With chants of “No ICE” who “Hey, hey, ho, ho, all these fascists got to go,” hundreds of people marched through Washington on Sunday to protest the killing of Renée Good, a 37-year-old motherof three, in Minneapolis by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
The demonstration, along 12th Street SW, ended outside ICE headquarters.
“I just hope we can find a way to more humanely treat our neighbors and welcome them into our country,” said Kaska Watson, 36, who said she was pleased with the size of the crowd given the chilly, windy conditions.
“In general, I am just really disappointed in the leadership of this country and the behavior of ICE agents for just not treating people humanely,” said her friend Theresa Dipeppe, 35.
The three spoke in front of the multistory ICE headquarters in the 500 block of 12th Street SW and said it was strange being so close to what they described as the place where policy decisions they disagree with are being made.
The protest in Washington, organized by 50501 DC and FLARE, was one of several actions against ICE held nationwide over the weekend. A crowd in New York City blocked 5th Avenue in front of Trump Tower, where the president maintained his personal residence for years, hurling insults and making gestures at the building.
On Saturday, protesters had gathered again in Minneapolis, near where Good lived and was fatally shot, and vigils and demonstrations were held in Boston; Philadelphia; Austin; Knoxville, Tennessee;and Portland, Oregon, where federal agents shot and injured two people on Thursday.
“The shootings in Minneapolis and Portland weren’t the beginning of ICE’s cruelty, but they must be the end,” Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said the administration would dispatch more federal agents to Minnesota on Monday.
“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said in an interview with Fox NewsBusiness’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Noem said that Good was to blame for the shooting, even though an official investigation into the shooting has not been completed, and as video evidence raised several questions about the administration’s assessment of what happened.
The D.C. protest began in the 300 block of Constitution Avenue NW. Although some signs and chants were laced with profanity, the march seemed peaceful with no apparent clashes with police.
Among the crowd was Keith Bettinger, who came with his 9½-month-old son, Xavier.
“He’s pretty used to this sort of thing,” said Bettinger, who has been taking his son to weekly protests against the Trump administration along Connecticut Avenue just north of Woodley Park.
“We feel this pretty much to our core,” he said.
Bettinger said he had been a contractor for the United States Agency for International Development but lost that work as it went through major cutbacks. Bettinger said he works as a technical specialist in the climate change field, and has picked up work for other nations such as Germany and Australia.
Bettinger wore a skeleton coveralls costume, originally purchased for Halloween, but said it’s also an accurate reflection of where he fears the country is heading.
“We’re kind of in a death spiral now,” he said.
Still, Bettinger said the size of the anti-ICE protest Sunday and the size of others gave him some optimism. “They can’t win if we are out in the streets, if we reach a critical mass of people who want change,” he said. “I think the worm is starting to turn.”
He likened problems in the country with the story of a frog in a pot of water that is slowly being heated until it boils, and how the frog might not notice the water getter hotter. But recent events, like Good’s shooting, are standing out, he said.
“These are kind of punctuation points in the boiling of the country,” Bettinger said.
He said he has watched videos of the shooting and it was clear to him the shooting was not justified. And the more the Trump administration tries to defend the ICE officer’s actions, he said, the more they will be viewed as wrong.
“Defending this guy is being a less-tenable position for the administration,” Bittinger said.
Tim Craig and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
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