Anti-Ice Protests come to providence
Gabe Torres of the PLA leads protest chant – photo by Joshua Geaughan
“I couldn’t stay home,” expressed Cynie Linton, protester and member of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. Cynie was one of the over seven hundred Rhode Island residents that gathered in front of the Joseph A Doorley Jr. Municipal Building to protest in solidarity with anti-ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) protests in Los Angeles, California. The protest, which was organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the AMOR network, lasted for just over 2 hours and included speeches from organizers and a march to the Providence Federal Center. Linton continues, “A lot of this stuff is the same thing that we’ve been doing for 50 years, but that doesn’t mean that we quit.”
The AMOR network is a Rhode island nonprofit centered around organizing to interrupt state violence and helping residents to navigate the immigration system. For this protest they partnered with the PSL of Rhode Island, a local branch of the nationwide party for socialism and Liberation. The PSL hopes to carry out the struggle for socialism through the united states through standing in solidarity with the working class.
“The movement for Black Lives, the student intifada, Occupy Wall Street - we can keep going. All of these struggles, the Flotilla right now, the fight against imperialism, all these things are connected. We’re fighting fascism on a global level and so many different fronts. We know an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Gabe Torres, organizer and leader of the protest chants, “We gotta understand what’s at stake. We’re seeing what’s happening in LA, we saw what happened in New York City. It's our right to protest that's under attack, and that’s why we have to continue to stand out here.”
Following Torres’ introduction co-organizer Riena explained,”Fuck ice. Ice has been terrorizing all of our communities, all the way from Los Angeles all the way to here in our local communities, I have seen it. I have seen it with my own eyes, even just going to New York. It is annoying. It is terrifying. It is traumatizing for our children, for our communities, for your loved ones. Immigrants are working through all walks of life. They are people who pick your food. They are people who are in your healthcare system. They work and they build this economy up more than anybody else in this goddamn country.”
She continues, “I can go ahead and tell you, and tell you that I'm scared for my own life, but honestly, I am scared for my family more than anything else. That's why I speak here today, because I am scared for my family who came here to this country looking for a better life, but this is what we get, and that's unfair. So I want you to repeat after me, abolish ice, abolish ice, abolish ice!”
The protest remained peaceful through its whole runtime. Organizers guided the protest through Providence's busy roads, making sure to block traffic and keep everyone moving. The march was alive with chants, music , and picket signs. The Providence Police Department was also present to make sure that the protest didn’t clash with the busy Providence traffic. According to the Providence police chief Oscar Perez the steps that the providence police force took were exactly the same as they would take with any other peaceful demonstration, which is to prioritize public saftey .
Speakers continually argued that the struggles that immigrants are facing against ice isn’t the only struggle and that every struggle is interconnected in the fight against Facism. The prefaced conversations by calling out large systemic issues that can be tied back to the current federal administration and its approach to not only domestic issues but foreign ones as well. The crowd, full of not only signs of protest against ICE but also waving Palestinian flags, all participated in their own personal protests against the current federal administration. Many protesters also participated in similar demonstrations in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement and expressed hope that this protest was the beginning of a much larger organizational effort across Rhode Island and the nation against the Trump administration.
“I have been to protests where I felt like I did something valuable. And other times I've been to protests where I felt like, well, did you get all that out of your system? You know, it just, it didn't feel palpable,” shares protester Edi.
“This is like a beginning, right? [This is a] Connectionist sort of rally to get more support to sort of build off of. So it's not going to be a one time thing, right? I've gone to many protests. Some of these people have gone again and again, but it's kind of good to come together as a community and sort of get energized about the hard work,” shares protester Naoko Shibusawa.
Shibusawa has been a longtime protester. She relayed fears around the current administration and how she believes it draws comparisons to pre world war two Germany with similarities drawn between the current president and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. She expresses that one of the issues that faces modern America is the lack of knowledge around those rhetorical parallels and that people might not have time or energy to truly understand them, but the administration doesn’t wait for people to understand.
She continues, “So first they went for the former prisoners, and then they went for, you know, like ethnic groups. But the thing that we should keep in mind, which is parallel with 1930s Germany, is the rapidity. So there's also the argument, the reason why certain state troops are to have this sort of protest, to have a way to impose martial law. Looking at the historical parallel, which is scary, because it's so kind of a track story, the one thing that we do have that they didn't have in 1930, Is the 1930s”
