On Monday, August 24, masked ICE thugs abducted over 25 of our immigrant neighbors across Danbury, Stamford, and Bridgeport. Their presence in our cities continues today as families are sending their children to start their first week of school. In addition to terrorizing the most vulnerable members of our communities, these fascist brutes are engaging in their usual tactics of intimidating bystanders and rapid response teams, documenting their flagrant disregard for human dignity.
As we stand in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors in these horrific times, we must also acknowledge the feeble response of our elected leaders. ICE agents carry out their campaign of terror with an impunity emboldened by the failure of elected officials to bring to justice the murderers of Johan Durán Guerrero, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti, among the dozens who died in ICE concentration camps. While politicians like Ned Lamont run campaign ads claiming to “stand up against ICE”, the reality on the ground continues to worsen. In Connecticut, ICE thugs have been recorded saying they are not accountable to state law, and it is clear that they do not expect to face any repercussions for wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, or brutalizing immigrants and bystanders alike. As ICE’s presence in our state grows, our leaders have thus far only offered hollow words of condemnation against ICE’s barbarity, despite the alleged goal of the Trust Act to prevent masked law enforcement agents from roaming in our streets. The refusal of our elected leaders to do anything more than provide empty platitudes and toothless legislation perpetuates the same conditions that have led to murder at the hands of ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
We are told that power is held in elected office, yet those who occupy those cushy seats have exercised none. Their willful failure to materially protect the targets of the Trump administration’s fascist agenda reaffirms the reality that we can only count on each other, the people, to stand up for ourselves and our neighbors. Earlier this year in Minneapolis, it was not Mayor Jacob Frey, or even Governor Tim Walz, that ended the ICE occupation; it was the sustained and collective community response across the Twin Cities. It was tens of thousands of workers walking out in a general strike in solidarity with their communities, risking their livelihoods.
It was working parents, retirees, and schoolchildren engaging in mutual aid while braving sub-zero temperatures.
It was ultimately citizens using their constitutionally protected rights to stand up for the dignity that this government denies our immigrant neighbors and violates daily.
If you tremble with indignation at every injustice we see today, if you have been waiting for the right moment to act in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors, and if you believe in a future free of the horrors we saw yesterday, now is the time to stand up.
Abolish ICE
now.
