Exclusive : Patricia Okoumou says her four-hour standoff with police was fired by outrage at caging of migrant children

'Are they going to shoot me?': Statue of Liberty ​climber on her anti-Trump protest

The grainy aerial images of a woman clinging to the skirts of the Statue of Liberty were beaming live around the world for hours on Independence Day, as police tried to talk her down from her protest against Trump immigration policies.

But what was going through the woman’s mind as she huddled against the green metal folds of the statue’s robes, 30 meters above the ground, was: “Are they going to shoot me?”

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“I wanted protection from Lady Liberty,” Therese Patricia Okoumou – who goes by Patricia – told the Guardian, in her first one-on-one interview since her dramatic lone act on Wednesday.

Okoumou had wanted to climb as high as she could – even up to the famous torch that Liberty holds aloft – if that had been possible, she said.

“I had thought, ‘It’s the Statue of Liberty, it’s the Fourth of July and there are children in cages, we are doing a protest but I want to send an even stronger message and this is the perfect day for it.’ All of those elements together were necessary to give me the courage,” she said.

Earlier in the day, Okoumou had been taking part in a protest with Rise and Resist, a New York activist group of which she is a member. About 40 people from the group had traveled to the Statue of Liberty, on its tiny island off the tip of Manhattan.

Ten members of the group had unfurled a banner from the stone pedestal, saying: “Abolish ICE” – in reference to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which has sparked uproar with increasingly hardline enforcement of immigration policies. Seven of the protesters were arrested.

Play Video 0:36 Statue of Liberty protester arrested after standoff – video

But Okoumou, a 44-year-old personal trainer, had other plans. She had intended to scale the statue without telling the rest of the group, and secretly brought her American passport to use as ID in the event of her arrest.

Okoumou said growing up in her native Republic of Congo, she had enjoyed climbing on things. But her dramatic protest was unusual for her. “My heart told me to do it,” she said.

Millions became transfixed not long after 3pm local time, when TV news cameras began showing live footage of Okoumou clambering on the Statue of Liberty itself, waving her Rise and Resist T-shirt.

Okoumou explained she had been huddling against the green metal folds of the statue’s robes to stay out of the sight line of the police officer pursuing her, while also trying not to be blown off the slippery structure by circling media and law enforcement helicopters.

Speaking to the Guardian at an undisclosed location in New York City, as she sought to avoid a media crush, she demonstrated in a doorway how she had tried to wedge her hands and feet against the folds of Liberty’s robes in the hope of climbing higher.

“I tried to go like Spiderman. But it didn’t work. My legs were shaking, I was dizzy, it was windy. I said ‘God, please help me up,’” Okoumou said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patricia Okoumou is apprehended by police at the feet of Lady Liberty. Photograph: AP

At one point in the standoff with police, she took a brief nap, she said.

“I was thinking of Lady Liberty above me, you are so huge, you have always been a symbol of welcome to people arriving in America and right now, for me under this sandal, she is a shelter.”

She awoke to police banging on the inside of the thin copper structure. The island had been evacuated of its Independence Day visitors. The police officer standing at the top of a ladder introduced himself as Brian, she said.

“I said ‘Don’t come up.’ He said ‘I care about you.’ I said, ‘No, you don’t, you could shoot me the way you shot Claudia Gomez and killed the trans woman,’” she said, referring to Gomez, a 20-year-old Guatemalan woman shot by the border patrol in Texas last month, and Roxana Hernández, from Honduras, who died in Ice custody in May after reportedly spending five days in a form of chilled detention dubbed the ice box.

Okoumou said she feared she would be shot or tranquilized, and shouted to the officer that “my life doesn’t matter to me now, what matters to me is that in a democracy we are holding children in cages”.

Her standoff with police eventually came to an end when Okoumou was arrested in a heart-stopping moment, as the officers edged around the statue’s base and grabbed her.



Sleepless in federal custody that night, she says she experienced a strange tranquility.



“I felt peaceful, that I was with those children in spirit. I could feel their isolation and their cries being answered only by four walls,” she said.

“Those children” refers to the 2,000 - 3,000 who remain separated from their parents after crossing the border into the US unlawfully. The government has admitted it is not sure exactly how many children were separated from their parents, or how and when they will be reunited.

Donald Trump called out Okoumou’s protest in a speech he gave at a rally on the following night in Montana, calling her a “clown” and saying the police should have waited for her to jump rather than risk their safety climbing up after her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patricia Okoumou raises her hand in the air after leaving federal court from her arraignment. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

“Trump is inciting violence and division and the Republican party should not tolerate him,” Okoumou said. “It’s impeachable – you don’t talk about human beings as ‘an infestation’ as he has done. It’s disrespectful of the Founding Fathers and I don’t sleep well at night thinking about those babies crying for their parents.”

Okoumou immigrated from Congo 24 years ago and is a US citizen. She declined to discuss why she left Congo but said she admired the American ideal of “everyone work hard and work together for prosperity”.

She was charged in federal court on Thursday with three misdemeanors.

Outside, surrounded by cameras, she riffed on something that became a slogan for Michelle Obama, saying: “Michelle Obama – our beloved first lady that I care so much about – said, ‘When they go low, we go high,’ and I went as high as I could.”