…We don’t create social change through the court system. The court system is primarily about protecting the rights of private property. Whatever gains we make are a result of what we win in the streets. We extract victories from the powerful, and force them to make concessions through the legal system.
—Bruce Nestor
My father was going to hotel school at Cornell University, in Ithaca New York when I was born. We lived there until my parents divorced. I was four. My older brother went with my Dad, and my mother, stepfather and I moved to the Virgin Islands.
My stepfather had been a Barry Goldwater Republican. When he got divorced he was kicked out of Ithaca because no-one wanted a divorced man being their wife’s gynecologist. He went to run a maternal health program on St Thomas. I think, also, he and my mother were crazy in love, and thought — lets go to the Virgin Islands!
I went to kindergarten at the St. Thomas public school. I was the only White kid in the school. People liked to touch my blond hair. I stood out. I remember that.
We moved to Berkeley in 1971-72 so my stepfather could get a Master’s in public health. I was oblivious to the political whirlwind around me. My parents were aware, but not involved. My world consisted of our apartment courtyard and the four block walk to my school.
Boyhood in Iowa City, Iowa
In the aftermath of Roe V Wade, my stepfather got a job in Iowa City as head of the state’s only early termination pregnancy clinic. He ran it for 27 years. There also was an independent women’s clinic in town, named after Emma Goldman. He worked for them too.
Iowa City was liberal. It had great schools and was easy to get around as a kid. I had a lot of freedom. Like many University towns, there was quite a town/gown divide. The University was on the West side. I lived and went to school on the East side until my teacher complained that I was bored. My mother decided the problem was with the school, not me. She sent me to an alternative private school, where we sat on bean bags and did math problems together. I wanted to go back to public school, so she got me into one on the North side. I had to take the city bus and transfer to get there. It was kind of an Open School model. I was entering fourth grade but they got mixed up and put me into fifth grade, which worked well. I wasn’t bored.
I went to Central Junior High, a small school with an open campus that drew people from both sides of town. I remember a history teacher who argued we should have dropped the A Bomb on Vietnam. I wrote a paper arguing against the war.
A Mother’s Son
In Iowa City, my mother became involved in local politics to oppose urban renewal projects. A developer wanted to bulldoze homes along the creek and the city was planning to raise a bunch of buildings downtown to build a mall. She ran for city council in a special election. The business community funded their own candidate. Mom spent $36 for a few leaflets, which she handed out at the bus stop. She won.
So then, after school I’d get off the bus downtown, and wait to go home with my mother. Sitting around the government center while the City Council was in session, builds a kid’s sense of civic engagement.
When she ran for re-election she made me her assistant campaign manager. I got my picture in the paper twice. The first, on Halloween, when I went as a voting booth covered in my mom’s campaign stickers. The second was on election night. The caption read: Assistant Campaign Manager Bruce Nestor Watches the Votes Come In.
Iowa City didn’t have social movements to join. It had a University and some free thinkers — and my mother was part of that crowd, but she was also willing to go out on her own when she saw injustice. She and her best friend picketed a bar that was ID-ing Blacks prejudicially. People thought that was going too far. She lost her third election. That was devastating to me, but she was glad. She was ready to move on.
My mother was an advocate for me. She got me into advanced classes. I took math classes with ninth graders when I was in seventh grade and enrolled in classes at the University of Iowa while in ninth grade. Sometimes I regret that. It affected me socially. But in other ways it was pretty cool.
I was in high school debate, 10-12th grade. The first years we debated consumer product safety and education. The last year the theme was foreign arms sales. My group argued for stopping arms sales to South Africa. My friends argued for stopping military aid to El Salvador. I became aware of Global South struggles. I didn’t yet have a revolutionary identification, but I knew peasants were the good people and oligarchs were the bad guys.
A group of us in high school went to Des Moines in 1981 to participate in a union-led protest against Reagan. I guess it was around PATCO. That was my first protest. When I wrote a critique of Ronald Reagan for my government class, my teacher said it was OK to be critical of the officer holder but not the institution. I said I respected neither.
For a white kid from a privileged economic background, with a mother that advocated for me, I had enormous access to ideas. I could speak in public loudly, whenever I wanted. My senior year I was valedictorian and state champion debater. I had my pick of colleges.
I applied to Columbia University and got in. I also applied to Deep Springs College in a Desert Valley on the California/Nevada border. They offered a free ride. That was a big attraction. I didn’t want to be dependent on my father.
Childhood Summers in rural Minnesota and Alaska
I still saw my biological father and brother every summer. He was in Marshall MN, and then Crookston, teaching hotel management. At a very young age I flew to Grand Forks by myself.
Dad was a small business Republican—didn’t like corporations, was in to gun rights. He’d complain about people using food stamps to buy candy and alcohol.
He taught me how to use power tools and work outside. From him I learned an appreciation of manual labor, which opened me to Deep Spring’s outdoor work curriculum. By the time I was applying to college, he was in Alaska. He would have helped me pay for college, but I’d heard him complain to my mother about paying child support. My Dad made Deep Springs attractive to me.
Becoming a Radical in College
Deep Springs was tiny and isolated—26 male students in a community of 50 people, an hour from the nearest town. The newspaper came a couple days late. No radio during the day, no TV. We spent half our days working on an alfalfa and cattle farm. We ran the administration of the school, hiring and firing faculty and running the application process. Our academic study focused on the liberal arts.
Their introductory summer seminar, Work and Community, was led by social democrats and marxist philosophers. We read Max Weber, Karl Marx, bell hooks, and Wendell Berry–my first introduction to issue-based political science; politics beyond elections.
Deep Springs was a two year program. I enrolled at Berkeley, but when I went back to Iowa for the summer, I decided to stay. My mother and stepfather had separated (they got back together). Mom had taken off to North Carolina. I thought my stepfather needed me, and maybe, I thought if I was there I could get them back together.
I got involved with the Iowa City Central America Solidarity Committee. I enrolled at the University of Iowa and got involved in New Wave a local chapter of the Progressive Student Network. Our big campaign was CIA off campus. Everyone thought I was a good speaker, so I read a speech about the history of the CIA in front of the administration building while a woman poured red paint on my feet and the building. We didn’t get charged because it was tempera paint.
We decided to escalate. Four of us chained ourselves to University President’s desk with bicycle locks. We called the media ahead of time –got a lot of news coverage.
At another protest I got arrested for “assaulting the Dean of Student Life.” I didn’t touch him, but I got real close to him when he put his hands around another protestor’s throat. I went through a series of disciplinary proceedings. When I went to law school the Iowa bar committee said I wasn’t morally fit, because of this record. I had to have a private interview and get letters from local prosecutors saying what a fine young man I was. Iowa City was a liberal town. People opposed the wars in Central America. It wasn’t hard to drum up support.
Student organizations at the University of Iowa were empowered in the 1980s. Since then they have remodeled the Student space, put people in little cubicles, like they did at the University of Minnesota. But then we were all connected and building coalitions was easier. Our offices were right next to the Black Student Union and GLBT groups.
This was the height of the AIDS epidemic. A right wing newspaper, run by a man who is now a county attorney in Iowa, viciously attacked gay men in particular. The leadership of student government all went on to become leaders of the extreme right wing in the Iowa Republican party.
When the US bombed Libya, we had a protest at the center of campus. We were a fairly small group of mostly white peace activists and anti-imperialists. A crowd of right wing men gathered chanting, “USA, USA.” We felt physically threatened. Four Black medical students opposed to the bombing who were members of the BSU showed up and saved us, with one singing Amazing Grace a capella from the steps of the Old Capitol. That shamed and calmed down the right wingers. It was a powerful moment.
I traveled to Palestine in 1987, during the first Intifada. The trip, called Eyewitness Israel, was sponsored by the Arab American Anti-discrimination League. We spent an entire week in the West Bank, with Palestinian families in Hebron, and the Gaza Strip.
One of the most aggressive Jewish settlements–Ariel–is right outside of Hebron. The Kach organization ran it. They had just assassinated a Palestinian shopkeeper. Tensions were really high. We stayed with a journalist and visited the refugee camps. I came home with spent shells and tear gas canisters. That was a formative experience.
I traveled to Nicaragua in 1989 on a solidarity brigade with college activists. We were crushed by the Sandinista defeat in the election of 1990. We had rented a satellite hook up to watch the returns and celebrate.
Law School, National Lawyers Guild
I got my degree in history and African American Studies and started working in the produce section of the local coop. I decided I didn’t want to do that forever so I went to law school at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1992. I didn’t like law school and spent as little time there as I could.
I had a political life outside of school that sustained me. I was into protest and Communism, and didn’t know there were lawyers who did that too. I interned one summer in New Jersey with a migrant farm worker program. The last year I got involved in the National Lawyers Guild. I went on an NLG delegation to Cuba in 1991.
When I graduated I worked for legal services of Iowa, earning $19,200 a year. I didn’t want to leave the area. Somebody convinced me to run for regional vice president of the NLG. I was flying to national meetings, and learning what the organization could do. I got a special grant to represent victims of domestic violence. After that I opened my own law office, doing criminal defense. In 1999 I got elected president of the NLG.
While I was a lawyer in Iowa City, they wanted to build a new jail in Johnson County, modern, big, and on the outskirts to town–inconvenient for families and inmate lawyers. Everything wrong with the mass incarceration system was embodied in that jail project. It would have been hard to visit, hard to lawyer, and if you got discharged, you would have been in the middle of nowhere, with no busses.
My mother started a group against the jail, opposing the bond referendum to pay for it, and brought me in as legal counsel. They have not built that jail yet. They’ve lost three bond referendums in a row. As a result they have implemented alternative policies to keep the jail population to within what the small jail can handle. People with DWIs don’t go to jail. People on bail get out right away. As a result, the existing jail is sufficient. If you build it, they will come. If they built that jail they would have filled it.
Getting to Minneapolis
I met Susana De Leon in San Francisco, when she was a law student. She came to an NLG meeting with Peter Ehrlinder. I was introduced as the President of the Lawyers Guild. She was thoroughly unimpressed. I met her again at a regional NLG meeting in Minnesota, in March of 2000, where my claim to fame was bringing a Color Lines article that talked about White privilege. She had just read that article. I showed up and handed that out, and gained a little bit of credibility with her, but not much.
In October of 2000, I went to Cuba for a meeting of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. So did Susana. It’s easy to fall in love in Cuba. By 2001, I was driving up every weekend to see her. By 2002, I moved up to Minneapolis.
I was also ready politically to be somewhere else. I knew people through the Progressive Student Network and NLG, so I was able to get involved politically right away..
Immigration Law in Minnesota
If you do criminal law in private practice, you pretty much have to serve rich people with drug, sex and alcohol problems. Otherwise no one can afford to hire you. In Iowa City I knew people, so I had clients. Susana was my age, but just out of law school. She had done immigration work, so together we started doing immigration law.
The immigrant population in the early 2000s was really taking off. I was able to find this niche serving clients dealing with the immigration consequences of criminal convictions. Due to the policies of Bush, Obama and Trump, it is a niche that has exploded.
I was NLG President until 2003. After 9/11 I was traveling around the country a lot.
In 2003 Susana and I got a grant from the Ford Foundation to work with Centro Campesino in Owatonna, doing racial justice work. We also did stuff at the capital. The state campaign for Driver licenses for undocumented people–that we are still fighting for–began then.
When the ICE raid happened at the Worthington Swift Meat Packing Plant in 2006, we got a call, drove down and arrived while the raid was still going on. For Susana that was traumatic. I was able to intellectualize it.
A sympathetic Latina human relations woman let us in. We were able to confront the ICE agents. We stayed there for a week, interviewing people affected. Ultimately we got hired by the UFCW to represent their members who were being processed and detained.
We also filed a lawsuit on behalf of meatpacking workers in Waseca who were US citizens; migrants workers who weren’t getting paid by Seneca Foods what they were promised. We were spending much of our time in rural Minnesota, while trying to run a private practice in Minneapolis and getting involved in urban political work.
A Lawyer for Social Movements
In 2008 when the RNC was in St. Paul, a coalition of groups organized a mass march and a smaller group of anarchists organized a no-business as-usual action. With the MN ACLU, we worked to get the larger group permits. The smaller group attracted the attention of the feds and the local Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher. There were pre dawn raids to arrest them for planning disruption. They became known as the RNC 8, and I became part of their defense team.
At the time of the RNC a woman undercover police officer infiltrated the Anti-War Committee. Her espionage resulted in the FBI raids in 2010. Activists’ homes were raided for suspected ties to Palestinians and Columbians. I was their lawyer.
I was one of a team of lawyers who represented those arrested during the 2014, Black Lives Matter, Christmas demonstration at the Mall of America. That was an extraordinarily powerful, large, peaceful demonstration. They took on this icon of capitalism in Minnesota, by daring to have it inside. The city prosecutor should have let it go, but instead Bloomington charged the organizers with conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, trespass and disorderly conduct–unsupported charges.
The demonstrators had tremendous community support. I was part of the legal team. We got all the charges dismissed, in part because the right judge took the case. He was right on the law, and he also understood the politics of it. He knew what kind of a high profile case it was, at that political moment.
The beauty of doing this kind of defense work, as I get older, is that I stay connected with young people taking on the world. I don’t always agree with them politically or strategically, but I admire their commitment. It is a privilege to represent them.
Fighting for $15 Hundreds of people spent thousands of hours gathering signatures to amend the city charter, to put in a minimum wage that would eventually reach $15. They got the signatures they needed. The city council, on the advice of the city attorney, refused to put it on the ballot, arguing that it wasn’t the proper subject for a charter amendment. We sued them in district court and won. The city brought it to the State Supreme Court and we lost there. I did the oral argument. All of the sudden I was one face of this movement that involved hundreds of people engaged in the grassroots effort. While we lost at the Supreme Court, that whole effort pushed the City Council to pass an ordinance, which we now have.
When I was a young lawyer in Iowa City, a junior high school friend of mine was murdered by a police officer. He was working in his pottery studio late at night with the door open. An officer thought a robbery was going on, came up, pushed in the door and shot him–murdered him. That led to a police reform movement in Iowa City. My mother worked on three referenda to amend the city charter. One referendum would prohibit the enforcement of state marijuana laws. Another would create a civilian review board with subpoena power. A third was to give the city council the power to appoint and oversee the chief of police. Like $15 Now, they gathered all the signatures and then the city refused to submit the referenda. We took the case to the State Supreme Court just as we did for $15Now. We won one of three — a civilian board with subpoena power, which the voters overwhelmingly supported at the next election.
Often justice does not prevail. In January of 2015, I was appointed to represent one of the nine young Somali American men charged with trying to travel to Syria to join ISIS. We went to trial in May of 2016, lost, and my client was sentenced to 30 years in prison. This was a tremendous injustice. He never hurt anyone, never handled guns or weapons, and was treated differently due to Islamophobia and the current political agenda of targeting “radical Islam.”
In 2016 when Standing Rock broke out I ended up getting licensed in North Dakota so I could sponsor 88 lawyers from across the country–we called ourselves the Water Protector Legal Collective–to represent over 800 people. I still have a case I’m finishing this summer related to that action.
I have had the privilege of being part of these and many political resistance cases: General College, the I-94 occupations, the Black Friday University Avenue sit-in against Walmart, and many more.
Now I am working with a team, on cases up North, defending people struggling to stop the Enbridge pipeline. Susana and I continue to work on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. The need for defense of immigrants who are criminally convicted is growing.
When I am not working, I garden, cook and do home repair. Working with my hands is very concrete and takes me back to my time at Deep Springs.
Perspective
My view, and that of the Lawyers Guild, is that we don’t create social change through the court system. The court system is primarily about protecting the rights of private property. Whatever gains we make are a result of what we win in the streets. We extract victories from the powerful, and force them to make concessions through the legal system. A century ago it was minimum wage and the eight hour day. Fifty years ago it was civil rights legislation. Brown V Board didn’t come about because the legal system suddenly awakened. It came about, because they realized the whole system was threatened if they didn’t change the legal superstructure to catch up with what was happening in the country.
The Twin Cities has had a strong Lawyers Guild chapter since the 1930s, and vibrant social movements that have relationships with those lawyers. The $15now win, for example, was not due to lawyers or the conviction of the City Council. It was the result of struggle in the streets, codified in an ordinance those in power were forced to pass.
It is up to us lawyers to defend social movements, to minimize the consequences to activists when they are charged by the state, and to open up space and codify victories they have won.
Minneapolis Interview Project Explained