance are assembling, we should too!

Mark when you are available so we can discuss next steps for both of these side-quests!

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I’m so late but still wanna say yes to both A&B :smiley: lol

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Thoughts on the flyer design?

2025-06-25 July 6th Event
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Forgot to link this after the meeting, but here are our meeting notes:

I summarized the notes below:

How should we coordinate with other organizations?

Working with Democratic Party

No one objected to V saying that the Democratic Party itself should be boxed out completely.

Working with other Non-Profits

There was general agreement to keep other nonprofits at arms length. But it depended on the circumstances:

  • We should not try to research/develop material that has already been compiled by others. We should take what others have put out and use that to create our own material following our own goals (simple, to the point, concise).
  • We should take relevant the rapid response / know your rights / accompanying training and essentially open source them (at least the points that are safe / don’t compromise other tactics).
  • On a side note, after talking to some people, it seems like most of the training has a lot of overlap across orgs/states. For some reason, everyone has just decided to follow down a similar path of putting all information behind a zoom wall.

Finding more legal aid

Others to work with

We can go straight to the churches.

July 6th Know Your Rights Event

We should also see if we can cover power of attorney / family preparedness.

Other organizations:

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I spoke with someone from Valley Watch today. Thank you @Veewok for coordinating the call.

I asked them about their process. Right now, they are taking confirmed ICE reports and posting them on Instagram. I brought up our texting idea; they said they were looking to roll one out in the next couple of months as well.

One thing they are doing that I have seen operated differently elsewhere is that they are training people to become confirmer + legal observer combos, while others have separate roles for both.

They said that so far, San Joaquin County has not had a confirmed report of an ICE pickup. There is a lot of FBI activity here, and they are deputized to act on behalf of ICE, so that makes reporting difficult. They are working internally on how to deal with that. DEA/ATF are also deputized to act on behalf of ICE. So it is a balancing act between making sure the rapid alerts are actually happening vs not scaring people every time someone spots someone from one of these agencies.

They are currently covering eight counties. From what I heard, it seems like they don’t have a ton of resources here in Stockton, but they are willing to work with groups here.

They are also (have or starting to develop) accompanyment training to help people coming to ice check ins, how to navigate the immigration benefit system (asylum, permanent residence, adjustment of status). In other places, people that have been here for less than two years have been getting picked up when they go in for check-ins.

So they want to train volunteers to teach people what to document, what information to have on hand, explain that once are you picked up, how you go through the process, ask for a judge, etc.

I invited them to come to the July 6th event so they can recruit more volunteers. They also said they would forward us their training and if wanted to make public versions of it, they saw no issue with that.

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These folks have linked their presentation and seem to be doing what we want to do with having a participatory training: CT activists teach immigrants their rights in case of ICE interaction

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This organization has a lot of resources: https://www.coloradorapidresponsenetwork.com/resources

but they are also open about their stats (yay)

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From someone I talked to in it, they have been sort of wasting people’s potential because the ratio of people who want to participate vs need is so off. And they still have not onboarded people onto more work.

And, maybe just for now, for whatever reason ICE is still not super active here either. So developing a rapid response team seems like we’d be making the mistake of replicating something that isn’t actually needed (for now at least) here. So maybe we should be focused on doing trainings/knowledge shares to as broad of an audience as possible, which would involve more typical canvas/outreach than rapid response (although we do need to figure out how to reach people going in for a check-in specifically).

Doing more train the trainer type material (so people can inform their own families/networks) could help spread the word a lot faster than the one zoom meeting at a time rate we are going at now. There are people from a lot of different backgrounds dealing with ICE, and I doubt we will know how to reach them all or that they will know to reach us. It does not make much sense to me to just do accompanyment training for a select few people, when what they’re being training on is what should be spread instead.

If we are doing outreach, it gives us an opportunity to also talk about our other work, and to @Bozzii 's point earlier today, would also give us an opportunity to ask people what else they are dealing with. And as long as we maintain contact points with everyone, if we do start to need more RR capabilities, we will have a network of people who are active doing other things to call upon, and since they are active, they are more likely to join anyway.

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I get where you’re coming from and largely agree. There should be ONE number to call if ICE is spotted, not fifty.

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Thanks @Tanner @Englishpete08 and S. for hopping on and helping draft the flyers.

We outlined two separate flyers, What to do if ICE comes to your home and What to do if ICE stops you in public. For both, the bold/highlighted text would go on the flyer.

We also made a skit for explaining what to do if ICE comes to your home.

For What if ICE comes to your workplace, we thought that could be paired with a flyer to hang up at workplaces (ICE not allowed in employee only places). We had all seen flyers like that on social media before, but we couldn’t find them now. Does anyone have a screen shot / image of a good one?