Picnic protest: 60 demonstrators surround ICE agents during spring picnic

HENDERSONVILLE — About 60 people protesting recent raids of the Western North Carolina's Hispanic community encircled a public picnic shelter where federal immigration authorities were eating lunch Friday afternoon.

To the beat of a small brass band, protesters shouted "El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!" — The people, united, will never be defeated! — while about 30 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other law enforcement personnel ate.

As the demonstration reached its crescendo, federal agents had to shout across picnic tables to hear each other over the chanting and music, which was exactly the goal of protest organizer Bruno Hinjosa.

Hinojosa heads the immigrant rights advocacy group Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Accion, meaning Companions of Mountain Migrants in Action. He organized Friday’s protest to apply pressure to immigration agents who he said have arrested about 25 people in Buncombe and Henderson counties since Saturday.

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“It’s time to push as hard as we can on local enforcement agencies,” Hinojosa told protesters before they surrounded the picnic. “Somebody needs to be held accountable. WNC has been attacked, and I don’t think this is something to celebrate.”

ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said the picnic is an annual event that was planned well in advance of the week’s immigration enforcement actions. He said that nobody who participated in the raids was present at the picnic and that any claim that the event was a celebration of the arrests is “just categorically false."

Hinojosa told the Citizen Times that he doesn’t believe that the date of the picnic was a coincidence, nor does he believe that the picnic goers had nothing to do with the immigration raids. Even if Cox is to be believed, Hinojosa said, the protest fulfilled its purpose.

“The fact that so many people were there with us shows that the community doesn't want anything to do with immigration agents," he said afterward.

Several picnic participants declined to tell the Citizen Times their names or their agency affiliation.

Cox said that lawyers with the U.S. Attorney's Office and officers from local law enforcement agencies attended the picnic along with agents from ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division, which he said is separate from immigration enforcement and removal. Several ICE agents arrived and departed in cars that bore no license plates.

Henderson County deputy sheriffs monitored the event and initially tried to confine the protesters to a separate picnic area, but they didn't intervene when demonstrators left the designated protest picnic shelter and surrounded the ICE event.

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Jorge Ramirez, a farm worker from Hendersonville, said that he protested the picnic because he believes immigrants are not being afforded fair treatment by the country that they’re helping make better.

Ramirez is originally from Mexico and said his younger brother, Alejandro, died fighting for the United States in the Middle East.

“When I see these raids, I wonder if it was worth it for him to go die for this country,” he said. “I think he would say no.”

Leslie Heywood, a social worker with Henderson County Social Services, said she attended the demonstration because she works with the Hispanic community and sees how it has been impacted by the immigration raids.

Heywood, who emigrated from Mexico, said none of the people with whom she works were arrested by ICE in the region’s most recent raids, but she said that her clients are scared nonetheless.

“These raids are putting tremendous fear in kids and families, and it seems like that’s the goal,” she said. “This resembles very much how the Nazis targeted the Jews. People have gone into hiding.”