Car Protest Demands End to ICE Detentions

You don’t get exactly the same feeling of solidarity when you wave at each other from the driver’s seat, but the horn makes up a lot of the difference.

If it were not already clear, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a disgusting arm of the US government. They hound and harrass migrants, separate children from families, and do it all with a smirk on their face. The people they target have been scapegoated as ‘criminals,’ ‘aliens,’ and worse. Many come to the US fleeing violence linked to the US government itself. In many ways, ICE is the logical conclusion of the age old tradition of American Nativism -- brutalization. 

ICE operates a data center in Williston, Vermont, which coordinates these operations. So, we honked like hell to tell them off. On April 17th, Migrant Justice and Community Voices for Immigrant Rights organized Vermont’s first pandemic-era car protest with the help of the Vermont Peace and Justice Center. Members of CVDSA’s Covid-19 Response Working group lined up with the others in the Home Depot parking lot in Williston. Community Voices for Immigrant rights member Bria Yazic roused us with a speech that made the stakes clear. From the hood of the car, Bria made the following demands:

1. Release all detainees

2. Stop ICE arrests and deportations

3. Close the ICE data center in Williston, VT

4. Ensure that undocumented essential workers receive benefits and are included in COVID-19 response plans.

These demands are crucial at a bare minimum--the pandemic has only made the continuous human rights crisis worse. 

At the Mexican border, ICE detains people and throws them back into the desert without any medical examination. ICE holds many others in detention and the US government pushes Mexico to do the same thing. With overcrowded and unhygienic conditions, these detention centers (aka prisons) leave detainees at a huge risk and with few resources. Many detainees that ICE deported from detention centers have already tested positive for covid-19, exacerbating the spread of the virus. It’s not an exaggeration to say detention is a death sentence.

In an effort to keep safe, protestors took strict measures to stay socially distant. For 45 minutes, we laid on our horns while we drove Harvest Lane. And it was loud! 

This protest was a crucial effort to register discontent and make public our resistance to ICE, but I hope we can build further from here. As Thelma from Migrant Justice, speaking through an interpreter, laid out: 

“We have to free all of our people who are suffering…[especially] in a situation that puts their lives in danger from the virus.” 

For me, freeing all the people means fighting like hell against detention centers, and beyond that. We need farmworkers to be free from exploitative labor, cramped living conditions, and exposure to toxins at work. We need to fight for everyone suffering in Vermont, about 40,000 of whom filed unemployment claims in the wake of the crisis. We need to fight for an end to US hegemony abroad. Onward to May Day, when we’ll fight for just that.