By Scott Brinton
Angela Lampe arrived in the United States from El Salvador in 1963 as a domestic worker earning $50 a month. Soon after, she threw herself into advocacy for the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King and the labor rights movement of César Chávez.
Lampe, now 88 and living in Massapequa, was among more than a hundred demonstrators who gathered at the Rosa Parks Hempstead Transit Center, commonly called the NICE Bus terminal, to protest the continued presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Long Island streets. The demonstrators marched through Hempstead’s downtown business district to a local Home Depot and from there to Hempstead Village Hall.
“We are here because there is so much injustice,” said Lampe, who earned a degree in social work in 1979 and became a licensed social worker. “What I want to see is a legal process that everybody deserves. Doesn’t matter what country you come from, you deserve to be heard.”
Lampe spoke under the shade of a small tree on this 85-degree day while marchers behind her chanted, “This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”
A media advisory from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Hempstead-based Workplace Project promoting the march read, “Over the past weeks and months, we have experienced a series of brutal ICE raids across Long Island, including the areas of Hempstead, Uniondale, Freeport, Roosevelt, Westbury and more. Masked men with guns are grabbing people and forcing them into unmarked cars with no warrant and no regard for due process.”
Earlier this year, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican from Atlantic Beach, assigned 11 Nassau County detectives to work with ICE agents to round up and deport immigrants suspected of crimes. The county officers, he said, do not take part in immigration raids.
For their part, ICE officials have acknowledged the right of demonstrators to lawfully protest federal policy. They add that they are upholding the nation’s immigration laws and are prioritizing public safety by arresting and removing criminal offenders and immigration violators from U.S. streets.
Dafny Irizarry, president and founder of the Long Island Latino Teachers Association, challenged such claims, telling the crowd that ICE agents are also targeting law-abiding students for detention and deportation.
“We stand with you to stand together in support of our immigrant children,” Irizarry said. “Schools are learning places. ICE has no place in our schools.”
Irizarry said immigrant children are suffering. ICE officials “say they’re coming for criminals,” she said. “That is a lie.”
The crowd responded, “It’s a lie.”
Miguel Alas, 62, assistant director of the nonprofit Workplace Project in Hempstead, said in an interview, “We are here to let the community know what is happening with immigration … At the same time, we are also showing, denouncing, this way of doing things.”
Alas said he believes recent raids, in which immigrants, documented and undocumented, are taken into custody without due process—and often without knowing the identities of the officers detaining them—equates to a form of violence. “They use terror as a way to threaten people,” he said.
Nearby, 80-year-old Susan Steinmann, of Mastic Beach, stood on the sidewalk loudly chanting, “ICE out, ICE out!” Steinmann said she sees a growing “police state” that is primarily targeting immigrants of color for arrest, detention and deportation. This police state, she said, “will crush everybody.
“We have to have justice and democracy in this country,” Steinmann said, “And we have a would-be king right now,” referring to President Trump. “ICE agents are everywhere right now.”
Steinmann noted that a number of immigrants have been detained while heading to scheduled legal hearings to process their immigration status. “They get snatched up, they get kidnapped,” she said.
NDLON volunteer Arlene Flores, 24, of Princeton, N.J., drove the “Justice Bus” for any marchers unable to walk the entire route of the protest. The bus accompanied protesters throughout the demonstration.
Flores said she knows and has been in touch with four friends who were recently detained and deported by ICE. They came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“They were just grabbed with no explanation or nothing and taken to a detention center [in New Jersey], and then they were transported to other detention centers” in Texas and Louisiana, Flores said.
“They suffered a lot in the detention center,” she said. While in custody, she said, they were not permitted to shower, were offered one meal a day and lived five to a room, with no privacy.
“I want to be the voice for those people who cannot speak up for themselves and let them know they are not alone in this fight,” Flores said.
