California is often hailed as a leader amongst states on progressive issues, particularly those related to women’s rights. Yet California is now on the verge of passing a law that facilitates placing pregnant women in solitary confinement. As someone who experienced the dehumanizing and degrading effects of being placed in solitary confinement while pregnant, I feel compelled to speak up and speak out.

I was arrested when I was six months pregnant, and placed into solitary confinement. When I was taken to court my arms were shackled to my waist, despite the fact that I was pregnant. When I gave birth I was handcuffed to the hospital bed, and treated like I was less than human. Giving birth can be one of the most beautiful and sacred experiences a person can have, yet for me it became a dark and degrading experience because of how I was treated.

Across the world, in all different countries and cultures, pregnant women are viewed as a symbol of life, and are cared for, accommodated, honored and respected. Yet in California jails and prisons, placing them in isolation is somehow viewed as acceptable. California has no law on the books that prevent pregnant women from being placed in solitary confinement, a practice that most of the enlightened world views as a form of torture.

What is perhaps most shocking to learn, is that attempts to legislate protections for pregnant women have not only been undermined, but they have been transformed from a ban on placing pregnant women in solitary confinement, to legislation that facilitates this placement for up to five days, with no medical or third party oversight.

I am referring to AB 2527, a bill by Asm. Bauer-Kahan that started out as a blanket ban on the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails and prisons. Speaking about the bill, Asm. Bauer-Kahan was quoted as saying: “To be pregnant, to remain healthy, I really, truly believe that restrictive housing shouldn’t be a part of the equation.”

Just days later, Bauer-Kahan accepted amendments by correctional authorities that fundamentally altered the bill from ending solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails and prisons, to empowering CDCR to place pregnant women in solitary for up to five days based on when there is a security concern.

To be clear, the legislature is proposing solitary confinement if a pregnant woman, and an unborn child, is facing a security concern. They are not providing a safe alternative to solitary, such as a trauma informed unit that can house a pregnant woman individually, but provide them with guaranteed time out of cell, and access to medical care and programming. Instead the proposed legislation places complete power in the hands of CDCR, without even requiring the development of a medical plan, or a cumulative limit to how many five day stretches of isolation can occur in a particular period.

The bill also completely eliminated all protection to pregnant women in county jails, so it would not have applied to me. Based on available information, instead the supposed “protections” of AB 2527 would apply to seven people in the entire state of California.

These amendments all took place during a period where the legislature quietly prevented the California Mandela Act from being sent to the desk of Governor Newsom. The Mandela Act twice received broad support in the legislature, and included a provision that would completely eliminate the use of solitary confinement for pregnant women in jails, prison and private detention facilities.

Now California appears to be moving backwards on this issue. Why? Apparently to send a bill that purports to care about pregnant women to Governor Newsom’s desk, in order for him to turn them into a tool to undermine real conversations for change.

This past week, I attended the military graduation of my son, who was born while I was in solitary confinement. Since my incarceration I have started a successful business, become an advocate, and am in the process of finishing my college degree. I am proud to reflect on my own resilience through the face of adversity, and honor my the strength that both my son and I have as survivors of solitary confinement. This reflection also includes a commitment to prevent what happened to me from ever happening to anyone else in California.

Cynthia Mendoza is a formerly incarcerated advocate and solitary survivor and is currently completing her education at California State University, Los Angeles

In an interview with Reuters, Satinder Pal Singh Raju, of Woodland, California, said FBI agents on Thursday came to speak with him and a friend who was driving the truck when they and another passenger were attacked on Interstate 505 South in Yolo County on their way back from a late dinner in Vacaville.

Nijjar was killed in June 2023 outside his gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. That killing, and Trudeau’s suggestion of possible Indian government involvement, triggered a diplomatic crisis between the countries.

Speaking through an interpreter, Raju said a white car pulled up to the left of their truck, then fell back behind them before pulling up alongside them again. That was when the first bullet was fired.

“With the first shot, I ducked down,” he said. “But then I heard more gunshots fired.”

As they attempted to escape the gunfire, their truck skidded and veered off the road into a ditch, said Raju. He and his two friends fled into a nearby field and hid behind a haystack while they called 911. Police officers later told him they located at least five shell casings.

The FBI’s Sacramento office confirmed it is collaborating with the California Highway Patrol “in support of the investigation” into the shooting.

A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol confirmed the shooting occurred, but declined to provide details and said the investigation is ongoing.

In the same month as Nijjar’s killing, the FBI foiled an alleged assassination attempt against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, another prominent Sikh separatist with dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. Pannun is general counsel for Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), a banned outfit in India.

The US Justice Department has charged Indian national Nikhil Gupta with trying to arrange Pannun’s murder at the behest of an Indian intelligence official.

Gupta pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in New York.

Four Indian nationals in Canada are facing charges of murder and conspiracy in the death of Nijjar.

India has denied involvement in both incidents, and it was not clear if there is a connection between the drive-by shooting involving Raju and those earlier incidents.

The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on Friday about the recent shooting in California.

In the days and months after Nijjar’s killing, the FBI and the Canadian Royal Mounted Police privately warned at least seven Sikh activists that their lives could be in grave danger, without specifying the source of the threat.

Raju told Reuters he was not among those who received such calls. Raju is involved with SFJ, an advocacy group co-founded by Pannun that organises non-binding referendums around the world to urge Punjab to secede from India and carve out an independent state called Khalistan.

The movement led to a violent insurgency in India’s Punjab state in the 1980s and 1990s.

The August 11 shooting occurred two weeks after Raju had returned from Calgary, Canada, where he helped organise a referendum that drew the participation of an estimated 55,000 members of the Sikh community, according to Pannun.

In 2019, India declared SFJ an unlawful association, citing its involvement in extremist activities. Pannun and its members deny these allegations.

Raju is not as well known as Pannun internationally, but he said he is active with organising referendums.

He said he does not have enemies, and suspects the shooting was motivated by a desire to stoke fear in those supporting the Khalistan movement. “…this attack on me and the death threats is not going to deter me from continuing the campaign,” he said.

Until recently, Satinder Pal Singh Raju was a mostly unknown figure in Northern California’s large and sprawling Sikh community.

From his home in the small city of Woodland, he worked as a trucker — a popular job for Sikhs — took care of his wife and kids and was a regular at Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, the temple where he’s prayed since emigrating from India nearly 19 years ago.

In his free time, he volunteered to travel Northern California and Canada to organize educational events and symbolic voting drives to establish a long-desired independent nation, Khalistan, that Sikh activists want to carve out of India’s Punjab region. India considers the decades-old global separatist movement to be a terrorist operation because of its territorial ambitions and violence committed by some of its offshoots.

On Aug. 11, when Raju was making a late-night food run with two friends, someone fired at his pickup truck as it traveled down Interstate 505 in rural Yolo County. At least four bullets struck his vehicle, police said. Raju and his friends — who are also Sikh activists involved in the separatist movement — were not injured, although their car veered off the road, coming to rest near a drainage ditch and a two-story stack of hay.

“They tried to kill me,” said Raju, 44.

In the last two weeks, news of the shooting has reverberated across Indian media and Punjabi-language radio shows in North America as fears grow among California Sikhs about recent threats against them because of their political activity in opposition to the right-wing, nationalist Indian government. In recent months, Sikh leaders at several temples across Northern California have reported anonymous calls and text messages that threaten them in Hindi for pro-Khalistan activities.

There has been debate in the Sikh community about whether the attack on Raju and his passengers could be linked to broader transnational incidents in Canada and the U.S. in which authorities have accused the Indian government of having links to the fatal shooting of a Sikh activist in British Columbia and a plot to kill another in New York.

India has denied all allegations.

Local law enforcement in Woodland and the California Highway Patrol, which responded to the 911 call, have not commented on the motivation for the shooting and publicly released information about it on Aug. 22, 10 days after the incident. In a statement, the FBI said it “continues to collaborate” with the CHP on an investigation and “takes all acts of violence seriously.” The Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not reply to questions from The Times.

Activists targeted

The Sikh Coalition, a U.S.-based civil rights group, said in a statement that the Yolo County incident, while under investigation, “underscores the continued threat of Indian transnational repression.”

The activists targeted in the Canada and New York cases were involved in a group called Sikhs for Justice. The organization promotes nonbinding referendum votes across the globe for the Sikh diaspora to express support for Khalistan, which means “land of the pure” in Punjabi. Voting events this year in Sacramento and San Francisco attracted tens of thousands of Sikhs.

In May, Canadian police arrested three Indian nationals residing in Alberta in connection with a June, 18, 2023, shooting that killed Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar — a close friend of Raju’s — as he stood outside his temple.

The three suspects — as well as a fourth alleged associate who was previously arrested — appeared in court this month on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial was delayed until October. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police — Canada’s national police force — did not disclose how it found the men. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Canadian intelligence agencies were looking into “credible allegations” of possible Indian government involvement.

India has said that Canada has shared no evidence to back its allegations of government involvement. It instead accused Canada of giving “shelter” to extremists.

In November, the U.S. government alleged in a federal indictment that India paid a hit man — an undercover agent connected to the Drug Enforcement Agency, it turned out — to kill a Sikh activist in New York who is a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs for Justice. In the indictment, the U.S. accused an unnamed Indian official of working with a known international narcotics trafficker to hire the fake hit man for $100,000. The trafficker was arrested in the Czech Republic and extradited in June to New York. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court ahead of a September trial.

India has said its investigation into U. S. charges found that “rogue” agents of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s spy agency, were operating without government approval.

Sikhs vow to continue

Activists brush off the denials and said they remain unflinching in their commitment.

“They lie,” said Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs For Justice who has been promoting Raju’s case. Pannun is the New York resident that the U.S. government said India tried to kill.

“If a bullet and death is the price to pay for Khalistan, that is what we will face as Sikhs,” said Pannun, who produces YouTube shows from his Astoria, Queens, office where he rails against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He’s now turned his attention toward Raju, who has become somewhat of a hero in the tight-knit community of Sikhs who organize for Khalistan.

For Raju, the shooting has emboldened his activism.

“What more is there to but keep on going?” he said. “We can’t stop now. We can’t be scared.”

Not all of of his co-activists agree with Raju’s allegations of a possible Indian plot against him.

“We don’t really know what happened. It could be something else,” said Bobby Singh, a 24-year-old Khalistan organizer in Sacramento who said he knows Raju from local pro-Khalistan rallies. “Still, we demand a full investigation.”

Decades-long strife

Sikhs number about 500,000 in the U.S., the third-largest population outside of India after the United Kingdom and Canada. About half of U.S. Sikhs live in California, where their presence in the Bay Area, Stockton and Sacramento goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While the most ardent activists for Khalistan, such as Raju, make up a small group, support for the movement is widespread among Sikhs in the United States. Posters and prayers at temples regularly cite the envisioned Sikh nation.

Many, like Raju, point to modern Indian history as the reason why.

Now 44, he was a young boy growing up in the Punjabi city of Jalandhar during a peak of strife between Sikhs and the Indian government.

In 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a siege on separatists occupying the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism. In response, her two Sikh guards assassinated her. Mobs went rampage around Delhi, killing Sikhs, often with government approval. Some estimates put the deaths in the tens of thousands. In another incident a year later that was tied to the violence, militants blew up an Air India flight over the Atlantic, killing 329 people.

Raju has friends and family back home who saw the violence of that era, he said, and knows people in India who faced lingering discrimination against Sikhs over the decades.

That — and the opportunity to work and live in America — brought him California when he was 25. Raju moved in with family in Woodland and got a job in trucking. He briefly quit to run a Punjabi grocery store before returning to trucks a decade ago. For much of his working life, Raju has been on Interstate 5, hauling dry goods from California to Oregon and Washington state.

Growing activism

“I was not very political,” he said. That was until 2016, when friends from the West Sacramento temple recruited him to volunteer for Sikhs for Justice. The growing group had ambitions to launch voting drives for Khalistan across Sikh population centers from London to Australia.

Raju would be in charge of educating Sikhs about the process — a way to show global Sikh support for the nation they seek to establish — and helping with voting centers in California and Canada. In WhatsApp groups and in-person gatherings, he got to meet Sikh activists who crisscrossed the globe in support of the cause.

It was a part-time hobby until last year. That’s when his friend, Nijjar, was shot dead ahead of that region’s vote.

“I was mourning,” Raju said. He took time away from trucking to spend three months in Surrey, Canada, a suburb of Vancouver, to organize the voting referendum. When Sikhs came together in San Francisco in January for a Khalistan vote, Raju was there. He joined in Sacramento, too, when a vote took place in April. Raju was in Calgary, Canada, until voting there concluded last month.

Unlike some higher-profile activists, Raju never received threats. But he suspects that his increasing visibility through his travels, including photos where he posed with Nijjar, put him on the radar of those opposed to his work.

The night of the shooting

During the day on Aug. 11, he said, he was at home in Woodland with two friends from the Khalistan movement who are less involved than him and asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety. Raju had spent the day playing with his young children before talking late into the night with his associates.

Hungry, they got on the road to drive south on I-505 for Vacaville, where BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse was open until midnight, Raju said.

His friend was driving Raju’s Dodge Ram 1500. Raju was in the passenger seat and the other friend was in the back. About 11:30 p.m. they noticed a car, possibly a white Honda Civic, following them closely, Raju said.

The Honda pulled to the passenger side of the truck, Raju said, and someone — he didn’t see who it was — began shooting. The three friends ducked and the car rolled into a ditch. Raju said they got out and briefly hid behind bales of hay, still visible Thursday afternoon.

“I’m thankful I survived,” said Raju. “Our religion is one of peace. But we also have to fight for our rights. So we will keep on going.”

Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Garrison from Woodland. Staff writer Richard Winton contributed reporting.