Detroiters Gather at Newly Declared Sanctuary School to Demonstrate Opposition to Nationwide Immigrant Arrests
A candlelight vigil at Western High School was held to show solidarity.
A crowd gathered last night at Western High School in Southwest Detroit for a candlelight vigil in support of immigrants and refugees. The bilingual ceremony was organized after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) arrested more than 680 immigrants in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Antonio and New York in the past week.
Adonis Flores, an Immigration Rights Organizer with the group Michigan United, says the scale of the arrests has caused a heightened sense of alarm for the families he works with.
“This was not happening under the Obama Administration,” Flores said. “We knew that families were being separated but it was mostly recent arrivals. Now we’re seeing anybody is fair game under ICE and we want to stop that,” he said.
The vigil outside the newly declared sanctuary school drew about 70 people. Southwest Detroiter Amanda Holiday attended with her husband and their young son.
“We live in a community that has a lot of people that are impacted by deportations and immigration and personally my nephew has been detained,” said Holiday.
During the vigil she and her husband told the crowd that their nephew, an 18-year-old born in El Salvador, had gone into an immigration appointment in Detroit earlier this month and was arrested. Holiday said that her nephew was in the process of applying for asylum and had not been convicted of any crimes.
“And now he’s all the way up north. He’s in Chippewa County,” she said.
Flores, the Immigration Rights Organizer, said in the past couple of days he received about ten calls in regards to Metro Detroiters being detained by ICE. ICE said in a statement that about 75 percent of the people they’ve arrested nationwide were illegal immigrants who had been convicted of crimes.
