Good afternoon mayor and council members,
My name is Michelle Ambriz and I am a policy advocate for CAUSE and a volunteer for the 805 rapid response network in Santa Maria.
I am here tonight to urge this Council to establish an immigration ad hoc committee to address our communities concerns on the increasing ICE activity within Santa Maria.
Recent increases in immigration enforcement have created fear and instability, especially among farmworker families, youth, and children. While you wait for more information on the logistics of this committee like who will be present, what council members will take the time to participate, and what topics will be discussed, your community members are being ripped away from their families and rapid response volunteers are being violently attacked for attempting to protect their neighbors.
As of today, there have been 1475 kidnappings by ICE in our region with nearly 400 of those arrests happening within Santa Maria. Over the holidays alone, ICE took over 90 people in our very own community, raiding predominantly latino, low income neighborhoods where they discriminately profiled brown people as their targets. This issue continues to escalate and it is extremely disappointing to see that our city council continues and even refuses to acknowledge that this is impacting the constituents they oversee, under the guise that “ICE has always been here, this has always happened”, as our Mayor stated during a meeting in November. Just because this has always happened doesn’t mean our response has to be the same. How much more loss does our community need to face until you take action? Does it take for one of your community members to die in the hands of these untrained agents for you to finally take action? That's how serious this issue has gotten. Our community will continue to attend these meetings and continue to speak out against these injustices as we have been since September, until you take action and take a stance against the horrors happening in our neighborhoods.
I stand with the undocumented community of Santa Maria and ask that our council take a stance as well. Please consider:
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• Establishing an immigration ad hoc committee to discuss potential local resolutions that
• protect our immigrant community.
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• Reflect the number of arrests made by ICE within Santa Maria city limits as a matter • of public record.
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• Request information from Immigration Customs Enforcement after any arrests made within
• Santa Maria city limits.
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• Publicly support state resolutions like the No Vigilantes Act/No Secret Police Act •
Many of us have witnessed firsthand the human impact of enforcement actions, families living in fear of separation, youth and children struggling with anxiety that affects their safety, stability, and academic success, and workers who are racially targeted simply for being a person of color and speaking a language other than English, while they simultaneously contribute to our local economy and positively to our society.
We urge this Council to take a strong and principled stand, as neighboring cities like Lompoc, Guadalupe, Carpinteria, and Goleta have already done, to protect and support your undocumented residents.
Thank you.
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Michelle Ambriz-Quintero
She/her/ella