San Francisco has more than 34,000 employees, and sometimes some of them get fired. In most cases, the workers are under union contracts, and termination requires some sort of cause, some sort of warning system, and some sort of due process: Your boss can’t just call you into their office one day and say you’re no longer needed.

But a small percentage or those workers are called “exempt,” which means they can be fired at will. The exempt workers tend to be political (supes aides) or people in senior positions (who don’t have contracts).

One of those workers is named Richard Whipple, and he played a huge role in supporting immigrants in the city as the deputy director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. He was fired in mid-November–without cause, without comment, with

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