Continuing Protests of ICE Across the Country—Much More Massive Resistance Urgently Needed

July 22, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Marches, blockades, die-ins and rallies demanding an end to the mass detention of immigrants continued across the country this past week. Thousands of people, from a wide range of backgrounds, have participated.

Never Again Action, an organization of mainly young Jewish people, has held demonstrations in about 17 cities throughout the country over the past several weeks. In Boston, over 1,000 people marched from the Holocaust Memorial to the Suffolk County House of Correction, taking over streets and stopping rush-hour traffic. Eighteen people were arrested. A 23-year-old organizer (over 30 of her family members were killed in the Holocaust) told a reporter, “When we grew up hearing the words ‘never again,’ it’s referring to a moment like this.”

In Elizabeth, New Jersey, 200 people organized by Never Again Action protested at an ICE detention center, and 36 were arrested for “obstruction of a public passage.” As Revolution reported last week, more than 1,000 people marched to shut down ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C. This past weekend, Never Again Action protests were held in Baltimore, Maryland; Orange, California; and Pompano Beach, Florida. In Houston, 150 people rallied outside an ICE concentration camp, and some sat down blocking the driveway into the building. Never Again Actions are called for this week in Milwaukee; Overland Park, Kansas; and Cleveland.

On Saturday, July 20, hundreds of people chanting “Close the camps!” protested outside Fort Sill, a U.S. Army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, and blocked an entrance to the fort for over an hour. The Oklahoman said the protesters included “members of Native American tribes, Black Lives Matter Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, Dream Action Oklahoma, a grassroots group of Japanese Americans called Tsuru for Solidarity, and more than two dozen Buddhist priests from across the country.” The executive director of Dream Action Oklahoma expressed a sentiment common to all the protests: “We are here to close camps across the country.”

These and other protests are positive developments that must be learned from, supported, and broadened. Millions of people are shocked and outraged by the relentless, vicious assaults on immigrants that are a cornerstone of the Trump/Pence regime’s fascism. The protests underway now indicate the possible breadth and persistence of truly massive and determined resistance to these attacks that is urgently needed, and the potential for it to contribute to the sustained resistance to the entire fascist agenda needed to drive out this regime from power.

A future entirely different from the one the Trump/Pence fascists are striving to consolidate is possible, but it must be fought for now.

Protest at Fort Sills, Oklahoma, July 20, 2019. Photo: AP

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