Tallahassee defeats city commission, wins right to bring signs to City Hall

Tallahassee, FL – On February 18, the Tallahassee City Commission’s meeting marked a win for organizers, who were allowed to wield signs protesting the city’s collaboration with ICE in defiance of the commission’s attempts to repress them. At the previous meeting in January, the city commission and Tallahassee Police Department tried to illegally confiscate the signs of attendees, and conservative Mayor John Dailey ended the meeting early when they refused to comply.

Even though the city commission only gives each attendee three minutes to speak, the huge crowd that packed the January 14 meeting still managed to talk to the commission for almost three hours about the overwhelming public opposition to TPD’s 287(g) agreement with ICE and the city’s decision to sell land containing the unmarked graves of enslaved people to a notoriously racist country club. That should have taught Mayor Dailey that the city needed to listen to the people of Tallahassee, but instead he decided the problem was letting the public speak at all.

At the start of February’s meeting, the commission voted to limit public comment to 30 minutes, only hearing the first ten speakers who sign up, even though public comment comes at the end of a full day of meetings. To make sure that you can speak to the city commission, you now have to show up at 2 or 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, in the middle of the workday, and sit through hours of bureaucracy until around 6 p.m. to be allowed to talk. This effectively bans working-class people from being heard by their city government and represents a clear escalation in the struggle between the commission’s conservative majority and Tallahassee’s growing immigrant rights movement.

Organizers and community members continued to stand up to the commission’s attacks on free speech. Residents hid 8.5 x 11 signs in their pockets denouncing the 287(g) agreement, pulling them out when speakers finally came up.

Mayor Dailey, shaken by the presence of journalists in the room, was forced to back down and allow the signs rather than threaten to arrest attendees again for expressing their anger with the city’s inaction. Visibly exasperated, he tried to play this weakness off as generosity, saying that these signs were “fine, because they’re a regular sheet of paper.” Speakers wasted no time in calling out his hypocrisy, pointing out that the signs hadn’t changed at all – what had changed was the unpopularity of the city’s repressive tactics.

“We’ve seen an outpouring of civic participation in local government. In a city this small, you guys should be excited to see this level of participation if you cared about democracy,” said Joelle Nuñez, president of the Tallahassee Immigrant Rights Alliance. “But instead your response to people being upset at what you’re doing is to keep pushing more unpopular measures to restrict free speech. We’re trying to open the gates for people to participate, and you’re here actively shutting them. We want a public town hall to talk about 287(g), where we have more than 30 minutes to speak, and we want y’all to listen to us. That’s all.”

Nonprofit founder Stanley Sims, a longtime critic of the commission, pointed out that at a previous meeting a group of white suburbanites had been allowed to bring much larger signs without pushback to protest a planned gas station in their neighborhood, yet the government was silencing citizens who were concerned about issues predominantly affecting Black and Latino people.

Commissioners seemed willing to waver on the 30-minute speaking time limit, at least while the cameras were rolling. Commissioner Jeremy Matlow, a progressive and Dailey’s main competitor in the race for mayor, pressured the conservative majority into relenting and giving all of the registered speakers for this meeting their three minutes.

Commissioner Jack Porter, another progressive, proposed a resolution to revisit the time limit in a public meeting, denouncing the fact that the previous decision was made behind closed doors without public input. This time the conservatives stood their ground, and Commissioners Diane Williams-Cox and Curtis Richardson joined Mayor Dailey in voting the resolution down, citing the same tired complaints about “decorum” that they used to justify shutting down the last meeting.

Delilah Pierre, president of the Tallahassee Community Action Committee, replied, “I’m so tired of the word ‘decorum’, that word that’s just used as an excuse to repress the community. You get to be isolated from the problems that people are facing, but the people who are being murdered by ICE and the people in Tallahassee who are watching graves being built over don’t have time for ‘decorum’ in their lives.”

Pierre continued, “Banning public comment isn’t a sign of strength – it’s a sign of your internal weakness. It’s a sign that you know that people will show up again and again to call you out because you represent the interests of the Trump administration in Tallahassee, and it’s time that everybody knows about it.”

TIRA will join other community organizations on International Women’s Day, March 8, to march for justice for immigrant women. For more information, visit TIRA’s pages on Facebook or Instagram (@tlh_ira).

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