In this episode, Jenny Beth is joined by Lori Roman, Chairman & CEO of the American Constitutional Rights Union, to discuss how her organization is carrying forward Ronald Reagan’s legacy by defending constitutional freedoms at every level of government. From exposing elder abuse and election fraud in nursing homes to combating woke policies in the military, Lori shares how ACRU is making an outsized impact on election integrity, free speech, and national security. Learn how ACRU is shaping the fight to restore liberty, and why now is the time for citizens to take action and safeguard our Republic.
In this episode, Jenny Beth is joined by Lori Roman, Chairman & CEO of the American Constitutional Rights Union, to discuss how her organization is carrying forward Ronald Reagan’s legacy by defending constitutional freedoms at every level of government. From exposing elder abuse and election fraud in nursing homes to combating woke policies in the military, Lori shares how ACRU is making an outsized impact on election integrity, free speech, and national security. Learn how ACRU is shaping the fight to restore liberty, and why now is the time for citizens to take action and safeguard our Republic.
Twitter/X: @The_ACRU | @jennybethm
Website: https://theacru.org/
Lori Roman (00:00):
But if all of us think we can just sit back now and say the administration's got it. Look at all those fighters. We have to keep fighting. There's so many battles at the state level, the local level, there's so much for all of us to do. We all helped get them there, but we can't abandon them now. We have to be the foot soldiers in doing the things that advanced liberty
Narrator (00:20):
Keeping Our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:52):
Today we're joined by Lori Roman, who is the chairman and CEO of the American Constitutional Rights Union. And I've known Lori since really the beginning of the Tea Party movement. Shortly into it. She's been a long time supporter, a very good friend, and I'm excited you're with me today, Lori.
Lori Roman (01:08):
Thanks Jenny
Jenny Beth Martin (01:09):
Beth. So explain to people what A CRU does the American Constitutional Rights Union.
Lori Roman (01:15):
Well, it was started over 25 years ago by some great advisors to Ronald Reagan, some of which you might recognize out there. Attorney General Ed Meese, who was the attorney general in the Reagan administration, and a close advisor to Ronald Reagan, Bob Carlson, who was known as the father of Modern Welfare reform. And both of those gentlemen came from California, Ronald Reagan state, and after the Reagan administration, they wanted to continue working on advancing constitutional rights. And they started over 25 years ago what was then called the American Civil Rights Union to kind of be the antithesis of the ACL U, but to fight on the side of liberty and free speech.
Lori Roman (02:00):
And we later changed that to the American Constitutional Rights Union because I got tired of explaining to people that we weren't the ACL U. And so it's American Constitutional Rights Union and we generally concentrate on a few things. First Amendment, second Amendment. Right now we're 14th Amendment and election integrity is a big part of what we do. And we're really happy that our team now includes Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, who leads up our Veterans Group committee to support and defend. And we just never get tired of advancing constitutional rights. And Attorney General Meese is still on our board and still active and we're so thankful for him. And at our organization we often say WWET, what would Ed do? And that guides us in what we do and in on our conduct and our ethics.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:54):
Ed Meese is an amazing man. He still has such a sharp mind and I was able to interview him in a podcast a few months ago. I just respect him so much. It would be such an honor to be leading an organization that he founded.
Lori Roman (03:10):
Well, I will say that in his nineties he doesn't have any trouble catching mistakes that I make in documents. So he's still very involved and we're very thankful for him and his example.
Jenny Beth Martin (03:22):
That is wonderful. So you mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Allen West. What does he do for you?
Lori Roman (03:29):
So he's our executive director and although most people probably associate him with our veterans work, he's really involved in all aspects of everything that we do. And he writes regular op-eds. We have also a podcast that he conducts called Live Free tv, and that is our motto, live free. And so everything related to live free TV and advancing constitutional rights. But one of the main things that he has been focused on and we've been working on for years and we're happy now to see such great progress is really getting the wokeness out of the military, the DEI programs that Alan really feels inhibit military readiness. And so one of the main things that we do is amplify the voices of veterans in Act of duty who really can't speak out for themselves, amplify their voices and push back against the things that really do affect military readiness.
Lori Roman (04:31):
And so that's what we've been doing now for years, making sure they have a voice and we amplify it and then we activate veterans to get busy in their communities, run for school board and at the very bare minimum vote. So what Allen always reminds folks is that oath that they took to defend the Constitution didn't have an expiration date. And so most of the time perhaps he's out with veterans, but he's working on everything and the bond that he has with veterans is really special. And I didn't realize it until he came in and we started traveling and doing some things together, but we joke that there has to be a 15 minute lobby buffer if you're walking through a lobby with Alan West because veterans flock to him. They love him, they genuinely love him, he genuinely loves them, and it's really something special to witness.
Jenny Beth Martin (05:21):
That is wonderful. He's such a great man. He was elected to Congress with that Tea Party wave back in 2010, and he is such a strong defender of our constitution. I respect him so much and it's amazing that you have him working with you and he's involved in the day-to-day, not just as a figurehead,
Lori Roman (05:43):
Right day to day executive director. And he is bold and that's what we like and we've always been for the last five years when I came into the organization, just set out to be bold and fearless. And Alan's a big part of that because no one's ever had to tell Alan to be bold and fearless. That's just who he is. Yes. But for instance, during Covid, we were the first national conservative organization to come out against Lockdowns and we were all over the country against lockdowns against mandates and transparency and freedom. So live free motto applied to Covid,
Jenny Beth Martin (06:27):
Right?
Lori Roman (06:27):
So get your facts about vaccinations, but you shouldn't have to take the vaccination. So we were very bold and very strong on that. And that just kind of has set the pace for us as far as and being fearless. And when you see Alan up on Capitol Hill talking to his former colleagues and he used to be on the Armed Services Committee, he's very bold and what he says about what some of the SW stuff has done to the military and what it's doing to our country. And at one point we put out a letter from veterans early on a few years ago and in the committee to support and defend and we partnered with another group, FLAG officers for America to do this, but we called it Our Nation is Imperil letter. And it was a very bold letter and it really outlined all these bullet points of where we were going wrong, not just in the military but Marxism. And we had over 10,000 veterans sign that letter to say publicly, the nation really is in peril and we can't survive like this. And part of that movement, there are all these movements now and now it's one big movement. But I feel like all these bits and pieces came together to see this wave that we have now where we're taking the country back. We are protecting against Marxism and thankfully I feel like God gave us another chance to save this country, but the veterans in this country I feel like had a really big part
Jenny Beth Martin (08:02):
In that. Absolutely they did, and they had a huge part and they were personally invested in what they were doing. What I mean is we can see the evidence of that because military enrollment decreased under the Biden years and then under just in the beginning of this first month and a half or two months of Trump, it's skyrocketing again. But they didn't want their own children, their own sons and daughters enlisting in a military that was creating the kind of problems and the uncertainty that we saw under
Lori Roman (08:43):
Biden. We were hearing three things in particular. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a turning point, A turning point I think in recruitment, a turning point in the country's morale and a turning point in the anger of veterans. We just had so much feedback from our members on the Afghanistan withdrawal forcing the Covid vaccine. We did a lot of work with military. We ended up hiring someone who lost their A chaplain who had lost his position because he refused to take the covid vaccine. These folks, they give up so much and they do so much for their country, but rightly so. A lot of them said, this is kind of the line in the sand for me. This isn't proven. I don't trust the vaccine. And to them, it didn't seem necessary to do their jobs. That was another thing that really was a turning point, I feel like for the military and for the willingness of a lot of people in the country to encourage their children to go into the military. Then the third thing was the transition in the military. So many of the veterans who were part of committee to support and defend just said, okay, that's it. That's ridiculous. That cannot contribute to military readiness. It's a detriment to our readiness. And I never heard one of them say anything negative about anyone personally. It was a matter of military
Jenny Beth Martin (10:11):
Readiness. Well, I've always felt like it is a matter of military readiness. I had to go through fertility treatments to get pregnant, and I was on medicines that affected my hormones. And I was just really crazy with some of the medicines and the people who were going through infertility treatment at the same time as we all joked about it, because it really just made you not even feel completely stable because of the sharp bone surges in your body. It is not a natural feeling. Well, I don't think that that would be a healthy thing for the military to put people who are that dependent on medications, certainly not. Maybe if they're on desk duty, it's one thing. But on active duty where their body is completely dependent on medicine, what if they're taking hostage? What if they are cut off from their supply of medicine for just a few days? It winds up making everyone around them less safe, not just themselves.
Lori Roman (11:17):
Right. Well, the boldness of Lieutenant Colonel Allen West on this issue was unsurpassed by anyone, and I really felt like he led the charge against this and spoke for our members and other veterans who felt like they didn't have a voice and that the world was spinning out of control. But the nice thing is now you see that uptick in recruitment and our members are feeling very optimistic and we've got a lot of work to do.
Lori Roman (11:49):
And one of the things that we keep talking about with our members and in our messaging is that it's not time to sit back and say, okay, the Trump administration has this. They can't do it all themselves. And I worked in the Bush administration and I spent many, many years in the swamp in the bureaucracy is very hard to turn the ship. And I just was seeing this morning that a judge ruled that the administration can't fire probationary employees. Okay, by definition you can fire a probationary employee. That's why they're a probationary employee. I'm sure all of this will get settled eventually at the Supreme Court, but when I was in the administration, the pushback within the swamp to work against us, to sabotage us, to trick us, it's very difficult to change things in the federal government. I mean, this president's bold and he's doing a fabulous job and he's assembled a great team.
Lori Roman (12:45):
But if all of us think we can just sit back now and say the administration's got it. Look at all those fighters. We have to keep fighting. There's so many battles at the state level, the local level, there's so much for all of us to do. We all helped get them there, but we can't abandon them now. We have to be the foot soldiers in doing the things that advanced liberty. Now I will say, even when I was in the Bush administration, I didn't always agree with everything the Bush administration did. And when you work in the administration, do you do as you're told, the president's your boss and you do as you're told. And if you can't support the president, you resign. That's what you should do.
Lori Roman (13:22):
And so those of us on the outside, we have a little more leeway. There will come times where we might not support every single thing, but there will be things that all of us can choose to support and to work toward to make the country better. We don't have to agree with every single thing, but we can all find things that we do support and we can work on. And it's hard right now at this pace, right? So 70 some executive orders and we're looking to see which ones we're focused on being supportive. But you have to check the news every few minutes to find out
Jenny Beth Martin (13:58):
You really do.
Lori Roman (13:59):
It's not even
Jenny Beth Martin (14:00):
Once every few hours. There really is several times an hour every hour of the entire day,
Lori Roman (14:06):
24 7. So I feel like the left is overwhelmed. Some of us on the outside are saying, okay, now we just have to choose our bits and pieces that we're going to work on, and we're not going to have mission creep. We're still going to work to advance liberty. We're going to work to advance free speech. Religious liberty, we are weighing in on birthright citizenship. This is something that Mr. Meese and others attorneys that have been with A CRU for a long time really do believe that we have to have an end birthright citizenship. So there will be some weighing in on that. We'll probably write a brief on that when it hits the Supreme Court. So we are picking but maintaining our mission, which is constitutional issues, anything that advances liberty is something that we're going to consider working on. And as always, what we often work on with you, which is election integrity.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:06):
That's right. So I want to go into election integrity, but one thing that you said a few minutes ago, you feel like God gave us a second chance or another chance. And I agree with that. I agree. And I think because of that additional opportunity that we have that I think is an answered prayer, we owe it to God, not just to our country, but to both God and our country to make sure we're using our talents to do all we can to take advantage of this opportunity and to save our country.
Lori Roman (15:40):
I think we have that obligation. We do have that obligation. Daniel Webster said, God Grants liberty only to those who love it and defend it. And that's what we're trying to get out to our members and the folks who watch lift free TV and the things that we do is we need to be working harder than ever before. This is no time to rest. We have a very small window of time to really put this country on the right course and protect it. And Congress, by the way, get busy. I mean, catch up, stop fighting, get things done, because we need all of this in statute.
Jenny Beth Martin (16:15):
That's right,
Lori Roman (16:16):
Permanency. And we have to protect it, and we have to protect our kids and future generations that this isn't a blip of freedom. This needs to be a long-term path for freedom. And I think for our organization, we're going to have very low tolerance for members of Congress who are looking for their own attention or their own glory or their own careers and not working together to advance liberty during this short period of time that we have. So I think we have to hold Congress to a high standard. It's pretty hard and it's a little unwieldy in Congress. You can't really keep up with the President, but support those good things that he's doing, the tax cuts and so forth, work hard and play well. Maybe not play nice. Maybe that's too much to ask for, but play well together. Right. That's
Jenny Beth Martin (17:09):
Fair enough. That's fair enough. Play well together. Okay. Election integrity. You have been working on election integrity and really making a huge difference, especially when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us. Explain that.
Lori Roman (17:26):
So those of us in the conservative world had often heard that through anecdotal stories that people in nursing homes had, had their ballots really stolen from them, either through ballot harvesting or sometimes they were suppressed, their votes were suppressed. But oftentimes activists were going in and filling out ballots for people with dementia. And so we knew this a problem, but no one had really ever tackled it. And so I decided that A CRU would be that organization and I'd always had a soft spot for people in nursing homes. And years before, I had volunteered for years in a nursing home doing just little things. And then when I became the president of a trade association in the salt industry, I found out that nursing home patients were being deprived of salt, which was causing cognition problems and balance problems and all kinds of problems. So I kind of got involved in helping nursing home patients then.
Lori Roman (18:29):
And then I took that love for the older people and nursing home residents to A CRU and said, the American Constitutional Rights Union is going to be the organization that tackles the problem of what I consider elder abuse and what attorney general Ed Meese from our board considers the most despicable form of vote fraud, which is taking advantage of elderly and often veterans who are in nursing homes and depriving them of their votes. And it really is a disgusting thing when you think about activists going in and filling out balance for dementia patients. And so we launched it in early 2020 and we started a campaign to educate nursing home directors and staff and advise them legally. So we started out by sending, and we still do this every election season, we send what we call the scary legal letter, and it's just a letter to the director by name of the nursing home or the facility or the assisted living or the group home that tells them under state and federal law what they should be doing to protect the rights of the people within their care.
Lori Roman (19:40):
And that has expanded over time. So we do training, we have materials, and now we have a blend of, we send the scary legal letter. It's not quite as scary maybe as you might think, but it's just telling them, here are the laws. This is what you have to do. Not just because you don't want a PR nightmare and you don't want your staff to go to jail and you don't want to go to out of business, but it's the right thing to do to take care of these people. And here's the other reason you should do it. We're watching and we like to litigate and we like to assist family members in filing formal complaints against people who do bad things. And so depending on the state, you will find yourselves in the crosshairs of district attorneys or secretaries of state or attorneys general, and we will help make that happen. And so it is a huge problem. And over time, what we found in 2020 and we first got started, we started this vote fraud hotline, and we got the most horrific phone calls. We had a phone call of someone said, my dad said that they told him if he didn't vote for Biden, that they would withhold food in medicine.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:52):
Wow.
Lori Roman (20:52):
I mean, really awful things were happening. And then we assisted a family in Texas where they used the Texas state system to see that their mom, who was nonverbal dementia patient in Lubbock had voted. Mom didn't even know what day it was, who the president was, barely recognized her own children at that point. And according to state records, she had voted. So we assisted that family with filing a formal complaint that was during Covid. It was difficult to investigate. And then as you know, Wisconsin, they did a special counsel report and a sheriff in Wisconsin did a study from 2020 based on complaints. So a sheriff found that multiple families had had their nonverbal dementia patient loved, one had been voted for on their behalf by someone, an activist or a nursing home member or someone. And then the Wisconsin Assembly did a huge special council report, as you know, which proved that that type of fraud was widespread in the 2020 election in Wisconsin. Now, the margin of victory for Biden in Wisconsin was very small. And we did calculations based on, there were five counties in Wisconsin, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but there were five counties in Wisconsin, the five biggest counties, three of those counties had 100% voter turnout in their nursing homes. This was according to the special 100%. So every percent women in their entire
Jenny Beth Martin (22:30):
Nursing home decided they wanted to vote In this election, they all vote all of them, even though the general population doesn't vote by nearly that much,
Lori Roman (22:37):
They do not vote by a hundred percent. And almost every one of those nursing homes has a memory care unit or a critical care unit. They have people who are comatose, they have people who are nonverbal dementia. And so in 2023 counties, every single nursing home patient voted. And in two other counties, 95% and 97%. And so obviously this is elder abuse, it is election fraud. But when you add up the numbers in Wisconsin, out of all the swing states, Wisconsin has the highest percentage of their residents in residential care facilities. And so when you look at the raw numbers of the number of people represented by those nursing homes, it could swing, it could have swung the election. And when you look at the study done by the special counsel for the Wisconsin assembly, and then you do the math very easily, just nursing home fraud in Wisconsin could have cost the election for Donald Trump. And so we're on the ground to abbreviate this a little bit. We're on the ground all over, but we're training them. What we're finding is that the nursing homes really do want the help and they're happy to have it, most of them.
Lori Roman (24:02):
And we train them. They love being able to call us when we can't answer a question, our legal team can answer a question. They don't want to be in trouble. They don't want the mugshot. So Father Murray nursing home in Macomb County, Michigan got a mugshot out of the 2020 election where one of their staff members was registering.
Jenny Beth Martin (24:24):
Nobody wants that
Lori Roman (24:25):
People to vote.
Lori Roman (24:27):
And that's really not the PR that anyone wants. And I will say when I travel around the country meeting with boards of nursing homes and CEOs and so forth, I take that Meg shot everywhere I go, and I just say, this is not what you want and it isn't what they want. And most of them have just been really cooperative. I will say Wisconsin is one of the least cooperative states, and we are focusing on that, I feel like. But at the most basic level, we are getting calls from nursing home anonymous calls from nursing home staff will say, Hey, I don't want to get in trouble, but I saw this.
Lori Roman (25:06):
And so we're really going to be active in this election coming up in Wisconsin in coming weeks. But now we've forged great relationships with nursing home staff and attorneys and board members all across the country, and we've just become a very cooperative resource with them. It's completely nonpartisan. We don't ask how anyone votes. We're not asking if they're Democrat or Republican or we don't even care. It's not even up to us to determine how they mark the ballot if they marked it incorrectly. We don't get into any of that. We just want clean fair elections,
Jenny Beth Martin (25:44):
Giving the ballots to those who've requested them and who are capable of requesting them.
Lori Roman (25:49):
That's simple. Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:51):
And not letting somebody who no longer can cast their ballot for whatever the reason, whatever health reason because they're elderly due to their age, to have a ballot cast in a manner contrary to what they would have wanted had they been loose, they probably would've wanted, we can't read their mind, but they either get to cast their own ballot or no one gets to cast it for them.
Lori Roman (26:17):
That's right. I mean, that's at its most simple level. Every state law is different. So it's a little tricky. All our legal letters have to be carefully crafted by the state. But the bottom line is this, if someone's not capable of asking and asking for their voter registration and doing it, there are some laws that allow, some state laws allow people to have some help in actually marking their ballot if they're unable to mark. So if they have the cognitive ability to make their own decision and their own free will, but perhaps they don't have the motor skills to market, there are accommodations in most state laws to allow help. But every state law is different too.
Lori Roman (26:58):
But generally speaking, if the cognitive ability is not there for them to request the registration themselves or request the ballot themselves and to exercise their free will, then no one should be forcing voting on them and no one should be filling out their ballot. And so there are multiple laws broken in most states registering someone that's the staff member in Macomb County, Michigan who went to jail, she didn't vote for anyone. She was registering people who were unable to register themselves, who did not request being registered. We had this situation just a few months ago in Wisconsin. We had in Wisconsin a complaint, a nursing home staffer called us and said, the special voting deputies sent by the election authorities in their city. The special voting deputies were registering people to vote who were comatose in their critical care unit. And so the nursing home is now ratting out the election officials. So we immediately contacted, and I'm just going to name and shame them, the municipal clerk for West Alice, Wisconsin. And we contacted them and said, this is the complaint we have. This is the nursing home. And we didn't give them the name. We gave anonymity to the nursing home worker. This is the nursing home. This is the critical care unit. It happened. We know it was one of your special voting deputies. There's only two of them. And they refused to investigate. They said, if we didn't give them the name of the anonymous, of course they did.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:39):
It's Wisconsin,
Lori Roman (28:40):
They're
Jenny Beth Martin (28:40):
Evil.
Lori Roman (28:40):
Or if we didn't give them the actual name of the special voting deputy, well, we said you sent them who the special voting deputies were in that facility. So they registered people who were clearly never going to be able to mark a ballot then because West Alice was not willing to do anything after repeated requests by us, then we just had to make sure that there were poll workers and people available to go in there and monitor. We had another situation, this was in a different state just a few months ago in the 2024 election where an activist was in a nursing home posing and pretending to be an election official. And so our poll worker that we had trained called the sheriff's Department, it's illegal to pose as an election official. And so that person literally ran out the door before the sheriffs got there.
Lori Roman (29:44):
So I mean, the things we see in here, it's unbelievable sometimes. But the great thing is the nursing homes have been, for the most part, they're just so happy to have the help because they never really thought about it before. They weren't doing any training on voting and voting rights. One of the things that I did when I first started this project, having been the president of a trade association, I went and looked at all the association websites in the states for the nursing homes, and this was the end of 2019. And if you looked at their annual meeting agendas, if you looked at their websites, you looked at their training materials, their continuing education materials. Nothing was about handling voting. It was kind of something they threw to the activity directors and a lot of 'em still do throw to the 25-year-old activity director with no training, and then you'd walk into a nursing home, there'd be ballots everywhere, just laying around.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:38):
Well, and I think that most of the people who work in nursing homes, they aren't doing that just because it's a job. They could go get a job in many other places, either as nursing, as nurses or whatever their position is. They're doing it partly because I believe because they care for the people who they actually are giving the care to and trying to help. And they don't want those people to be, they don't want their rights to be abused. They're not sitting there taking care of them all day long so that they can harm them. So what you're doing by offering the training and making sure that they're thinking about it, it is a service. It's not like you're doing it to just rat them out or be difficult for them. You actually want to help them.
Lori Roman (31:26):
And the cooperation from some of the state associations has been fantastic. They're so thankful. We get emails and notes all the time saying, thank you. This is something that has always been a difficult topic for us. We never knew how to handle it. Some of these, the turnover too. So you're training these people all the time because the turnover in nursing homes is very high. And we're doing all this for free in a completely nonpartisan way. We never, ever bring up parties and we never ask anyone about how anyone's voting. If fraud happens, we do not care who perpetrated it. If they're a Democrat or they're Republican, if it's illegal, we're on them. That's just the way it has to be a free and honest election for everyone.
Lori Roman (32:19):
And party has nothing to do with that. I mean, we have a senior citizen voting bill of rights. We train family members. We have materials for them. So we're training family members. We're training. We're providing information to residents. We give all this stuff for free. The senior citizen voting bill of rights, we'll give it in bulk to the nursing homes and they can pass it out to all their residents. They can give it to their family members, their guardians, all the training materials we give them, we give those for free. And there's not one speck of anything partisan in any of it. We are just honest brokers with these people. If they ask who we are, we tell 'em you, the parent organization is. But this part of what we do, there's nothing partisan
Jenny Beth Martin (33:02):
About it. I think that when it comes to election integrity, we all have to want, as Americans, there has to be a baseline that we just want to be able to trust the outcome of the election because they were run fairly in laws we're followed, period, whatever, regardless of who wins or loses. We have to have that trust in the election. And our organization, when we get involved, it's the same way. That's what the goal is. We're not doing it to manipulate a partisan outcome. We're doing it because we know that our country depends on citizens trusting the outcome of elections.
Lori Roman (33:38):
And in most cases in these nursing rooms, we weren't sure in the beginning. But what I'm beginning to understand now is a lot of times it's just that nursing home staff not knowing what to do or not knowing how to do things, would often let activists in the door under the guise of voter education or something like that. And people come in and these activists come in and they are taking advantage of the residents. It's most often not the nursing home staff. It's most often a nursing home staffer who doesn't understand, and they let in other people who then take advantage or ballot harvest. But usually, although I will say nursing home staff, some of them are susceptible to getting 20 or $50 and letting someone in the door. Most of them just don't make very much money and they don't understand the laws. But we help them understand the laws, which protects them too. We're really helping the nursing homes protect the residents, but we're also helping the nursing homes protect themselves.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:43):
So Lori, there's one other thing that you're working on in 2025 and 2026 with sheriffs that you will be working on. Do you want to talk about that?
Lori Roman (34:52):
Right. So Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, our executive director and I, illegal immigration has just been something that we've been focused on for a long time and really near and dear to Colonel West's heart. He's been on the border many, many times.
Lori Roman (35:10):
He's been down there with border patrol. And given what he's seen and being in the Middle East fighting terrorists and the bad guys, he realizes how much these open borders are a national security threat to our country. I mean, not only just a threat to our national sovereignty, but a threat to our national security. So we spent a lot of time in the border and it's just been a travesty what's happened and what we've allowed to happen with criminals and terrorists and cartel. This is something we've been focused on. Once again, kind of like the nursing home project. We were looking for a little subsection of where we can be supportive in the new reinvigorated efforts to close the border and to keep our country safe. So we've been focusing on looking at sheriffs and police departments in states that have a governor that is cooperative with ICE cooperative with the president and see how the counties are doing. So we're going to be rating the counties in these states. Okay, we're going to rate the counties on how well they're cooperating with ice. My thought process is, and our thought process is if you are a sheriff or a police chief in a state where you have a governor who is cooperating with ICE and protecting your citizens, that you have no excuse
Jenny Beth Martin (36:40):
Not to do this
Lori Roman (36:41):
Thing. To not do this, you have to be cooperating with ice. And so that means working on them with detention. So when you have a criminal illegal alien, you are making sure ICE gets to come in before you release them. When that ice detainer ISS on them, you let ice in to come and get them. But further than that, now the next step is working in a law enforcement perspective. So even those who are not already in your custody, you're working with ICE with these people who may not already be in custody, but they are a problem in your community. They're an illegal alien. They have a record or they've come to your attention through some action, and maybe they're not convicted yet, but you are now sharing information with ice. You're working together in a law enforcement methods. And so those are the two things that we're looking at.
Lori Roman (37:37):
Florida Governor DeSantis, where our headquarters are, and Governor DeSantis is doing a great job. Our state legislature has completely said, we are going to work with ice. We are going to cooperate. Governor DeSantis has come out and said, if you are not cooperating with this now state law, which is in cooperation with the federal laws, then I have the power to remove you from your position. So sheriffs in Florida are constitutional positions. They are elected. They're supposed to be upholding the constitution and the laws of the state. And so Florida's a great model, but we have to see this everywhere. And so what're going to be rating them, evaluating them. We are going to be holding up great examples like Collier County in Florida, a great example of doing things right and trying to work together, but we're also going to be naming and shaming those who are not doing this.
Lori Roman (38:39):
And Dallas Police Chief in the last couple of weeks, we've put a little heat on them, and they have said that in Dallas, they're not going to cooperate with ice. And so every single county of municipality will be evaluated by us, and there will be actions. There will be radio ads, there will be press releases, there will be legal letters. And this is the bare minimum. Are you protecting your citizens? Are you keeping them safe? Right. That's not, I mean, if you're a police chief or if you're a sheriff and you can't do the bare minimum to keep criminal illegal aliens from harming your citizens, then you shouldn't have that job. No. And we're going to make sure people know you shouldn't have that
Jenny Beth Martin (39:22):
Job. That's great. I'm excited to see that and we'll help promote it as you start rolling it out, because that is very important work.
Lori Roman (39:29):
Great. Thanks.
Jenny Beth Martin (39:30):
Well, Lori, you do such good work and I love how you are going in and finding where you can make a huge difference in a small area that winds up having a massive impact. More people should look at how they can do that. Thanks. Thank you so much for joining me today, Lori.
Lori Roman (39:45):
Well, thanks for all you do, Jenny Beth, and we love working together with you. And it's been a great and cooperative relationship for many years.
Narrator (39:52):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org
Jenny Beth Martin (40:12):
Party. If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know, every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow, and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.