After being rejected twice — by the Privacy Advisory Commission and the Public Safety Committee — OPD’s $2.25 million FLOCK mass surveillance contract is back on the agenda through a backdoor, undemocratic process.

On Wednesday, with less than 24 hours’ notice, Council President Kevin Jenkins, Councilmembers Rowena Brown, and Janani Ramachandran voted in the Rules Committee to send the FLOCK contract to the full City Council for a vote on December 16. Councilmember Ken Houston even thanked Jenkins for “bringing it back,” making it clear this was a coordinated effort to bypass the democratic process and ignore the people’s will.

This comes after more than 4,000 Oaklanders sent emails and over 40 organizations — including ACLU NorCal, SEIU-USWW, and Trabajadores Unidos Workers United — called on the Council to reject FLOCK’s expansion.

This is a betrayal of public trust and a direct attack on Oakland’s most vulnerable communities. A city that calls itself a sanctuary cannot partner with a surveillance company that shares data with ICE and the Trump administration.

Join us Tuesday, December 16 at 1:00 PM to stand against this outrageous move and demand real community safety, not mass surveillance.

The people of Alameda County deserve leaders who will stand for justice — not secrecy, not police power, and not corruption.

Until justice is won, we’re not done.

In solidarity and resistance,

Cat Brooks & the Anti Police-Terror Project Crew

www.antipoliceterrorproject.org

Across the country, ICE agents are escalating violence against immigrant workers in Home Depot stores and parking lots. These enforcement operations are chaotic, traumatic, and sometimes deadly.

Just last week in Oregon, agents forcibly abducted a man inside a Home Depot as onlookers called them cowards. In August, in Monrovia, CA, Carlos Roberto Montoya – a Guatemalan day laborer – was killed while fleeing an ICE operation at a Home Depot store.

These attacks are happening on Home Depot property, under Home Depot’s watch, and with Home Depot’s silence. The company has taken no public steps to condemn these raids or to demand that the government stop carrying out enforcement actions at its stores. Home Depot Co-Founder Bernie Marcus amassed billions from an industry built on immigrant labor –  only to funnel millions into Trump’s xenophobbic campaigns.

In Oakland, day laborers face the threat of ICE while Home Depot refuses to provide them with a safe place to seek work, banning them from parking lots and denying them basic dignity and respect.

Home Depot has ignored the harm for far too long. We will not. As ICE escalates its attacks, we are escalating our response.

From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, people nationwide said, “We Ain’t Buying it,” withheld their dollars, and took aim at Home Depot and other key corporate targets for collaborating with ICE and the MAGA agenda.

This Super Saturday – the final major shopping day before the holidays – we’re keeping the pressure on and gathering near Oakland Home Depot on 12/20 from 10:00am � 12:30pm to say, EEnough is enough. RSVP for more info on location details.

Join us to demand that Home Depot immediately:

• Publicly condemn ICE raids.
• Stop cooperating with ICE – close stores and parking lots to ICCE agents.
• Negotiate with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to protect workers and customers from attacks.
• Help detained victims and support their families.
• Release security video and other footage of enforcement actions at Home Depot stores

Through its silence and inaction, Home Depot has become ICE’s passive partner. Every raid on its properties deepens fear in our communities.

Stand with us to reject ICE terror and demand real protections – not corporate silence.

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.  All are welcome!

For our December, 2025 meeting we will be reading and discussing the first two chapters of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by Malcolm Harris (Amazon) (Hatchette).  For our January meeting we will finish the book.

A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling progressive intellectual Malcolm Harris—“a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture).

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What’s Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Vital and transformative, What’s Left confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Our first book was  Doughnut Economics, and our most recent books were The Age of Insecurity and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals”. For the rest of our reading list see here.