Immigrants, supporters say: End ICE raids!

A terror raid against immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on May 12 devastated a whole town. (See WW, May 29.) Residents and local officials have expressed their shock and anger in the national media.

A group of Guatemalans living in the United States has launched an online protest petition focusing on those at the plant who came from Guatemala and make up approximately 300 of the 390 workers detained in this town of only 3,000 people. To add your name to the petition, contact regimarroquin at hotmail.com. To provide material assistance to the support effort that has been set up for the detained workers, visit mainstreetproject.org.

In Northern California the Alianza Latinoamericana por los Derechos de los Inmigrantes (ALDI—Latin American Alliance for Immigrant Rights) is providing frequent e-mail reports on ICE activities. Their May 23 news release says that in the preceding three weeks, ICE had arrested 905 individuals in California. Among these victims of ICE terrorism are 63 people who worked at El Balazo restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. ALDI has called for support demonstrations for these workers at their hearings. ALDI may be reached at alianzalatinoamericana at gmail.com.

Students at the University of California-San Diego organized a rally on May 22 to protest an ICE raid at an area bakery in which 18 workers were detained. Two human rights observers present at the raid were questioned, threatened with arrest, their video camera seized and the images on it erased. Following the raid another worker at the bakery, who is also a student at UCSD and a permanent resident of the U.S., was harassed by ICE agents at the campus housing where he lives with his family.

The harassed student, Jorge Narvaez, opened the rally by condemning “the inhumane process of extraction” practiced by ICE.

Pedro Ríos spoke representing the American Friends Service Committee. He was present at the raid and was threatened by ICE agents. “We must be allowed to document these raids,” he told the assembled crowd.

Olga Torres, a leader of VAPPOR-Oaxaca, condemned the “free trade” agreements that have made life in their home countries impossible for millions of workers.

Jorge Mariscal, a professor at UCSD and longtime activist, condemned the U.S. government for breaking down doors in Iraq and here. “Starving people will keep coming here, so the problem isn’t going away,” he pointed out.

Cecilia Ubilla, also a UCSD professor and one of many Chileans forced to flee their native country following the U.S.-sponsored fascist coup against the Allende government in 1973, expressed her solidarity with Narvaez and drew a parallel to Chilean fascism where, she emphasized, students were declared enemies of the state.

A student from the MEChA organization at San Diego State University said, to cheers from the audience, “Don’t ask for the ICE raids to stop. Demand it! We’re not illegal! We’re Indigenous to this land!”