Allan Appel photos
At Thursday's anti-Avelo protest in Morris Cove.
Allan Appel file photo
CT Students for a Dream's Tabitha Sookdeo: "Let’s honor [the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis] not just with memory but with courage today.”
Bearing signs like “De-Ice ICE,” “People Are Not Cargo,” “The Pilgrims Were Undocumented,” and “No More Kidnapping Flights,” nearly 150 people gathered outside Tweed New Haven Airport for just the latest protest of Avelo Airlines’ operations of deportation flights for the Trump administration.
Thursday afternoon’s protest took place in the 90-degree heat on a grassy lawn at Burr and Dean Streets facing the parking lots and busy runways of Tweed. It marked the 66th day since Avelo began its migrant-removal flights for the federal government; it also took place on the five-year anniversary of the death of Georgia U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
Avelo has defended the deportation-contract decision as necessary to bolster the company’s finances amid increased passenger-travel competition at Tweed. In response to a request for comment for this story, Avelo spokesperson Courtney Goff said, “We recognize the right of individuals to peacefully assemble and assert their freedom of speech. Avelo’s main priority continues to be maintaining the safety and timeliness of our operation that over 7.4 million Customers continue to enjoy.”
One attendee at Thursday’s rally, Terry Clark, said he can no longer recite the last lines of the Pledge of Alliance because if he says “with liberty and justice for all,” to his ear in America today, it sounds profoundly hypocritical.
Another attendee, New Haven teacher David Weinreb, said his students no longer feel safe in school.
Still another attendee, CT Students for a Dream leader Tabitha Sookdeo (whose organization also helped sponsor the event), said that if you are a partner with ICE — like Avelo Airlines in operating deportation flights for immigrants seized without due process — then you are also absolutely responsible for that violation of civil and human rights.
Thursday’s protest marked one of the city’s two contributions to the day’s national “Good Trouble Rallies” in memory and honor of civil rights luminary Rep. John Lewis. (Another “Good Trouble” protest took place at the same time on the New Haven Green.)
For an hour the enthusiastic crowd cheered on the boycott and demonstration campaign that began in New Haven, spread nationally, and just recently resulted, asserted one of the lead organizers of the rally — Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center — in Avelo’s closing down its Burbank Airport, southern California hub.
To refrains of “no justice, no peace,” “si se puede,” and “good trouble/necessary trouble,” which was Lewis’s most famous call to moral non-violent action, Matos and other speakers invoked Lewis’s spirit in that if he were alive today he’d be among those calling out Avelo for profiting on the misery of those most vulnerable in America today, who are undocumented immigrants.
“ICE acts like a private army,” said John Spisak, a 20-year resident of Morris Cove, who was there to protest not only the Avelo-ICE connection but the expansion of the airport into his neighborhood. “I hope they fail as they’re making money only for the prison industry.”
While Spisak and others in the crowd held their signs aloft, facing them across Burr Street was a single lone anti-protest protester with a blue and white Trump 2024 sign who kept shouting his desire for Trump to be (illegally) re-elected in 2028.
Back across the street atop a black pick-up truck, with tailgate down, which functioned as the impromptu stage for the event, Sookdeo cautioned that “ICE now has access to Medicaid data [enabling them to be] tracking immigrants by what keeps them alive. Let’s honor him [Lewis] not just with memory but with courage today.”
She called for volunteers, especially attorneys who could support future arrestees during their proceedings.
Bishop John Selders, of Moral Monday CT, one of several clergy who spoke, said lawyers in courtrooms were well and good but what the urgency of the moment calls for is “hundreds of people loudly taking their concerns to the streets.”
He paraphrased a turning point moment in John Lewis’s evolution as an activist when as a young man Lewis realized “keeping my silence may be accepting it.”
The atmosphere was largely upbeat, especially with regard to local activists taking some credit for a first small victory (the closing down of Avelo’s Burbank/Los Angeles hub — although Avelo CEO Andrew Levy denies the pressure campaign had anything to do with that decision) the rally was also punctuated by notes of both dread and humor.
Clinton resident Terry Clark — the one who could no longer recite the pledge of allegiance with conviction — reflected, “I hope one day we’ll turn it around. People need to wake up, Trump is following Hitler’s playbook to a tee.”
And the humor: As she led 19 people off a school bus that CT Shoreline Indivisible rented for the rally, Mar‑C Peraza-Baker said, “It’s much easier to fight for democracy when you don’t have to look for parking.”
The rally concluded with calls for Avelo to end all deportation flights and Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans reminding participants that “John Lewis also fought for us to have the right to vote. Voting is the fundamental act that protects democracy. Let’s show up and let’s vote.”
Other sponsors of the rally included Unidad Latina en Accion, The National Coalition to Stop Avelo, Middlesex Immigrant Rights Alliance, CT Faith-based Immigrant Support Network, and the New Haven Federation of Teachers.
