Over 50 protesters stood outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Downtown Fresno on Tuesday. Speakers chanted and delivered their messages to the crowd, encouraging those who gathered to get involved with their community and take a stand against ICE.
One of the upcoming community actions is a strike planned for tomorrow. In addition to withholding their labor, Faith in the Valley plans to organize the event as a day of fasting as well.
“ICE is a huge issue, it’s terrorizing just about everybody’s communities nationwide,” said Atticus Martin, a member of the Central Valley Party of Socialism and Liberalism (PSL) and organizer of the Jan 20. event. “We’ve started to see an uptick in ICE arrests in Fresno over the last year; people are really sick of this military occupation happening within our communities.”
Members of many other organizations attended the demonstration, and some representatives delivered speeches, including Peace Fresno, the ANSWER Coalition, the MEChA Chapter at Fresno City College, Fresno WILPF and Faith in the Valley.
“We’re here to give people a call to strike, to withhold their labor,” Martin said.
The push for the strike tomorrow is in solidarity with the Minnesota general strike planned for Friday in response to ICE actions. The general strike calls for all Minnesotans to stay home from work and school and to refrain from shopping, suspending the normal order of things to protest ICE’s presence in Minnesota.
“I want to emphasize that a general strike does not start overnight,” Martin said. “It starts with organizing our workplaces, our unions and our neighborhoods.”
Along with several other speakers, Martin encouraged the crowd to sign up for the national general strike, as research shows the effort of 3.5% of the national population, or 11 million Americans, would be necessary for the general strike to be successful.
Dan Yaseen, president of Peace Fresno, said that what’s been going on in the U.S. is unprecedented.
“I’m an immigrant, I’ve been here for 52 years and it’s unbelievable what we’re seeing,” Yaseen said. “[ICE] is being horrible to people, especially people of color. They’re arresting, detaining, deporting people even to countries they didn’t come from and being tortured in countries like El Salvador.”
Yaseen encouraged people who did not attend the protest to get involved in their community.
“If you don’t stand up, if you stay silent for the things that matter, then things are not going to change,” Yaseen said. “It is up to us to talk to our neighbors, talk to our families, talk to our friends, talk to our colleagues at work to take action.”
Both Yaseen and Martin recommend that those who are interested reach out to Faith in the Valley’s Valley Watch Network for a number of various resources for those who may be targeted by ICE. This includes connections to legal resources and accompaniment to immigration court hearings and medical appointments.
Roman Rain Tree, a community organizer with Faith in the Valley, was also one of the people to speak at the protest, emphasizing the importance of joining the Valley Watch Network and becoming a legal observer.
“[ICE] is still at work,” Rain Tree said. “There are people still detained here from yesterday, from the day before. People are being kidnapped off our community, out of our streets, put into this building, before they go to California City.”
Rain Tree added that it is not the job of legal observers to interfere or prevent any detentions from taking place, as they are only there to document what takes place during the detention in order to share that information with the family and legal team of those who are being detained.
“We need more people,” Rain Tree said. “I already had two calls already of folks being detained. We can’t cover the entire community.”
The protest remained peaceful in its entirety as people spoke and shared information with one another.
