May 12, 2019 Dena Jensen
Community members continue to show up weekly to call on our local government agencies to engage with members of the immigrant community, of all statuses, to reduce and hopefully put an end to, the daily fear and apprehension that they endure living under the Trump administration, not to mention the profiling and mistreatment numerous individuals experience at the hands of local officials.
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April 30, 2019 Dena Jensen
Folks may remember discussion last year of the Port of Bellingham allowing some of their public parks to be shut down to non-paying members of the public for private events due to requests from event organizers. Port Commissioners decided to try a “pilot program” that resulted in, I believe, ultimately just one event in August of 2018 that shut down Zuanich Point Park.
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April 3, 2019 ACTION Dena Jensen
Yesterday Senate Bill 5438 was successfully moved out of the WA state legislature’s Labor & Workplace Standards committee with a do-pass recommendation! SB 5438 would provide measures to offer more adequate protections for the rising number of H-2A farm workers being recruited by Washington state farms.
Continue readingMarch 30, 2019 Dena Jensen
For those who didn’t catch it on air, the March 20, 2019 Community Voz radio show on KMRE centered on the trip that members of the Bellingham women-led , grassroots organization, Community to Community Development (C2C), made to Olympia on March 18, 2019 for the 6th Annual Farmworker Tribunal and Latino Legislative Day.
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March 20, 2019 Dena Jensen
County Council Member Rud Browne expressed the sentiment twice at the Whatcom County Council March 12, 2019 regular meeting during the Council committee reports segment near the end of the meeting. One exact quote was: “Yeah, so anyway, anyway, so, I just, 26,000 bucks a door is just a hard pill to swallow.”
Continue readingMarch 14, 2019 Dena Jensen
I just listened to a recent Community Voz radio show on SB 5438 – which recently passed the state senate – a bill that would provide a source of funding and resources to provide better oversight to help prevent abuses of the H-2A visa agricultural program. You all should listen too. There’s a ton of information and analysis packed into the hour-long show that will help you better understand the bill. (Great music too!)
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March 6, 2019 Victoria Matey and Maru Mora Villalpando
On February 25th, 2019 the City of Bellingham, in Washington State, reviewed the ordinance–#2017-02-008 and BMC Chapter 2.25 regarding immigration matters in the city. Two years ago, undocumented students and community members advised the city not to collaborate with federal immigration officials in order to make Bellingham a safer city for everyone by addressing racial profiling. Instead, the city passed an ordinance that not only dismissed everything the undocumented community was collectively working towards, but also passed an ordinance supposedly to protect the undocumented community with zero enforcement and accountability, and with no promise of keeping our community safe from immigration enforcement families being torn apart.
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March 5, 2019 Dena Jensen
In this post is the email I sent today to the Bellingham City Council and Mayor Linville, that was copied to the Whatcom County Council, County Executive Louws and Deputy Executive Schroeder regarding conflicting reports of bed availability from the Lighthouse Mission.
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It’s been two full years since the City of Bellingham abruptly pushed aside the Keep Bellingham Families Working ordinance in favor of approving their own ordinance regarding immigrant protection. In all that time there has been no amending of that ordinance or activation of civilian oversight or of a safe space to report discrimination or persecution.
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February 22, 2019 Dena Jensen
I have written a couple posts now on the part of the January 15, 2019 meeting of Whatcom County Council’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee related to the Whatcom County Sheriff’s proposal to repeal and replace Whatcom County Code (WCC) 1.28 regarding correctional facility standards.
According to the documents supplied to the Council Members on the committee and the presentation given by Whatcom County Undersheriff Jeff Parks, the Title 289 Washington Administrative Code (WAC), which Whatcom County had adopted as WCC 1.28, had been deemed obsolete and was done away with in 2006.
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noisy waters northwest 
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