Watch: Santa Barbara Suffers in Trump's Halloween Hellscape - ICE Raids, Oil Schemes, Food and Housing Cuts
More than 50,000 local residents face new hunger uncertainty amid regime's refusal to fund food benefits, as deportation fears scrap annual Day of the Dead parade and sheriff sides with Trump
Except for the never-ending heebie-jeebies inflicted on State Street by City Hall, every other horror festooning Santa Barbara’s Halloween hellscape derives from the cruelty and callousness of Donald Trump.
On this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV, Ryan P. Cruz, Christina McDermott, Josh Molina and Nick Welsh join the genial host to reprise reporting that details how the regime’s right-wing policies are inflicting pain and suffering on the Central Coast:
Food stamp cut-off. As the shutdown of the federal government, controlled at every level by Republicans, dragged into its fifth week, more than 50,000 country residents - many of them children and seniors - faced the cut-off of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits that provide them with food. A federal judge ordered Trump’s Agriculture Department to tap emergency funds to keep the program going into November, which it’s so far refused to do, while five million people in California — and 40 million nationwide - faced uncertainty about being able to afford food.
Deportation dread. Amid ongoing deporation raids by roving bands of heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents, Santa Barbara’s annual Día de los Muertos parade was canceled by its sponsor, the Museum of Contemporary Art. The event drew 10,000 people downtown last year, but organizers called it off because of fears that people attending could be harassed, detained, or arrested.
Immigration smackdown. Heating up a simmering political feud, Sheriff Bill Brown told the Board of Supervisors to slag off, as they seek to respond to community concerns about his department’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, refusing to provide the board with any information about local ICE activity, past or pending. The dis by Brown, whose political ambitions have given him a national platform as president of the Major County Sheriffs of America association, rekindled talk of a recall campaign against him.
Sable’s slippery strategy. In a week when California’s Fire Marshall dealt a critical blow to the effort by Sable Offshore to reopen the pipeline that triggered the 2015 Refugio oil spill, Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright helped boost the rogue company’s stock price with a social media post backing its efforts, at a time when the company wants Administration backing for an environmentally risky plan to use tankers to barge oil off its platforms in federal waters.
Housing and homelessness. Following an earlier announcement that it will stop paying for emergency housing vouchers that are keeping people off the street, the Department of Housing and Urban Development now is threatening a policy change to end government funding for subsidized units occupied by families that include any undocumented members, a move that would impact more than 300 people in Santa Barbara, many of them longstanding residents, working people with kids in public schools.
Amid this shambolic landscape, however, Trump cannot be blamed for the enduring problems that local politics has wreaked on State Street, where the vacancy rate for retail space just reached a two-year high, even as the City Council voted to flush down the pissoir spend another $350,000 on the State Street Master Plan, after forking over more than half-a-million dollars to its previous consultant, who was just fired.
Oy.
All this, plus Ryan’s Halloween search for ghosts on the South Coast, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.
Check out Episode 528 via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on Soundcloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.
Image: Celebrity-cutouts.com
One has to ask, why are there 50,000 poor people in Santa Barbara county. I’m asking. And if they are citizens? Because if they are not citizens, then do we still have some responsibility to feed, and house them. And why is that?
Because as rich as we are as a county or nation, we can’t feed the world.
With 25 million new illegal aliens flooding into the US just in the last 4 years…
that’s 57,000 new homeless people in our CA congressional district in the last four years.
I should know I ran for Congress here in 2024.
There are 435 congressional districts divided into 25,000,000 people flooding in.
These new residents have to live somewhere, so they take up every square inch of low cost housing, much of it provided by local, state and federal government.
If the federal government finds it unprofitable to support CA’s illegal alien poor person flock, the state will have step up and cover all these millions of new, non America poor people.
That will mean the state of CA will have to raise more taxes, and cut other programs for actual citizens in order to cover what the federal government used to cover.
And this is as it should be. Why should the federal government pay for CA to import poor people from Mexico? Why indeed.
And so when the citizens of CA have to pay, those citizens in CA may be less infatuated with illegal immigration.
One has to ask,