I've been mischaracterized as an anti-government extremist and subjected to retaliatory lawfare as a result of my civil rights activism.

In 2014, my brother and I were wrongfully arrested in Barstow, CA and prosecuted for refusing to present ID to police without cause. The ACLU ended up representing us, and we reached a settlement that included mandatory civil rights training for all sworn officers in that jurisdiction. We've been harassed by law enforcement in our hometown (Santa Clara County, CA) relentlessly ever since.

In 2017, that harassment culminated in a second arrest for the same thing. Police pulled me out of a private residence to demand ID without cause, then arrested me for refusing. After receiving the same charges, I called the Santa Clara County district attorney and emailed him the training bulletin I'd co-authored with the ACLU. The charges were dropped the next day. Both times, refusing to show ID was the only charge, which is not allowed in CA .

A few hours after that phone call with the DA, a sheriff showed up at our property. He was trespassing with no cause to be there. I ordered him off our property. He later came back and trespassed again. This time he went 1.5 miles up a private road with no public access or right of way and conducted a warrantless search of our farm. Then he prompted code enforcement to open a case against us. We have copies of emails from the sheriff to code enforcement documenting all of this, obtained through public records requests.

When the editor of a local newspaper interviewed a senior police officer about what was happening to us, the officer disclosed an email he'd sent to all sworn officers, declaring my brother and me a threat to law enforcement and a danger to the community. When asked why, he named the ACLU case as the primary reason. The editor pressed because he knew we'd been wrongfully arrested and vindicated. The officer confirmed, and the editor published an account of the interview along with a copy of the email.

That referral was the turning point where law enforcement weaponized code enforcement and our family farm became the main focus and point of leverage in a broad and well-documented conspiracy between government agencies against us.

We’ve spent the last eight years fighting to prevent Santa Clara County from seizing our farm over non-existent code violations, based on falsified and fabricated evidence.

We were presented with a draconian compliance agreement that we were told was related to unspecified alleged code violations, that would have required us to forfeit all of our rights and to accept unspecified penalties and to pay unspecified fines and fees. Government officers threatened us, saying that if we refused to sign, we would be scraped off our land.

We should have been given an opportunity to challenge any alleged violations, but the government claimed we forfeited rights to any administrative remedies by failing to respond to Notices of Violation (NOV) that we never received and that the government refused to show us any proof ever existed. 

Years later, when the government was finally forced to admit that the disputed NOV’s were entirely fictitious, the only remedy offered was to start the whole enforcement process all over again. Unsurprisingly, that was not handled with any more integrity than the first time around.

Enforcement was coordinated in large part by a disgraced former police officer and convicted felon, re-hired as a code enforcement officer. He was widely known for abusing his authority and extorting property owners, and was only very recently suspended for allegedly running real estate scams.

Given the way we'd been abused by law enforcement, I recorded all of our interactions with these officers, and in doing so, documented a culture of open and rampant corruption. 

Presented with objective evidence of egregious abuses of power and process, instead of holding bad actors accountable, the government fought to keep the transcripts out of administrative and legal proceedings. We were not even allowed to use transcripts of recorded conversations to impeach false testimony given under oath by government officers.

The government actually threatened to prosecute me for recording officers without their consent, attempting to criminalize the way that I obtained evidence of their own criminality.

Additionally, we were mischaracterized by the government’s own lawyers accused us of being some type of domestic terrorists and running militia training camps. Their evidence was social media posts linking to Airbnb listings where we'd offered free temporary housing to people and animals displaced by wildfires.

My brother and I have extensive wildfire-fighting experience and we store firefighting equipment at our farm, which is remote, hard to reach, and at extreme fire risk. We've responded to many fires and been heralded as hometown heroes for saving dozens of homes in one of the worst, but the local government is trying to deny us the right to defend lives and property.

The most serious of the alleged violations are for emergency work my brother and I performed at our property during the 2016 Loma wildfire, in direct coordination with Cal Fire. Two Cal Fire chiefs testified under oath on our behalf that the work was typical and reasonable and necessary under the circumstances, and responsibly done. Senior Cal Fire officers told us that, as far as they know, we're the first people in California ever cited in this manner for actions taken in response to an emergency.

We've defeated 13 of the 17 alleged violations. Our legal costs have run to several hundred thousand dollars and now exceed what we paid for the property. The larger cost is time. For eight years we've been held in administrative purgatory, prohibited from making any meaningful beneficial use of our own land and told by many different government officers that they will never approve uses that are supposed to be allowed by right.

The fines and fees on the four remaining allegations far exceed the value of the property, which is our combined life savings and work. There is no reasonable settlement available, and we stand to lose everything if we can't afford the price of justice.

All claims are substantiated with corroborating evidence.