Guest Column
Today We March, Tomorrow We Resist
- Today We March, Tomorrow We Resist
- By Roberto Lovato,
- New America Media, News Digest,
- May 2, 2007
- Within minutes, hundreds of marchers surrounded the police who put
up a wall of blue uniforms as they retreated into the parking lot
while they awaited reinforcements. Riled by the arrest, Ledesma looked
past the baton-wielding wall and yelled to his friend, “Don’t say
anything! We will get you out!” As police cars drove away with Romano
after several tense minutes of a standoff, the hundreds of marchers
cheered after him, “You are not alone! You are not alone!”
They then flowed back into one of the many marches in which the central message was as much about defending the 12 million undocumented immigrants from increased raids, arrests and imprisonment as it was about legalizing them.
One year after the historic marches announced “Today we march, tomorrow we vote!” and only months after a dozen anti-immigrant legislators were removed from Congress in a historic political shift, Tuesday’s more somber, but still spirited marches seemed to mark a new strategy. It advocates legalization while more aggressively defending against increased raids and what marchers consider the punitive policy proposals of even the most liberal legislation.
“We are adamantly opposed to the STRIVE Act,” said Daniel Vila, member of the May 1 Coalition that organized the New York mobilization. Introduced by Congressman Luis Gutierrez, the "Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy (STRIVE) Act," contains most of the enforcement and legalization provisions of last year’s McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. It also includes additional "triggers" that will hold up any legalization until Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff certifies that sufficient “border security” measures are in place. The STRIVE Act also includes a "touchback" provision that requires undocumented immigrants to leave the country and re-enter before adjusting their legal status.
Vila was among those who marched against the STRIVE Act, which they see as a more friendly version of the Sensenbrenner immigration bill. That bill, which would have made anyone who aided an illegal immigrant a felon, helped spark last year’s massive response.
The STRIVE Act will lead to a Faustian exchange of legalization for increased jailing of and raids on immigrants, they said. “Under the best conditions, we will only get a problematic legalization process and lots of the more repressive parts of (the) Sensenbrenner (bill): biometric identification, building the wall, increased border surveillance and dozens of new ways to turn immigrants into criminals. In the long term, it’s not worth it,” said Vila, who cited new strategic priorities in response to the spate of immigration raids since last year. Vila added, “We will be asking for legalization; we will be voting; but we will also be showing more resistance. In coming months you will see some of us organizing rapid response groups that will begin to intervene and stop ICE from arresting, terrorizing and deporting immigrants. The community needs to see that immigrants are willing to defend themselves.”
In Chicago – where estimates of the marchers ranged between 150,000 to 500,000 – mobilization leader Roberto Lopez of the nonprofit Sin Fronteras agreed with Vila’s strategic assessment of the mobilizations. “We can’t just let them get away with these raids under the cover of darkness,” said Lopez, who, unlike Vila, supports the STRIVE Act, while repudiating what he considers its more dangerous enforcement provisions.
Lopez witnessed M-16-wielding “rapid response” ICE agents shut off entrances into and out of a shopping mall in Chicago’s Little Village section last week. ICE agents then detained more than 200 people including dozens of young children. That “fired up the community,” said Lopez. “We drew some of the leadership for today’s march from the hundreds immigrant community members that surrounded the ICE and the mall for over eight hours.” Most of those detained in the mall were later released.
Leaders in Milwaukee, where the police estimated more than 80,000 marched, and in Los Angeles, said that the immigration raids inspired, as much as they scared, many into joining the marches. In Los Angeles, dozens from among the tens of thousands who marched were injured when shotgun-wielding police shot them with rubber bullets.
Maria Flores and her three daughters witnessed the commotion of the parking lot arrest of Romano in Manhattan. Asked if she would continue to march despite having just witnessed police dragging the young immigrant into custody, Flores, a Brooklyn resident and undocumented supermarket clerk who had never marched or been politically active before yesterday, said, “I don’t want fear to be all my daughters remember. I’m here because I need to show them that they have to keep struggling; that I will fight to be legal so that we don’t get separated; that they shouldn’t be intimidated by anything.” - Article at: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=8db615c019d4abed1627a3cb5a8f9545
Queens resident Alberto Ledesma and other immigrant
marchers literally put their bodies on the line in the tug of
immigration war on Tuesday, May 1. “Give him back!” they yelled. “Let
him go!”
They yanked the arm of the NYPD officer clutching a fellow marcher named
Romano. They leaned and pushed against the officer until they freed
their friend from a chokehold. But Ledesma and the other marchers were
tackled by a dozen or more officers who proceeded to re-arrest Romano
and dragged him into a parking garage on Broadway Street, the site of
the massive May Day immigration march in New York
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