Tacoma SDS

Protesters are resisting the US Military surge in Afghanistan by blocking Stryker Vehicles bound for the Port of Tacoma for shipment overseas.

May 3, 2009 Tacoma, WA – Activists staged a series of successful direct actions in several locations on the night of May 2, blocking striker vehicles bound for the Port of Tacoma from Fort Lewis. Blockades halted strikers at several points along Interstate 5, and 11 activists were arrested. Demonstrators have pledged to continue resisting the use of the port for war shipments.

This video provides a brief overview of the on-going "Sign Wars" and the "Adopt-A-Spot" strategy employed by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee-Tacoma

http://tacomasds.org/node/980

to monitor the Northwest Detention Center and the activities of the GEO Group,
Inc (TGGI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). TGGI has now asserted that they own a 1.17 Acre traffic strip which is clearly City of Tacoma (COT) property according to both the City of Tacoma gov.ME website and the Pierce County Assessor.

TGGI forced the City of Tacoma to remove one of our Adopt-A-Spot signs and

Some of the key documents can be found here. Note the large number of activist groups targeted in the Puget Sound Region:

http://cryptome.org/rl33616.pdf
http://cryptome.org/spy-protests-02.pdf

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee - The City of Tacoma has confirmed that the Tacoma PD and Port of Tacoma Police have collected and shared intelligence data on various local and regional activist groups such as Hate Free Zone (Seattle), Community-to-Community (Bellingham), People for Peace Justice and Healing (Tacoma), the Pierce County ACLU, BORDC-Tacoma, and the Tacoma Students for a Democratic Society (Tacoma SDS) since at least 2006.

In the year prior to 9/11, Immigration Naturalization Services (as it was called at the time) was scouting locations for a detention/deportation facility within 25 miles of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Having been rejected by a number of smaller communities, they were welcomed to Tacoma, WA and offered two possible sites near Commencement Bay. The preferred site was near residential zoning (though not within existing neighborhoods) and the other site was in an industrial area known as the Tacoma Tar Pits, one of the top ten most contaminated Superfund Wastesites in the county.