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Report from the Connecticut branch of the IWW about ongoing anti-ICE organizing.

During a busy Thursday evening rush hour in front of immigration court in Hartford, CT, several hundred community members and allies gathered in defiance and anger at the assassinations of Claudia Gomez Gonzalez, Roxsana Hernandez, and the more than 7,200 people who have died while crossing the border over the past two decades.

"I didn't want to come to Mexico — I wanted to stay in Honduras but I couldn't…They kill trans people in Honduras." Roxsana Hernandez, a transgender woman who was part of the migrant caravan, has died in ICE custody. https://t.co/1sI8WOPNjQ pic.twitter.com/aGPE8y5yJ6 — Pero Like (@BFPeroLike) May 30, 2018

This number is the official estimate; we all know there are likely thousands more who have died at the hands of immigration agents and through the inhumane way families are forced to cross this imaginary line called the border. Claudia, an indigenous Mayan from Guatemala, was 19 years old and had decided to migrate to the United States to finance her college education. Roxsana was a trans woman who died while in the custody of immigration authorities on May 25th when she suffered a heart attack after the willful medical negligence of immigration authorities while in detention.

Members of several organizations spoke, including Unidad Latina en Acción, a radical grassroots immigrant rights organization that has been fighting for the rights of immigrants and workers across Connecticut for more than 15 years.

It is important to remember that what is happening now is nothing new. What has been happening to our communities for, indeed, decades, including under Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, is nothing short of genocide. We will never be able to rely on politicians or government agencies to protect us or our families. It ends now!

Immigration agents, both customs patrol and ICE, kill us in cold blood on the borders and deny us the medical care we need while in detention centers. They are committing genocide against our communities as they tear children out of the arms of our families, steal us from our homes, and strip workers away from jobs and livelihoods. We are calling for the abolition of ICE, the abolition of detention centers, and the abolition of these inhumane policies and immoral government agencies.

We want to make it clear that we are not immigrants. We are migrants. No one can be illegal on stolen land. So-called immigrants in the so-called United States stand in solidarity with our indigenous brothers and sisters as we call for a reclamation of the land we traversed for thousands of years before the colonizers came and started to kill us off. This is our land, this is our home, and we are reclaiming it as such. We reclaim our right to travel freely among the many lands of this continent.

To call attention to these issues and more, at a pre-determined signal, around 40 community members slowly walked out of the crowd and onto the plaza, directly in front of the immigration court building. As they began to lie down, others came around with chalk to draw outlines in order to leave a longer-lasting reminder to those who work within this genocidal system and passersby of the deaths, detentions, and separations suffered by thousands upon thousands of people every year. After several minutes, police made their way over to where we were laying and warned that anyone who didn’t move would be arrested.

In order to ensure the safety of everyone at the action, which included several families with young children, we slowly rose up and walked back into the crowd to chants of “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido,” “Cops and ICE and Klan go hand in hand,” and “La poli, la migra, la misma porquería.” Left behind were some bloodied handprints and the shadows of all those lost. We will not stop until ICE is abolished, all of our families and children are free, and we are once again able to travel our land unimpeded by power-hungry, white supremacist laws and leaders. As our final speaker put it, “This is a beginning.”