California State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez joined Pitzer College on Wednesday to host a ‘Town Hall on Civil Liberties and Freedom of Speech.’ Over a dozen students attended the town hall, a public meeting designed for local elected officials to speak with and inform community members. The event featured a panel discussion and an audience Q&A session at the end.
Pérez, who represents Claremont alongside the rest of District 25, moderated a panel consisting of five community members who are passionate about civil liberties, including 5C professors and representatives from civil liberty advocacy groups. The discussion spanned immigration laws, data privacy, surveillance technology, education and a call to action for college students.
“A town hall on civil liberties couldn’t have come at a more important, pressing time,” Pérez said during the event.
In her opening remarks, Pérez highlighted her work in the California Senate, where she championed both SB 1105, the Protect California Rights Act that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed, and SB 957, the Protecting Vulnerable Immigrant Detainees Model Act that Newsom signed into law Sept. 29. She also announced that, as of last Thursday, the state of California has sued the Trump Administration 100 times in the past two years, including over recent federal immigration enforcement policies.
“President Trump continues to launch campaigns to target immigrant populations,” Pérez said. “From the right to vote to the right to privacy, no right can be taken for granted.”
Jeannette Zanipatin, an immigration lawyer and director of policy and advocacy at Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), echoed Pérez’s concerns, describing the numerous “heartbreaking” cases she has witnessed involving individuals detained by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She also said CHIRLA is supporting several lawsuits to protect due process rights.
“The Constitution isn’t working,” Zanipatin said. “As an attorney, I have very little faith right now. The federal administration is not following the judicial order, in most instances.”
Alongside immigration concerns, the panelists brought up issues surrounding privacy. Vinhcent Le, TechEquity Collaborative’s vice president of AI policy, spoke about “the constant erosion of what reasonable privacy looks like.”
He said that the government is using taxpayer dollars to purchase data from private industries to build profiles and that ICE is recording peoples’ faces at protests and logging those faces in a database, information that is allegedly being used in order to “target those against the party in power.”
Chandra Bhatnagar, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said he is similarly worried about the threat to individuals’ rights to privacy from increased surveillance technology and the potential abuses of power that come with it.
“In Costa Mesa, a police officer used Flock technology to stalk his wife, his mistress and his romantic rivals,” Bhatnagar said. “The constitutional rights we enjoy are really at stake. We should be able to support a cause or express a political viewpoint without having to worry that it’s going to be tracked … We need to be alarmed.”
Rachel VanSickle-Ward, a political studies professor at Pitzer, highlighted that being aware of historical context is crucial to fully understand current events.
“[Be aware of] the severe and urgent situation that we’re in right now, but also the continuation of decades and decades of efforts to restrict the vote to specific communities,” VanSickle-Ward said.
Because “the threat is so existential,” according to VanSickle-Ward, she also urged 5C students to join coalitions and be politically engaged.
Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an American government professor at Pomona College, emphasized that weakening education “to control the facts” is a political tactic and noted that the Trump administration has cut 1,400 educational grants.
She also accused President Donald Trump of attempting to transition to “raw autocracy” and “behaving like a monarch,” and that he “doesn’t care anymore about pretending to be legal.”
Like VanSickle-Ward, Hollis-Brusky urged students to vote and engage with political institutions as a way to push back against this, which includes attending town halls.
Several 5C students attended Wednesday’s event, including Madeline Huq PZ ’28, vice president of 5C Democrats, who highlighted the importance of making town halls and other political events accessible.
“It was super informative,” Huq said. “It’s great to [host a town hall] on a college campus because a lot of students don’t have transportation, so they may be really interested in a cause like this, but they would have no way to go to events like this if it were somewhere farther away.”
Similarly, Andrew Curtice PZ ’28, operations director at 5C Democrats, said the town hall gave him hope during a time of national political turmoil.
“There’s a lot of cynicism, especially around individual liberties, especially around things like ICE,” Curtice said. “But I really did get a semblance of hope for the future, even though things are incredibly dark right now. I do believe that there is a way for us to get out of this, and the speakers articulated that vision and that way that we can get involved.”