On Saturday, more than 70 protesters gathered in front of the Humboldt County Courthouse in support of Gilberto “Rudy” Jimenez Gonzalez, 52-year-old Eureka resident detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Wyoming on July 15.
Jimenez Gonzalez has lived in the United States for more than 30 years with his wife Luz Moreno and the couple shares five children and two grandchildren. According to Moreno, they were traveling through Rock Springs, Wyoming, when they were stopped by police officers at around 11:15 p.m. due to an issue with their tail light.
During the rally, Moreno recounts how the officers asked Jimenez Gonzalez to exit the vehicle and took both of their driver’s licenses. “They [didn’t] give me any information,” she said. “No business cards from the sheriff’s department, no addresses, no names, no phone numbers, no anything. And I didn’t know what to do in that moment. They told me, ‘Just go home,’ like if it was that easy, you know?”
On July 17, a 50501 Humboldt County organizer who goes by AJ was notified of Jimenez Gonzalez’s detainment and immediately sprang into action, directing the Jimenez family to Centro del Pueblo, a local organization dedicated to serving Indigenous migrant communities.
According to AJ, while Centro del Pueblo connected the Jimenez family to legal assistance and offered moral support, 50501 Humboldt “handled the protest side of things.” AJ, who was in Biddeford, Maine, when Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero was fatally shot there by ICE agents, says that living in Humboldt County, he often feels disconnected from news of ICE presence in other areas.
But being in the city when the 25-year-old delivery driver, husband and father from Colombia — who was not the target of enforcement operation according to media reports — was shot on July 13 and then hearing about Jimenez Gonzalez’s detainment landed hard, AJ says.
“I have felt that way with all of the big protests, all of the ICE shootings,” AJ says. “It feels like it’s on the other side of the world and just hearing that it was a Humboldt resident definitely kicked it into a different gear for me. That feeling is felt throughout the community and people just need to use it as a driving force to come out and support the protest and the family. Because we know that it could be us and it now has been one of us.”
During the protest, the Jimenez family handed out homemade signs calling for the release of Jimenez Gonzalez and an end to brutality against immigrants. Eureka/Bayside Food Not Bombs set up a table where they collected donations and local musicians, including The Raging Grannies, provided entertainment.
50501 Humboldt organizers walked through the crowd asking protesters to spare any change they had for a donation box to support the Jimenez family’s legal expenses. They also asked people to donate to the Jimenez family’s GoFundMe. At the center of the protest were Jimenez Gonzalez’s children and Moreno swathed in an American flag that split halfway into a Mexican flag.
Jimenez Gonzalez’s 21-year-old son Larry recalled the morning he learned that his father had been detained by ICE.
“I woke up at five in the morning and I got a text from the family group chat and I thought it was, you know, the good old Facebook reels or something and I opened it and it was just a video of my dad getting detained by ICE,” he says. “I see videos like that all around the world and you never think it would happen to you.”
Among the protesters were several organizers from Centro del Pueblo, including their Executive Director Brenda Pérez. While they came to show their support for the Jimenez family, they also brought homegrown vegetables from the Sanctuary Garden in Arcata. Pérez explains that activists must first fuel themselves with healthy food before they can put their bodies on the line for others in need.
“We are growing this with our community, and we say, ‘Hey, the supporters need to eat well, feed their bodies and souls,’ and that’s something I will also recommend because this is a long, long fight and a very dark moment in our history and we need to be strong,” Pérez says.
Throughout the protest, Moreno held her head high and waved her flag in the breeze as cars drove past. Despite the devastation she and her family have felt in the past weeks, Moreno stresses the importance of staying peaceful, showing the world that immigrants are not criminals and, above all, that Rudy Jimenez Gonzalez is a beloved Eureka community member who deserves to come home.
“Speak up with [peace] because people need to know,” Moreno says. “People need to understand because when you hear a lie a hundred, a million times for I don’t know, four, eight years and you hear the same and same lies, ‘All Mexicans are criminals, all immigrants are criminals,’ and you hear it and you hear it, people believe it. So, we have to speak the truth. We are not criminals. Immigrants are not criminals. Immigrants are humans. We’re family, we have culture and we need to keep talking and speak up.”
Mia Costales (she/her) is a freelance reporter and recent Cal Poly Humboldt journalism graduate. Reach her at costalesmia@gmail.com.
This article appears in BESTO! Best of Humboldt.