About 200 Atlantans converged on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office downtown on Friday evening to denounce the agency’s Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The next day, Customs and Border Patrol agents killed another Minneapolis resident, Alex Pretti.
State Rep. Gabriel Sanchez (D-Smyrna) decried ICE as “a rogue fascist entity that completely ignores the rule of law” at the Jan. 23 rally — one of dozens of National Day of Truth and Freedom rallies held nationally to demand that ICE get out of Minnesota. Locally the protest was organized by a coalition that included Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America, Atlanta North Georgia Labor Council (AFL-CIO), Emory Unite, Starbucks Workers United, Union of Southern Service Workers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Campus Workers of Georgia, The People’s Campaign and Black Male Initiative.
Several protestors said the “ICE Out” demonstration, one of hundreds across the country on Jan. 23, was a way to build solidarity.
“By bringing people together, we’re creating community,” said Kathy Omaites, 67, a retired legal assistant who now works as a dog-walker and mobile notary public. The Smyrna resident braved the impending winter storm for the downtown Atlanta protest with her neighbor Carol, who declined to provide her last name for fear of right-wing doxxing.
The pair said they’ve been showing up regularly for protests since the 2016 police killing of Philando Castile, also in Minneapolis. That visibility matters, Carol said. “We are getting more people to be serious and ready.”
Zach Margulies, a 33-year-old graduate student at Georgia Tech, said he felt “a moral obligation to at least be present” — because of Good’s death — as well as a long list of other documented ICE abuses.
“When you see five year-old children apprehended or used as bait, this is just way too far,” Margulies said, referring to another Minneapolis resident, Liam Ramos, whom ICE agents took into custody Jan. 20 in his driveway along with his father, as he returned home from school.
Anti-ICE protestors lined the sidewalks on both sides of Ted Turner Drive for the two-hour peaceful protest Friday evening in front of ICE’s regional headquarters. It was held after office hours to get more people out on the street. “Even if this doesn’t accomplish anything, there’s an obligation to say: We don’t accept this,” Margulies said.
“You aren’t the good guys” is the message Georgia State University student Mueez Azfar, 22, said he wants to send to ICE and the Trump administration.
“I’d like to see a revolution happen,” Azfar said. “A peaceful one,” he added. Azfar said he’d also participated earlier last week in a GSU walkout and an anti-ICE rally at Hurt Park, which sits in the middle of GSU’s downtown campus.
“We need to give these people a reminder that when the Constitution was written, it wasn’t for citizens, it was for all people,” said Sanchez when he addressed the crowd.
The Smyrna legislator, whose parents are Colombian immigrants, exhorted the crowd not to give up hope. “It may seem very hard to see right now, but there is hope on the horizon,” he said.
The following day immigration agents killed Pretti, shooting the 37-year-old ICU nurse for the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis over 10 times at point blank range — first in the back, and then as his body lay prone on the ground.