Words & Photos by Josh Brokaw

A circle of people gathered round in a cold drizzle on the afternoon of Thursday, March 31, on Ithaca’s Commons to protest the detention of José Coyote Pérez by Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE].

Pérez is a farm worker and advocate who has lived in Livingston County for 17 years, according to the Worker Justice Center of New York. He was detained by ICE on Feb. 24 and is now being held in Batavia, though his case was closed in September 2016.

Rebecca Fuentes, of Syracuse’s Workers’ Center of Central New York, attended the bail hearing for Pérez in Batavia on Thursday morning. [More information about Pérez’s case is available at the Workers’ Center website.]

“Unfortunately the judge in charge of the case used to be a lawyer in a legal service nonprofit in Rochester, and last year José went there for some guidance,” Fuentes told the crowd. “Today he had to recuse himself in the case.”

Pérez’s re-scheduled hearing will be held on 2 p.m. on April 19 in Batavia at the federal detention center. Fuentes shared that another ICE detainee from Medina was granted bond this morning, for the price of $7,500.

Numerous other speakers and performers took the microphone over the hour-and-a-half rally, including Carlos Gutierrez of the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, who shared his own story of exile; an Ithaca College student who read a poem; and Colleen Kattau sang a song.

Jennifer Breen, a local immigration attorney, told of her trip to Dilley, Texas, where there’s a detention center for about 2,400 women and children.

“It’s a basic principle of both United States law and international law that there is a right to move when you have no other choice,” Breen said. “There were women who I thought deserved a party when they crossed that border, and instead they were treated like animals.”

Chelsea told the crowd about her husband, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who has been detained in Baker County jail, Florida, since December 2015.

“He’s been beaten twice for saying ‘I know my rights, don’t treat me like an animal,'” Chelsea said.

Below are some photos from the rally. If you have a story about these issues of immigration and detention by ICE, contact Truthsayers through the box in the top-left corner of our page.

Support more Truthsaying reporting with a donation today.

Alderperson Cynthia Brock told the rally that it was “un-American” that Perez’s “action in solidarity and leadership ended in his detention by ICE.”