BLM Grassroots Fires Back With Plan to Stand Against ICE Raids
Black Lives Matter (BLM) Grassroots recently reaffirmed its commitment to opposing the Trump administration’s immigration raids, which target Latinx communities and Black immigrants, and announced a new campaign to encourage the public to support Black-owned businesses in response to Target dropping its DEI initiatives.
During a press briefing last week, BLM Grassroots featured a panel discussion of four distinguished speakers who addressed updates on their political and economic strategies, with a call to action to stand in solidarity.
BLM Grassroots Director Dr. Melina Abdullah kicked off the briefing with an emotionally charged update on the protests in Los Angeles. BLM was among many organizations protesting the ICE raids led by federal agents in downtown Los Angeles last week.
“There was a brutal arrest of our labor brother, David Huerta, who is the California president of SEIU. He was released on Monday, “ said Abdullah.
“We know that more than a thousand families have been rounded up. We also know that we (political organization) are being targeted as organizers. Yesterday, CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights) received a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee, investigating them for their protest and organizing work as well as their finances,” she said, adding that other groups representing marginalized groups, such as the Union del Barrio received the letter too.
“There are targets on anyone’s back who dares to speak out,” she said.
Abdullah said that this is as much of a Black fight as it is a Latinx fight and that all people of color should band together. “When they say migrants, the most targeted of all migrants are Black people,” she said. “There were military vehicles on Crenshaw. They were in Compton, and they are coming after Black people.”
Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance Guerline Jozef expounded on how Black people from Africa and the Caribbean have been deported by the thousands.
“No matter who is in the White House, our Blackness can never be protected,” said Jozef. “The Haitian Bridge Alliance is number three on the list of the organizations that Republican Congressional members have attacked.”
The UN recently reported concerns over the increasing number of Haitian deportees, including pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Since President Trump took office for the second time, his administration is seemingly aimed at reducing the number of immigrants, with Haitians being a target group, regardless of legal status or criminal history.
Since the call to action to boycott Target after it discontinued its DEI initiatives, many of the store’s featured Black-owned companies went bankrupt, said YoNasDa Lonewolf, Organizer with BLM Grassroots.
“There were approximately 30 Black-owned businesses that went bankrupt after the boycott because we were not supporting them,” said Lonewolf. “That’s the reason why we haven’t seen a lot of the businesses that we’ve seen in the past.”
In response to the successful boycott, BLM Grassroots has launched a new e-commerce website called www.verifiedblackowned.com, also known as Blackxmas.org. Verifiedblackowned.com will offer many of the Black-owned products that are on Target’s website as well as other Black businesses.
“We will begin to push people to go directly to their websites as opposed to going into the stores,” she said.
Nerves have been frayed as Sharon Jenkins seeks justice for the death of her son, Erskin Jenkins, 20, a sophomore at Texas Tech University who was shot and killed by a Lubbock County, Texas sheriff’s deputy last year. Jenkins has been leading the fight for justice and conducting an independent investigation into the cause of her son’s death.
“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it, the heart of it, which I feel will be successful because I am not going to give up. I’m going to know what happened to my son,” she said.
Abdullah said that they are working with the NAACP Lubbock chapter to raise awareness about Erskin in a Juneteenth parade, which will be followed by a press conference and town hall meeting. In addition, they are launching a petition to remove the district attorney from the case and reopen the it under a new investigator.