WASHINGTON—A Jan. 28 candlelight vigil at Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in downtown D.C., one of many organized by National Nurses United, aimed to pressure the Senate to defeat the massive money bill funding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) and the Border Patrol. Their agents killed VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis days before.
“Stop the killing, stop the murders, stop the deportations, stop the raids and the white supremacy,” said local activist, Dante O’Hara, who organized speakers at the event. He’s an affiliate with the Federal Unionists Network, DMV.
“This is all connected to police violence” over the years, O’Hara said. He led the crowd of hundreds in a roll of names of Black and brown—and now white—people who have died. The latest two on the list were Twin Cities poet and mom Renee Good and Pretti.
O’Hara forecast lawmakers and ICE’s ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, will ultimately be forced to pay attention.
“Authoritarians don’t fear politicians. They don’t fear courts. They don’t fear laws. They do fear millions of people” rising in opposition, he declared.
The Senate was scheduled to vote the evening of Jan. 29 on a package of money bills to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, through Sept. 30. Outraged Democrats threatened to filibuster the whole package unless the bill covering the Department of Homeland Security, which has both agencies, was split out.
The Democratic filibuster threat, aided by a handful of Republicans, prompted Trump and the Republican majority to drop ICE funding. They cut the entire Homeland Security section—notably ICE—from the large money bill to keep the government going.
But the 55-45 vote against shutting off the anti-ICE talkathon still left a win for Trump and the GOP. Lawmakers have two more weeks to work out a permanent funding bill for the department, with Democrats putting forward a list of ICE reforms that fall far short of what labor, immigrant, and community groups advocate.
Thanks to the deal, Trump gets cuts he sought in other domestic programs. They include a 33% cut at the National Labor Relations Board and 9% at OSHA, for example. The vote also cleared the way for 96% of the government to stay open past midnight on Jan. 30, avoiding another shutdown. Still unclear is if Trump’s Budget Director, Russell Vought, regains his power to fire every government worker he wants.
The day before the rally at VA headquarters in D.C., more than 150 registered nurse leaders from the California Nurses Association marched from the union’s offices in Oakland to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting to back several critical proposals to protect the city from ICE violence.
“Nurses are outraged by the cold-blooded murder of our fellow RN, Alex Pretti, who is the latest in a growing list of people killed by violent, out-of-control, lawless ICE agents. While we fight to abolish ICE, nurses are marching to call for strong protections in Alameda County before one more person is injured or one more life is lost,” said CNA President Michelle Gutierrez Vo, a registered nurse at Kaiser Permanente in Fremont.
The nurses there pushed “ICE-free zones,” restricting the use of county-owned and county-controlled properties for immigration enforcement, creating an Alameda County Immigration Enforcement Response Plan “for rapid communication and response among county agencies in case of escalated federal enforcement,” and not reopening the federal prison in Dublin as an immigration detention center.
Meanwhile, “Trump came to the conclusion he needed to switch the script—dominated by the shootings—15 sources, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly,” told NBC.
“The reality is, you can’t stop what you’re doing,” said a former White House official. “This is the whole point of ICE in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going.”
“The conservative base is pissed” about what they see as signs of weakness, a GOP strategist said. He argued Trump is “demoralizing” voters he needs to turn out for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections.
At the same time, the report said Trump’s aides have broken into ugly rounds of finger-pointing over the botched initial response to the shooting, blaming one another in private conversations with reporters.
Immigrants, their allies like the federal workers at the Washington rally, and others are vowing to keep up the pressure on Democrats to press for substantive changes over the next two weeks as the stripped-out ICE funding bill is debated.
As O’Hara told the crowd at the VA, “We the people are not broken.” They know the fight isn’t over.
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