HAPA is preserving the office of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project as a HISTORIC SITE to share the story of local organizing efforts to reign in abuse of protected civil liberties by government authorities.

Plant eradication was the ostensible goal of that arm of the war on drugs, but the tactics used disturbed and threatened the very lifestyle of a large local community that were becoming the “New Settlers”, a decade after the the Back-to the-Land rush of the 70’s. Ironically, these “outlaws” would turn to the law and courts as the only way to restrain abuse by government actions. The lawlessness of law enforcement continued, culminating in a literal invasion in July, 1990, when a joint task force converged at a base camp in Humboldt County for what was known as Operation Green Sweep. Led by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, it consisted of approximately 60 drug law enforcement agents, 110 California National Guardsmen and 60 regular U.S. Army soldiers from the 7th Infantry Division, the same unit that was used in the invasion of Panama during the previous December. Military helicopters flew overhead surveying residents, homes, and fields, and conducted road blocks, interrogations, and detentions. And backlash demonstrations, some violent, by Humboldt County locals against Green Sweep broke out.