100 signatures reached
To: Cole County Sheriff John Wheeler
Cole County Sheriff: Protect all immigrants!
Sheriff Wheeler,
We are a coalition of Cole County residents who appreciate your role in keeping us and all of our neighbors safe. We welcome your department’s commitment to model integrity, fairness, and professionalism in delivering law enforcement services.
We recognize the inherent worth of every person and value the diversity that immigrants bring to Cole County. We experience their contributions to our culture and economy as enriching and beneficial.
We — and many of our friends — are greatly distressed by the U.S. government’s targeting and harsh treatment of immigrants, resulting in the separation of families and abandonment of the American guarantee of due process.
We are writing to express our hope that as licensed peace officers, you and your deputies can be counted on to honor the Constitution, respect due process, and treat every individual you encounter respectfully. We encourage you to treat immigrants with equality, unbiased service, open-mindedness, and courteous devotion as you have pledged to do through the department’s mission statement.
We ask you not to get distracted by the national focus on issues that do nothing to promote safety in our communities, and in fact, harm people, families, and local economies. We encourage you and your team to act with the integrity you have promised the people of Cole County, and demonstrate the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and have the courage of conviction to always choose what is right in the face of peer pressure.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Why is this important?
We know many of you share our concern about the distressing way immigration enforcement is currently being handled in the U.S. Here is a chance to make your voice heard locally by adding your name to this email being sent to Cole County Sheriff John Wheeler to encourage him and his department to resist cooperating with ICE in our county.
Background
A note on signing this letter
Timothy Snyder is a Yale professor of undergraduate and graduate level courses in modern Eastern European political history and graduate seminars on the Holocaust. His book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, allows us to learn from the experience of Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the 20th century. This advantage teaches us first and foremost to not obey in advance. To preemptively give up our freedom of speech would be a surrender to the authoritarianism that is now confronting us. To be absent as our neighbors are targeted would relinquish our humanity.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
~ Martin Niemöller, 1946