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Sunday may have been overcast and drizzly, but that didn’t dampen the determination of those who turned out at Orlando City Hall for the ICE Out For Good rally to protest a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer’s killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis just four days earlier.
People crowded the plaza and the corner of Orange Avenue and South Street, where they encouraged passing cars to honk in support of signs that read, Justice for Renee, They’ll Come For You Next, Abolish ICE and ICE Only In Our Drinks. A red banner emblazoned with FUCK ICE was hoisted high on Orange Ave.
The anti-ICE event was one of more than 1,000 rallies that took place across the country during the ICE Out For Good’s Weekend of Action, organized “to honor the lives lost at the hands of ICE, demand accountability, and make visible the human cost of this administration’s actions,” according to a press release from the ACLU, one of the event’s coalition partners.
On the ground at the Orlando rally, Corey Hill, an organizer for the grassroots pro-democracy group 50501, told VoxPopuli, “We are here today because we say no more to ICE’s violence on our friends, family, and neighbors. We're here because we know that their excuses and their lies cannot cover up for their brutality, and that the only way that we can end this violence is through collective action.”
Hill added that for many people “an eye-opening event was seeing somebody murdered on the streets of Minneapolis in cold blood and then an administration lie about it.”
He was referring to comments from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who had said after the shooting and before any investigation that Good “weaponized” her car, “attacked” the ICE officers and “attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” She characterized Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism.”
President Donald Trump also told New York Times reporters, in the Oval Office for an extended interview, that Good “behaved horribly” and that she had hit the officer with her car. “She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over,” he said. Even after watching video that disproved his statements, Trump stuck to his characterization of the events, the New York Times reporters said.
Those comments were enough to bring out Harvey from Orlando. He had come to the rally with his daughter Kim and a couple of friends. It wasn’t his first protest; he'd been to others with his daughter, he said, declining to share his last name.
“I’m not a big fan of first-degree murder, never been a fan,” said Harvey, drily. “I’ve never been a fan of second-degree murder. And the fact that this [ICE agent] could get away with it and go home and spend the night with his family like nothing happened brought me here. Plus, I can’t believe his bosses are getting on television and telling us what we didn’t see when we saw it. I’m done. I can’t. I can’t listen to this any longer.”
“Everything this administration has been doing, trampling on our rights, now murdering a citizen … people … the fact that she was a citizen shouldn’t even matter,” said Heather who came from Pine Hills for the protest with her mother Robin. Heather had an American flag scarf tied around her head and was wrestling an American flag with rainbow stripes, which said We the people means all the people, against the wind. “I just had to get out here and make my voice known,” she said.
Aaron Lewis, a candidate for Orange County Commission in the newly created District 7, told VoxPopuli that Americans have an “obligation” to stand up against ICE's actions.
“The fact that we have American citizens being murdered in the street goes against everything that Americans are supposed to stand for,” he said. “I think that we have an obligation in our community to stand up against that.
"We have a regime that is trying to force their will upon the population when the way that's supposed to work is we come together as a country, and we elect representatives that are going to fight for what it is that we believe in. And we just don't have that at this moment. So we have to show up in the streets and fight for ourselves to make sure that what happened in Minnesota … doesn’t turn up in our neighborhoods right here. It can feel really far away, but if it happens anywhere in this country, then it can happen in our neighborhoods.”
Sporting electric purple ringlets and green cat-eye glasses, Jesse of Orlando sounded a much more strident warning. “Here's the thing," she said as it really started to rain. "When people in Germany say What’s happening right now is exactly what happened to us in the 1930s — not familiar, not sort of but literally what’s happening — wake up people. Wake the hell up.”
