The next nationwide No Kings Day is scheduled for March 28th. Mark it on your calendars. More information will be coming as plans continue to develop.
Action Items to choose from (or do all of them: your choice!) Scroll down to the matching number of your option:
- No further funding for ICE (and DHS and Customs & Border Patrol)
- Impeach and remove Attorney General Pam Bondi
- Resist with your wallet
- Demand that Target, Hilton, and Enterprise stop supporting ICE
- Oppose AI-driven Medicare denials
- Social Media and messaging guidance
Reminder: When you call vs when you email via our reps’ websites (best way to contact them in writing), don’t forget to begin with: “Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent calling from [zip code]. That is important, because if they don’t know you’re actually a constituent, your opinion will be ignored.
Contact info:
Angus King
DC: (202) 224-5344
Augusta: (207) 622-8292
Susan Collins
DC: (202) 224-2523
Augusta: (207) 622-8414
Bangor: (207) 945-0417
Chellie Pingree
DC: (202) 225-6116
Portland: (207) 774-5019
Waterville: (207) 873-5713
Jared Golden
DC: (202) 225-6306
Bangor: (207) 249-7400
Caribou: (207) 492-6009
Lewiston: (207) 241-6767
Find your State Representative:
By name: Here
By district: Here
Find your State Senator:
By name: Here
By district: Here
(Please note that for those of you receiving this email who are not represented by Senators or House members in our district, I have to leave it up to you to find the contact info for your own representatives.)
Actions
1) Keep calling our Senators and Congressman over and over, as long as it takes, to push for no further funding for ICE (and DHS and Customs & Border Patrol) until huge changes are made:
We need to see some big changes before we can support the DHS funding bill (personally, I am against funding it at all, but that’s just me). 1) ICE and CBP must leave Minneapolis and other American cities: no more funding federal enforcement agencies that are terrorizing American cities. 2) The killings of both Renee Good and Alex Pretti must have full, independent investigations—no more allowing the FBI to push out Minnesota state and Minneapolis city investigators. 3) No more detaining and deporting U.S. citizens: ICE and CBP can no longer be allowed (never mind encouraged) to grab just about anyone with brown skin in order to fulfill arbitrary and generally bullshit quotas dictated by nutjob Stephen Miller. Every single arrest and detention must be done following constitutional law/due process. Which also means no more unconstitutional home break-ins with anything less than a proper warrant signed by a judge. It is illegal for DHS to just issue a blanket statement to their employees that they only need an internal DHS memo to break into people’s homes. 4) Stephen Miller, who has never been elected or approved for any kind of official government position, must be removed, Kristi Noem must step down or be impeached, and Greg Bovino must be investigated.
We need to make clear to all our representatives in Congress that the American people are fed up and will not stand for our lawmakers being lawbreakers and abrogating their own oath-bound responsibilities to protect the U.S. constitution and their constituents. They work for us, not for ICE or CBP, and not for Project 2025. Enough is enough.
2) Push for the impeachment and removal of Attorney General Pam Bondi:
Read this article (https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/bondi-minnesota-voter-data-shakedown) and contact Senators King and Collins and House Rep Golden to impeach and remove Attorney General Pam Bondi:
There is apparently no low to which this woman will sink in order to suck up to Trump. She is trying to extort Minnesota to give up its voter rolls while at the same time blatantly breaking the new law requiring her to release the Epstein files. Governor Tim Walz put it best: “I would just give a pro tip to the Attorney General. There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.” And as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Congress mandated that Bondi and her DOJ release the full Epstein Files. They refuse, and are breaking the law in hiding them. Pedophile protectors shouldn’t be anywhere NEAR your vote record.”
3) Resist with your wallet:
Follow this Instagram influencer, whose taglines read: “Doing the research so you don’t have to!” and “Sharing alternatives to badly behaving companies, big corps & private equity firms”: https://www.instagram.com/cutoffthespigot/
Remember, you don’t have to be perfect and boycott every company that has connections to or otherwise supports Trump and ICE. Just do what you can.
Overall, though, I’m more and more convinced that a (successful) general strike is what’s needed to make a point. Hopefully that movement is building.
4) Demand that Target, Hilton, and Enterprise stop supporting ICE:
Send letters to the CEOs of Target, Hilton, and Enterprise for those companies roles in supporting ICE. Use this toolkit to send these letters, with scripts you can rework to be more personal: https://freedcproject.org/news/solidarity-with-minnesota-email-the-ceos-of-target-hilton-and-enterprise
5) Oppose AI-driven Medicare denials:
Traditional, government-run Medicare is the closest thing we have to universal healthcare (only for those of us over 65, of course), a system with little to no prior authorizations required, so that patients and doctors—not corporations—make most of the care decisions. The system called Medicare Advantage is actually privatized healthcare subsidized by the government and has resulted in denials, delays, and billions of dollars siphoned off into CEO bonuses and shareholder profits. Medicare Advantage is rife with corruption, introduces more red tape, and costs taxpayers $150 billion more a year than traditional Medicare.
Now Trump’s Medicare chief, Dr. Oz, has begun a pilot program in six states (Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington) that would hand traditional Medicare over to private companies using artificial intelligence to override doctors’ decisions. You can read more about it here. It’s not that something like this isn’t worth testing; it’s the way it’s being implemented, without transparency and just claiming that it will save the government money and make everything easier for everyone.
Contact Senators King and Collins and Congressman Golden and urge them to stop this privatization scheme, or at least pause it until all questions are satisfactorily answered and all healthcare providers and patients are fully informed and allowed to opt out of this new program. You can also use the letter-writing-and-sending tool provided by the Action Network (https://actionnetwork.org/letters/say-no-to-ai-denials); you can use their script, though it’s always better to personalize it.
6) Social Media and messaging guidance:
This was supposedly posted by MLK’s daughter. I don’t know if that’s true, but it looks like good advice to me, so I’m sharing it:
I. Don’t use his name; EVER (45 will do)
2. Remember this is a regime and he is not acting alone;
3. Do not argue with those who support him–it doesn’t work;
4. Focus on his POLICIES, not his orange-ness and his mental state;
5. Keep your message positive; they want the country to be angry and fearful because this is the soil from which their darkest policies will grow;
6. No more helpless/hopeless talk;
7. Support artists and the arts;
8. Be careful not to spread fake news. Check it;
9. Take care of yourselves; and
IO. Resist!
When you post or talk about him, don’t assign his actions to him, assign them to “The Republican Administration” or “The Republicans.” This will have several effects: the
Republican legislators will either have to take responsibility for their association with him or stand up for what some of them don’t like; he will not get the focus of attention he craves.
Yours in Civic Action,
Bold Coast Civic Alliance
p.s. Two resources to use and share widely:
A) The ACLU of Maine has a “know your rights” page: www.aclumaine.org/know-your-rights/
B) From the National Immigration Law Center, how to tell a judicial warrant from an administrative warrant (ICE agents have been using a lot of the latter): https://www.nilc.org/resources/know-your-rights-warrants/
