Minneapolis, MN – Immigrant rights activists demanded “Sanctuary now!” at the Minneapolis City Council meeting Oct. 6. The activists gathered outside of City Hall then made their presence felt in the City Council chamber, holding their banner and signs at the start of the council meeting.

The visibility action was part of an ongoing campaign demanding that the Minneapolis City Council quickly pass the Sanctuary Platform. Adopting the platform’s 13 demands would deepen Minneapolis' commitment to standing with immigrant communities that are under attack.

The Sanctuary Platform was initiated by the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), and has been endorsed by many immigrant rights organizations, unions, social justice and religious groups. It has already attracted support from some current city council members as well as several of the candidates running for city council and mayor in the November election.

The platform was launched with a community press conference before the prior City Council meeting on Sept. 20. A day later, Hennepin County Sheriff Stanek sent a 3-page letter to all City Council members that can be read as both defensive and threatening. Stanek’s close cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the county jail is a target of some of the platform’s demands. Stanek’s letter says, among other things, “there is no sanctuary for criminals anywhere in Hennepin County” and brags that in 2016 his jail arranged for ICE to talk to approximately 2700 people detained in the county jail.

Stanek’s letter was made public by Minneapolis City Council member Cam Gordon (Green Party). That has focused wider community and media attention on Sheriff Stanek’s close cooperation with ICE that results in many deportations, directly undercutting the Minneapolis’ stated goal of being a safe city for immigrants.

Activists at the action vowed to keep the pressure on the city council and the mayor to unite against Stanek and Trump’s attacks on immigrants.

#MinneapolisMN #MIRAc #MinnesotaImmigrantRightsActionCommittee #SheriffStanek

Minneapolis, MN – Nearly 2000 protesters, many Native American, rallied at city hall here, Oct. 28, demanding that Hennepin County Sheriff Stanek immediately withdraw sheriff department personnel from North Dakota, where they have been deployed against demonstrators who are fighting to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.

About 30 sheriff department personnel have been sent to North Dakota, where they have been photographed carrying out brutal attacks on demonstrators who are defending water resources and sacred land.

#MinneapolisMN #IndigenousPeoples #EnvironmentalJustice #SheriffStanek #StandingRockNation #DakotaAccessPipeline #NODAPL

Minneapolis, MN – On June 11, Hennepin County Sheriff Stanek announced that the Hennepin County Jail will no longer honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer requests, or “ICE holds”, which have resulted in countless deportations against immigrants who are guilty of no crime. The announcement is an about-face for Sheriff Stanek, who in the past has supported close police-immigration collaboration and has campaigned for harsher immigration enforcement in the state legislature. The change in policy for Minnesota’s largest jail follows four years of grassroots pressure from the No More Deportations campaign organized by the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), as well as pressure from many other community organizations, lawyers, and from immigrant families who have spoken out about their experience with deportation.

Immigrant rights activists around the country are targeting sheriffs to break ties with ICE as one way to limit the effects of the disastrous “Secure Communities” deportation program that was imposed nationwide in 2010 and caused an unprecedented wave of deportations. Since 2009 when President Obama took office, 2 million people have been deported, more than under any other administration in U.S. history. Most of those deportations happen through county jails as a result of “Secure Communities” and related ICE programs. Recent court rulings have indicated that ICE holds may be unconstitutional since they cause local jails to detain people for an undetermined amount of time without charge waiting for ICE to arrive to question them about their immigration status. These questions about whether ICE holds are even legal has given further momentum to these anti-deportation campaigns, and increasing numbers of sheriffs are announcing their refusal to honor ICE hold requests anymore.

Since 2010 the No More Deportations campaign has demanded this change, organizing dozens of protests outside the Hennepin County Jail and Sheriff Stanek’s office, as well as educational events about deportations and ‘know your rights’ trainings at churches, community centers, and campuses. MIRAC also helped form a coalition with a broad array of organizations concerned about deportations. Just last week MIRAC protested outside Sheriff Stanek’s reelection campaign fundraising event in downtown Minneapolis, while three activists also attempted to respectfully raise the issue inside the event but were forcibly removed. These grassroots efforts as well as the recent court rulings and electoral factors (last week a Minneapolis Police Department Deputy Chief announced his intention to run against Stanek in November) seem to have converged to influence Sheriff Stanek to reverse course and loosen his jail’s ties with ICE.

According to Brad Sigal of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), “This is an important victory against deportations that will help prevent the separation of some families, but the struggle is not over. We will continue to fight for an end to deportations in Minnesota and nationally. We call on Ramsey County Sheriff Bostrom to follow Sheriff Stanek and immediately stop cooperating with ICE holds in Ramsey County. And we call on President Obama to take immediate executive action to expand deferred action to stop deportations nationally.”

#MinneapolisMN #MIRAc #NoMoreDeportationsCampaign #SheriffStanek

Minneapolis, MN – Chanting, “Stanek says deportation! We say no!” 30 immigrant rights activists protested outside Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek’s reelection campaign fundraiser here June 4. Protesters marched around the busy downtown intersection of Nicollet and 9th Street for an hour, while chanting, handing out flyers and engaging the public. Stanek’s fundraiser was inside at the Minneapolis Downtown Council office. Two activists tried to enter Sheriff Stanek’s fundraiser but were immediately confronted by police, threatened with arrest and kicked out.

The protest was organized by the No More Deportations campaign of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC). Protesters were highly visible marching in the crowded Nicollet Mall area, educating the public about Sheriff Stanek’s role in deporting immigrants and separating families.

More immigrants are deported from Sheriff Stanek’s Hennepin County jail than any other in Minnesota. Stanek has also lobbied for anti-immigrant legislation at the state legislature. Stanek is running for reelection in November so he has been campaigning in many communities, including in the Latino community, smiling and waving on a float in the Cinco de Mayo parade on Lake Street.

Activists with MIRAC’s No More Deportations campaign say they will continue to pressure Sheriff Stanek until he agrees to stop cooperating with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s ‘hold requests’ on immigrants in the Hennepin County jail. The activists see this as a way to prevent deportations that separate families. 2 million people have been deported since President Obama took office in 2009, more than Bush deported during his entire eight years in office, and more than any other president in U.S. history.

While immigrant rights activists continue to push President Obama to take executive action to stop deportations nationally, campaigns are gaining momentum on the local level to pressure sheriffs to stop cooperating with ICE in detaining and deporting so many people. These campaigns have been successful in several major cities and counties around the country.

On June 4, the same day as the Minneapolis protest, there was a victory in San Diego county in California where Sheriff Bill Gore said in a statement, “The Sheriff's Department will no longer hold someone past their release date based on an ICE detainer alone.” A recent federal court decision has bolstered activists’ efforts to get local sheriffs to stop honoring ICE hold requests. The court decision held that a local jail had violated the Fourth Amendment by granting the detainer request without probable cause or a court-approved warrant.

#MinneapolisMN #Deportation #MinnesotaImmigrantRightsActionCommittee #NoMoreDeportationsCampaign #SheriffStanek #ICEHolds

Minneapolis, MN – A Valentine’s Day protest here called on Hennepin County Sheriff Stanek to stop cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in deporting immigrants via the Hennepin County jail. Protesters gathered at noon outside the jail and then marched to Sheriff Stanek’s office inside City Hall. The protest was organized by MIRAc’s No More Deportations campaign and endorsed by several other organizations.

In the Valentine’s Day spirit, protesters sang songs to the tune of Heartbreaker by Pat Benetar and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki Dee, with lyrics reworded to make Sheriff Stanek the ‘heartbreaker’ for deporting people and separating families.

Speakers included Jeff Carlson, who spoke of community mobilization in the face of several recent deportations in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis; Eder Alarcon of the No More Deportations campaign who spoke of his ongoing struggle against deportation; David Cruz of Occupy Homes and Katie Hatt, who is running for a Hennepin County Commissioner seat and who expressed her support for stopping deportations.

Protesters left a large Valentine’s Day heart at Sheriff Stanek’s office with messages calling on him to stop breaking our hearts by stopping deportations and the separation of families.

#MinneapolisMN #NoMoreDeportationsCampaign #SheriffStanek #ValentinesDay

Minneapolis, MN – On Jan. 12, immigrant rights activists protested outside the Hennepin County jail, demanding that Sheriff Stanek stop using the jail as a deportation machine. More people are deported from the Hennepin County jail than from any other jail in the state.

The protest was organized by the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAc). MIRAc’s No More Deportations campaign is targeting Sheriff Stanek, demanding that he change policy in the Hennepin County jail to stop cooperating with the ‘Secure Communities’ deportation program, by ceasing to honor ICE hold requests. Jail-based deportation programs like Secure Communities are the main source of deportations and separation of families, which have reached record numbers, with well over a million deportations in the last four years.

When people are booked into county jails, they are now run through a national Secure Communities database and ICE flags people they want to interview. So even if a person is arrested without cause and isn’t charged with anything (as happens quite commonly with Latino, Black and Native people in Hennepin County), they still go through the booking process and can end up getting deported.

It’s not mandatory for county jails to hold people extra time (at the local jail’s cost)for ICE to come interview them, so many county jails around the country are deciding to stop honoring ICE’s hold requests. Most significantly, the California attorney general recently declared that jails statewide will no longer have to cooperate with ICE hold requests. Many counties in other states are also making the same decision, as they don’t want their local jails to be turned into conveyer belts to ICE’s deportation juggernaut.

Sheriff Stanek has a long history of antagonizing people of color and immigrants. Before he was sheriff, he admitted to racist conduct when he was an officer. He pushed for the state to adopt harsh anti-immigrant policies. He also antagonized progressive political movements like Occupy Homes, using heavy-handed tactics to carry out foreclosures, and he was in charge of the repressive police response to the Occupy Minneapolis encampment in People’s Plaza, which was on Hennepin County property, last year.

MIRAc’s No More Deportations campaign will continue to target Sheriff Stanek to stop deportations in Hennepin County jail. The next protest targeting Stanek will be Saturday, Feb. 16 at 9:00 a.m. in front of the jail at 4th Avenue and 5th Street in Minneapolis.

#MinneapolisMN #deportations #MIRAc #NoMoreDeportationsCampaign #SecureCommunities #SheriffStanek

Minneapolis, MN – On Feb. 7, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that they imposed the highly controversial “Secure Communities” deportation program on all 87 counties in Minnesota. In response, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAc) announced a protest on Saturday, Feb. 18 at noon. The protest will start at People’s Plaza (300 S 6th Street, Minneapolis) and then march across the street to the Hennepin County Detention Center, one of the jails where this deportation program is now activated. Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek, the controversial figure who is in charge of the Hennepin County jail, pushed hard for Minnesota to participate in Secure Communities.

According to Isaac Martin of MIRAc, “This news is horrifying. This program would compromise community safety and separate families here in Minnesota. We call on county and local officials to refuse to honor ICE detainer requests and we call on President Obama to end the horribly misnamed 'Secure Communities'. This program just doesn't make any communities more secure, and in fact it makes immigrant and Latino communities much more insecure by separating hundreds of thousands of parents from their children.”

Secure Communities is a deportation program run by ICE that operates in county and local jails. Under the program, anyone booked into jail for whatever reason has his or her fingerprints taken and run through a national FBI database to try to determine their immigration status. ICE flags people they think might be undocumented then takes them from the county jail to start a deportation process. The program has been the main culprit in the dramatic rise in deportations since President Obama took office. Under eight years of the Bush administration, 1.6 million people were deported. In contrast, after only three years of the current administration, there have already been 1.2 million deportations, a much higher annual rate.

The Secure Communities program claims to focus on deporting violent criminals. But since so many people that pass through county and local jails don’t ever end up getting charged with anything, and most are there for trivial or non-violent reasons, the vast majority of people deported under Secure Communities – more than 70%, according to data ICE was forced to release under a Freedom of Information lawsuit – are not criminals at all. Most immigrants that end up in the county jail are there because of things like being arrested due to being racially profiled while driving, not because they have done anything criminal.

Such racial profiling in traffic stops has been thoroughly documented in Minnesota via a study commissioned by the Minnesota legislature. The results of the resulting Minnesota Statewide Racial Profiling Study showed that:

“Law enforcement officers stopped Black, Latino, and American Indian drivers at greater rates than White drivers, searched Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at greater rates than White drivers, and found contraband as a result of searches of Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at lower rates than in searches of White drivers … These disparities are particularly large for Blacks and Latinos … The pattern for Blacks and Latinos existed in nearly every participating jurisdiction.”

This documented racial profiling, combined with the Secure Communities program, means that thousands of people who have done nothing wrong are getting pulled over just because they appear Latino or Black and then end up getting deported and having their families torn apart for no reason other than that they were driving to work and have dark skin. Once their fingerprints are run through ICE’s database via Secure Communities, they are likely to end up being deported even if they aren’t charged with or convicted of any crime.

When the program started, at ICE said the Secure Communities program was optional and that counties or states could opt out if they didn’t want to participate. So immigrant rights activists convinced several counties to vote to opt out of the program. In response, ICE changed the rules and declared that counties couldn’t opt out once their state had signed a contract for the program. Then activists convinced several states to vote to leave the program and ICE changed the rules yet again – voiding all the state contracts and announcing they would just implement the program themselves directly with county jails, against the will of states and counties that don’t want to participate.

The Feb. 7 announcement of imposing the program on all 87 Minnesota counties comes in that context. Minnesota was one of the few remaining states that hadn’t implemented the program in any counties. During last year’s state legislative session, Republican Senator Julianne Ortmann teamed up with Hennepin County Sheriff Stanek to try to sneak Secure Communities into a massive budget bill at the end of the legislative session. Immigrant rights activists were able to exert enough pressure so that Governor Dayton vetoed the bill and that section of the bill was removed. Now ICE has bypassed state leaders entirely, in an attempt to force local police and jails to act as ICE agents.

MIRAc is calling on President Obama to end the Secure Communities program nationally and is calling on Minnesota county sheriffs and county boards to refuse to honor ICE hold requests in the county jails. Currently, if ICE asks a local jail to hold someone past the time the local jail has finished their business with an individual, the jail then holds them for that extra time at the local jail’s own expense. Several counties across the U.S. – including Cook County, Illinois; Santa Clara County, California and Washington D.C. – are now changing their policies, so they will no longer cooperate with such unfunded ICE requests that lead to deportation. Such policy changes undercut jail-based deportation programs like Secure Communities and the “Criminal Alien Program”. Such changes in policy are spreading rapidly around the country in response to ICE’s repeated attempts to force cities and counties to massively deport people even when they don’t want to do so.

#MinneapolisMN #deportations #MIRAc #MinnesotaImmigrantRightsActionCommittee #SecureCommunities #SheriffStanek #SComm

Minneapolis, MN – About 400 people rallied at People’s Plaza and marched through downtown Minneapolis on November 14 in defense of OccupyMN. After the march they returned to the plaza and filled it with blankets and sleeping bags for a mass ‘sleep-in’ in defiance of Hennepin County’s new rules banning sleeping in the plaza. As of 10:00 p.m. the County authorities have not moved to clear the plaza.

The new rules which go into effect today were passed at the County Commissioners’ meeting last Tuesday in response to OccupyMN’s occupation of Hennepin County Government Plaza since October 7, which the protesters renamed “People’s Plaza”.

The new restrictions include the ban on sleeping in the plaza, no hanging or posting of signs on the plaza, and no porta-potties on the plaza except at the discretion of the County Administrator. The porta-potties which had been there since October 7 are no longer there. The commissioners passed the new restrictions unanimously.

According to Deb Konechne of the Minnesota People’s Bailout Coalition, who co-emceed today’s rally, “The new rules are an eviction notice, and people won’t accept them. Tonight we can see that more people are occupying the plaza to speak out against corporate greed and injustice, regardless of whatever new restrictions on freedom of assembly Sheriff Stanek may have gotten the commissioners to pass.”

The rally featured many speakers vowing to defend people’s right to continue the occupation of People’s Plaza. Union leaders that spoke included Cliff Poehler of AFSCME Council 5, Javier Morillo of SEIU Local 26, Michelle Sommers of ATU Local 1005, Donnie McMillan of Carpenters Local 322 and Kieran Knutson of the IWW. Some of the people who have been sleeping out at the plaza since the beginning spoke about the need to continue the movement. Several individuals and organizations from the community vowed to defend the occupation including Darryl Robinson of Communities United Against Police Brutality, community activist Mel Reeves, Polly Kellogg of Women Against Military Madness, Linden Gawboy of the Welfare Rights Committee, Jennie Eisert of the Anti-War Committee, among others.

#MinneapolisMN #MinneaoplisMN #OccupyWallStreet #OccupyMN #SheriffStanek #HennepinCountyCommissioners

Stanek, a Republican, is well known for his racist views, which include using the n-word to refer to African Americans. He has also taken steps to draw the sheriff’s department into Homeland Security’s repressive ‘anti-terrorism’ programs.

We encourage all our readers to circulate the following statement:

Anti-War Committee Stands in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, Minneapolis

County / Sheriff Hands Off People’s Plaza!

Starting with New York City, and spreading to more than a thousand cities in the US and across the globe, the Occupy Wall Street movement has given voice to the majority of people, who are suffering from an ever-deepening economic crisis here at home, and endless war abroad. Minnesota has joined this movement in saying it’s time to put people over profits, and several occupations have started here, including one in downtown Minneapolis.

Since October 7, thousands of Minnesotans have occupied the People’s Plaza, outside the Hennepin County Government Center, maintaining a presence day and night to demonstrate against corporate greed and political corruption.

The Anti-War Committee has been a part of Occupy Minneapolis since the beginning, because we too are a part of the 99%. We understand that corporate control of resources in other countries is one of the driving reasons that the U.S. goes to war, and we will not pay with our tax dollars or our lives to further the profits of a few while so many suffer. At the occupation, we have rallied and marched, attended teach-ins, shared meals, participated in general assembly meetings and slept out on the plaza with no shelter.

County officials have restricted the rights of Occupy Minneapolis from the very first day. Claiming that it is for the safety of the protesters, we were denied the right to set up tents, or any kind of structure, to provide shelter from the cold and rain (even though many other occupations have tents). Yesterday, Hennepin County Commissioners voted for a plan to shut down the People’s Plaza on November 14th: All protest signs must be taken down and no one will be allowed to sleep at the Plaza.

Commissioners have cited the cold weather, but if they were concerned about the health and well being of the protesters they would lift the restrictions on shelter, not evict us. We know that this is an attempt to end the occupation they wish had never begun, and we condemn all threats to evict Occupy Minneapolis!

In the name of the 99%, we support the rights of the occupiers, and demand the right to continue a round-the-clock presence at the People’s Plaza. We call on all people of conscience to take concrete actions to defend Occupy Minneapolis. This includes contacting County Commissioners to demand they allow the occupation to continue without interruption. If the county moves to evict us from the People’s Plaza on Monday, November 14th, we call on all people of conscience to mobilize to the Plaza, and stand in solidarity with the 99%.

Please call the Hennepin County Commissioners and Sheriff Stanek. Let them know this is an unacceptable denial of our constitutional right to assemble!

Sheriff Rich Stanek: (612) 348-3744 and sheriff@co.hennepin.mn.us

Mike Opat, chair: 612-348-7881

Mark Stenglein: 612-348-7882

Gail Dorfman: 612-348-7883

Peter McLaughlin: 612-348-7884

Randy Johnson: 612-348-7885

Jan Callison: 612-348-7886

Jeff Johnson: 612-348-7887

General information: 612-348-3000

#MinneapolisMN #AntiWarCommittee #OccupyWallStreet #OccupyMN #SheriffStanek