Chanting “Not in our neighborhood, not in our city, not in our name,” as many as 600 Washington, D.C. community leaders and members flooded the streets Monday, in protest of a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids where agents, Faith in Action said in a statement, “indiscriminately detained any undocumented residents they could find”—and possibly with the help of Metropolitan police.
Faith in Action, a grassroots, faith-based organizing network, said ICE arrested nine people during one raid targeting a Mt. Pleasant apartment, “as well as passersby on 16th Street. ICE also entered a private home near Georgia Avenue and detained two people, and detained another person at a restaurant on 14th Street, reportedly with collusion from D.C. police.”
“Locals have been told,” ThinkProgress reported, “that the Georgia Avenue raid was spurred by renegade city police officers who tipped ICE that someone without documentation of legal status was living there,” which would be in violation of the city’s so-called “sanctuary city” policy. During the Monday night protest, demonstrators called for answers and a renewed effort to protect the district’s immigrant residents from mass deportation.
“Last week, ICE knocked on at least a dozen doors in D.C.—each knock threatening to tear apart a family, to endanger someone's life, to infect our neighborhoods with fear,” said immigrant rights advocate Ben Beachy. “D.C. must act like the ‘sanctuary city’ it aspires to be by severing all ties with ICE and demanding the release of our neighbors.”
ICE spokesperson Justine Whelan claimed that "ICE does not conduct indiscriminate raids or target individuals indiscriminately,” but this is a lie. ICE doesn’t like the term “raids,” but it conducts them anyway. Additionally, ICE’s own acting ICE director, Thomas Homan, threatened to escalate “collateral arrests”—a crass term describing when non-targets are swept up in targeted raids because they happened to be there at the time—due to pro-immigrant policies.
According to ThinkProgress, “MPD officials denied any official cooperation with ICE ... but acknowledged that it couldn’t rule out an officer acting alone.” In a statement to WAMU, Mayor Muriel Bowser said that “we must send a message loud and clear to the President and Congress that we are not a country of fear and cruelty, that we know these inhumane actions do not make us any safer, and that this is not the type of leadership, or lack thereof, that Americans want.”
"ICE tore through our neighborhood last week picking up our community members,” said Sanctuary DMV’s Kathryn Johnson during the protest. “So we will move too, to the site of the largest raid last week, and then use the momentum of the hundreds gathered here to call on Mayor Bowser to ensure that DC is truly a sanctuary city where everyone is welcome."