They charged him with a felony for standing in front of a gate.

This week’s Good Trouble Report

They charged him with a felony for standing in front of a gate.

I want you to sit with that for a second. David Huerta, president of SEIU California, the largest labor union in the state, stood at the entrance of a downtown LA clothing wholesaler while federal agents conducted an immigration raid on the workers inside. He yelled at them. He told masked agents to take their masks off. He flipped them off. He sat down in front of a van. He was angry, and he made sure they knew it.

He was not violent. He did not touch anyone.

They arrested him anyway. And the arrest was not gentle. He ended up in the hospital with a head injury.

The next day, Donald Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles.

I’ll be honest with you. I spent years inside the United States Capitol. I know something about how institutions use force to send a message. Sometimes the arrest is the point. It does not matter if it holds up in court. What matters is the footage of the handcuffs. What matters is that everyone watching understands what happens when you get in the way.

The charge they used was conspiracy to impede a federal officer. Civil War era. It had barely been touched before this administration started reaching for it. They were not interested in conviction. They were interested in the message.

Here is what they may not have fully understood about David Huerta. This was not a first offense. This was a life’s work.

Under his leadership at SEIU, the union built immigrant integration programs. English classes for members. Hundreds of people became US citizens. He was advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, helping workers understand their rights and become their own advocates, long before Trump’s Justice Department knew his name. The Obama White House recognized him for it. That record is archived, frozen in time, on a government website Trump cannot reach back and change.

His family were immigrants. He is a US citizen who spent his career standing up for people under pressure. That is the person they arrested. That is the person they charged with a felony.

He spent thirteen months under that charge. Thirteen months of court dates, bond conditions, the whole weight of a federal case hanging over him.

Last month, the charges were dismissed.

Huerta put out a statement. He said: “This means the government is finally admitting what we knew from day one and what was obvious to anyone who saw the videos. The charge against me was baseless and meant to intimidate anyone who dares to speak out or organize or demand justice. There was never a real case. Only an attempt to punish and silence me for exercising my constitutional rights.”

He is right. And you can tell he is right by the way the Justice Department responded to the dismissal. Their statement said, and I am quoting directly, that “The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting.” Then, in the same statement, they mentioned that Huerta had been compliant with his bond for thirteen months and had not engaged in the same behavior again.

That is their argument. He behaved himself, so everything worked out.

Look. I know that move. When you cannot defend the action, you pivot to the outcome. You act like the system corrected itself. But the system did not correct itself. The system dropped a case it knew it could not win in front of a jury.

That is the real reason. It was all on tape. Every one of these interactions is filmed. People are watching. And if you are going to put masked federal agents and a labor organizer in front of twelve ordinary Americans and ask them to say that man committed a felony, you are going to lose. This Justice Department knows it has been losing. The credibility is gone. They walked away from this one before the jury could take it from them.

What I cannot stop thinking about is the timing of all of this. Because what happened to David Huerta was not an isolated incident. This is a campaign. Mark Wayne Mullen has talked openly about deploying ICE to polling places on election day. Stop and think about what that means. This is not about prosecuting crimes. It is about making people afraid to show up. Afraid to be visible. Afraid to stand at a gate and say, these are my members, and I am not moving.

Courage is contagious. I believe that. I have seen it. And I have seen the other side of it too, the way fear moves through a crowd, the way one arrest can make a hundred people step back. That is what they are counting on.

David Huerta did not step back. They put him in the hospital, charged him with a Civil War felony, and watched him for thirteen months. He came out on the other side saying he has nothing to apologize for.

He doesn’t.

-Harry

*The Good Trouble Report. New episodes when there’s something worth saying.*