Around 100 anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstrators rallied at the Connecticut State Capitol lawn on Friday to stand in solidarity with Minnesota’s “ICE out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom Rally.”
The protest was held from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. and organized by a variety of groups, including the Connecticut Democratic Socialists for America (DSA) and Connecticut American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
AFL-CIO president Ed Hawthorne spoke about how the rally was intended to shut down hundreds of businesses in Minnesota as part of a strike against ICE, according to the protest’s website.
“We cannot allow the kidnapping and murder of our neighbors to become normal,” Hawthorne said, adding that organized labor is meeting the moment. “The working class of Minnesota know this to be true, so they organized a strike.”
Rallygoers did call-and-response chants like “up, up, with liberation, down, down, with deportation,” and “abolish ICE,” as temperatures dropped into the 20s while the sun set.
One group of protestors began their demonstration hours before the protest began, waving a flag for Palestine and a pride flag with a peace sign outside of the Abraham Ribicoff Court House on Main Street.
Eric Stamm, a member of the group, said his first protest was back in 1959, when his parents took him to a rally for banning the bomb and walked from Manchester to Hartford. Now, he routinely attends multiple protests a week.
“This is my third protest this week,” Stamm said, adding that he planned to protest again on Saturday afternoon in West Hartford. “It’s time to be out on the streets now.”
On Saturday, one day after the “Day of Truth and Freedom Rally,” a 37-year-old U.S. citizen named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, according to The New York Times. A press release was issued later in the day announcing that local law enforcement in Minneapolis had requested the Minnesota National Guard to be present around the area Pretti was shot.
Rochelle Palache, vice president of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ, spoke about her dissatisfaction with how much federal state funding was going towards ICE and the governmental leaders passing bills funding it.
“Do your jobs,” Palache said, leading a chant criticizing policies which prioritize ICE instead of other social services like schools, housing and transportation. “Demand an end for racial profiling.”
Mars Rodriguez, a protestor with Connecticut DSA, said that recent actions by ICE were the main drive for attending the protest, but that their frustrations ran deeper than that.
“Trump is a product of decades of neoliberal and imperialist policies,” Rodriguez said scathingly. “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”
Throughout the protest, the crowd reiterated their intention to keep things peaceful and non-violent and practiced an arm-linking circle to defend against any escalation.
Multiple speakers at the protest brought up an escalation at a previous Hartford demonstration where protestors were knocked down and pepper-sprayed during a vigil for Renée Good at the Abraham Ribicoff Court House on Jan. 8. The crowd would chant back “shame” when a speaker discussed the incident.
The last speaker at the rally, Julio Núñez-García, focused on ICE detentions in Connecticut more specifically.
“We have seen empty seats at graduations,” Núñez-García said, referring to instances like a Milford teenager getting deported days before his graduation, according to Connecticut Insider. He also discussed meeting a 13-year-old girl named Monse during a New Haven protest last year whose mother had recently been deported. “That day, I realized that the abolition of ICE is not just a dream, but a necessity.”
The next anti-ICE protest at the Connecticut State Capitol will be on Tuesday, Jan. 27, from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., according to a Facebook flyer by Indivisible CT.