There are those who remain in positions of power who would much rather that voices of dissent be silenced than allowed to keep spreading their message. This past Wednesday night, a truck was caught on camera plowing right into a group of protesters who had gathered against a Central Falls, Rhode Island Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that they were outside of. The demonstrators, who were with the Jewish group Never Again Action, say that a facility officer was behind the wheel, while ICE claims that the driver was not an employee of theirs — although they don’t seem to have offered any explanation for what this supposed non-employee was doing driving around one of their facilities at 10 P.M. or so.
Check it out:
BREAKING: Here is HD video of an ICE guard driving his truck into us as we sat peacefully blocking the Wyatt Detention Center.
We’re putting our bodies on the line because we see the camps and the roundups. We’ve learned from our ancestors: NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE. pic.twitter.com/KnOu5xoOEb
— ✡️ Never Again Action ✡️ (@NeverAgainActn) August 15, 2019
Some on the right — like Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire — have made light of or encouraged driving into protest crowds. There were no reported major injuries stemming from this incident, although after the truck altercation — in which the demonstrators tried to get the driver to stop, hanging close around their vehicle — at least one definitive ICE officer spread a cloud of pepper spray. Reportedly, about a dozen people were “treated for irritation” over the pepper spray, and one person was “taken to the hospital for a minor injury,” the exact nature of which remains unspecified.
Never Again Action has been organizing protests at the Rhode Island ICE detention facility since at least July, when in one incident, a full eighteen protesters were arrested. In response to the latest incident, the group released a Thursday morning statement:
‘Last night we experienced a small example of the violence that ICE uses against our immigrant neighbors every day. As Jews, our families taught us the lessons of the Holocaust, and we promised that we would speak out and act if we ever saw a group of people being targeted, dehumanized, and rounded up. We are answering the call of our ancestors to sound the alarm: #NeverAgainIsNow. Every person in the United States needs to join the fight to close the concentration camps, shut down ICE, and secure permanent protection for all undocumented people in the U.S.’
Protester Jack Silverman added to local media:
‘Every time we ask ourselves would I have done something during the Holocaust? Would I have done something? I want to make sure that when I tell my grandkids, ‘This is what was happening in the United States,’ and they say, ‘Well what did you do?’ I need to say that I did these things, and this is how it helped. Because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise.’
At this point, Never Again Action have organized protests all across the United States as one of many interests rising against the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants. Trump’s team has held large numbers of asylum seekers in dangerous conditions for days and even weeks on end, leaving them without access to sanitation and even sometimes much besides room to stand.
More recently than those conditions coming to light, ICE orchestrated a raid in Mississippi in which they took hundreds of undocumented immigrants into custody from their workplaces. The only “crime” was the employers’ illegal employment of these individuals. At the time of the raids, though, no action whatsoever had been taken against any of those employers. The Trump administration just targeted the people who Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) head Mark Morgan claimed on national television they were oh-so-carefully just trying to protect.
Featured Image via screenshot
