WESTMINSTER – At least 100 people congregated to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Presidents Day People Power Action event hosted on FRCC’s Westminster campus on February 17th. Hosted in room L-211 on the upstairs and college-run portion of the library, the room overflowed with people feverishly cheering on remarks provided by staff at the ACLU and a handful of guest speakers. So many joined the event that there was a small crowd of a few dozen just outside the room watching the presentation, as there was quickly no sitting or standing room within room L-211.
One ACLU staffer commented that it was “a pleasant surprise that we had so many people actually show up.” Similar ACLU events in other states, including Kansas and New Hampshire, also had large turnouts.
ACLU Director of Advocacy and Strategic Alliances, Sophia Mayott-Guerrero said that “this really shows the community’s just excited to be doing the work” and that Coloradans have the ideal of “wanting everyone in Colorado and in the U.S. to feel safe and protected.”
The crowd was too large for the ACLU to take questions or suggestions. FRCC president Dr. Colleen Simpson and vice president Gabriel Castano joined for a brief moment seemingly to check out what was going on. Dr. Simpson had sent an email out two hours before the event to state that the event was not hosted by FRCC. A FOX 31 cameraman interviewed Mayott-Guerrero afterwards.
ACLU chose FRCC for the event because FRCC’s Westminster campus is located in Congressional District 8, and Gabe Evans “is somebody to be targeted at the national level in terms of accountability and actually doing his Congressional duties,” Mayott-Guerrero explained. The library was chosen since it is “a really large library, with relatively large spaces that are a positive community center.”
A brief ACLU slideshow presentation started the event. One of the slides instructed those in attendance to “Tell Congress: Fight President Trump’s Cruel and Brazen Power Grab” and to email Congress that they protest against “DOGE’s invasion of our privacy.” Afterwards, three guest speakers, touted as Community Impact Speakers, took the stand and delivered their own speeches.
The first speaker – Erin Kenworthy, who currently serves on the Jefferson County School Board – delivered her speech to “elevate other voices that need to be heard” as a documented citizen. She protested the Trump Administration banning transgender athletes from sports, questioning if it should be a top priority at the moment. She used the analogy of a finger trap to relate to the current presidential administration: they “can be easy to get into but really difficult to get out of.”
“I wish that adults in my community and the federal leadership positions would try to learn this and model it for others. It’s time for us to stop, collaborate, and listen,” she said, to laughs and applause.
“Wanting our children to be safe, healthy, and educated is a universal value,” she said. “We need our kids, and they need us to support them, to advocate for them.” She believed that every child needs an environment “where they are welcome exactly as they are, exactly where they are,” as well as resourced and legitimately empowered.
“Right now the reality falls short of that ideal,” Kenworthy said. “I’m alarmed at the speed and intensity of the changes to our educational and national landscape. … What’s happening is aggressive and harmful, and it needs to be challenged and stopped by those serving in federal, state, and local positions, like Representative Evans.”
She explained that Colorado schools are “inadequately funded” by $3 to 4 billion annually, citing two independent studies for this fact. Colorado students receive some of the lowest funding per person. In spite of that, she said that Colorado was not one of the lowest performers in the United States “because of the amazing work our educators do.” Her speech reached its focal point: Kenworthy said that the promise by the Trump Administration to eliminate the Department of Education would hurt Colorado.
“In Colorado, we will not be able to compensate for the loss in dollars if we lose the Department of Education. We’re gonna lose funding for special education students, we’re going to lose dollars for unhoused students, immigrant and global majority students. The reduction in federal Title 1 dollars will be catastrophic for students who are already struggling with a lack of basic resources. … We cannot take the hit of losing those federal dollars from the Department of Education.”
“The current Administration is prioritizing keeping kids from playing sports. It doesn’t change the price of eggs,” she joked. “It’s political theatre of the absurd.”
“When we make the well-being and education of children cause a political scene, what does that say about our values and who we are as a nation? So I’m here to say I do not consent to forfeiting the futures of our children to the whims of officials who care more for their egos and positions than for our kids.” Among the applause, one woman stood up, holding her right arm and fist up in solidarity.
“We must have clear and comprehensive policies and laws that prohibit bullying and hate speech, the kinds that we see coming out of the mouths of people who are serving on our federal government right now. … Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are foundational components of successful schools. They are not things that we throw away,” she continued.
She touched further on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, commonly abbreviated as DEI. “We are not gonna abandon these values in service of keeping unreasonable people from being uncomfortable. We will not preemptively comply with hateful dictates or participate in dehumanizing our students or their families, as there’s talks about that happening at schools with ICE immigration raids. And we haven’t seen it happen at any schools across the nation yet, but the concern is real.”
“The work ahead of each of us is not easy, and we all have a role to play. So it’s gonna require courage, commitment, and a willingness to challenge the status quo, or a neighbor, or that one uncle. … It requires that we hold our legislators and policymakers at all levels, including a school board member, accountable, and that we hold one another accountable.”
“We are a team. I was a coach, so team means ‘together.’ Everyone achieves more, so be on the team. Onward,” she concluded.
After Kenworthy’s speech, the next speaker was to be introduced, but someone leaned on the emergency door exit, causing a delay until the door was deactivated.
“This is not an emergency. We leaned on the emergency door,” Sophia Mayott-Guerrero told the somewhat confused crowd. “Just so that everybody knows what’s happening, we leaned on the emergency door. I apologize.”
“It is an emergency!” One of the crowd members shouted, yet again to applause and laughs.
Paul Houstons’s speech was next, and his first remark was that he had no prepared remarks.
A 1974 graduate of the Naval Academy and who was stationed in the Mediterranean Sea during the Cold War, he bluntly began with, “I’m just gonna talk about an oath to the Constitution,” to cheers and applause.
“When you enter the Naval Academy, you’re scared out of your wits. First day, they get you together and you have to stand up and raise your right hand. And there were 1400 of us, and we took this oath. … And the oath said … ‘I will support, uphold, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’”
After explaining more of his military service, including the time that martial law was nearly called in regards to Nixon, his speech went back to the oath he took.
“It’s time to call things by their proper names,” he continued. “What’s the proper name for what’s going on right now? … The proper name is fascism.” Cheers followed.
Houston admitted, “If this gets on anything, I will not be a popular classmate because there are a number of people, veterans, who still say, ‘Oh, well, we support Trump! Yeah! He’s for America. U.S.A!’ Well, let me tell you: please look back at the oath you took. Tell me how you can read that oath and say ‘That’s what I’m doing right now, yeah!’”
He then criticised the current administration. The mention of Vance immediately brought about boos from the crowd, and Houston continued with a criticism of Pete Hegseth and President Trump. “I don’t take anybody’s service away [Hegseth] spent too much time on the couch in Fox News, I think. And of course, Corporal, excuse me, Private Lee Bone Spurs,” he said.
He quickly finished his speech with one last call to action. “Let’s stand up for the Constitution.”
When Houston was asked why he decided to deliver his speech at the ACLU event, he echoed his mention of veterans, expressing that “I thought it was far past time that veterans start to speak up and remind people that they took an oath to the Constitution … maybe people need to reread that and try to remember, ‘What did I mean when I took that oath?’ Because to me, it’s a lifetime oath, and it’s really in danger right now.”
As Houston left the stage and exited to the left side of the crowded room, Sophia Mayott-Guerrero thanked Houston for his service and then rallied the crowd to perform the ACLU chant.
“A-C-L-U: fight for me, fight for you!” She instructed the crowd to follow along with her. As she repeated the chant twice, the crowd loudly shouted it with her.
Mayott-Guerrero introduced Ben David Hensley, a lead pastor for the Lakewood United Methodist Church, who emerged from a corner of the room to the stand.
After briefly introducing himself, the pastor said, “As someone who tries his best to follow Jesus Christ every day, I don’t unfortunately have the luxury of hating people. It would be simple for me to use the overwhelming amount of anger that I have at all that is happening at our federal government today and allow it to become bitter hatred at the actors for putting on this grotesque theatrical production of wannabe authoritarianism.”
Like Kenworthy, his voice was loud and clear and audience reactions followed many of his statements. Akin to the other speakers, applause accompanied many of his words.
“As someone who tries his best to follow Jesus Christ every day,” he repeated, “I also don’t have a luxury of pretending my sanity by not bearing witness to all of this, nor could I sleep at night if I only remained silent, plugging my ears, covering my eyes, and taping my mouth shut in the vain hope that this nonsense will end soon, and some hero picked by some political party will just pull some magical governmental lever of checks and balances to save us all. No, I don’t have that luxury either. None of us do.”
He referenced one of the Bible’s scriptures. “The first epistle of John in the New Testament says in its second chapter that anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in darkness. … It’s astounding how fecklessly all of the acts of hatred that this presidential administration is committing is wrapped up in language that falsely claims the best intentions for our country.”
To ground the event more to the local level, Hensley said, “Perhaps we here who are in Congressional District 8 can make it clear to Gabe [Evans] what kinds of priorities his constituents demand [and] guide his questioning rather than him parroting the Republican talking points and mirroring the hatred of this presidential administration.”
Hensley then recounted a story of the Denver United Methodist Church allowing an immigrant El Salvadoran family to live there and provide sanctuary, whose children were citizens via birthright citizenship but the parents weren’t.
“This church surrounded this family with love,” he explained. “This church joined this family when they attended all of the mandatory meetings they have to attend, to adjudicate their presence in this country. And unfortunately that family wasn’t able to stay. … but while they were here, they were afforded dignity and an – albeit small – sense of security.”
He warped forward to the present day situation with his church and how they handle immigrants. “But that policy with ICE has ended as a part of a much larger, broadly hateful approach. I’m now a pastor of a different church that has preschools, and I’ve already had to have conversations with our preschool directors to clarify what our approaches will be should ICE officers come knocking on our doors. This environment we are in has made even clearer to me something I already knew. Our teachers are courageous heroes, and our society would fall apart without them, and they are now on the front line.”
Hensley, like the other speakers, was incredibly direct and blunt with his views on the current administration. He additionally fact-checked the administration’s claims that immigrants are criminals. “These directives and threatening promises made by this president, who seems to salivate at the notion of removing as many people of color as possible from this country, is just a sequel of hate for this administration when it comes to our immigrant neighbors, the vast majority of them law-abiding people, whose absence will not only scar our moral identity, but whose absence will also decimate our economy.”
“And what is the government’s stated rationale for doing this? ‘Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.’ This government claims to be in the light, but it hates our immigrant siblings and thus it continues to thrive in darkness.” He circled back to his reference to the first epistle of John, and would do so once more throughout his speech. He also discussed his and other churches’ actions to, in his words, “stop this overreach.”
Hensley further laid out the credentials of the United Methodist Church, namely advocating for 20th-century labor laws and founding a university in Zimbabwe. “But due to the funding freezes, especially those affecting USAID, programs in [that] African university researching malaria and tuberculosis have been halted. … HIV/AIDS medications are now expiring in warehouses,” he explained. “No matter what claims our presidential regime tries to make – the funding freezes to root out corruption, waste, and fraud are in the light – there’s nothing but hatred in these actions.”
“[The administration] must hate Christianity,” he said outright. “A movement that’s rooted in stories of God creating a planet full of diverse people, people of different cultures and languages and whose Savior – the son of God himself – spoke out on behalf of the poor. This language that tries to vilify wokeness and the values of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are a pathetic and transparent gesture of support for white supremacy.”
His speech moved towards the topic of transgender people. “And our trans siblings are caught in the middle of it, as their access to medical care and their sense of safety – simply being out in public as their true selves – is now threatened.”
“None of us can stay silent. It’s time to get to work. It’s time to be focused on fighting what is most clearly in front of us today. Hatred upon hatred, overreach upon overreach, power grab upon power grab. … It’s time to drink your water, it’s time to get enough sleep because love has a lot to do in the fight against hatred in the years ahead of us,” Hensley concluded.
Hensley, a friend of Sophia Mayott-Guerrero, explained that he gave his speech at the event to “say a lot of things that I’ve had in my heart about what’s been going on. And so it was kind of a natural thing for me to say ‘Yes’ to it when she [Sophia] made the invitation [to me to give a speech].”
After thanking the guests at the event and the attendees, Mayott-Guerrero reviewed the action sheet. The sheet listed three actions for attendees to take. The first was to call their representatives and tell them to vote no on House Resolution 32. The second was to tell Congress “they must step up, do their job, and get DOGE out of our data” – referring to DOGE’s access to Treasury and other sensitive government data. The last was for them to join ACLU’s self-described People Power movement. QR codes for links on information were beside each point on the list.
“I know that it is people like you who are showing up already, now, on a cold Monday afternoon, to take these actions, to sit in a library, are the people who will be showing up in six months, a year, or a few years,” she said to the crowd.
“But I also wanna recognize that while all of this speed with which things have been happening – again, the point is the overwhelming confusion, the misdirection – that you can know a few things: that 1) you will get accurate information from the ACLU, and that 2) they were preparing for this moment, and so were we,” she further explained.
Mayott-Guerrero called on the attendees to call their representatives and let them know they want them to vote no on H.R. 32. “Please make that call today, because this is something where again, we are not sure whether or not Congressperson Evans is going to do the right thing. But what we do know is that it should not be easy to do the wrong thing … If you’re only gonna do one of those [points on the action sheet], do that one.”
“Did you know that double jeopardy does not apply to you calling your Congressperson?” she joked. She then moved briefly to the points of DOGE accountability and to join ACLU’s People Power Movement.
When asking who will make a phone call to Gabe Evans today, nearly the entire room raised their hands, again to applause. One person shortly afterwards wrote a phone number on the board and to “ask for Gabe Evans.”
To conclude, Mayott-Guerrero joked again, “This does not feel like the sexiest possible action, I get it. It is impactful, and it feels daunting, and it’s like, ‘The phone calls – do they even do anything?’ That narrative is on purpose to prevent you from doing it, because basically, being a pain actually does matter.”
“This district is one of the swingiest in the nation, and we do not work on candidates and we won’t, but what we do know is that we need our Congresspeople to stand up for our civil rights and civil liberties,” she explained. “That should not be partisan, and it is ridiculous that somebody is trying to make it partisan. That is not the way the Constitution is. That’s not the way of this nation.”
“Thank you all, and go give ‘em some hell, you guys,” Mayott-Guerrero concluded. She asked everyone who provided signs to hold them up to have other ACLU staff take a picture of the room. The event ended with another enthusiastic ACLU chant, this time running three times instead of two.
