Neighbourhood resistance to an abduction by US immigration agency ICE last week prompted local police to back agents up by pinning a child to the ground.
Police back up ICE with violence amid neighbourhood outrage
A mother in Worcester, Massachusetts, was seeking asylum. She reportedly didn’t have a deportation order against her. But amid an increasingly aggressive and possibly unconstitutional assault on immigrants under the Donald Trump administration, things like due process don’t seem to matter.
Immigration officials (mostly bulky men) abducted the mother, but “crowds of neighbors” (many of them women) quickly came out to try and intervene, “surrounding the ICE vehicles and trying to stop them from leaving”. ICE panicked and called in police officers, who backed the agents up. Viral footage of the mother’s 16-year-old daughter show police holding her face down to the ground. Her understandably strong reaction to the abduction saw officers arrest her, along with another woman. The daughter’s 21-year-old sister, whose daughter’s father had been taken by ICE the day before, said she had been left “very traumatized”. Massachusetts Department of Children and Families are currently holding both her 16-year-old sister and 13-year-old sister.
Hundreds of people attended a peaceful protest in Worcester on 11 May, with one protester insisting that “the Safe Communities Act provides due process for these immigrants”. Another protester said:
We don’t want to live in a community where our neighbours are pulled off the street.
Resistance is fertile
In March, masked agents elsewhere in Massachusetts abducted PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, focusing on her opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Critics have called her kidnapping a “chilling violation of civil liberties“. But after protests, legal action, and a six-week stay in a Louisiana abduction facility, this weekend saw a judge order her release on bail. The legal battle is not over, but the pressure seems to be paying off.
Another anti-genocide abductee, Mohsen Mahdawi, had received a similar release order previously. His battle continues, but has now launched “a legal defence fund to help immigrants like himself who are facing deportation hearings”.
Intensifying the Joe Biden administration‘s repression of anti-genocide students, Donald Trump’s government has gone after prominent activist voices like Ozturk, Mahdawi, and Mahmoud Khalil. The latter is now about two months into his ordeal, having to miss the birth of his son in the process. A judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation, while pushing Trump’s regime to justify using an obscure law to persecute the campaigner over potential “foreign policy consequences”.
The rise of Trump-style politics very much relies on lack of popular engagement in the political process. But as recent weeks have shown, challenges both on the street and in the courts can be incredibly powerful. And the more the Trump administration oversteps, the more resistance it will face.
Featured image via screengrab
