Hundreds of demonstrators marched through San Antonio’s East Side on Saturday morning to protest against White House plans to open a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center there.
ICE bought the warehouse at 542 SE Loop 410 earlier this year and plans to use it as a holding site for up to 1,500 detainees at a time. The plan has met with opposition from local officials, and Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones announced Friday that she would back legal action by the city to prevent it from opening.
Chanting slogans such as “Immigrants are welcome here” and “Chinga la migra,” protesters marched the two and a half miles to the chain-link-fence-shrouded warehouse, where they observed a moment of silence for those imprisoned and deported as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown.
“We are marching for the hundreds of thousands of people who are being forced into these concentration camps and are being sent out of our country,” COPS/Metro organizer Father Jimmy Drennan told the crowd gathered at Davis Middle School at the start of the march. “These people have been stripped of their voice, these people have been stripped of their ability to be present, these people have been stripped of their freedom.”
County Commissioner Tommy Calvert said he was heartened that Jones called for San Antonio to file a lawsuit to stop ICE’s plans. He also called for congressional investigations into ICE’s abuses and the agency’s decision to spend $66 million in tax dollars to buy the East Side warehouse, which sat vacant for nearly three years.
“We have to look into the heart and soul of who we are in San Antonio, and we’ve got to get to the truth,” said Calvert, whose precinct includes the warehouse. “And, let me tell you, we’re going to march today to see them in court.”
Laura Flores Dixit, managing attorney with American Gateways in San Antonio, also called for local leaders to pursue legal action, pointing out that lawsuits have shut down ICE’s plans in other communities.
“Other cities, smaller cities, more conservative cities have successfully forced ICE to abandon their plans,” Flores Dixit said. “I know we can do the same here, because we love San Antonio, we love our community, and we fight for the things that we love.”
As he addressed the crowd, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, urged President Donald Trump to visit the ICE detention center in nearby Dilley when he travels to San Antonio on Wednesday to stump for Republican candidates.
Castro has visited the site, a privately run detention camp for immigrant families, nine times this year on fact-finding missions. He said Trump should enter the camp to see the trauma his administration has inflicted on children, some as young as 2 months old, who have been locked up there.
“If you can’t stand there, go inside and look into the eyes of these kids and tell them that — despite the fact that they’ve done nothing wrong — they belong there just because of where they were born, just because of the color of their skin, just because of the language that they speak, then you don’t deserve to be president of the United States,” Castro said.
Photos by Alex Roush.
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