Finn (from the Smoke Signal): You said that you’re with Indivisible Fremont. What role specifically do you play with that organization?
Lauren Teixeira: I’m the co-lead. We only formed our organization in April of 2025. Oh, my God. It’s not even been a year. We actually applied to be an Indivisible group in March, and had our first two meetings on April 15 and April 29, I believe. We went to the Fremont Main Library and let people know about what we were doing and recruiting members and so on. So, yeah, we’ve been– it’s been on a roller coaster since then.
F: Can you give insight on what your organization or what your sector of Indivisible originally started out as?
L: That’s a good question, because we started– our idea is to be a community political, civic engagement, build community, provide, well, support for our immigrants and other vulnerable people, to provide places for people to have an outlet who are upset, like our rallies. And we responded, of course, to the murder of Renee Good with a vigil. We coupled that with a national effort by Indivisible.org with ICE Out for Good, so we held the vigil with the idea that it’s also about, well, ICE in general, how it’s killing us, all of us. We tried to focus also, not just on Renee, but there were actually 36 other people so far who have been killed, and since I reported that, I think there’s been a couple more that have been [killed] by ICE.
F: [ICE has] been slow on updating [the list].
L: Yes. I mean, it started off with– I had 32 [listed], and then she became 33, then [it became] 37, and now I think it’s 39. Meanwhile, there were a bunch of people at the vigil. They were standing on the– we were in the park, Veterans Memorial Park on the corner of Walnut and Paseo Padre. And [the protestors] were on the corner, and that’s where we normally have, sort of, where we start our rallies at. And people seem to know that. So they came, and they had their signs, and cars were driving by and honking and responding. There was about 50 people out there [protesting], apparently, is what I understand. So that was kind of interesting. We were wanting to do a vigil, but we had a lot of rally-type noise and stuff. But it was a good turnout. We had, we think about 350 people [overall]. [Good] was killed on Wednesday. Thursday, I was vigorously going around the community, talking to different people like [redacted] from the Niles Discovery Church, who is deeply involved in Fremont programs for well-being regarding different community problems like homelessness and so on– and the LGBTQ community. I met with him just to see his direction is as an advistor to our organization. And then we took a ride out to Pleasanton that night, on Thursday, I went to the vigil [Tri-Valley Indivisible] had. That was very– it was not only emotional, [but also] it was very informative as to what we could do ourselves. And then we went home that night and went back to our houses, but then got quickly on Zoom and had a meeting [at] eight o’clock, and then found out we had kind of a hiccup with the organization. But we rallied. And the next day, I was the main organizer, I just worked my tail off for the next, whatever, day and a half till we got there. Luckily, I have people who are in the know, and I have different people doing different things. I’m a retired librarian, but I’ve also worked in communities involving Indigenous people, and I’ve organized events and symposia, as well as library programs. So, I kind of naturally like to do that, but other people would– in the periphery would be doing things, like [redacted], the other co-lead, she went out and picked up all the different supplies that we needed [for the vigil]. One of them was nine dozen white roses. So things like that. And then one of our advisors, [redacted], who’s been deeply involved in Fremont politics. She’s in her 80s, but she has maintained some real close contacts with the city council and people in the Tri-City Interfaith Council, the Tri-City Democratic people… all kinds of them. So she kind of advises us and lets us know about who we should contact, in the police department, who we should contact, because we did have to contact [the police] to make sure [we] let them know we’re going to be [there]. [The police] were a little upset because, ‘We need more notice!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, so did we, I mean, geez.’ So those are the things we do. We respond to events that are in the moment, such as this, and we also respond when Indivisible calls for a big rally or something; we organize around that in our own local community. We also work with other Indivisible groups, like Indivisible East Bay, which is out of Berkeley and Oakland, and we also worked with the Tri-Valley people that are out of Livermore and Pleasanton. I’m working with a statewide group. We’re trying to develop a network of local Indivisibles so that they can share information and respond even more rapidly to what’s going on, and that can include rallies. That can also include working on primaries and sharing information about the election, and doing what we can to keep it going. The idea is to have a network that would — yeah, we’re working locally, but we got to know what the person down the street, down the other city is doing — [allow us to] support each other. We’ll also have an information bank and all that, but that’s in development. So I work with people throughout the state.
F: You guys work with immigrants, and you have done the training with ACILEP. How have you seen your community impacted by the recent enforcement changes, like immigration enforcement? In what ways have you seen those changes?
L: Well for me, personally, I’ve known people who’ve had their family members. I go to this restaurant, [redacted], the Mexican restaurant on Fremont Boulevard. It’s a family-owned restaurant, I really like it. I’ve got to know a lot of the wait staff. They’re really lovely people, and they’re all from different Hispanic communities. There was one young man, [and] his family’s from Colombia. It was, I guess it was when it was when it very first started — the ICE stuff — where his dad got a letter to report to the San Francisco immigration court. They were concerned because that was when ICE was really starting– well, what happened? You remember [ICE] had people go to court, and then they’d arrest them? Well, that happened to his dad. And they told him, ‘Dad, don’t go. Don’t go.’ And he says, ‘But I have to go.’ And he goes. He [lived] here in Fremont, went all the way up to San Francisco to do what he was supposed to do, and they arrested him. He ended up in this camp, I would say a concentration camp, in Arizona for several months, and finally, they sent him back to Colombia. They have family [in Colombia], but his poor son — who I do know — [redacted], was just devastated. I mean, I have so much respect for how strong he is, but it just hurts my heart to see them suffer and the cruelty. [When I was growing up], this country has [accepted] all immigrants, right? We’ve always been a place of refuge for people. I was once in partnership with a person who was an Iraq War veteran from the Gulf War who came here because of Amnesty International. He was in a refugee camp for seven years, and finally, he was able to come the United States and have a life. We’ve always been that kind of country, but now that has completely changed. It’s heartbreaking. So many good people. I know there have been other people impacted, at least that restaurant alone, where family members have been taken. There was one incident when we were out at the Sundale neighborhood–
F: The Knock and Talk operation?
L: Yeah. One person they took was the husband of the woman [who] worked at the restaurant.
F: I didn’t know they took anyone there.
L: Well, they took her husband, and I guess they left her. I mean, she didn’t have anybody. She’s a woman alone with her baby, right? Apparently, they let him go. I don’t know what happened after that, but [ICE] still put them through it. I talked to them. I went there last night after the vigil, and they’re just on edge. They’re good people. I hate to see them living like they’re, you know. They don’t know if they’re going to be here. That sense of having a gun over your head. And they’re such good, good people. That’s one of the reasons I asked [redacted] to talk about her experience. Her mother was on the train to Auschwitz because she was a Jewish woman, a young woman who was taken by the Gestapo. She was able to escape the train. [She] was shot in the process, [but] survived, and had lived in hiding. When you hear her [story/hear her daughter speak], it becomes visceral, because this feels like what [the United States] is doing. I mean, [redacted] said her mom saw the Gestapo coming, and she went, ran, and hid up in the attic or something, behind a door, behind a refrigerator or something. There were three Gespato guys, and they came in and they looked around and they couldn’t find anything. So they said, ‘Okay, well, there’s nobody here. We’re gonna go.’ So they went, but they left one guy behind, and [redacted]’s mom thought, ‘Oh, wow, I’m safe.’ And she comes out. As soon as she pops her head out, there’s the guy waiting for her, and she gets taken off to Auschwitz. But she jumped the train — she and a few others. It was a friend of hers that [got] wounded and then died a couple of days after that. You hear those stories, right? But now you know the stories. It feels like we’re living them again.
F: For your organization, did you have to modify or change any of the resources that you provide to address the concerns surrounding the amplified immigration crackdown?
L: Well, because we’re so new, we actually started with all the things that came out. We started with– I think I sent you the email with the list of things we’ve done, like working with the solidarity and support, which is a campaign that provides ways to approach businesses and with signage that they can put up in their windows. It says, ‘We support immigrants,’ and also Know Your Rights cards and other ways to educate people that they do have rights and how [they] need to exercise them. That’s the signs of solidarity. We’ve embraced that from the get-go. We ourselves have responded with– there’s also Adopt-a-Corner, which is relatively new. That’s where we train volunteers to go to places of business where they have day laborers, and that’s supported by NDLON. So there’s the business aspect, handing out information and having people put posters in the window, there’s Adopt-a-Corner, and then I personally had for [Indivisible Fremont], I developed this campaign on the monarch. The monarch butterfly is a deeply symbolic– deeply symbolic to Indigenous communities in history in North and South America. It means regeneration, the ancestors, and solidarity with one another. My idea was that if we can find a way to educate the community, the greater, larger community, to know more about what monarchs are– as we are also providing monarch posters and buttons, and finding ways to talk to people about how they have the greater community supporting them. Like having the picture of a monarch in the window of a home in a neighborhood where maybe there’s a gardener, and he comes by and sees that. And he says, ‘Oh my gosh, they understand. They care.’ There’s the business aspect that Indivisible.org is doing, and there’s this one where we’ve started. We’ve also had some teachers take [the posters] take it and distribute them through their union and in their classrooms. So, that’s how we’ve responded. We haven’t had to change anything because we are so new. We haven’t really started anything. We do have to be able to kind of be nimble on our toes, because things happen so rapidly, and this whole thing with Renee Good… The greater culture, bigger, more dominant culture sees [itself] now being pursued and persecuted, killed, and there’s a certain amount of our vulnerable populations, immigrant populations, people of color. They’ve always been regarded as secondary. We call the citizens secondary citizens in that they are invisible to the greater dominant culture. So, there’s some kind of anger. They’re like, ‘Oh, now people are paying attention because a white woman got killed.’ On the other hand, if you know that, unfortunate as it is, this affinity with being white and its privileges is deeply embedded in our culture, and why not use it for what you can to build momentum and get people to engage them. If they see themselves, then maybe they will respond and step up and do something.
F: I actually went to one of Indivisible Palo Altos’ protests on Saturday, and I met the Raging Grannies. And one of them had told me that she kind of feels like she has a responsibility, as a white woman, to come to these events. So it’sl ike you said, and how it’s her people who perpetuated this, or like, started it in the first place. In a way.
L: I mean, we’ve had a certain way of privilege and not realizing, right? We’ve grown up in an era with the New Deal came in the Depression that changed America completely. Before the depression, the country was very much not a supporter of the individual people. They were there for the rich and the powerful. And then FDR comes along, and he starts his New Deal. And it changes the trajectory and the consciousness of our country to be more a community, people-oriented country. We had all this prosperity with the middle class. Then, starting with Ronald Reagan and the propaganda about the women on welfare driving their Cadillacs kind of changed [into], ‘ Why should we rich people have to pay for those poor people just sitting around driving their Cadillacs?’ So what it did — it had changed over time — and now we’re at this place where there’s a big resentment in a way, and now here we are where they’re trying to do all this awful stuff. People are brainwashed. The point of all this, really, behind all this is that what we can do by being aware and becoming a community that is bonded and thriving and connected is what will be ultimate– like the ultimate safety thing. Community is a shredded safety net. […] Our democracy is at stake, and people are afraid, and people are also suffering financially. House is so expesnive, just expensive to live here and across anywhre in the country. People don’t have the resources they need. There are people who naturally gravitate to something that’s authoritarian, because it feels like, ‘Oh, maybe they’ll keep things under control. I feel like I’m not safe.’ […] I worked with the Native American community for about 25 years, and it taught me a lot about community and how they were able to survive, the way they were able to thrive, even though they had genocide and cultural decimation. It was their deep abiding community engagement that kept them going and keeps them alive today. So that’s my model, but also as a way to respond to our immigrant community and all the things that are happening that are out of whack. We need to make this country better. It has to [have] some community.
F: I think that you’ve answered this already, but are the recent immigration enforcement changes impacting how this organization can help people?
L: Oh yeah, totally. It also segues into things like all of our rights, like the First Amendment rights, for example. We’ve tried to be an educational component to what we do in the community. We’ve held two panels, one at Newark Library, one at Fremont Main Library, on indivisible, stronger together, and democracy. In both of them, we’ve invited community members, and for the first time, we had [redacted], the assemblyman, and we have had poets come perform. The first one we had was my friend [redacted], who was [at the vigil] last night. He is a poet laureate meritus of Santa Clara County. […] So, we had a component of elected people, elected persons, community experts, and then poets, because poetry is so important to help us make it to the other side of things. To get us to emotionally engage. So we had two [panels[, and we plan to keep on doing them. We were probably going to do this at the Niles Discovery Church, which has taken us under their wing as one of their ministries, so that we have a space to have our meetings and have other programs, such as more panel sessions. We have also been selected to screen the film The Librarians, which is a documentary on librarians who were taken to court for book banning and not doing what they were supoosed to do with the book banning. [They were] refusing to ban the books. And this [was] in Texas and Florida, and it’s now a documentary. […] But we want to have a focus on the First Amendment and what we can do to educate people more about that kind of thing in history. We also want to have community conversations, to connect people and to build dialogue, and, of course, build community. We were talking about having a conversation with– how to talk, not a conversation– a workshop, or a panel, or– what do you want to call it? Presentation on talking across political boundaries or political differences. So all these things are addressing why, really, we’re having this problem with immigrants? All of it, it’s all together. It’s not [unconnected]. Just addressing everybody’s rights.
F: So, your organization, it’s more protest-based, or would you say that you also do community outreach? It’s like a 50/50 divide?
L: I haven’t thought about that, but I don’t think it’s 50/50. There’s the engagement with the rallies, which we have regular– we have regular resistance. They call them resistance stuff on Friday night and then Sunday, where people stand on the corner with signs and yell. But that’s like, actually not, I’d say not a 50% at all. I mean [protesting is really] 20%. It’s all the other stuff in education and outreach, and looking to find ways that we can become trained in utilizing our services– what do you call it?– our own privileges, right? […] I could take this training and rapid response, and I’m able to go in the middle of the day. Then we’re also engaged in community, just, they’re called “IndivisiGather.” We’re going to have one on February 1. We’re going to make resistant Valentines. People can come and make Valentine’s and send them to people, their politicians, or whatever, and say, ‘Oh, thank you for this, or whatever.’ Just kind of get together and hang out. It’s not politics, but really about having fun. SO we want to engage the community. We also do education, and we present other programs like we did [at] the panel. We’re also exploring more and more ways of how we can consolidate ourselves as an organization. We’re still– we’re only like, not even a year old. Nine months or 10 months old. Today I had a meeting, we were talking about how can we build teams that are — instead of me being the main person doing whatever — an events response team. When there’s going to be more [events[ and we have to get it done rapidly. So got to build that infrastructure. This past year, we’ve focused on basic infrastructure, like having a steering committee and having different committees that are like, communications or the tech community, or a community events committee or the action committee. So now we’re getting more deeper (otter.ai transcript cuts off here, audio still there, just no text) (it was just more about organization/community that is similar to what other interviewees said)