It’s been a week. The grassroots work of getting people out to exercise their right to vote paid off in getting Trump out of office - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan appear to have flipped and, fingers crossed, Arizona and Georgia are likely to follow. Whether or not people are excited about the Biden/Harris ticket, it is worth celebrating and acknowledging the victory of removing an administration whose disregard for human life and dignity, basic civil and human rights, science and public health and the environment resulted in severe daily and long-term consequences, particularly for those closest to these injustices and threats.

And, though so many us of took on Kamala Harris when she was an SF prosecutor and the SF District Attorney, there is progress in the Executive Orders and plans the Biden/Harris ticket has for the first 100 days in office.

The work is far from over. At the moment Trump is refusing to concede and has ordered that his administration and cabinet not cooperate with the incoming Biden/Harris administration. He fired his Secretary of Defense, Mark Ester, after a growing rift that started when Ester said in a June press briefing that he did not support using active-duty troops to quell the large-scale protests across the United States triggered by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. We are engaging with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Advancing Justice on the potential legal defense for the results and civil lawsuits against the Trump administration. Below is a call for NLG members to volunteer with Seed the Vote to do calls in Georgia for the Senate run-off. 

The forces that Trump has mobilized - explicitly and implicitly - are also continuing to show up and more is being revealed about the depth of their connection to formal law enforcement and government officials. We are organizing online security and scrubbing trainings and continuing to offer in person Know Your Rights and security training for activists on the streets and involved in direct action, grassroots organizing and mass mobilizations. 

Biden and Harris have an impossible job in just reversing the rate of COVID infections resulting from the failure of the Trump administration to take measures to curb it, provide for basic needs in the face of a massive economic recession, and provide relief as well as accelerate policies to curb massive environmental disaster. And, we now need to gear up to mobilize our own and in defense of others actions and organizing to hold Biden and Harris accountable to advancing well beyond rolling back the policies of the Trump administration and the policies of previous administrations towards the demands for the drastic changes needed to realize full democratic, social, political, economic and environmental rights.

There is also a strong sentiment of respectability politics blaming the left for rising fascism and white nationalism rather than Trump, centuries of racism that has never been transformed and a growing crisis in employment options and a safety net. This fuels a push to move the Democratic Party even further to the center, including calls to isolate the squad. The NLG-SF will continue to support solidarity towards a strong and vocal left pull that is clearly anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, pro-working class and poor, and pro-environment. 

More importantly, for the NLG and beyond, is building and defending the political power of those who turned out to get rid of Trump - particularly those communities and movements on the front lines of struggles for justice and survival - towards advancing the truly radical change necessary for the urgent change needed.  

Sara Kershnar, Interim Executive Director

We will be posting news links and opportunities for NLG-SF members to get involved and informed in electoral defense work.

Please send action and organizing opportunities to sara@nlgsf.org.

The NLG is looking for attorneys to train in submitting Public Record Act requests for our own work and for the organizing of our partners. Please email sara@nlgsf.org if you are interested. 

For previous weekly updates, please check https://srjsolidarity.org/weekly-updates/. Santa Rita Jail Solidarity is a website and prisoner solidarity project which publishes testimonies by prisoners and helps to disseminate information that is reported to the National Lawyers Guild Santa Rita Hotline.

Seeking Hotline Volunteers

The NLG-SF Santa Rita Jail Hotline is seeking more hotline workers to participate in an orientation planned for early December. The Santa Rita Jail Hotline receives calls from prisoners with concerns ranging from COVID-19 to food quality, sanitation, and the jail’s culture of secrecy, which has led to abuse of the jail’s internal grievance system and few meaningful outlets for prisoners to express serious concerns.

In addition to answering calls, hotline workers may correspond with prisoners, advocate prisoners’ concerns to the jail, and collect testimonies about jail conditions.

 If you are interested to attend the orientation, please fill out this volunteer form.

COVID-19 Update

The population in Santa Rita Jail has continued to increase over the past two weeks to 2,171 people, or nearly 84% of the total population at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. One prisoner in Housing Unit 6 called to express his concern that population reduction measures such as bail reductions and supervised release – with an ankle monitor – are not being applied. “We're housed here like we're boxes in a storage room,” he says. He fears that the lack of social distancing is setting the stage for another, future outbreak of COVID-19.

For the past two weeks active, recorded COVID-19 cases in Santa Rita have hovered between 0-1 cases. This fluctuation is due in part to the fact that, on 3 separate occasions between October 26 to November 1, prisoners who tested positive for COVID-19 were immediately released from custody.

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 The content of hotline calls can suggest a very different reality than what is being presented to the public. If you are interested in becoming a hotline worker, please fill out this form.

Demonstrations in the Bay Area

On November 5 and November 6, protesters mobilized in Brentwood for two subsequent marches when a Brentwood resident hung an effigy in his yard next to a Trump sign. On Friday, November 6, Brentwood police wearing riot gear lined up in front of the resident’s home to block protesters. Legal Observers report a tense situation with police pointing rifles – containing live ammunition, not less than lethal rounds – at the crowd. Seven Legal Observers traveled to Brentwood for this action. There was one arrest of an individual on battery charges.

Also on Friday, November 6, United Front Against Displacement organized a rally at Oscar Grant Plaza to protest the electoral system and its maintenance of the status quo. Five legal observers were present, and there were no incidents.

On Sunday, November 8, protesters mobilized at the gates of San Quentin to demand releases, rather than transfers in the wake of a ruling that San Quentin must drastically reduce its population due to a massive outbreak of COVID-19. Three legal observers were present, and there were no arrests.

While many of us take a moment to breathe a sigh of relief that this country, and the world, will not face another Trump administration for the next four years, let us now forge on with renewed vigor and more possibility to enable just migration. It will take months, likely years, to reverse the hideously harmful immigration policies that the current administration has forced into place, which would only take us back to a system still so far from what we actually want. Take a moment to envision a humane and just, even radically hospitable, US immigration system — with universal legal representation, without metering, allowing families to cross borders, without detention, giving refuge to those escaping environmental and economic hardship as well as the current, narrowly defined forms of persecution . . . . Now, choose what pieces of that transformation you will work on in the next few months. Whether it is sharing your knowledge with others, sponsoring a migrant without any documented friends or family to house them, writing an op-ed, advocating to an ICE officer or elected representatives, or participating in our collaborative court watch program, we encourage you to increase or broaden your level of engagement. We are in this together! 

If you would like to volunteer to learn more and increase the transparency and accountability of the San Francisco Immigration Court, please apply here. Our next training will take place Friday, 11/20, 12:30-2pm. 

See below for related petitions and actions.

Resources

While we resume our plans for the environmental justice teach-in, be sure to check out the upcoming screening and discussion this Thursday, Nov. 12 from 3-5 PM of the documentary “Never Surrender: The Fight for Environmental Justice in Bayview Hunters Point” directed by Dr. M. Reza Shirazi, Professor/Reader at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Two years in the making, this documentary narrates the community fight for environmental justice, and documents the conflict between people and government over the safety of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund Site. Decades of remediation work at Hunters Point Shipyard, a former military base contaminated during the Second World War and beyond, were reported to be fraudulent and data were falsified. This turned the biggest re-development project in San Francisco into one of the worst toxic and radioactive scandals in US history.

See the film trailer here

Registration is free! For registration please visit click on the button below.

If you are interested in learning more or getting involved in the Environmental Justice Committee within the NLG-SF, please contact Zsea Bowmani directly at zsea@nglsf.org.