Support Disaster Relief for Puerto Rico

Senator Dianne Feinstein

SF Office: (415) 393-0707
DC Office: (202) 224-3841
LA Office: (310) 914-7300
Fresno Office: (559) 485-7430
San Diego Office: (619) 231-9712

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Senator Kamala Harris

SF Office: (415) 981-9369
DC Office: (202) 224-3553
Sacramento Office: (916) 448-2787
LA Office: (213) 894-5000
San Diego Office: (619) 239-3884

Call the SF office first, but try the other offices if you can’t get through. If you can’t get a live person, leave a voicemail and also send a follow-up email written in your own words. Hate the phone? Resistbot is your friend.

Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

I urge you to work to pass HR.2157 and resist the Republicans’ attempts to remove funding for Puerto Rico from the bill.

Thank you for your past statements in support of fair and equal treatment for the American citizens of Puerto Rico and the disaster relief they so desperately need and deserve. Now that the House has passed HR.2157 and sent it to the Senate, I urge you to hold fast and strongly resist all efforts by Trump and his gang of Republican accomplices in the Senate to eliminate economic recovery aid for Puerto Rico. $600 million for food stamps is not enough. Reconstruction, physical and mental health care, food assistance, and resilient long-term global-warming solutions are all essential.

I know that California fire survivors and victims of Midwest and Southern storms and flood are also suffering. They too need and deserve our aid which Trump and his gang of Republican accomplices are holding hostage to force abandonment of Puerto Rico. They are determined to split America apart along racial lines for their own partisan purposes. We cannot allow that to happen. We need you to stand for the America of Equality, Liberty and Justice for all regardless of race and color. Therefore, I urge you to continue supporting full and fair funding for Puerto Rican disaster recovery.

I also urge you to resist all Republican attempts to redirect disaster relief funding towards yet more immigration detention camps and family separations, expanded police forces, increased immigration raids and surveillance, and more miles of racist walls.

Context

Last week, the House passed the disaster relief bill HR.2157, the Supplemental Appropriations Act. This bill provides $17.2 billion in desperately needed disaster relief aid to the survivors of recent wildfires, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters. In addition to funds for California fire victims and storm & flood relief in the South and Midwest, the bill includes a bit over $3 billion in aid to Puerto Rico which has still not recovered from the devastation of two Cat-5 hurricanes in 2017. Trump and Republicans in the Senate are threatening to block or veto the bill if it includes anything more than $600 million in food stamps because they are opposed to providing significant recovery funds for Puerto Rico.

In 2017, Puerto Rico was slammed by two ferocious Cat-5 Hurricanes. Since then, responses of Trump and the Republicans have been racist and colonialist. Their actions – and failures to act – are shaped by their assumption that brown lives and futures matter less than those of whites. And their determination to use the Puerto Rican disaster as an opportunity to financially reward Republican campaign donors and political cronies. Meanwhile, because of Trump/Republican policies, the Puerto Rican government has had to cut more than a million people off of food assistance and countless homes remain unrepaired from storm damage, as do public buildings and vital infrastructure.

Trump and the Republicans have repeatedly lied about the amount of aid that the island has already received – it's actually around $11 billion, not the $91 billion they falsely claim. And they've blamed the Puerto Rican people – the victims – for financial-economic-environmental problems that are rooted in Washington's racist, colonial attitude towards the island and that have festered for generations. Congress turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven for manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies, then when Congress allowed those tax breaks to expire the Puerto Rican economy collapsed and its government had to take on additional debt. In response, Washington imposed an un-elected, Wall Street-backed “fiscal control board” to institute harsh austerity measures that crippled local government. Though Puerto Ricans are American citizens, they have been treated like colonial subjects, exploited by giant American corporations and then told they cannot manage their own affairs.

And Trump and his Republican accomplices are now demanding that the disaster relief bill be used to pay $4.5 billion for emergency border spending on more detention camps and family separations, expanded police forces, increased surveillance and immigration raids, and more miles of walls whose only real function is to emotionally satisfy the desire of their white-nationalist base to somehow wall-off white American from the nonwhite peoples of the world.