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California's Bishop Latino Community Grapples with Trump’s Return
Ana Whitmore, a Latina who has spent the past fifteen years teaching TK-5 Spanish Dual Immersion in Bishop and nearby Mammoth Lakes, said she believes the right-wing appealed to the “religious revival” playing out within Bishops' Latino community.
The revival created “a sway back into Catholic and conservative values on issues like abortion,” Whitmore said.
Meanwhile, Carlos Cruz, a handyman who moved to Bishop in 2007 to provide for his family in Mexico, suggested that Latinos turned to the Republican Party searching for economic relief.
“Every Latino wants to live better,” he said. “And Trump is a business guy. He’s going to raise the country again. Try to make [it] better.”
Cruz is not alone. Approximately 52% of Latinos rated the cost of living and inflation as their top priorities in this year’s election, and some reports point to Trump's win as a reflection of the Democratic party’s failure to address working-class issues, ultimately leading to Harris’s loss.
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Yet there is little evidence that suggests Trump will prioritize the needs of everyday, working-class Americans when he takes office.
During his first presidency, Trump tried to raise the rent for 4 million low-income households, force single mothers to reveal their sexual histories before receiving welfare, transfer $5.8 billion in workers' tip money to employers, and attack workers' rights to collective bargaining, according to several reports.
In November last year, Trump announced plans to declare a national emergency and order the U.S. military to conduct mass deportations.
This plan could rip apart the 6.3 million mixed-status households, which account for nearly 5% of the country’s population.
But Cruz said, “Latinos aren’t scared about being deported. Trump was already President, and he didn’t do it that bad for us.”
Trump’s first-term family separation policy at the southern border was described as one of “the cruelest and most shameful chapters in recent American history” by MSNBC News.
Thousands of children were forcibly taken from their parents and transferred to shelters nationwide.
A string of mules walk past Mexican restaurants during the annual Mule Days parade in Bishop, CA.Robin Linse
Despite this recent history, Cruz believes mass deportations are “unlikely” to occur.
“It’s not like the President is going to take all the hard workers. He’s going to go for the money,” he said. “But if they do send me back to Mexico, I won’t really have a problem because I’ll just work harder there to build up my country.”
Nearly 1 in 10 California workers are undocumented immigrants, with immigrants representing 1 in every 3.
A mass deportation event would drastically deplete the workforce, increasing prices for all Americans by 9.1% and slashing the GDP by up to 7.4% over the next four years, according to reports.
The wildfires consuming over 40,000 acres and 12,000 structures in the Greater Los Angeles area as of January 13th have further eased Cruz’s mind.
“LA is going to need a lot of help to rebuild these houses. Who is going to help them but immigrants?” Cruz questioned.
However, Karen Rivas, a Bishop local and first-year student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice was among the 58% majority of Latinas who chose Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Rivas said the fact that 54% of Latino men voted for Trump “felt like a stab in the back as a Latina. This man waged war against Hispanics and women, treating us like criminals and aliens, and you’re still going to vote for that?”
Because Bishop is a small, rural town, “ICE doesn’t come here often, but when they do it is a big deal in the Latino community,” Rivas said. “There’s always this inherent fear of losing my family, losing my parents, because of these threats.”
Some Latinos have already withdrawn from the Bishop community for fear of deportation.
On December 14, 2024, some Latino families opted to remove their children from the holiday “Shop-with-a-Cop” program in which low-income students pick out toys with law enforcement officers, fearing police could record their address and return to search for undocumented residents.
Murals decorate the kindergarten hall where Ana Whitmore teaches.Robin Linse
Some families are also worried about sending their kids to school.
During Trump’s first term, Nancy Hagopian, a Hispanic Liaison at Bishop Elementary, tried to assure parents of their student’s safety with letters and phone calls via the district office.
“But now parents are afraid that that is changing. You can see kids come here, their mind is somewhere else,” she said. “They try to play, learn, and all that, but they sense fear at home.”
Hagopian said her students have told her they don’t want to speak Spanish because classmates told them, ‘Go back to your country,’ and students playing soccer have replaced insults of ‘Oh, you’re slow; bad at running’ with ‘Oh, you’re Mexican.’
“Whether they are Mexican or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s a racist comment equating them with not belonging,” Hagopian said.
However, not everyone has noticed tensions rising in the classroom.
Ana Whitmore, the Spanish Dual Immersion teacher, said she remembers her kindergarten students “voiced concerns over immigration,” during the 2020 election, but “this time around, I have not heard it.”
Regardless, Whitmore said she is “nervous for some students.”
“Being an immigrant myself when I was younger, that was always a source of anxiety,” Whitmore added.
Not all teachers are as open to discussing identity and politics in the classroom.
Last Thursday, Hagopian met with school district superintendent Katy Kolker to discuss designing a class for teachers to better support and empathize with their immigrant students.
Regardless of political alignment, some Latinos hope to build a more unified Bishop for their children.
Rivas’ father started a soccer group for Latinos over the age of forty, the Seventh Day Adventists started a Hispanic support group, and Cruz hopes to see Bishop’s folklórico dance group perform in the 56th annual Mule Days parade.
Cruz said there is only one way to survive the hard days ahead, and that’s realizing “we’re all family—Hispanics and whites. We have to work together and keep each other going.”
Robin Linse explores the interplay between culture, language, and the environment as a student at Grinnell College.
Recommended
R.A.F.T. for America: An Important Lesson About Bridging Our Differences
(From left to right, beginning at the top) Jennifer Roberts (D), Thom Tillis (R), Lance Moseley (R), Rev. Dr. Rodney Sadler (D)
At its core, R.A.F.T. represents a simple experiment with far-reaching implications. It rests on the premise that, as Americans, we are all in the same boat together, and no matter what the challenge, we do better by pulling together than by pulling apart.
We'd all be testing this premise very soon - by challenging the rapids of the iconic Nantahala River, not far from Ashville in western North Carolina - the same area that a few weeks later would be obliterated by Hurricane Helene.
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Our red/blue pairs of participants knew two things about the day's itinerary:
- They knew they'd be matched up for the day with someone from a dramatically different background, culture, religion, or political persuasion.
- They knew they'd be challenged not just by the river's rapids but also by engaging in the kinds of conversations that Americans from different backgrounds are finding increasingly difficult to have.
As the morning mist gradually lifted, the mood remained one of wariness and apprehension. Some pairs found it difficult to connect at all. Rodney and Lance confessed to CBS host Major Garrett that they had "absolutely nothing in common, not even our choice of smartphones."
Over the next hour, a few dozen more elected officials and lay people arrived, got the whitewater rafting "safety talk," and worked their way to the launch site. The river was cold, the air still chilly, but spirits were warming to the task at hand - stepping outside our comfort zones and tackling more than seven miles of raucous whitewater.
Fast forward three dripping-wet hours.
With the exception of one harmless man-overboard in Nantahala Falls (a wonderful photo op provided by Senator Tillis' Chief of Staff), we all reached the take-out point in high spirits and, importantly, with new-found respect for our raftmates who, on any other day, in any other place, we might have been disinclined even to have a conversation with.
Our new friends Lance and Rodney agreed to one more interview together. This time, they talked about the ideas they had shared on the river and how many of them weren't as different as they had originally thought they'd be. They applauded each other's willingness to actually listen with intellectual curiosity. And they concluded that "we're not as far apart as we thought we were."
More importantly, they laughed together, joked together, poked each other playfully, and ended their day in an embrace punctuated by the affirmation that "I love ya brother" - on national TV!
The lessons from R.A.F.T. for America are simple but profound. Reaching out and connecting across our differences doesn't need to be scary; it doesn't need to be hard work; it doesn't even need to be awkward. Quite the contrary, stepping outside our comfort zone - whether on whitewater or in politics - helps us feel pretty darn good about that person on the other side of the issue, and it can make us feel pretty darn good about ourselves, too.
Each of us has this capacity. More than ever, America needs us to let go of our biases and unleash that innate inclination to be curious about every new thing in the world - especially the new people we engage with, regardless of their politics.
There are undoubtedly rough currents ahead. Lots of them. There always have been. And there always will be. R.A.F.T. for America is proving that we can navigate the rough spots together if we just dig a little deeper, let go of some of our preconceptions, find value in our differences, and give each other half a chance. As Lance and Rodney discovered, to their mutual surprise, "we're not really that different."
To leverage Americans' vision and inspiration into concrete action, there are no better places to start than teamdemocracy.org, citizenconnect.us, and conversation.us.
Q&A: Arizona’s legacy of “tough and cheap” sheriff enforcement explored in new book on power and democracy
According to this political philosophy, Pishko writes, sheriffs can “block all other government branches and officials,” Pishko writes, … “from enforcing laws and regulations within their county that might conflict with their specific, originalist interpretation of the Constitution.”
Arizona sheriffs in particular, Pishko argues, have significantly influenced how the nation sees and accepts the role of the sheriff. With local sheriffs poised to play a key role in the incoming Trump administration, Arizona Luminaria spoke with Pishko about the history of sheriffs in Arizona, who oversees sheriffs’ departments, and why jails continue to be so deadly.
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The following conversation with Pishko has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: Tell me about your title. Can you lay out why the subtitle, about sheriffs’ power potentially threatening democracy, isn’t alarmist?
Jessica Pishko: The first way in which I meant the title was literally, because of sheriffs’ involvement in the Stop the Steal campaign, because of their distrust in election processes and their desire to quote-unquote, investigate voter fraud. The second way in which I meant the title was actually in a way that’s a little more subtle. One of the things that I think is important to consider when we think about sheriffs is that, because they are elected on a countywide basis, many sheriffs do not represent a substantial number of people. Rather, they represent land.
As an example, North Carolina has 100 counties. So we have 100 sheriffs, but only about five counties contain something like 2/3 of the total state population. When the state sheriff’s association, as they recently did, wanted to press for legislation that would require sheriffs to cooperate with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), they can present 90-something sheriffs who all agree, which looks like a lot of support. But behind that is the fact that those sheriffs do not represent anywhere near half the people living in the state. So, kind of like the Electoral College, you have this situation where rural and suburban areas are able to dictate policing and immigration policy in a disproportionate way. And that burden falls on immigrant communities, people of color, urban areas, all places where people are overly policed.
Q. Let’s move out west. In this book you spend a lot of time in Arizona. How important is the state to the development of the modern-day sheriff?
A. Because it is a growing state and because that population is very heavily Latino in many places, the state sits at this really important nexus of being on the U.S.-México border, having a lot of rural and federal land and also being a place where there’s a great deal of business development and demographic change.
That’s added up to sheriffs exerting a rather large amount of power. I think there’s something to be said for the fact that Arizona is where the far-right sheriffs movement has gotten a lot of traction. It is, of course, the home place of Richard Mack (who founded the constitutional sheriffs movement and was sheriff of Graham County from 1988 to 1996), but it is also the birthplace of Joe Arpaio, and the constitutional sheriff movement owes a lot to Joe Arpaio in many ways.
Arizona’s criminal and prison systems were set up to be tough and cheap, as they say, in terms of policing and punishment. And so the state has long relied on Old West-style, unregulated policing, or, at least, policing that is a little less regulated than many urban police departments. Sheriffs in Arizona have a slightly different style that I argue is more influenced by militias and military service.
Q. What do you mean by “tough and cheap”?
A. I borrowed that from Mona Lynch’s book, what she describes as “a tough and cheap” model of law enforcement that frames violence as a cost-cutting measure. Arizona hired a sheriff (Pima County Sheriff Frank Eyman) to run the first state prison in Arizona, and he ran in with a bunch of his guys and subdued a prison riot. He used tear gas and lined up the leaders of the prison uprising against the wall. Authorities were so pleased with his work that they asked Eyman to run Arizona’s prisons for two decades. During that time, he instituted a “codebook” of military-style rules while ensuring that incarcerated people were forced to work so that the prison could be self-sustaining and, as a result, cost-effective and “efficient.”
Q. But does that differ from how other states rely on sheriffs?
A. I don’t want to suggest other states aren’t tough and cheap because, for example, Texas is a place where tough and cheap also sells well. Arizona has larger and fewer counties, especially compared to eastern states, so originally sheriffs there were set up to police larger territories.
But the idea and modeling in Arizona was that if you use a lot of violence that would subdue populations, you would deter and incapacitate people who might commit crimes. But also there was a policy of not wanting to spend a lot of money on what you might call a rehabilitative model.
Arizona has long had the strategy that, well, we’re not very concerned about rehabilitation, what we’re very concerned about is warehousing people very cheaply, being kind of mean and tough and that sort of translates into things like Joe Arpaio. His style was tough and cheap. The model says, well, I’ll be excessively cruel and violent and not concerned about rehabilitating and programming.
Q. Tell us about Eyman. Not many people have heard of him. Why is he important in this story?
A. Frank Eyman was a very interesting figure because he was a sheriff who was put in charge of the first state prison in Arizona, which was in Florence, and he was there for a very long time, at least 20 years. His claim to fame was that he was a tough-talking sheriff. He was foul-mouthed, and not very polite, and his tactics were incredibly violent. He brought his guys into the prison and would subdue people housed there with pure violence.His main tactic was just to beat people into submission. He was the first person brought in specifically to tame what was seen as an incredibly unruly population of people housed in Florence.
I think that another trope is that Arizona sheriffs, as with a lot of the West, believed that strict policing was necessary because you had to subdue unruly elements, people who were seen as having been hardened by the environment, hardened by the desert. You can see the same tropes today, especially in immigration policing, this stereotype that immigrants are bad and tough, or the cartels or coyotes are these hardened criminals.
Q. Do you see a partisan divide in how sheriffs run their departments or their jails?
A. The partisan divide among sheriffs is stronger than it used to be although it is also less indicative of outcomes as people might like to assume. It didn’t used to be that the local party dictated your policy. There wasn’t what political scientists would call the realignment of the parties on a local level. But we have seen, since 2016 – and it really is attributable to the rise of Donald Trump – that rather suddenly local politics began to align with national party politics. So you now have sheriffs running as Republicans who support Trump, and sheriffs running as Democrats who do not support him.
But, at the same time, it is not clear that these partisan divides produce different results. For example, sheriffs who run as Democrats believe in ostensible liberal values in policing, like diversity training, de-escalation, programming, and all these sorts of things. It turns out, however, that they do not run safer jails. Overall, jail deaths continue to go up.
Jessica Pishko, author of The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.
Q. Who oversees the sheriff? Or who should? I know some states have oversight of jails, though Arizona isn’t one of them.
A. If I had to pinpoint the greatest harm of the constitutional sheriff movement it’s that the believers have created this impression that sheriffs are beholden to no one.
This has become a widespread belief on both the right and the left. Both Democrat and Republican sheriffs will argue that they answer to no one (but the voters), and states tend to believe them. Lawmakers think that; the Department of Justice seems to think that. Sheriffs have somehow managed to persuade swaths of lawmakers that this is true, and it’s really hampered reform. It’s hard to change sheriffs or alter their departments because they’ve created this impression that they cannot be altered, their practices cannot be changed.
But it’s just not true. Even in states where sheriffs are embedded in the state constitution, which is about half of states (including Arizona), there are still lots of statutes that govern sheriffs.There just isn’t any legal justification to say that sheriffs are different from other elected officers.
So, there are mechanisms to hold sheriffs accountable, and one of the most interesting and promising, quite frankly, is just state lawmaking. They can simply make laws that alter the way sheriffs have to run their departments.
Q. Is there a state that has reduced the power of sheriffs?
A. Washington is one of the states that has attempted to create more robust state oversight. One of the things you can do there, if you have a complaint against your sheriff or the police, is go to a state oversight board who then has state investigators look into it. (Three years into the experiment, no investigations have been initiated by the oversight group.)
They’re also trying to pass a requirement for background checks for sheriff candidates. So basically, they’ve been trying to create state legislation that limits who can be sheriff and who they can hire.
In most places, to hold a sheriff accountable, you have to file a lawsuit, which of course, is very expensive. It puts the burden on the person who least has power. It requires that people come forward and make these allegations, which is very burdensome.
From my point of view, we need to reduce policing powers. One of the problems with the sheriff’s office as a whole is that it just has too many things. I don’t think county jails should exist, quite frankly, at all. But I think, in the meantime, that the county jail apparatus needs to be removed from the purview of the sheriff. Sheriffs have not shown themselves to be good stewards of jails, which are currently more unsafe than they ever have been.
Q: If the county sheriff didn’t run the jail, who would run it?
A. Seattle (King County) put its jail under an appointed executive. Similarly, other jails could use appointed officials, a person whose only job is to run the jail. They’re not elected. So the jail isn’t being used like a slush fund for contracts and favors. Of course, this isn’t perfect either, as the situation at Rikers Island in New York suggests.
Every sheriff will tell you their jail is the largest hospital in the county. They’ll say, oh, we run the largest mental health institution in the county. And they say it like it’s a job that they should be doing. But if it is, in fact, the largest mental health institution, then why on earth is a law enforcement officer running it?
Q&A: Arizona’s legacy of “tough and cheap” sheriff enforcement explored in new book on power and democracy was first published on Arizona Luminaria and is republished with permission.
John Washington covers Tucson, Pima County, criminal justice and the environment for Arizona Luminaria.
Bridging Hearts in a Divided America
The country is experiencing a polar vortex, both literally and figuratively. Americans seem to be frozen in their perceptions of reality. Some are truly upbeat about the prospect of a second Trump presidency, while others are terrified and believe we are headed toward an autocratic regime.
Mikey Johnson, a caricature artist living in Virginia, is hopeful and excited about the next four years. From an economic standpoint, he believes everyone’s life will improve under President Trump. “I feel like the grown-up is finally in the White House, and he is going to do the things grown-ups do. People will be held responsible for criminal acts, and the border will be finally sealed off. Only people who apply legally will be able to come to America. This is, after all, a nation of immigrants.”
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Asked whether President Trump could represent all Americans, Johnson said, “Absolutely, he wants to be everyone’s president. I have been listening to him since the first time he ran for president. You never hear anything derogatory towards any race. Even as a businessman, it did not matter the gender or the race of a person. He is a man who didn't have to run for president. He loves this country, has big plans and is for whatever is best for all Americans.”
Cathy Harmon Christian, Executive Director for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, is concerned about “the spoken and unspoken dehumanization of the most vulnerable.” The Atlanta, Georgia resident says there is a movement in the country to ostracize people who are transgender, immigrant, and incarcerated. “I believe that everyone belongs and that we are all interconnected. My experience has been that President Trump does not see the world the way that I do. He likes to pit one person against another.”
(From left to right, beginning at the top) Patricia Gomez (WI), Reginald Robinson (DC), Vicky Chen (MA), Mikey Johnson (VA), Cathy Harmon Christian (GA)
Modern psychology tells us that our perspectives and worldviews are shaped by culture, our life experiences, and the context we live in. Where and how we consume information is also an important factor influencing how we think about the world. Social media algorithms, which determine what content appears as we scroll, have faced intense scrutiny recently for deepening America's political divide and reinforcing our ideological bubbles. This may, in part, explain the diametrically opposed views.
“As a mother of two boys in kindergarten, I feel America has changed, and not for the better. We are not as crime-free as before. I feel more confident and safer with Trump as president, and I know he will grow the economy,” says Vicky Chen, a restaurant owner in Boston, Massachusetts. Chen says that sexuality is a taboo topic in traditional Chinese culture, and she does not feel comfortable with LGBTQ ideas. “I don’t want that ideology to influence my children. President Trump said the term LGBTQ only stands for two words: male and female, and that works for me.”
But, concepts of safety and sexuality are subjective and rooted in lived experiences. Patricia Gomez, a bilingual teacher in a charter school in Wisconsin, is worried about the safety of her students. “As a Latina who works with underprivileged communities, I carry with me the history, culture, and resilience of these communities. I worry about the impact of mass deportations on the families I work with and on the economy.” “She admits that she cannot think beyond this month and wants “to bring more awareness to the parents I work with in case something drastic happens to them or to my students.”
Reginald Robinson, a distinguished law professor at Howard University, considers himself an outlier at his undergraduate alma mater, but stands firmly by his convictions. “President Trump plans to sunset the IRS and replace it with the external revenue service that deals with tariffs and trade. This will increase the country’s revenue and relieve us of an oppressive tax burden.” Robinson believes that since 1871, America has been run as a private corporation, not a constitutional republic. “Trump will return our country to the people. He will have four years of re-growing the prosperity of America for all of us.”
Many people nationwide feel vindicated that Trump got elected for a second term. Robinson, who believes that Trump overwhelmingly won the last election, says, “We have seen what happens when we push a narrative inconsistent with the desires of the majority of the country.” He blames legacy media for misleading us, especially around January 6. “People who participated in the so-called insurrection have been wasting away in prison.” While he supports holding individuals accountable for destroying public property, he urges President Trump to pardon the wrongfully convicted promptly.
Can we agree to disagree and simultaneously stay focused on our shared humanity? What Americans have in common may be surprisingly more than what separates us. After all, there is ample evidence that most Americans care about essential issues such as equitable access to quality health care, support of fundamental democratic principles, immigration reform, and stricter gun control measures. Those interviewed for this story share a genuine concern for family, community, and country.
When asked what he would tell a fellow American who's afraid of a second Trump presidency, Johnson said, “Give him [President Trump] the benefit of the doubt. Don’t be afraid unless he demonstrates a real reason to fear his presidency. Keep in mind that over half of the country voted for him, and they trust that he will do what’s best to lead us for the next four years,” says Johnson. “We don’t always get the candidate, or political party, that we want in office, but we all must try to relax and accept what is.”
Harmon Christian wants those who voted for Trump to “be sensitive and alert to vulnerable people and communities, especially if they lose their rights, representation and respect. Believe them when they say what’s happening to them.”
As an Indigenous woman from Colombia, Gomez says that First Nations people have a tradition of healing circles where individuals are invited to come together, transcend their differences, and connect as human beings, speaking from the heart.
Maybe it is not a coincidence that the second inauguration of President Trump overlaps with Dr. King’s Day. The message in these polarized times is to try and connect to each other from the heart. As Dr. King said during a sermon reproduced in his 1963 book Strength to Love, “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”
Beatrice Spadacini is a freelance journalist who writes about social justice and public health.