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People at Sunday's protest expressed outrage at the killings by federal immigration agents and said it is essential to stand up to the Trump administration — from making “whistle kits” to patrolling for ICE to demonstrating publicly.
For the second day running in Eugene, a crowd turned out to protest the aggressive tactics of Trump administration immigration agents.
An estimated thousand people lined Seventh Avenue at Pearl Street in front of the downtown Eugene Federal Building on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 25, a much larger crowd than had assembled on Saturday.
Saturday’s demonstration was an impromptu rally in response to the shooting death in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti by federal agents. Sunday’s protest had been planned in advance.
Abigail Hernandez Rojas, a 19-year-old who lives in Eugene, attended the protest on Sunday with her cousin.
“I had a lot of family decide not to come just because, obviously, ICE is in our city, and it’s just, it’s very scary,” she said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She said she has relatives who are immigrants and are scared to even go get groceries.
“I want to be here to support them and to show them that I’m here for them,” Hernandez Rojas said.
She said she is outraged by not only the shootings of Pretti and Renee Good in Minneaopolis, but also the response from President Donald Trump’s administration.
“The Trump administration justifying it in a way of like, that it was self defense is so despicable and horrendous to say when we’ve all seen the videos, we’ve all seen what’s happening,” she said.
Hernandez Rojas said she relates to the fear that children have of being afraid that their parents will be taken: “I’m here just to support my family and those people that are also having that same fear,” she said.
Salvador Rios attended the protest with his wife and 9-year-old son. Rios and his wife held an American flag upside down and a sign that read “Justice for Alex Pretti.”
“As Americans, we need to stand up for what’s right,” said the 34-year old Eugene resident. “When we see something that’s blatantly wrong, we need to call it out. And that’s our right. That’s our responsibility as Americans. So we’re out here doing that.”
He said he is scared for his son and all children as he thinks about the uncertainty of the future.
“And if this is what it looks like, we all need to stand up and show that this is not what we want,” Rios said.
One person with a megaphone, who identified herself to a reporter as Hazel, spoke with a group of protesters gathered in front of the federal building about “civil resistance”:
“We all know that things are very wrong and it’s getting more dangerous for all of us, but a lot of us don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “I’ll tell you exactly what we can do, and it does not involve staying home and trying to wait it out or simply voting and hoping for the best. In order to meet this terrible point in American history and save our country, we must engage in mass, coordinated, nonviolent civil resistance.”
She told the group that civil resistance in Eugene has been effective. She said the Eugene ICE office last June was the site of about 40 detentions and deportations, but afterward, “a bunch of mutual aid movements and protests have sprung up. And then in December, that number went down to less than five detentions and deportations. It works.”
She encouraged people to keep coming to protests at the federal building, as well as to patrol the community for ICE vehicles and pass out “whistle kits” to people in the community.
Whistle kits were the focus of a folding table set up in front of the Federal Building, where people were assembling the kits. These include a whistle and information on how to use it to alert others about ICE activity.
Neil Penn, who is 73 and lives in Eugene, described how they work:
“Multiple blasts on the whistle with space in between to alert vulnerable people. In the unfortunate situation where someone is being abducted by ICE, a continuous blast on the whistle alerts people this is a time for public witnessing, with the hope that people standing around with cell cameras are able to inhibit ICE agents from the insidious pattern of brutality that they seem to engage in when they feel they’re not being held accountable.”
Penn said he is a member of the Activist Coalition of Eugene and Springfield and that the organization was endorsing a nationwide campaign of using whistles to alert vulnerable people about ICE agents.
The coalition he is a part of, he said, is a group of over 20 organizations that work on democracy, social justice and the compassionate treatment of others.
Following are a few more images from the Sunday protest downtown:
