Activists target Ice facilities in cities including San Francisco and Philadelphia: ‘We’ll be here as long as we can’

Occupy Ice protests have spread across the US, with new occupations and encampments growing outside federal immigration facilities in San Francisco and Philadelphia this week.

The demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) are escalating as progressive activists and some Democrats are calling for the abolition of the federal agency carrying out the Trump administration’s xenophobic agenda and widely condemned deportation machine.

“We will be here as long as we can,” said Imri Rivas, a 25-year-old camped outside a San Francisco Ice building on Tuesday. “What’s important for me is the active disruption of Ice operations. I hope people do it everywhere.”

The occupations follow mass protests over the weekend in the wake of the Trump administration separating more than 2,300 undocumented children from their families as part of the president’s “zero-tolerance” policy. Though the administration said it would reverse course and stop separating children, the government is pursuing indefinite detention of families, a policy that human rights activists say is cruel and inhumane.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Imri Rivas: ‘What’s important for me is the active disruption of Ice operations.’ Photograph: Sam Levin/The Guardian

There were more than 143,000 immigration arrests last year under Trump, a 41% increase from 2016, and aggressive raids have increasingly torn apart immigrant communities and families. The movements to abolish Ice and the expanding Occupy actions, however, are pushing for a dismantling of the broader enforcement system, which involved mass deportations under Obama and previous administrations and took its current form after the founding of Ice in 2003.

“It’s time to abolish Ice and the inhumane and unnecessary system of oppression,” said Cat Brooks, a longtime Oakland activist who is running for mayor and showed up to Occupy Ice in San Francisco on its second day in action. “Abolishing Ice is a reasonable goal.”

In Philadelphia, activists set up Occupy Ice encampments this week, leading to a response from US counter-terrorism officers, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and local law enforcement. Officers arrested nearly 30 people and cleared more from the area, police said.

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group invigorated by the recent stunning victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Democratic congressional primary, are helping fuel the Occupy Ice actions, with language and tactics that echo the Occupy Wall Street movement that took hold in the US in 2011. The DSA has been involved in a number of high-profile demonstrations, including the protest against Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, while she dined at a Mexican restaurant last month.

Occupy Ice demonstrations have also emerged in Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit and New York.

“I have to do everything I can to stop history from repeating itself,” said Kelly Groth, a 28-year-old San Francisco DSA member at Occupy Ice, which had roughly 10 tents and several dozen protesters out on Tuesday morning. “We need to be in front of detention centers.”

Zoé Samudzi, a writer at the San Francisco protest, said she did not want to see Democrats adopt the “abolish Ice” message and then advocate for the creation of a similar system with a different name: “We can’t talk about abolishing Ice without talking about mass incarceration.”

Local governments like San Francisco should do much more to live up to their “sanctuary city” name and altogether cease working with federal immigration authorities, she added. “The thing that I hope comes out of this is shutting down Ice business as usual.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Occupy encampment in San Francisco. Photograph: Sam Levin/The Guardian

San Francisco police (SFPD) and DHS officers showed up to the demonstration Monday night but have not made arrests. A police spokesman, Robert Rueca, said officers were monitoring the situation but declined to comment on whether SFPD was working with federal authorities or had plans to try to break up the camp.

“We’re helping facilitate people’s first amendment rights,” he said, adding that he hoped protesters would be “civil” and “maintain a peaceful and orderly demonstration”.

An Ice spokesman said in an email that the agency “fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference” and declined to comment further.

Heather Carranza, a 36-year-old San Francisco protester, said her great-grandmother traveled across the border from Mexico on foot at age five and that she did not want to see Ice simply rebranded. “This is the time now to recognize the harms borders have caused. Families are beat down by generations of oppression.”