Migrant justice organizer Aizar Cabrera on the fight against ICE raids in Minneapolis [video]

A migrant justice organizer from Minneapolis recently visited New Brunswick to speak about how people in his community have fought back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s brutal and deadly mass deportation campaign.

Aizar Cabrera, from the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, spoke in Moncton and Fredericton about how people have built solidarity against Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the anti-immigrant crackdown. 

“If there’s one thing that you can remember from this talk today, just remember that immigrant rights are workers’ rights, and workers rights are human rights,” he said during his talk at the United Food and Commercial Workers union hall in Moncton. You can watch the full talk here:

He described how community organizers worked to empower people of colour by distributing information cards outlining their rights. The red cards were available in multiple languages, including Arabic, Somali, and Spanish.

“What ICE was doing was saying, ‘Well, if you’re brown, you’re going down, no matter what,’ so we applied the same principle, but backwards,” he said. “If you’re brown, I’m going to share this information with you, I’m going to share your rights.”

He explained how migrant justice activists stepped in as elected leaders failed to protect local residents from thousands of armed ICE agents.

For example, community organizers trained hospital staff, including doctors and nurses, to prevent ICE agents from abducting patients. Residents also identified unmarked ICE vehicles and discreetly shared information such as licence plate numbers between neighbourhood organizations to help disrupt the clampdown.

Cabrera also spoke about mutual aid efforts that included purchasing groceries for people who were afraid to leave their homes.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign created an atmosphere of terror in the Twin Cities, with ICE agents even abducting families as they picked up or dropped off their children from school, and people at courthouses as they attended to legal business.

“We would go to the courthouse and tell them, ‘They might take you today, or may not. You might not see your family anymore. You might want to write a number, an important number on your arm. And good luck and may God help you.'”

The Trump administration has largely withdrawn its ICE agents from the Minnesota after they fatally shot two civilians, namely Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

However, during a question-and-answer session after the talk, Cabrera explained that ICE continues to operate in the state at a lower intensity, in collaboration with local sheriffs.

Cabrera noted deadly cases elsewhere in the United States, such as Buffalo, N.Y., where Nurul Amin Shah Alam — a 56-year-old refugee with a visual impairment and multiple other medical conditions — was found dead after federal agents left him at a Tim Hortons.

“We are trying to demand justice for all these people that you may have heard about it, we are fighting for the names to be heard, for their stories to be told,” Cabrera said.

He was joined by migrant justice organizers living in New Brunswick, who spoke about the struggles of temporary foreign workers in the seafood processing sector. During the question-and-answer period, Cabrera remarked that similar conditions exist for temporary foreign workers working in agriculture in the United States.

He added that immigrants are “the canary in the coal mine” and stressed the importance of fighting back. “It’s just the beginning, so let’s be aware of what can be happening if things are not done, if something is not said. That’s the important thing… being here and spreading the message and keep getting involved.”

The two events, which took place during May Day weekend to mark International Workers’ Day, were organized by the Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, and the Socialist Project of Fredericton.

David Gordon Koch is a journalist with the NB Media Co-op. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, via the Local Journalism Initiative.