Category: Immigration

Charter schools, Cody Davis, Democrats, Elections, Good things about Mesa County, Grassroots advocacy, Housing, Human rights, Immigration, Local concerns, politics, Poverty, Worker advocacy

Former CMU Professor Tom Acker to run against Cody Davis for County Commissioner

by Anne Landman • March 26, 2024 • 6 Comments

Retired CMU Spanish Professor Tom Acker

A Democrat has joined the race against Cody Davis for Mesa County Commissioner. Tom Acker is currently the only Democrat running for local office in Mesa County.

Acker was a professor of Spanish language at CMU for two decades. He is now a retired professor emeritus, an honorary title conferred upon him for his distinguished service to the academic community. He is a founding member of the award-winning Hispanic Affairs Project.

Originally from the east coast, in the 1980s Acker worked with refugees from the Mariel Boatlift, after over 125,000 Cubans piled into boats and headed for Florida after the Cuban government announced that anyone who wanted to leave the country was free to do so.

While he lived in Pennsylvania, Acker worked with a federally-funded agency to help farmers interact with agriculture workers.

Civil War & Feeding Migrants to Wolves: Western CO Congressional Forum Gets Extreme

by Anne Landman • February 16, 2024 • 12 Comments

The forum for Republican candidates for CD-3 held at Appleton Christian Church, 2/12/24. (Photo: Sharon Sullivan)

Article by Sharon Sullivan, Feb. 14, 2024

This article is republished with permission from the Colorado Times Recorder. You can see the original article here.

Immigration policy dominated the discussion among five of the Republican candidates vying to win Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District primary election in June, and it included some eyebrow-raising statements.

The candidate forum, which took place Monday night at Appleton Christian Church in Grand Junction, included all but one of the Republicans hoping to become their party’s nominee following Congresswoman’s Boebert decision to abandon her hometown district for redder pastures on the Eastern Plains.

While their positions on immigration varied, the candidates found more consensus around their doubts about Colorado’s election system. Four of the five participants spoke in favor of banning the mail ballots used by nearly all Coloradans, based on the debunked conspiracy that they have been used to rig elections. All but one of the candidates advocated for a return to hand-counting paper ballots, a process which has been proven to be less accurate and far more expensive than Colorado’s current system. Hanks, Andrews and Varela all promoted elements of another debunked conspiracy theory: that the Dominion Voting machines used by nearly all counties to tabulate their elections could be manipulated to rig the results.

Newly-appointed Board of Public Health member is anti-vax, anti immigrant, anti-gay extremist

by Anne Landman • July 7, 2023 • 32 Comments

Stephen Daniels, an extremist and anti-vaxxer the Commissioners just appointed to be Chair of the Mesa County Board of Public Health (Photo: Facebook)

A person the Mesa County Commissioners appointed to the Board of Health yesterday, Stephen D. Daniels, is a strong supporter of anti-vax conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK), according to his social media accounts. Posts on the same sources also reveal Daniels is anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Disney, and a climate change denier who opposes Colorado’s new family and medical leave law, which gives workers paid time off to care for a new baby or a loved one who has a serious health condition.

Presidential candidate RFK, whom Daniels supports, opposes vaccines that prevent dire illnesses in children and adults, like polio, measles and smallpox. In 2017, Scientific American wrote that “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality,” and if his anti-vax advocacy “leads to even a small decline in vaccine rates across the country, it will result in the waste of untold amounts of money and in all likelihood, the preventable deaths of infants too young to be vaccinated.”

Boebert votes against bill to help people access baby formula

by Anne Landman • May 20, 2022 • 11 Comments

House Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was one of nine House Republicans who voted against the Access to Baby Formula Act, a bill introduced to help alleviate the national baby formula shortage. The bill passed on May 18, 2022 by a vote of 414-9.

“The Day Democracy Died,” sung by our Founding Fathers

by Anne Landman • February 15, 2020 • 2 Comments

A lesson for every western slope voter.

Activism, Consumer advocacy, Equal rights, Ethnic/Minority, Human rights, Immigration

What to do if ICE comes knocking: Know your rights

by Anne Landman • July 14, 2019 • 0 Comments

On the same day Trump’s raids on immigrant families are scheduled to start (today), Trump issued a series of tweets that make his racism very clear:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly…… ….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how……..it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

Trump and his administration are working to create terror in immigrant communities throughout the U.S. by directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carry out sweeping “family op” raids across the country on undocumented immigrant families who have been in the United States for years.

Rep. Scott Tipton votes to continue government shutdown, keep federal workers unpaid

by Anne Landman • January 14, 2019 • 1 Comment

House Rep. Scott Tipton voted to keep inflicting financial pain on government employees to help President Trump extort American taxpayers for $5.6 billion to pay for a 2,000 mile wall between the U.S. and Mexico. (Chart courtesy of the Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction.)

The western slope’s House representative in Washington, D.C., Scott Tipton, voted AGAINST a bill on Jan. 6 to end President Trump’s shutdown for most federal agencies.

The bill, HR 265, passed the House by a wide margin — 243 to 183 — and would have funded most of the parts of government that are shut down, including food safety inspections, child nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program), rural utilities programs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Farm Credit programs and other crucial agencies and functions on which Americans depend.

Currently over 800,000 federal employees are furloughed or working without pay due to the shutdown, negatively impacting commerce across the country.

Hate in Grand Junction on full display today at Mesa County Deplorables rally against refugees

by Anne Landman • October 26, 2018 • 16 Comments

People from central America on their thousand-mile foot trek to find a place where they can live in safety with their families. Vicious gang violence has become rampant in some central American countries, forcing families to flee.

An article in today’s Daily Sentinel says Mesa County Deplorables will hold a rally downtown today against the people who make up the “caravan” of central American refugees headed northward on foot towards the U.S. border to escape violence in their home countries. People joined the caravan and have been traveling together to protect themselves against violent attacks while en route to find a safer place to live with their families.

Who are the “Deplorables”?

Mesa County Commissioner John Justman is listed as a member of Mesa County Deplorables

“Deplorables” is a label many of President Trump’s supporters eagerly took on during the 2016 presidential campaign. The social media of “Deplorable” groups around the country depicts the group’s ideology as manifesting broad-brush disrespect towards people from other countries, objectification of women and an emphasis on the way women look rather than on their intellect, abilities or contributions. “Deplorable” ideology reflects feelings of superiority and an outright fear of people who are different physically, racially, sexually and ethnically from people within their own social circles.

Western Slope pastor and Mesa County “Patriots” display stunning callousness towards refugees, children

by Anne Landman • July 2, 2018 • 4 Comments

Reverend Babcox, Orchard Mesa Baptist Church

Amid the massive “Keep Families Together” protests in over 750 cities across the country including in Grand Junction last weekend against the Trump administration’s harsh “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated thousands of refugee children from their parents, some Mesa County citizens are publicly denying that any children of refugees have been taken away from their parents, while also denying there is anything wrong with doing it. Others show utter disdain towards immigrant parents for taking desperate measures to get their families out of harm’s way.

Of all people, Robert Babcox, the pastor of the Orchard Mesa Baptist Church, is one of those people.

Trump’s Border Wall Folly

by Anne Landman • February 4, 2018 • 52 Comments

“Believe me,” said Trump. But no, Mexico won’t pay for a wall. Trump is now demanding American taxpayers pay for it.

While still promising Mexico will pay for it, President Trump is now trying to extort $25 billion from U.S. taxpayers to build a “big, beautiful” border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and he’s holding DACA recipients hostage to do it.

It’s clear Trump either doesn’t understand, or is ignoring the nuances of legal and illegal immigration as well as actual statistics about the rates of crime committed by immigrants vs. U.S. citizens, and how most contraband gets into the country illegally.

By far the biggest contributor to violent deaths in the U.S. is not immigrants, but our country’s own violent culture paired with easy access to deadly firearms — a fact President Trump completely ignores in his effort to whip up xenophobic fear among Americans.

The stakes for Trump’s wall are extremely high for American taxpayers in many ways. The first is financial.