The state director of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group resigned Thursday.
Elsa Aranda announced her resignation from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) days after a dispute with the organization’s national leadership. The conflict is tied to a proposed partnership between the Douglas County jail and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson in an Oct. 7 statement proposed using the county jail in Omaha to hold people detained by ICE agents. His announcement included input from Aranda, who wrote that both the Sheriff’s Office and LULAC Nebraska expressed interest in continuing dialogue around the idea.
“LULAC’s role is not to facilitate detention,” Aranda wrote. “Our role is to ensure that if detention occurs, it happens under humane, fair, and transparent conditions — and that the rights and dignity of every person are protected, just as the Sheriff is proposing.”
LULAC’s national spokesperson, David Cruz, pushed back on the organization being publicly tied to Hanson’s proposal. He told The Reader the idea of a partnership or endorsement was passed along to the group’s attorneys after a brief meeting with Hanson with no official stance shared.
“I would say to the sheriff that he may want to think twice before he uses the name of LULAC again without the express written permission of the national board and the national president,” Cruz said Oct. 10.
Aranda alleges conversations between national leadership, including LULAC President Roman Palomares, and Hanson were more in depth than Cruz implied.
In text messages shared with The Reader, Palomares wrote that Aranda “could offer to serve in an advisory capacity, not contractual or financial, focused solely on monitoring detainee welfare, access to counsel and family contact.”
The text continued, “While framed as humanitarian, the initiative carries significant public perception and reputational risks for LULAC due to its association with the immigration detention system.”
Regardless of the internal strife, it appears there’s little opportunity for Hanson’s proposal to move forward. The Douglas County Board of Commissioners would have to approve such a partnership with ICE, and in a statement shared last week, four of seven commissioners expressed their opposition to the idea.
The discussion is still reverberating through LULAC. Aranda’s resignation letter to the group’s national leadership Thursday stated she is working with an attorney.
“I am not afraid to enter a storm, and I always hold my ground in this situation,” Aranda told The Reader. “It is a huge betrayal from my national president, but this is not the first time that he and I have had issues, and I am disgusted, shocked, and here we are with the situation.”
Aranda previously retired as state director of Nebraska LULAC due to health problems but was reinstated in recent months.
In an emailed statement Friday, Palomares wrote that LULAC’s attorneys “are now handling the case.”