Fredericton vigil shows solidarity with migrants, ICE resisters facing police violence in United States

Editor’s note: About 50 people gathered at Fredericton City Hall for a vigil for Renee Good on Saturday, January 10 as other vigils and protests took place across the United States. Below, we have assembled photos from the vigil by Atticus Hume along with an edited version of opening remarks from Angus Fletcher.

Friends and neighbours, we’re gathered here to mourn the death and celebrate the life of Renee Good, who was murdered in Minneapolis on January 7 by Jonathan Ross, an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was 37 years old. Renee was taken too soon from her wife, Becca Good, and her three children.

Renee was killed doing what scores of people who live in the United States have been doing since 2003, resisting the expansion and actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE was formed as a result of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 and has enjoyed support from both Democrats and Republicans, with a budget starting at $3 billion and growing to $9 billion.

In fact, the true figure is higher. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” appropriated $45 billion between now and 2029 for detention and $29 billion for staffing and bonuses. We could estimate the budget at $18 billion annually. How do you fight this kind of money? How do you fight a state propaganda machine that paints the vulnerable as an existential threat, and that people of conscience are dangerous criminals? How do you fight a force that has a mandate to kidnap your neighbors in their homes, or in their communities? A force that increasingly acts with impunity and is testing the bounds of assault, the use of chemical weapons, and murder in cold blood on camera? A force that enjoys the support of police unions and other state institutions. A force that flourishes as so-called leaders at home and abroad continue to respond with utter silence.

Renee knew, and other ICE resisters know, that the answer is simple: you show up. When people come to kidnap your friends and neighbors, you try to stop them. You defend your friends and neighbors in the streets, you defend them in the courts, and you drive up the cost of trying to take them. You ensure ICE and its collaborators can’t work or sleep in peace, you work together to gather up your time, your abilities, your love and your rage, and you put it to work for your community. You work for a world where this kind of violence is impossible, whether you’ll live to see it or not.

The answers may be simple, and the solutions may be in front of us. That does not retract from the courage required to stand up to these heavily armed and mobilized agents of the state, the courage demanded of the millions of people who are just trying to live their lives who are being harassed, detained or deported.

Because ICE’s brutality may be exceptional, but it is just a louder, uglier expression of a system that exists in countries all over the world including ours. All borders imply the violence of their maintenance and la migra’s business is the business of limiting freedom of movement, dividing families, and imprisoning and terrorizing migrants. The only difference is scale and publicity.

During weeks like this the world can feel like it’s closing in, like the reach of white supremacy and imperial expansion is unlimited. That the pettiness, small-mindedness, cowardice, and lies that accompany them chokes the air until it’s hard to breathe, hard to imagine the worlds of compassion and care we want to build and inhabit. For a moment like this I’d like to turn to Kelly Hayes and Miriam Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You:

When our communities experience disaster, we understand that care and rescue efforts are essential, even if some loss is inevitable. In those moments, we know that care matters and that trying matters, come what may. It may be difficult for some people to imagine extending such sentiments to the larger world we live in, and to all of our relations, but it is possible. Sometimes we expect the energy and feelings that we need in order to build movements amid crisis to flow naturally, as though they are embedded in our personalities. That is the influence of individualism. Just as patience is a practice, rather than a feeling, hope and grief are not simply things we feel but things we enact in the world. When we enact grief with intention, and in concert with other people, we can find and create moments of relief, comfort, and even joy—and those moments can sustain us. As Malkia Devich-Cyril writes, “Becoming aware of grief gives us more choices about how to respond to grief and opens up possibilities to approach grief not only with compassion for self and others, but also with joy. Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.”

Hope, too, requires us to reject indifference. And like any indifference-rejecting phenomenon, it demands effort in order to thrive. When we talk about hope in these times, we are not prescribing optimism. Rather, we are talking about a practice and a discipline.

This practice of hope allows us to remain creative and strategic. It does not require us to deny the severity of our situation or detract from our practice of grief. To practice active hope, we do not need to believe that everything will work out in the end. We need only decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to the outcome we desire and abide by what those decisions demand of us.

Rest in Power Renee Good, who practiced active hope, all solidarity with ICE resisters, all solidarity with migrants everywhere.

Angus Fletcher is a community organizer in Fredericton/Ekpahak.