PORT ANGELES — Dozens flocked to a Port Angeles rally against the expansion of the Border Patrol headquarters at the site of the planned building renovation on Sunday.
Thirty-five protesters held signs in support of immigrants’ rights and against defense spending during the two-hour May Day Rally.
They stood on both sides of Front Street near the intersection of Penn Street, where Homeland Security will modify the former Eagles Aerie building into a new Border Patrol headquarters beginning later this month.
The federal government plans to complete the $5.7 million renovation by April 2012. The government purchased the 19,000-square-foot building for $2 million.
Protesters’ positions
The Stop the Checkpoints Committee, a Port Angeles group that railed against Border Patrol checkpoints and bus boardings in 2008, organized the May Day Rally.
“One of the main things that I am concerned with is the continuing militarization of our society,” said rally-goer Nelson Cone, a Green Party state committee member and the secretary of the local Green Party.
“We should be supporting freedom and not more restrictive agencies that come in and supervise and monitor us. We’re supposed to be a free society. We don’t need this.”
Cone and others at the rally said the Border Patrol doesn’t need holding cells at the 3.4-acre site.
“We have the Coast Guard,” Cone said. “We have municipal and county law enforcement people here. Do we really need this? It’s the kind of thing where the federal government is becoming more intrusive into our lives, in the wrong way.”
Stop the Checkpoints Committee coordinator Lois Danks said the planned facility will hurt the aesthetics of the city. The new Border Patrol headquarters will have a 40-foot radio tower, two above-ground fuel tanks and chain-link fence topped by razor wire.
It will be the base for 34 Border Patrol vehicles, she said.
“It’s going to be a big military-looking operation,” Danks said. “It’s not exactly a welcome to Port Angeles sight.”
Horns from passing cars blared every minute or two during Sunday’s rally.
Protesters held signs that read: “Stop Border Patrol expansion,” “$ for schools not jails” and “No one is illegal.”
Message to Washington, D.C.
Kassandra Kersting of Sequim handed out cards for people to the write down their top three spending priorities. The cards were addressed to President Barack Obama and the North Olympic Peninsula’s congressional delegation.
The cards showed a pie chart breaking down U.S. spending, with the Pentagon taking almost half of the 2011 discretionary budget at $574 billion.
“So much is being spent on defense,” Kersting said. “I’m very much in favor of the establishment of a Department of Peace so that over time we can stop killing each other.”
Border Patrol agents in a white SUV drove around the parking lot and past the rally-goers at the start of the event. The agents and protesters did not exchange words. There was no counter-demonstration.
“The message is basically human rights, that everyone across all borders should be free to move about and support their family and survive,” Danks said.
Danks questioned why the federal government is spending $8 million on the new Border Patrol headquarters.
“What will they do?,” she said. “They average an arrest of two people per year per agent.
“The Homeland Security budget should be cut instead of expanded, and that money can be used for some of the things that the budget’s cutting — schools and Medicare, Medicaid.”
Rather than spending on defense, Danks said, the Obama Administration should hire more workers to ease the backlog of immigrants waiting to become U.S. citizens.
“Obama isn’t being the leader he should,” Danks said.
Desperate measures
“They could take this $8 million and they could use it to hire more immigration clerks to process the visas, and then people wouldn’t get desperate waiting four to six years for their visa to get processed and try to sneak across the border.”
Several members of Bridges Not Walls, an immigrants’ rights and human rights organization based in Olympia, made the 120-mile trip to the rally.
Jamie Alwine of Olympia, who held a sign that said “Bridges Not Walls” in Spanish, heard about the rally from other organizations that work on the Peninsula.
Alwine said members of Bridges Not Walls “do not support the opening of any sort of detainment center.”
The current, smaller Border Patrol building at 138 W. First St. in downtown Port Angeles contains two holding cells, the same number planned for the new headquarters.
Cone said Mexicans are crossing the border illegally because their families are starving. He said the U.S. “destroyed” the Mexican economy with NAFTA.
“If your family was starving, would you let immigration laws stand in your way if it meant the difference between survival and seeing your kids starve to death?” Cone said.
“I don’t condone breaking the law. In fact, I am a former policeman, and I support the law. But when you create a situation that’s unjust, you’re asking for these kinds of situations to arise.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
