SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – A photo taken by Governor Gavin Newsom’s office is of a community meeting on Monday with the Governor and San Diego community leaders.
“It was a really, really wonderful roundtable brought together by Governor Newsom,” Shawn VanDiver, President & Founder of AfghanEvac, said. “It was primarily folks that are focused in the San Diego region. And it was all about the impact on local communities of the federal government's immigration enforcement actions.”
VanDiver was at the sit-down prior to the Governor’s press conference in San Diego.
“I brought up family reunification and the idea that these people arrived with legal status, they arrived in the way that they were supposed to, and the federal government is trying to strip them of that legal status. It's very unfair,” VanDiver said.
VanDiver told ABC 10News the meeting with Newsom went on for about an hour and a half.
“It was so clear to me that the governor was listening, he was taking notes, he took like 6 or 7 pages of notes. He was really well read in on what was happening already,” VanDiver said. “At his press conference, right after that, he gave voice to those communities, he gave voice to the stories that the experiences that people are having here.”
The Governor mentioned the hour and a half long meeting during his press conference in San Diego on Monday.
“I just left meeting people, representing all our diverse communities, many diverse communities in the state of California, giving me chapter and verse about how ICE is still conducting operations around schools,” Newsom said on Monday. “So that was expressed very intimately to me around specific examples down here in Southern California, and I'll be following up with many, many pages of notes with those specific concerns with my team when I get back to Sacramento.”
Once Newsom does get back to the Capital City, ABC 10News asked VanDiver what he hopes can come out of this lengthy conversation with him and other San Diego leaders.
“If we can just make it a little bit better every day, then that's what we can do,” VanDiver said.
