David Huerta faces up to a year in prison for allegedly interfering in a federal immigration raid last year in his hometown of Los Angeles. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial, but he is not staying quiet in the meantime.
“I was tackled, I was pepper-sprayed, I was detained [while] exercising a First Amendment right,” Huerta, a prominent California labor leader, told HuffPost in an interview this week. “I firmly believe that everything that’s happened since then ― not only to myself but to others ― is with the intention to silence dissent. It’s state repression against people who are exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Huerta, 58, is the president of Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West, a union of 50,000 janitors and other service workers, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants. He became national news last June due to his encounter with federal agents outside a clothing wholesale company, where Huerta allegedly refused to make way for a law enforcement van. An officer grabbed him, and Huerta pushed back, according to a complaint. A bystander’s video captured the officers throwing Huerta to the ground and arresting him.
Prosecutors initially filed a felony conspiracy charge that carried up to six years in prison. They later downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor after several similar federal cases failed to end in convictions.
