Thomas Breen photo
ULA protesters outside the federal courthouse on Monday.
One of the many banners at Monday’s protest.
Two dozen local immigrant rights activists held a protest in the pouring rain one day after the U.S. border patrol shot tear gas into a crowd of Central American migrants and asylum seekers.
Cloaked in raincoats and umbrellas amidst a cold and icy rain, around 25 protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse at 141 Church St. at 5 p.m. to protest the federal government’s militaristic response to Sunday’s crisis in Tijuana, Mex. near the San Diego, Ca. border.
The protest was organized by the local immigrant rights group Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA). The event saw a range of local activists and religious leaders take the bullhorn to denounce violent government action and rhetoric at the border.
Protesters brave the cold, wet weather.
“It is outrageous,” ULA organizer Jesus Morales Sanchez said about yesterday’s tear-gassing. “It is not moral, regardless of political beliefs.”
On Sunday afternoon, several hundred Central American migrants and refugees in Tijuana attempted to bypass a blockade of Mexican police officials at a border bridge leading to San Diego. In response, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency temporarily shut down the border and shot tear gas to repel the crowd, sending men, women, and children running panic-stricken back and forth across a dried river bed on the Mexican side of the border.
ULA organizer John Lugo.
ULA organizer John Lugo said that thousands of migrants fleeing gang violence, political oppression, and economic hardship in Honduras have arrived in Tijuana in recent weeks. Yesterday, he said, several hundred migrants, desperate, hungry, and in need of asylum, tried to jum the border fence and get into the U.S. so as to expedite their political asylum applications.
“Then they got shot,” Lugo said. “They got gassed by the border patrol. We feel this violence is not right.”
He connected Sunday’s violence at the border to the fate of Roxana Hernandez, a 33-year-old transgender Honduran woman who died in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in New Mexico earlier this year. Lugo said that a recent autopsy report shows that Hernandez was beaten before her death.
He also connected Sunday’s event to this week’s one-year anniversary of Nelson Pinos seeking sanctuary at the First & Summerfield church at Elm Street and College Street. Late last week, ICE denied Pinos’s request for a stay on his deportation.
“All those levels of violence,” Lugo said. “That’s why we’re here today.
Hamden Plains United Methodist Church Rev. Paul Fleck.
Hamden Plains United Methodist Church Rev. Paul Fleck said that he accompanied a young mother from Honduras to the ICE office at 450 Main St. in Hartford today. He said that he had chalked up the temporary reprieve that the woman received from her deportation order to happenstance. But upon learning about yesterday’s tear gassing later this afternoon, he said he now thinks the ICE office decided to grant this woman more time in this country out of a sense of national shame.
“It had to be folks in this administration who were ashamed of what had happened and wanted to show some mercy for a change,” Fleck said. “I have to confess, I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed about the evil that’s being perpetrated in our names. God forgive us.”
Former Mishkan Israel Rabbi Herb Brockman.
Recently retired Mishkan Israel Rabbit Herb Brockman said that he showed up at Monday’s protest to help let asylum seekers across the border know that there are people in the U.S. who are care about their safety and comfort and believe that they should be allowed to live in this country. He said he was also standing out in the rain on Monday night to remind his fellow countrymen that the U.S. government’s action at the border on Sunday was anathema to many citizens’ understandings of what it means to be an American.
“I’m here for us,” Brockman said, “because we need to know that as people of conscience and as people of faith, that what we see happening is evil, is immoral, and is not what this country stands for.”
Norm Clement.
Local activist Norm Clement and ULA’s Morales Sanchez denounced the U.S.‘s long history of undermining democratically elected governments in Central and South America in favor of supporting tyrannical regimes more loyal to U.S. interests.
“We want to condemn in the strongest possible terms what is happening at the border,” Clement said. “The U.S. in its imperialist search for more profit has caused this problem for many, many hundreds of years. The U.S. needs to get out of South America. They need to get out of Central America. They need to get out of the Middle East.”
ULA organizer Jesus Morales Sanchez.
Morales Sanchez agreed, imploring New Haven immigrants rights activists to stay active and alert and in the streets to protest the violence at the border, the violence that led to Hernandez’s death in an ICE detention center, and the political violence keeping Pinos holed up in a church and away from his family.
“It’s still the moment to put a stop to this,” he said.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of the protest.
I despise the US government's "immigration" and foreign policy altogether. We are the nazis now. I consider myself an "illegal immigrant" living on stolen land. Right on, Mr. Lugo.
The rest of the world is finally seeing us for who we really are, murderers, thieves, liars.....complacent, apathetic murderers. I am guilty and ashamed of my country. Our dictator is as evil as Putin or Xi or Ertogan or Alsisi or Duterte or Salman.