An open letter to Mayor LaGrand: Resisting ICE or being complicit with ICE

Yesterday I reported on the Press Conference hosted by Movimiento Cosecha and the response from Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand regarding GRPD’s collaboration with ICE in a recent incident at the 517 Ottawa NW ICE office in downtown Grand Rapids.

On July 31st I wrote about the Grand Rapids Police Chief’s response to that same incident, where Chief Trigg denied that the GRPD are collaborated with ICE during a public forum. Chief Trigg works for the City of Grand Rapids and is answerable to Mayor LaGrand, thus this open letter is address specifically to you Mayor LaGrand.

At the very end of Tuesday’s Grand Rapids City Commission meeting Mayor LaGrand stated that the GRPD were at the 517 Ottawa ICE office because people were blocking an alleyway. While it is partly true that people were blocking an alleyway, Mayor LaGrand conveniently omitted the fact that people were blocking a GEO Group van, which was transporting an immigrant that had been abducted by ICE earlier on that day. People were blocking the GEO Group van because they wanted to prevent yet another immigrant from being subjected to the brutal treatment they would receive at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan.

The GEO Group runs that for-profit detention center, which is the largest in the midwest. Detainees in the Baldwin detention center have communicated to the autonomous group No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM) that guards have physically abused detainees, along with the fact that people are not receiving adequate nutrition or medical care, thus the GEO Group is violating the basic rights of detainees.

You can hide behind the argument that the GRPD was there to prevent people from blocking an alleyway or for some notion of public safety, but the fact remains that ICE and the GEO Group (which has a contract with ICE to detain immigrants) are engaged in unjust, racist and oppressive practices by criminalizing undocumented immigrants, where ICE abducts immigrants and the GEO Group makes money from detaining them.

Throughout US history people have always resisted laws that have supported, propped up, condoned or normalized the exploitation, repression and state sponsored terrorism of groups of people. What people were doing recently at the 517 Ottawa ICE office was no different, since undocumented immigrants are being hunted by ICE, arrested – often with force – detained and deported primarily because they are undocumented.

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids when the fugitive slave act was enacted in 1850, would you prevent residents of Grand Rapids from providing safe have from slave patrols because because it was the law of the land? Would you prevent people from resisting slave patrols from trying to abduct people who fled slavery because what slave patrols was doing was legal?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids when the US passed laws (late 19th century and early 20th century) that removed Indigenous children from their communities to be place in so-called Boarding Schools because it was legal? Would you instruct the GRPD to prevent residents of this city who attempted to stop such actions to be arrested?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids when Jim Crows laws were practiced throughout the country would you prevent residents from trying to stop a lynching or discriminatory segregation practices in this city because brutalizing Black people and segregation practices were supported by the law?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids when Japanese Americans were forced from their homes during WWII because President Roosevelt put into affect Executive Order 9066 – which allowed the US government to put Japanese Americans into Internment Camps – would you have the GRPD arrest residents who actively resisted this law?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the 1960s when Black Americans were engaged in sit-ins at lunch counters to protests segregation laws that made Black people eat in the back or outside, would you have the GRPD arrest those involved in such actions because those sit-ins were on private property?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the anti-Vietnam War Movement and people were resisting the draft or shutting down government offices or other institutions that were supporting the US war in Southeast Asia, would you have them arrested for their actions because they were disrupting business as usual to draw attention to that brutal US Imperialist War?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the late 1960s or early 1970s when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender people were engaged in an uprising similar to the one at Stonewall, would you have them arrested?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, which often included protests at institutions that had investments in South African, would you have them arrested for resisting the white supremacist practice of apartheid?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the 1980s when the US was engaged in counter-insurgency wars in Central America and residents were housing political refugees that fled Guatemala and El Salvador, would you have them arrested or have the GRPD provide support to the FBI to arrest those residents offering sanctuary?

Mayor LaGrand, if you were Mayor of Grand Rapids during the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s, would you support the GRPD arresting residents who were occupying the office of Congressman Vern Ehlers to expose him for voting for war crimes?

Mayor LaGrand, as Mayor of Grand Rapids right now will you continue to instruct or support the GRPD’s arrest of residents who want to non-violently prevent ICE from abducting undocumented immigrants or the GEO Group from transporting them to the detention center in Baldwin, Michigan?

What people who are resisting ICE in Grand Rapids are doing is part of the legacy of opposing the laws and practices that are supporting, propping up, condoning and normalizing the exploitation, repression and state sponsored terrorism by ICE of undocumented immigrants.

We will continue to engage in such actions because we believe that this is what solidarity looks like. Mayor LaGrand will you continue to be complicit with ICE violence by using the GRPD to prevent us from resisting ICE terrorism or will you instruct the GRPD to stop assisting ICE and arresting those who want to put an end to state terrorism directed at undocumented immigrants in Grand Rapids?