20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 16-22, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com website to help residents know their rights, among other things. Groot says while there’s the “distinct possibility” there are raids on ag fields, he’s not sure the federal government will have the resources to do it. Groot believes our immigration system has been “broken 40-plus years now,” adding, “I think it boils down to how Congress has done their job. We’ve created this mess and we’re not solving it.…Everyone is waiting to see how fast this moves. At this point, it’s hard to say. How it’s all going to play out will become much more clear after Jan. 20.” The county’s second biggest industry, hospitality, could likewise be impacted by mass deportations. Rick Aldinger is co-chair of the Monterey County Hospitality Association’s government affairs committee and just retired at the end of last year as general manager of Big Sur River Inn. “We don’t want to panic over this because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “It’s something we’re going to keep on our radar.” That being said, he adds, “This could affect a lot of people if this indeed plays out. At this point we’re just biding our time. Hopefully it turns out to be much ado about nothing.” Rob Bonta, Attorney General of the State of California, does not expect the Trump administration will be much ado about nothing. During Trump’s first term, his office sued the administration 123 times. And Bonta is ramping up for similar expectations from 2025-29. He visited the UFW hall in Salinas on Friday, Jan. 10, for a meeting focused on immigration policy. “This moment requires us to come together, to be unified, to fight for our shared values,” Bonta said. “I am here with my team in person in Salinas to make that known. We look forward to fighting side by side with you. I wish we were not in this position, but we are in it. I am grateful to be in it with you.” He noted specific courtroom victories from the first Trump administration—on DACA, a policy protecting people who immigrated illegally as children; on California’s sanctuary state status; on a “public charge” rule that would have broadened the definition of who would not be eligible for status if they sought benefits. (Bonta’s team also sued successfully over health issues, environmental issues and more.) Where locally elected lawmakers serving in Washington might find themselves unable to take action, state-level officials in a Democratic supermajority may find themselves more readily able to organize. For example, state lawmakers are looking to allocate $50 million for legal resources to push back against the Trump administration, with $25 million set aside for Bonta’s DOJ to sue. Lofgren and Panetta are both in safely blue districts—in 2024, she was reelected for a 16th term with 65 percent of the vote, and Panetta to his fifth with 69 percent of the vote—but still, it might be at the state level where officials are best positioned to fight back. “United, there’s nothing we can’t do,” Bonta told the group in Salinas. “This is a moment that will test us. It’s a moment of uncertainty and pain and challenge, but I also believe we can rise to the occasion.” On Dec. 18, about 30 or so political progressives met at the Center For Peace in Seaside to discuss the issues they want to focus on in the next two to four years. The organizer of the meeting, Carmel Valley resident Murtaza Mogri, who moved up from Southern California about a year-and-a-half ago, revived a local but dormant Indivisible Facebook page. He notes the group, a national nonprofit, is nonpartisan. “The goal is to help communities represent folks better, and influence what goes on locally and nationally,” Mogri says, adding that during the Biden Administration the group became a lot less active. The group’s goal now, in the advent of Trump’s second term, he says, is deciding “Where are we going to focus? Who are we going to help?” And while this time around, unlike at the beginning of Trump’s first term, there haven’t been any notable protests nationwide, Mogri is hoping to change that locally. “I think we’ll figure out more in the upcoming year,” he adds. In his view, “[Attendees] came out of that meeting with some optimism.” But the vibes are distinctly different on the left than they were eight years ago. In 2016, there were at least a dozen Indivisible chapters registered in the area. The weekend after Trump was elected in 2016, the Monterey County Democratic Central Committee hosted a post-mortem that drew about 130 people for an event called “Moving From Grief to Strategy.” Since the 2024 election, the organization has not yet hosted any similar public event. (The organizers of a local Women’s March chapter in 2016 will return with a People’s March at Window on the Bay in Monterey on Saturday, Jan. 18. “It’s a demonstration of the resilience of resistance,” the organizers wrote. “We all march for different reasons, but we march for the same cause: to defend our rights and our future.”) Yet there’s a sense of resignation among many Democratic voters, and dispiritedness. Trump, after all, who has largely escaped accountability his entire life, is a serial liar, a convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual assaulter, but the federal charges against him in two separate cases are now being dropped that he’s been reelected. And while he was scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 10 for his felony conviction in New York, a judge unconditionally discharged Trump’s sentence. That means no jail time, despite a conviction last year by a jury of his peers on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to efforts to cover up a sex scandal with Stormy Daniels. In his remarks in court, Trump continued to deny responsibility and dismissed the case against him as a “witch hunt.” Yet Democrats seem exhausted. As Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, and later as his chief strategist in the White House for the first seven months of his term in 2017—and who’s now a bomb-throwing podcast host—famously told author Michael Lewis in a 2018 interview, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Mission accomplished. No one yet knows how the next term will play out, but if it’s anything like the last eight years with Trump at the center of our politics, it’s sure to be chaotic. The People’s March Monterey Bay takes place 11am-1pm Saturday, Jan. 18 at Window on the Bay, Monterey (on Del Monte Avenue, across from Lake El Estero). Free. More information at action.womensmarch.com. Sara Rubin contributed to this report. “How it’s all going to play out will become much more clear after Jan. 20.” “We all march for different reasons, but we march for the same cause: to defend our rights and our future.”
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