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FEATURING DOLORES HUERTA -  Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the single largest, most well-funded police force in the nation, thanks to Congressionally approved funding. In spite of the fact that Democrats stymied emergency funding for ICE in the latest government spending bill, the agency continues to operate. Meanwhile, more than two thirds of Americans polled disapprove of ICE operations, saying they make people less safe. It’s not the first time in the nation’s history that state forces have taken aim at immigrants, particularly those from Latin America. From the Mexican American repatriation in the 1930s to the so-called Operation Wetback in the 1950s, immigrants have faced programs of mass, often violent, removal.

Today we turn to a legendary figure active in civil and human rights, whose activism spans half a century. Dolores Huerta, Founder & President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. In 1962, she co-founded the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) with Cesar Chavez and served as Vice President, playing a vital role in securing critical labor rights for farmworkers. In 2002, Huerta used the $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF), which empowers grassroots leadership and advocates for educational equity, LGBTQ+ rights, infrastructure improvements, and civic engagement in underserved communities. She was also recently featured in a short film by Ellen Gavin called The People, United.

Dolores Huerta spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her participation in the anti-ICE protests.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let me start with the question of how you are viewing the current situation, the current struggle against ICE terror. For some young activists that might feel like this is unprecedented, this is brand new, but for those who have been around for a long time, there have been so many moments in history where the government has basically attacked either Mexican Americans or immigrants or people perceived to be Spanish speaking folks. This is not new, and I'm wondering what you are thinking about as you view the current moment in terms of the historical comparisons.

Dolores Huerta: Well, we've seen this kind of behavior but it's usually been by private security people or local police, that in instances of when you had a labor strike. Like in the United Farm Workers, we had five people who were actually killed, and one of them was killed by a Sheriff’s deputy in Kern County. And so we have seen this kind of brutality in the past, but it's been by, by the local police or local people that, that were anti the workers. 

But to see something on the wholesale level that we're seeing now, and especially when it is being supported and promoted by our president and to have this national a goon squad, you might say, when you have all of these people that have been hired by the government and been given bonuses to go in there and to beat up and, and to kill immigrants to put them into detention centers, I think the only comparable thing would be like what happened in Nazi Germany back in the late thirties and early forties when the Nazis were in control. So, this is something we never thought that we would see in the United States of America. 

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