By email from Vallejo-Benicia Indivisible, July 27, 2026
Hello Vallejo-Benicia Resisters!
Please join us this coming Saturday as we stand together with our local partners in a solemn national call for truth, mourning, and accountability.
Important Schedule Note: This vigil will replace our regular weekly Stand Up for Democracy gathering this week. We encourage all members to attend and lend their voices to this critical cause.
We are coming together in remembrance of two community members whose lives were tragically cut short:
• Lorenzo Salgado Araujo: A devoted father shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, TX, while driving a work van with his crew on his way to a job site.
• Johan Sebastian Guerrero: A 26-year-old food delivery driver fatally shot by ICE in Biddeford, ME, while starting his workday in front of his wife and toddler.
Our Demands for Justice – Together, we will call on local, state, and national leaders to act on the following core demands:
• Independent Investigation: Demand full, transparent investigations independent of ICE, with public findings.
• Protect Witnesses: Immediately release those detained with Lorenzo and safeguard all witnesses from retaliation or deportation.
• End Local ICE Collaboration: Call on local and state leaders to end cooperation and agreements with ICE.
• Congressional Action: Require Congress to use its oversight and funding power to demand answers and accountability.
All community members, faith leaders, workers, and families are welcome. Please bring your friends, neighbors, and posters as we stand together in solidarity.
During Bruce Springsteen’s recently completed “Land of Hope and Dreams” concert tour, his “This Is Happening Now” speech in the middle of each show packed as much punch as his music. He delivered it just before his song, “My City of Ruins” – which, despite its title, is distinguished by its hopeful refrain: “Rise up!”
It’s in that spirit that I share the core of a Reddit post that quotes most of Springsteen’s speech (as delivered at his April 20 Newark concert). Following almost every quote, you’ll find italicized commentary by the post’s author, Chris Jordan of The Asbury Park Press. Jordan’s illuminating remarks back up Bruce’s statements with relevant documentation.
In a few instances, I supplement Jordan’s commentary with my own remarks, in brackets.
For me, the power of the speech culminates in Springsteen’s concluding message. It’s as uplifting as most of his songs.
Here’s what Springsteen said, then, along with Jordan’s explanatory comments (again, in italics) and my additional remarks (in brackets):
Bruce: “Our young men and women’s lives are at risk in an unwise and illegal war. This is happening now.”
The Iran war has been called illegal by members of Congress who say the action was unprovoked and a violation of international law as there was no imminent threat, and no Congressional approval was sought.
Bruce: “There are immigrants being held in for-profit detention centers around the country and being deported without due process of law to alien countries and foreign prisons. This is happening now.“
A U.S. District Judge ruled in February that the Department of Homeland Security deporting immigrants who arrived here illegally to “third countries” is “not fine, nor is it legal.” The deportees should not be sent to where their “life or freedom would be threatened” because of their “race, religion, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
The two largest private prison corporations reported profits of more than a billion dollars in total for second quarter, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
[As articulated by principled conservative authors in The Bulwark’s “A Season of Death and Fear” online post, two of the many other manifestations of current immigration policy can be found in the highly questionable shooting death (and apparent coverup) by ICE agents of a 35-year US resident in Texas and the possibly imminent deportation of a hard-working immigrant community in Ohio that has lived in America legally for years.]
Bruce: “Our Justice Department has thrown away its independence, and it takes its orders directly from a corrupt White House. They prosecute our president’s perceived enemies, they cover up for his misdeeds and protect his powerful friends. This is happening now.”
DOJ lawyers have lost credibility in the courts after ignoring court orders, misrepresented facts and made arguments with no basis in the law, said Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, an advocacy group for former DOJ workers. More than 3,300 attorneys left the Justice Department between Trump’s first day back in office and February 2026, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Meanwhile, only about 800 attorneys have been hired.
Bruce: “The richest men in America have abandoned the world’s poorest children to death and disease, by dismantling USAID. It’s not on the front pages anymore but it’s happening now. People are dying.“
More than 757,000 people, the majority of them children, have died from the funding cuts to USAID, according to ImpactCounter, which tracks the effect of USAID cuts, as reported by the Health Policy Watch. There are also almost a million more malaria cases, over 700,000 affecting children.
The budget for USAID was slashed by Elon Musk, former head of the Department of Government Efficacy, last year.
[A leading medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that within four years the USAID cuts could yield over 14 million deaths worldwide, 4.5 million of them children under five.]
Bruce: “We undermined NATO, the world order that’s kept us safe and at global peace for 80 years. This is happening now.”
President Donald Trump has said that NATO, a defense alliance created after World War II, was a “paper tiger” and that he’s considering withdrawing America from the alliance.
[In contrast, as summarized by the online site Politico, he has repeatedly praised the authoritarian leaders of China, Hungary, Russia, Turkey and even totalitarian North Korea.]
Bruce: “We threaten our good neighbors and our allies whose sons and daughters have fought alongside us in American wars, Canada and (Denmark), we threaten them with predatory annexation of their land. This is happening now.”
Trump has repeatedly said Canada should be the 51st state and launched tariffs against our neighbor to the north, which has resulted in fewer Canadians visiting the Jersey Shore than in recent years, and also secured a political victory for the ruling Liberal Party, which was fading in the polls until Trump’s rhetoric reversed its fortunes. Meanwhile, Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, said that Trump is “very serious” about acquiring Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish island off North America.
[At this past week’s NATO summit, Trump doubled down on his Greenland threat against Denmark, which lost more soldiers per capita as America’s ally in Afghanistan than the United States itself did.]
Bruce: “Our museums are being told to whitewash American history of any unpleasant or inconvenient facts, like the full history of the brutality of slavery. You want to talk about snowflakes? We have a president who can’t handle the truth. This is happening now.”
Trump’s declarations and executive orders have led to the altering and dismantling of slavery exhibits, such as one at the site of George Washington’s house in Philadelphia when he was president, the restoration of Confederate statues and other initiatives, say civil rights advocates, according to Reuters.
Bruce: “While working Americans struggle, our president and his family enrich themselves by billions of dollars trading on the people’s office in corruption unmatched in American history. This is happening now.”
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, raised $2 billion from the Saudi Arabia government’s Public Investment Fund for his private equity fund and has collected more than $110 million in management fees from the Saudi government, according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA). He’s currently in negotiations with Iran, a neighbor of Saudi Arabia, to settle the war.
[Departing from past presidents’ practice of separating themselves from previous financial interests, Trump’s own businesses made an unprecedented $2.2 billion in 2025 alone, including from Saudi Arabian real estate deals, a massive crypto-currency venture with a criminal he pardoned and other crypto deals. Through June 2026, nearly a million people (that is, most of his crypto investors) lost over $3.8 billion on such deals.]
The sum of these transgressions is undermining America, Springsteen says:
“This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world. To many, we are no longer looked upon as an often imperfect but strong defender of democracy standing for the global good. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now, to many, America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration and this president’s legacy. This is happening now,” Springsteen said.
“Honesty, honor, humility, truth, compassion, humanity, thoughtfulness, morality, true strength and decency — don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore — they do. They are at the heart of the kind of men and women we are, the kind of citizens we want to be, the kind of country we’ll be leaving to our children. So many of our elected leaders have failed us that this American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people — by you. So join us and let’s fight for the America that we love.”
What’s made America great? What’s made America different? Along with whatever else we do on July 4th and afterwards, let’s celebrate this:
We all came from somewhere else.
It’s something we sometimes take for granted. We shouldn’t.
Of the 40 nations I’ve been fortunate enough to visit for work and the many additional ones for play, I’ve never encountered one nearly as diverse as our own.
I never thanked them, but I’m blessed that my peasant grandparents took a leap of faith toward the promise of America, venturing across Europe and the Atlantic to flee persecution. They were but a few of the many millions, from all over the world, represented in the iconic Bruce Springsteen song, “American Land”:
They come across the water a thousand miles from home With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below
Indeed, and without disparaging any other nation, there’s something special to be said for one springing from souls who largely risked and suffered so much to get here, forming a melting pot of peoples and perspectives.
From Debate to Demagoguery
Sadly, as America turns 250, current immigrants and even our immigrant heritage are under attack.
To be fair, there is room for legitimate debate about this issue. That includes whether Joe Biden was initially too lax in addressing it – though much of the overheated anti-Biden rhetoric significantly overstates the number of illegal/undocumented (pick your politically loaded term) immigrants who entered across the Mexican border and were able to stay.
Furthermore, both sides have politicized the matter. I’ll get to the Republicans in a minute. But Democrats were driven not just by humanitarian values but by some of their pollsters’ misleading public opinion survey results. That research incorrectly indicated that Latino citizens don’t share their fellow Americans’ strong concerns about overly lenient border policies. The resulting, mistaken Democratic political and policy calculations did damage to their presidential election performances in 2016, 2020 and, especially and disastrously, in 2024.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats.”
The depth and breadth of other abuses are too extensive to summarize. So, I’ll pick just one recent instance, since it illustrates how severely the anti-immigrant demagoguery is playing out.
It’s documented by Timothy Snyder, a leading historian who’s an expert on European and American fascism and Nazism. In a powerful online commentary, he describes how J.D. Vance and then Donald Trump stoked the flames of hatred and racism against (Black) Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Most notably, building on a woman’s Facebook post about a missing cat, in September 2024 vice presidential candidate Vance spread groundless accusations about them: “…people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people [Haitians] who should not be in this country.” Trump amplified this to 67 million viewers in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris the next day, asserting “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”
What’s more, Blood Tribe, a growing neo-Nazi group with chapters across the United States and a leader who worships Hitler as a deity, exploited various Vance anti-Haitian slurs to mount demonstrations in Springfield and otherwise spread this racist gospel.
Putting this in historical context, Snyder explains that such tactics echo Hitler’s and Stalin’s genocidal playbooks:
“In an urban or suburban setting, in which animals are companions, the idea that others mistreat animals can be the signal that they are not like us, barbarians, not fully human. Among the many other accelerating repressions, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep pets at home.”
The Truth
Springfield’s conservative Republican mayor and Ohio’s conservative Republican governor disproved and decried these Vance, Trump and Blood Tribe claims, the governor calling them “garbage.”
The truth, in fact, as both officials have asserted, is that Haitians have greatly contributed to the revitalization of what had been an economically devastated Rust Belt town. Many have been there for over a decade, after having been granted temporary but renewable legal status in the wake of a devastating 2010 earthquake (which claimed roughly 200,000 lives) in Haiti and in view of widespread political chaos and gang violence there.
Despite these dangers, last month the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in ruling that the 350,000 Haitians immigrants across America can be deported – putting a million other immigrants with similar status and home country dangers in jeopardy.
In addition to this being devastating news for the Haitians themselves, this could be devastating for Springfield and other communities across America who depend on them to fill jobs, run businesses, buy goods and services, and otherwise build or rebuild local economies.
That reflects a larger reality about current immigrants in America, no matter how they got here. Contrary to hostile claims, they actually commit crimes at lower rates than people born here do; do not take jobs from Americans; in fact, generate economic activity that aids employment creation; help hold down inflation; and contribute payments to Social Security and Medicare without (if they don’t have legal status) taking any payments from those programs.
It’s true that we can’t open our borders to everyone. There are legitimate housing, social services and other constraints to consider.
But it’s equally true that our immigration policies should not be driven by hate, lies and racism.
Honoring Our Immigrants
Even more to the point, today’s immigrants are contributing to this country in ways our parents, grandparents and ancestors did. And no matter the nation of origin, most of our predecessors faced the same kind of bigotry here that Haitians and other current immigrants today encounter. The only thing that’s different is the slurs being hurled at them.
Going forward from the Fourth of July, we should honor immigrants, past or present, for their hard work and their sacrifices in the face of so many challenges and so much hostility.
We should honor them for how they embody an American motto, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.
We should honor them in the spirit of our better angels, rather than our darker demons.
As Springsteen puts it in “American Land”:
They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re still dying now Their hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep out
On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate a rebellion.
To celebrate a rebellion means not to obey in advance, not to accept any of this as normal: not the lies told about the history by the people destroying our future, not the saccharine veneration of the Constitution by people who violate it every day, not the seizure of the mantle of revolution by a band of reactionary oligarchs. It is to be as courageous as you can: to speak the truth, to protect the elections we still have, and above all to organize in a great a joyful coalition.
History is not something that our oligarchs and fascists can take, try though they will today. History is what we make. It does not come to us. We come to it — with what we know, what we say, and what we do. Nothing in history dooms us; and nothing in history saves us. In the months between now and the next elections, there will be much forecasting, speculating, and worrying. None of that matters. All that matters is organizing a great and joyful coalition.
All that matters is the work. If my words are useful, if the beautiful reading here of my words is useful, it is only because those words bring you to act.
To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things. We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America.
Joyful thanks to those who pronounced the lessons: Isabel Allende, Judd Apatow, Margaret Atwood, Joan Baez, Sophia Bush, Misha Collins, Kimberlè Crenshaw, Ted Danson, Ron Funches, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Holder, Jenifer Lewis, Leslie Odom Jr., Sarah Jessica Parker, Billy Porter, Maria Ressa, Lisa Rinna, Molly Ringwald, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron, Holland Taylor, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Bradley Whitford.
You must be logged in to post a comment.