A near-constant cacophony of car horns issued from the core of Maple Avenue in Vienna yesterday afternoon (Sunday), and this time, it wasn’t an expression of frustration with congestion.
Instead, passing drivers were honking in support of protestors lining both sides of the town’s main street in response to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shooting poet and mother Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Wednesday (Jan. 7).
Organized by volunteering local residents, the Vienna “ICE Out for Good” rally was one of hundreds assembled across the U.S. in the days since Good’s killing to “honor the life lost, demand accountability, and make visible the human cost of ICE’s actions,” according to the grassroots activist network Indivisible, one of several organizations that helped mobilize the protests.
Protests were also held in D.C., Arlington, Franconia, Montgomery County and elsewhere in the region.
“Good and the Portland victims are part of a broader and deeply alarming pattern of unchecked violence and abuse by federal immigration enforcement agencies,” Indivisible said in a statement on Friday (Jan. 9), referring to two people shot by Border Patrol agents during a traffic stop in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday.
ICE agents have fired on at least nine people in five states and D.C. since September, including Mexican immigrant and cook Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Chicago suburb on Sept. 12. In each case, federal authorities have claimed that the person was attempting to hit the agent with a vehicle — allegations generally disputed by video evidence when available and attorneys for the victims.
Multiple people have also died while fleeing immigration agents, and last year, 32 people died in ICE custody — the most since 2004, the Guardian reported.
One organizer of the Vienna protest who asked to speak anonymously told FFXnow that she wanted to show solidarity with Good, because if she could be “murdered mercilessly” by ICE as an American citizen, “it can happen to everyone.”
“The [Trump] administration tried to lie about something that we saw with our own eyes,” she said. “They could kill any one of us.”
Though Trump administration officials have repeatedly alleged that Good tried to hit the ICE agent — identified in court records as Jonathan Ross — with her vehicle, witnesses and videos taken of the shooting, including one taken by Ross on his cell phone, suggest she was starting to drive away from him when he shot her in the head.
Good’s wife said they were relatively new to Minneapolis but wanted to participate in protests against ongoing ICE operations across the city to show support for their neighbors.
The Vienna organizer has led two anti-ICE protests in the past, but she expected this latest one to be the biggest yet, potentially drawing as many as 2,000 people. While the spread-out layout made a crowd count difficult, protestors could be seen along Maple Avenue from the Park Street corner to at least Center Street at the demonstration’s height, starting at noon.
The protest didn’t feature formal speeches, but at least one elected official — Rep. James Walkinshaw, whose district includes the Town of Vienna — stopped by to talk to participants and show his support.
“I joined today’s ICE OUT protestors in Fairfax to thank them and lend my support to their calls for an end to the Trump Administration’s reckless mass deportation agenda,” the Congressman said later in a statement to FFXnow. “The American people want a secure border and fair and humane enforcement of our laws, they don’t want mothers gunned down at the hands of a lawless Administration.”
The turnout was heartening to Steve Swanekamp, another organizer and Vienna resident who agreed to help with crowd control at the request of a friend who’s part of Indivisible Virginia.
“I’m very pleased and hopeful that this will continue to be a movement that grows,” he said,” because we can’t sit by and just let things happen without raising our voices to let the [Trump] administration know that we’re not happy with the way he’s running the country.”
The only person FFXnow talked to who agreed to be named, Swanekamp called for a “good, clean investigation” into Good’s killing and suggested President Donald Trump and other officials in his administration “should keep his mouth shut” until that happens.
He and other protestors also decried the Trump administration’s immigration policies and ICE’s tactics as antithetical to the principles of due process, democracy and “the way that this country is supposed to be run.”
“Last time I checked, in this country, in order to arrest somebody, you needed to have a warrant,” Swanekamp said. “You just don’t go in with masks on and take people out of their beds at night and put them in jail.”
A woman dressed in an inflatable frog costume in a nod to the Portland Frog said she was inspired by those activists’ use of mockery to show defiance as they protested outside ICE’s processing facility in South Portland, Oregon.
Another woman attended the “ICE Out for Good” protest in a Garfield costume, declaring “I hate Mondays and fascism” with her sign.
“It’s important for me to stand up for our Constitution, due process and make sure that every person, whether a citizen or a visitor, is safe in this country and right now, we’re not safe because of the ICE raids and abuse of power,” the frog said.
Also among the attendees was a mother who has been regularly protesting with her son, now 13, and his grandmother since Trump’s first term, starting specifically in 2017 with the demonstrations that emerged at Dulles International Airport in opposition to the president’s ban on immigrants from nine Muslim-majority countries and suspension of refugee admissions.
“Not that we haven’t protested other things,” the grandmother noted. “But in terms of supporting our immigration legal policies, supporting our immigrant neighbors and the work that they do and the kids in our schools, it’s been important to us before then, but that’s when we started being visible.”
More recently, the family attended last year’s “No Kings” rallies, and they’ve shown up at pro-immigration vigils held in Vienna every Monday morning. The mother says she wants her son to see that “we’re part of a community that comes together against injustice and fascism.”
When asked what message she hopes yesterday’s protest sends, she echoed the sentiment shared by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after Good was killed.
“No ICE here whatsoever. Leave our communities alone,” she said. “There’s no place for this kind of fearmongering and harm.”
“It’s a secret police, and America does not tolerate that,” the grandmother added.
“Absolutely not.”
