Editor’s note: This commentary is by Scarlett Moore, a UVM student who has spent the past several years focused on immigrants’ rights, reproductive justice, and labor solidarity organizing. She is a co-founder of a new Burlington-based socialist organization called the Bread and Roses Collective.
Two weeks ago, I stood shoulder to shoulder with fellow Vermonters and UVM students as we formed a blockade across Harvest Lane in Williston. It was July 28, and we were determined to prevent Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents and employees from entering or leaving their facility.
Many people do not know that Williston is home to a key data processing center in ICE’s network. Although most of the facility’s employees are not personally brutalizing refugees, their labor at the data center allows ICE’s system of surveillance, repression, and violence to function. The facility’s employees, the law enforcement officials who defend it, and the lawmakers who brought it here are all implicated in the current assault on immigrants’ rights. Sen. Patrick Leahy lobbied for this facility under the guise of “good jobs.” Instead, it enables the criminalization and detention of undocumented Vermonters. The Williston facility is a part of the broader concentration camp system and it, like ICE, must be dismantled.
The protest in Williston brought a variety of tactics together to build one of the most successful actions I have ever attended – and I speak as a resident of Burlington, where it feels as though there’s a protest to attend on an almost weekly basis. Crucially, the planning process combined a mass action approach to organizing meetings with a commitment to center the voices of those most impacted by the racist, heteronormative, xenophobic system we oppose. Organizing meetings were open to everyone who was able to participate, and many participated from afar by building the event on social media and in towns outside of Burlington. Space was created for people to discuss a possible direct action component of the protest, and within a week, we had a plan.
I firmly believe that this model will continue to be essential in the struggle to abolish ICE and close the concentration camps it runs. Mass action rallies and marches express the will of the people and, when planned well, encourage the broadest possible level of involvement in the movement. Direct action and civil disobedience symbolically remind us that all working class people, whether or not they are immigrants, have common interests. When we give in to racialized, gendered, and nationalist divisions, our collective exploitation continues unhindered. By using our own bodies as barriers to ICE’s normal functioning, we both materially disrupt their ability to oppress our immigrant neighbors and symbolically remove our consent from a system which oppresses all of us.
These types of actions must continue. Using mass actions approaches and civil disobedience, we must challenge ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and the Department of Homeland Security in their every attempt to terrorize immigrants and people of color. For employees at institutions which have contracts with ICE, we must use strikes and walkouts to render relationships with concentration camps not just immoral but unprofitable. Every disruption, every impediment to ICE’s function is a victory. Every protest action which inspires new involvement in the movement is a victory. Vermonters do not have the luxury of believing that our state is exempt from anti-immigrant violence, or thinking that one successful rally is enough. But we also can’t afford to become cynical – thousands, perhaps millions of lives depend on the consistent involvement of everyday working people in the struggle to abolish ICE. #NeverAgain actions like that of July 28 have an impact when we keep the pressure on.
As I and 18 others were arrested, we were lucky enough to know that fellow activists and community members have our backs. We know that this action is only an important step in a long campaign of disruption, disobedience, and mass action to close the concentration camps and dismantle systems of violence against immigrants in the U.S.
I hope that the march and our arrests will inspire even more Vermonters to take this moment seriously and get involved however they can.
