‘The address that we deserve’: Juneau residents protest Sullivan before his speech to Alaska Legislature
- Jasz Garrett
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
Alaska residents chant that 'they do not consent' to Trump administration's agenda supported by state's senator
By Jasz Garrett
Juneau Independent
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, gave his annual address to the Alaska Legislature on Wednesday morning. But before he spoke, dozens of protesters gathered outside the Alaska State Capitol in the bitter cold to listen to Anjuli Grantham read the “address I want to hear.”
Grantham, a Juneau for Democracy volunteer, said she wrote the address as a vision for the future because what Sullivan would say inside “is not the address that we demand or the address that we deserve.”
“We are retraining workers and educating our youth as we transition our economy to centering the care of people, community and nature,” she said during her speech. “We are working diligently to sunset the few remaining fossil fuel systems, as our energy retrofit program has decreased costs and improved health across the land, and we have finally outlawed billionaires. No one will gain such wealth and power off the backs of their fellow humans, or the extraction of our finite planet ever again.”
Erin Jackson-Hill, executive director of Stand Up Alaska, led the protest against Sullivan titled “We Do Not Consent” near the Secretary William Henry Seward statue by the Juneau courthouse. She is a co-founder of the organization, which “promotes social, racial, environmental and economic justice in the state of Alaska.”
She was a guest speaker from Anchorage and said the event was timed before Sullivan’s remarks. Stand Up Alaska organized alongside advocacy groups Juneau for Democracy, Juneau Indivisible and ReSisters.
“We do not consent to a government that sanctions cruelty and tears families apart when we see ICE enforcement actions targeting our friends and our neighbors, ripping people from their homes, from their jobs, from the communities that they have built, helped build and actually killing people in cold blood,” Jackson-Hill said. “We say with one voice, we do not consent. When families are forced to live in constant fear, not for any crime they’ve committed, but simply because of where they were born. This is not an American value.”
After the planned speeches, she offered the microphone to the crowd and Paul DeSloover took it.
“When I entered the U.S. military 60 years ago, I took an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “Senator Sullivan, when he entered the Marines, took the same oath. He likes to say ‘semper fi,’ because he’s a Marine. But his should be ‘semper timidness,’ because he is a timid coward. He has displayed it over and over and over again.”
DeSloover said the protest attendees must demand that “he no longer be a coward, but do the right thing for America.”
“I’m up here, not for myself because I will probably be dead before the ruins of what they are constructing happens — but for the next generation and the generation after that,” he said.
Jackson-Hill agreed, saying that Sullivan’s complicity and party-line votes “is consent.”
She said she is scared about the direction of America’s democracy, then said, “But do you know what bravery really is? It’s being scared and doing the right thing regardless.”
She and other attendees criticized the SAVE Act, legislation that is aimed at ensuring that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote in federal elections.
“He’s got to know that people in the Bush and people in rural communities, even like Haines and Skagway, to get copies of your birth certificate isn’t easy,” said Kimberly Metcalfe Helmar, an attendee at the protest.
Other protesters spoke about the need for affordable health care, expressing anxiety for the future of Medicaid. And others said how they “do not consent” to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainments.
“Immigrants make our country richer,” Jackson-Hill said, before starting a chant of “we do not consent.”
Leslie Ishii, with tears in her eyes, said in an interview she is a fourth-generation Japanese American. She said her family was abducted, detained and put into camps. Ishii said she came to the protest “because we want to be the allies that our elders and ancestors didn’t have during World War II.”
“I am a descendant of survivors and non-survivors of U.S. World War II concentration camps,” she said. “And this is an absolute repeat of history, the way people are detained in detention centers.”
She said if she could talk to Sullivan face-to-face, a question Jackson-Hill repeated during the protest, she would urge him to make a change “and stop repeating history.”
After the outside protest concluded, most of the group went inside the Capitol to line the halls leading to the House of Representatives chamber, awaiting Sullivan’s arrival. Many of the demonstrators did the same during last year’s address.
“This is insanity. Our country is better than this, our state is better than this, and our leaders should be better than this. And if they’re not, they need to be removed,” Jackson-Hill said.
When the senator was guided to the House chambers, he was booed, shamed and called a coward by protesters. He responded, “Good morning, everybody,” before the doors closed behind him and he delivered his speech to the Legislature.
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.
