California must stop turning over incarcerated firefighters over to ICE

Incarcerated immigrants like Phi Pham, above, are fighting California's wildfires
and deportation by ICE.

By Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo and Phi Pham

Earlier this summer, as devastating wildfires were about to erupt across California, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached the firehouse at Folsom State Prison.

But they weren’t there to help fight the terrifying blazes that have now burned 1.3 million acres this year and counting.

Instead, they had come to detain Phi Pham, a Vietnamese refugee and incarcerated firefighter who had earned release from state prison.

If not for where he was born, Phi would have been free that day. He would have reunited with his family in Hayward, California, and pursued his dream of becoming a professional firefighter.

Instead, under a cruel state policy, prison officials transferred Phi to ICE. Even as California’s wildfires grow with terrifying speed, he now languishes in an ICE detention center in Colorado.

As a state legislator and an immigrant myself, I am angered by the double-punishment that Phi — and so many other immigrants who served their time, including other firefighters — have been subjected to.

Working with a broad coalition of organizations across the state, I’m proud to author the VISION Act (AB 937), which would protect refugees and immigrants from being funneled into ICE detention when they earn release from jails and prisons.

With a crucial Senate hearing, Thursday, August 26, I am hopeful that my colleagues in the Senate, and soon after, Governor Newsom, will champion this bill.

As legislators gather in Sacramento, Phi will remain locked in ICE detention a thousand miles away from his family and community. While he can’t join next week’s hearing, I want to share a message Phi sent me from detention:

“If the VISION Act was the law back in June, I would be working right now to become a professional firefighter to protect our state.

I came to the U.S. when I was only four months old. My parents were refugees from Vietnam who survived the war, and I was born in a refugee camp in the Philippines. Growing up in Hayward, my family never had much. My parents struggled, and I was bullied at school. Fearing for my safety, I joined a gang for protection.

Ten years ago, when I was 20 years old, I made the biggest mistake in my life and shot a man during an argument at an In-and-Out. What I did was wrong. During my time in prison, I worked hard to change my life and to make amends for the harm I caused. When I became a firefighter, I was proud to protect people and give back to the community. After a decade focusing on my rehabilitation, I earned release through the rigorous board of parole hearing process

But now that I’ve been turned over to ICE and ordered deported, I don’t know what will happen. I am afraid I will be deported to a country I have never stepped foot in and become homeless.”

Phi’s story underscores that when we use our state and local resources to transfer people who’ve earned release to ICE, we ignore their hard fought rehabilitation and their contributions to our communities.

Phi is one of a growing number of currently and formerly incarcerated community members who’ve lived the pain of ICE transfers and are calling for change. He joins domestic violence survivors like Gabby Solano and Liyah Birru, community leaders like Joe Mejia and Carlos Muñoz, and formerly incarcerated firefighters Kao Saelee, Bounchan Keola and Leonel.

These brave voices are the anchoring force for a statewide coalition that’s 180 organizations strong. They’ve won the support of local governments, legislative caucuses and labor unions. And they have transformed public opinion, with a new poll conducted by UC San Diego showing two thirds of California voters support the VISION Act.

Phi should be home right now, preparing to fight the monstrous fires threatening our state. Governor Newsom has a powerful opportunity to right this wrong by issuing a pardon for Phi — and signing the VISION Act when it reaches his desk.

About the authors: Wendy Carrillo is a member of the California State Assembly and lead author of the Vision Act, AB 937. Phi Pham is an incarcerated firefighter now in ICE custody with a pending deportation proceeding.

Census wrestles with shifting deadlines - now Oct. 5 - and natural disasters

Census takers will have a hard time finding the residents of this household.

Ignoring a federal judge’s ruling last week allowing the decennial head count of every U.S. resident to continue through Oct. 31, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross says the 2020 census will end Oct. 5 according to a one-sentence press release issued by the Census Bureau late Monday.

"The Secretary of Commerce has announced a target date of October 5, 2020 to conclude 2020 Census self-response and field data collection operations," said the press release.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh issued a preliminary injunction last Thursday suspending the Sept. 30 deadline and continuing the Census until at least through the end of October.

The press release came as a virtual hearing was being held in San Jose, California, as a follow-up to Koh’s ruling. The injunction issued last week suspended the Census Bureau’s deadline for ending the head count on Sept. 30, which automatically reverted back to an earlier Census Bureau plan ending field operations on Oct. 31.

The Oct. 31 deadline was agreed to by the Bureau because the coronavirus pandemic had derailed to Census timetable and field operations that required enumerators to go the households who had not yet self-reported.

But last August, the Bureau announced a return to the Sept. 31 deadline without explanation.

RESPOND to the U.S. Census online.

A lawsuit of civil rights organizations and local governments led by the National Urban League sought the Census to return to the October 31 deadline. Koh sought and explanation from the Census why the decision was made to revert to the September deadline.

Koh asked federal attorneys during Monday’s hearing to provide documents on how the Oct. 5 date was decided upon. When a federal government lawyer suggested that the decision-making was a moving target without any records, the judge asked, “A one sentence tweet? Are you saying that is enough reason to establish decision-making? A one sentence tweet?”

In her preliminary injunction issued Thursday, Koh said the Sept. 30 deadline would not provide enough time for an accurate count.

As Census takers continue to scramble to complete their task as best as possible while assuming the Oct. 5 deadline would go into effect. Koh had received messages from Census field offices that they were ordered to assume the Sept. 30 deadline was the effective end of their field operations.

Besides determining the political representation for communities, the data from the Census helps allocate about $1.5 trillion for government assistance.

"In 2010, in just watching what happened the census bureau, we know that there were a lot of gaps, maybe a lot of resources that didn’t land in our communities," said Victoria Huynh, Vice President of the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, to  11Alive in Georgia where the AAP community has grown by 83% in the past decade. 

"2020 is a really important time to capture that information, especially as those cities continue to grow and plan for that growth," said Karuna Ramachandran, the Deputy Director of "Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta."

Additionally, the Constitutionally mandated head count is having difficulty in those areas where wildfires and flooding has forced thousands of residents from their homes.

In Northern California, a Census manager told the staff working underneath her Monday that they needed to complete 99% of households in the the Santa Rosa region where new evacuation orders had been sent out because of threatening wildfires by Sept. 30, including 12,000 households yet to be counted in Mendocino County, reported the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, a measure passed by the U.S. House of the Representatives officially extending the deadline to Oct. 31 never went into effect because the Republican-controlled Senate has not voted on it.

The Trump administration is pushing for the early end to the Census because an inaccurate count -- especially of those areas with historically hard-to-count immigrants -- would likely lose representation if they are undercounted. 

The administration's earlier attempts to dissuade immigrants from participating in the Census -- by adding a question about citizenship status to the Census form and to not include undocumented immigrants when drawing boundaries for Congressional districts -- have been ruled illegal by the courts. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this article is news laced with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions. 

A Year Later: Heroic Filipino American family recalls the California wildfire

COURTESY OF ROBLES FAMILY

The Robles family: Alica Tanael, Yoehan, Cristaly and Charlie.

A YEAR after the devastating wildfires that swept through northern California's wine country, neighborhoods are slowly starting to rebuild their homes from the ashes. 

Residents are also rebuilding their lives including the Robles family: Charlie, Cristalyn, their 7-year-old son, Yoehan, and his grandmother, Alicia Tanael. 

The heroism of the Filipino American family was recounted by a KQED podcast. The Robles family lived at a care facility where they cared for the four wheelchair-bound  elderly residents.

Charlie and Cristalyn Robles were awaken around 1 a.m. on Oct. 8, 2017. Charlie answered it and the only word he heard was "Evacuate!"

He and his wife looked outside of the home in the city of Santa Rosa, smack dab in the middle of the picturesque Sonoma Valley. "We saw the bright mountain, and we knew it was fire approaching,” recalls Charlie.

He loaded up each resident, and each family member -- including 7-year old Yoehan -- pushed a wheelchair out to the road.

Embers were flying everywhere, the wind whipping fast, the flames edging just feet from the assisted living home. Charlie loaded up each resident into their wheelchair and pushed the Robles wheelchairs out to the road.

With three residents on the roadside, there was still one more resident left inside: 76-year old retired CalFire Captain Ferrol Mead.

It never occurred to the Robles to just save themselves. The elderly residents were just as important to them.

“We wanted to save lives together,” Cristalyn says. “We would go together, alive.” 

Charlie went back inside.

Read the rest of the harrowing story or listen to the podcast by clicking here.

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Samoan firefighters are back in California

FILE / 2017

The American Samoa firefighters are called to help California put out its wildfires.

AMONG THE 13,000 firefighters trying to extinguish California's wildfires, are 17 American Samoan firefighters from the National Park of American Samoa, which is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the South Pacific Ocean.

It is getting to be an annual trip for the Samoans. Ten of the crew of 17 are veterans of previous firefighting efforts in California. 

Last year, an inspiring video of the Samoan firefighters singing as they emerge from the forest went viral.

The U.S. Forest Service commented on its Facebook page that the crew worked hard on the Helena/Fork and Buck fires and received an award from the incident commander for their hard work. California firefighters have seen the crew in action and praised their hard work, passion and camaraderie.

Singing for Samoan fire crews is more than just a way to pass the time. According to 'The Samoan Way,' Samoans grow up singing in church and in school. Around 98% of the population is Christian so singing is a huge part of the culture. There's a sense of unity and pride when singing Samoan hymns. 

The words of the song, posted here, were translated by James Stevenson to read:

Fa’afetai i le atua lena tatou tupu ai ina ua na alofa fua ia te tatou uma Tali: ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai Faafetai i lona alo lena afio mai luga le ua fai ma faapaolo mai le puapuaga Tali: ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai Faafetai i le agaga le fesoasoani mai e manuia talosaga atoa uma mea e fai Tali: ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai ia pepese ia pepese aleluia faafetai

In English, the song loosely translates to: Thanks to God. We grow when He has compassion for all of us. Answer: sing hello songs thank you to sing hello thanks thank you Thanks to his son who comes from above who is a savior from the trouble… Answers : sing alleluia songs thank you to sing songs aleluia thanks Thank you very much for help to succeed in all the answers to all the [problems/trouble]… Answers: answer singing alleluia thank you sing songs thank you thank you

In case you haven't seen it, here's the video from last year:

With more than 300,000 acres burned, the Mendocino Complex Fire is the largest in California’s history. Drought-like conditions due to climate change, dry winds and temperatures in the triple digits have hampered firefighting efforts.

Almost 700,000 acres total have been burned in California so far this year; in which 2,300 National Guardsmen as well as scores of non-violent inmates have joined in to put out the fires. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, and thousands have sought shelter in emergency shelters.
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Samoan hotshots are a source of inspiration fighting California wildfires

The hotshots from America Samoa emerge from the forest.

ONE OF THE MANY AMAZING STORIES coming out of the devastating wildfires in northern California is the inspirational presence of the hotshots from American Samoa.

As the worst fire in California history continues to burn, firefighters have come from across the country and as far away as Australia to assist in controlling the fires that have claimed more than 40 lives and thousands of homes.

The crew of five veterans and 11 rookie firefighters from the National Park of American Samoa joined the Northern California wildfire force.

The Samoans were equipped with gear when they arrived in Redding, Calif., and they, in turn, said thanks with celebratory songs and a haka.

Later, a bone-chilling video captures the American Samoan hotshots coming down from the mountains after a hard days work. The video was filmed at the Helena-Fork Fire on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in northwest California.

It shows a trail coming out of the forest. In the distance you hear a song. Then, one by one in single file the fire crew emerges out of the dark forest sounding like a choir. With their strong, powerful, harmonizing voices it's a scenes that sends chills up the spine. 

They are singing a Christian hymn, acapella, in Samoan with some of the firefighters singing harmony. Even though you don't know the words, you can feel the power emanating from the men and women.

The video was posted Sept. 27, 2017 by Lori Light and has gone viral. The videographer said in his post on You Tube, “Take a break from the depressing national news and watch the best thing you will see today.”

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