total time: 18.67 minutes
total words: 2557
[Matt Leming]: Hello, City Councilor Matt LeMing here. So what I am going to talk about today is the Red Card campaign. Bit of backstory. Obviously, with some of the recent events in Medford, namely the abduction of Hermesa Ozturk and Other reports that I've been hearing from the community about ICE going around neighborhoods, detaining migrants in other municipalities in greater Boston. We've been hearing a lot of feedback from constituents where they want us to do something as local elected representatives. I've had people call me out personally for, you know, asking me, you know, do something to make us feel safe, just put out some sort of reply, take some kind of action on this topic. Back in January, Medford City Council decided to pass a Welcoming City Ordinance, which is sanctuary city legislation, and this was a week before the current administration came into office. So in some ways, as local elected officials, we kind of took action before the wave really started. But that wasn't quite as publicized as it could have been. I mean, you know, I wrote about it on my website. We passed it through. It had been on the dockets in city council for over a year before we did it. But even so, people weren't really paying attention until all of this stuff started to happen. So we so we and I say this because we actually have had people come to city council saying make Medford do a sanctuary city and I just say we already did that several months ago. So I am also involved in the executive committee of the of the Medford Democrat, so I'm secretary. There are two co-chairs, there are ward chairs for all of Medford's eight wards, and there's me, which is a secretary. I'm mainly in charge of communications and note-taking paperwork. There's also a treasurer and a diversity officer. And there were some discussions within the committee about, okay, what can we do to show that we're putting up some kind of response to all of this? So one member came up with the idea of buying these red cards. They look like this. They are simple ID-sized cards where on one side they just list your basic Fourth and Fifth Amendment constitutional rights, saying that you don't have to talk to police officers, you don't have to open a door if nobody gives you a if nobody has a warrant with your name on it and on the other side in different languages there's just instructions for how to use it focused on of course people who are migrants who may be wondering what they can do with these so there's instructions saying that you know you don't have to open a door if nobody has a warrant or they're not looking for you specifically you don't have to answer questions you can just hand this card to an officer who's trying to question you and that shows what your response will be. And so, to me, this is just a very basic question of telling people what their rights are and helping people who may be scared or feel unsafe just handle these situations in as healthy a way as possible. To me, it seemed like a very common sense move. So we had a special meeting on April 7th within the Democratic City Committee in which there were something like about a dozen a little more than a dozen people that were that were in attendance and we discussed it and voted to authorize the purchase of up to 8,000 of these cards which would be approximately $826. By the end of it, we purchased 4,000 cards in Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, because Medford has community liaisons for each of those communities, so we figured it was a pretty representative set of foreign languages for the city. And then, we tried to find ways to distribute them. A caveat of all of this is that these were purchased by campaign funds. If you have campaign funds, then you either spend it on costs that are associated with the campaign, like mailers, paying staff, et cetera, or if, for instance, you're a candidate who lost, you don't wanna run for office again, but you still have money in your campaign account, you just can't put it in your personal account, you have to give it to charity. So the co-chair had a conversation with OCPF and they told him that these are campaign funds but we can effectively give them to charity and if we wanted to do that then we could purchase red cards but we would have to give them to non-profit organizations. So that's the route that we ended up going down. I ended up creating just a simple Google form and tried to solicit ideas from folks about which nonprofits we can give them to. So just churches, community organizations, things of that nature. you know, just try to advertise it. So I put a Reddit post about it. I put it onto a couple of Facebook groups. I'm gonna be putting it out onto my personal mailing list. And that's where things got a little bit surprising for me because I put out an advertisement for those red cards on Twitter. I think it was like April 28th, I think, so two days after I physically got some myself. And then I think it was later that night that somebody from WBZ Radio reached out to me and wanted to interview me about the red card issue, about just, you know, what the Democratic City Committee was doing. And, you know, I'm a politician entering campaign season, I'm not going to be refusing free media, so I end up interviewing with him. That interview happened at 9am, the story was posted before 12. And a few hours later, I got a call from Boston 25, and they were like, hey, we want to interview you about this too. So I interviewed them before a city council meeting, and they, you know, it took like 15 minutes, went inside, it aired that night. And then the next day, Boston.com NBC Telemundo, the Spanish language news and Fox News Digital all reached out to me. I interviewed with NBC Telemundo that next morning, interviewed over the phone with Boston.com, and answered some questions over email with Fox News. And that was posted, and then it was reposted by a couple of other sites, and so on. I was personally surprised that this got so much attention because one, it was still pretty early stages. Two, it just seemed like a pretty, you know, common sense thing to me. And three, it just seemed like a pretty low effort thing that we had done, whereas I feel like I've put a lot more effort into, for instance, the override campaigns, and we really struggled to get media attention around that throughout the campaign. And it just seemed like that whole media cycle just sort of took off. And that's really the first time that something like that has ever happened for me. But it did end up getting some more signups on the Google Sheets, so that was good. So concurrently, City Council also This was, so the Democratic City Committee meeting where we approved those happened on April 7th. On April 8th, the City Council also approved a Know Your Rights campaign in which we endorsed the release of Know Your Rights information, similar information to the community. And those things, that initiative is totally unrelated to what was happening with the Democratic City Committee. Usually with those kinds of resolutions that require action, often what it is, is it's the city council requesting the city, i.e. the mayor's office to do something. So we're endorsing an action and just requires the mayor to actually do something about it themselves. And oftentimes we could pass a resolution, it could be ignored, or it could pass a resolution. We just really have to push behind the scenes to make something happen. I think throughout this whole process, a lot of city council has been taking a different approach to this situation than the mayor. City Council, we're really taking more of an activist stance on it. We really want to. We know a lot of folks feel unsafe. We want to show people where we stand with what's happening at the national level right now. The mayor is concerned about the budget. She's afraid of losing federal funding. And so I think there's just a little bit of differences in points of view in terms of where folks land on this. And I think that You know, there are points to both sides, but I've made my decision in terms of where I want to go with that, particularly because I think that, you know, during the first Trump administration, they did attempt to, for instance, revoke federal funding from sanctuary cities and failed. So I just don't think that those efforts really like they didn't work in the past. So I think they're less likely to work in the in the future. But even if they do work this time, because obviously these two administrations are very different, then, you know, I do I do think that at some point you do have to put human rights above above municipal funds. So that's just that's just my two cents on it. That's that's my point of view. Yeah, mainly, I'm also sharing this because people are quite afraid right now. We had a trans woman talk about how she felt unsafe at a recent city council meeting very late at night, and the city council spent a little bit of time assuring her that things were, that we were on her side, we were trying our best to do this. I was on the phone with a Haitian woman the other day just trying to get her to sign her church up on the Google form that I put out just so I could send over some of these red cards to her. And she was afraid of even putting anything on the internet, having any paper trail. thought that the government could get access to Google, which I didn't really think was quite as much of a concern as she thought. But the point was that the fear was still there. You know, when I other members of the Democratic City Committee, when the Fox News thing came out, they wanted their emails temporarily removed from the website because they're afraid of people reaching out to them. And, you know, I got some I got some messages when I was When I was put on the news from some people who were really unpleasant like it just just trolls like just sent like nasty messages onto my Facebook and Instagram and I'm not really afraid of that kind of thing. I just kind of see them as paper tigers. But I'm relating that because I think a lot of people, when they do start to get out there, that sort of draws this response from these crazy right-wingers who will try to intimidate folks who speak out. And I'm just saying that as a way to relate, it happens to everybody. These people are cowards. They're paper tigers. Just don't like you should feel free to speak up if you think that you're in a position to speak up or you won't be targeted by people who might actually put you in danger. But, you know, don't be afraid to speak up just because you might get some unpleasant messages from people who are just mentally unwell and happen to have a computer. So, so yeah, that's That's, that's just that. So yeah, I'm just, I'm just putting out this, I'm just putting out this video blog just to, you know, talk about what happened from my perspective, just to, you know, relay an interesting story, um, about some media cycles and an initiative that I see as a very common sense, which, which I think everybody can get around, you know, um, I, When it comes to the red card situation, I honestly don't understand why it's controversial because nobody should be above the Constitution. All this does is list two amendments from the Bill of Rights and explains to people how they work. A question that Fox News asked me was it said, like this was one of the questions they emailed me, they said, some people think that these rights don't apply to non-citizens, which is not true. The Fourth and Fifth Amendment say people and persons, they don't say citizens, and this was reaffirmed in a 1993 Supreme Court case where Justice Scalia wrote that it's been well known that the Fifth Amendment applies in deportation cases for illegal aliens. So the idea that somehow the Constitution, constitutional rights don't apply to non-citizens. It's just, it's just a farce. Like I don't, I don't understand where that, where that sort of thinking is coming from. So, so yeah, like in, in summary, red cards definitely should be distributed to migrant communities. I personally find that it's, more important to try to find ways to reach out to communities who might be more vulnerable and kind of are generally are far away from city politics. I think that that's more important personally than Going to Then going to protests not not that you shouldn't go to protests but just like for my personal priorities like I just think the way that I can make the most impact is trying to find ways to reach those groups of people who will like actually be the most affected by this whereas You know, I don't think that migrants who are scared or unsure about what's going to happen or don't speak English are going to be going to a lot of these protests in like Boston Common. They're going to be going to community spaces that normally people in progressive and political circles don't interact with. So I'm really trying to find ways to break into that and, you know, tell people how they can be kept safe. So that's really my priority as a local politician when dealing with this stuff. Anyway. Yeah, not much more to say about this. If you've watched this far, thank you very much for tuning in. And if you want to request any red cards, then feel free to fill out the form, which is linked in the blog and other places. If you don't list a legitimate 501c3, I'm not gonna be sending them to you. So there's a person who's a graduate of Harvard, for instance, who said that he represented Harvard as a 501c3. I'm not sending him red cards, but if it's like a church where you've talked to the pastor or a community organization where you know somebody there, just feel free to request it. And if we have any left, I'll send them over. So yeah, thank you very much for tuning in and feel free to come to city council meetings in the future. All right, thank you very much and yeah, have a wonderful day, bye.
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total time: 18.67 minutes total words: 2557 |
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