MLK Day saw hundreds of people march across the Brooklyn Bridge on a frigid Monday morning to not only honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, but also demand an end to ICE and its brutal operations in America.
Demonstrators gathered in Cadman Plaza for a rally on MLK Day before crossing the iconic bridge to 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Here, speakers say they aimed to continue the civil rights leader’s teachings by marching against what they called a rise in authoritarianism and racial profiling by ICE agents.
“If Dr King were alive today, he’d be admonishing us across the nation to stand up and march for Renee Good,” Minister Kirsten John Foy said, referencing the Minnesota woman shot and killed by an ICE agent earlier this month.
“If we miss this moment, our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be paying the price in a dying planet, in an authoritarian, tyrannical America where women don’t have biological autonomy, and Black and Brown people are in chains, and white women are getting gunned down in the streets,” Foy added. “That is not Dr. King’s America.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams echoed these grim concerns about the country’s future. Citing the fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good and the escalating violence by ICE agents, Williams called for the United States to make a change for his children’s children.
“Let’s lock arms in the name of Dr King and get through this. I want to do it for my children, but for my children’s children. People who are not born are looking to us to make sure we bring them a country that is better than the direction we are going right now, and in the name of Dr. King, dammit, we have to bring it to them,” Williams said.
Murad Awawdeh, the president of the Immigration Coalition, stated that the march would not only demand justice for immigrants detained by ICE but also pay homage to the legacy of King by marching for their rights.
“Today, we honor Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, not as a monument, but as a mandate. Dr. King warned us that, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ and today, that truth lives in the fear of immigrant communities and families forced to carry the fear of separation, deportation, and treat it as disposable in a country that they help build every day,” Awawdeh said.
The protest itself marched from Cadman Plaza, led by a banner with the likenesses of both King and Good, and flowed over the Brooklyn Bridge before ending outside of 26 Federal Plaza, where masked federal agents have been detaining immigrants attending their court hearings.
