Residents of Maywood and their supporters outnumbered minutemen objecting to their sanctuary city, but the counterprotestors were met by a hostile array of local and area cops fronting for the racist invaders.MAYWOOD, CA, 12 November 2006--Maywood has a problem, and it isn't the minutemen who invaded the small city outside of Los Angeles yesterday. Maywood has a police problem.
The minutemen at yesterday's protest were penned in hundred or more aggressive police, guarding the minutemen from two hundred and fifty peaceful Maywood residents and supporters.
Save Our State, a group that routinely contributes their time and resources to hassling day laborers, joined with leaders of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, Minuteman Project, and the Crispus Attucks Brigade, all area anti-immigrant groups. Together they managed to pull together seventy or so supporters to protest Maywood's resolution to be a sanctuary city, refusing federal funds to aid in immigrant roundups.
They were led into Maywood with a police escort, and the police spent the day serving as shock troops for the racist agenda.
After some minutemen cars were vandalized at a September protest in Maywood, Save Our State arranged with Maywood police to protect their vehicles. The cop escort led the minutemen into a gated parking lot off Slauson.
Apparently they appropriated the parking lot without notifying the owner, who later in the day called a towing service to haul the vehicles away. The cops turned the tow truck away.
heavy metal barricades across Slauson Boulevard, while police, at times with rifles drawn, surrounded the city's residents in the street and from rooftops on the remaining three sides.
It didn't take ten minutes after the minutemen showed up when the cops, an traffic light behind the Maywood crowd.
Twenty minutes later, at 10:30 a.m.
, a minuteman was allowed to leave the pen crowd handing out Mexican flags with an orange S.O.S mark on them, presumably to set up a photo-op for the minutemen.
He finally threw them on the ground when they were refused. A few people chased him out and, as he crossed to protestors, the cops stopped him. When he flashed his wallet at the cops, he got an escort across the zone between the two groups.
Meanwhile, one of the protestors dogging him crossed a couple of steps beyond the barricade and was thrown down, handcuffed, and led away. It was only after another protestor complained to the Maywood mayor that Sam Zislman, attorney at law and professor at Irvine University, was plucked from the minutemen cohort and taken off to jail. Both protestors were released a few hours later.
Reportedly, another counterprotestor, perhaps two, were arrested later in the day, and one was shot with a rubber bullet. The cops pulled one arrestee's shirt over his face and led him, on their way to the cop car, through a gauntlet of minutemen shouting abuse. Some counterprotestors managed to lob eggs at the minutemen from a rooftop.
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