ICE Agents Sent to DC to Suppress BLM Protests Caused the Massive COVID Outbreak at ICA- Farmville
Farmville, VA. September 11th — New reports reveal that the driving force behind the June 2nd transfers to Virginia detention centers was to rapidly bring ICE agents to the DC area to suppress Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Park. ICE agents are only allowed to use ICE Air when accompanying detained people; therefore, the agency scheduled the transfers as a way to quickly bring ICE agents to the region. ICE transferred 74 people from three facilities in Arizona and Florida to Virginia. 51 of those people later tested positive for COVID-19. By June 16th, there were 34 positive cases at ICA-Farmville. As a result, 339 people have had COVID at the facility — the largest migrant detention center COVID outbreak in the country to date. James Hill, a 72-year-old man, was detained at this facility during that time and contracted COVID-19. On August 5th, he lost his life due to coronavirus-related complications and became the 17th person to die in ICE custody this fiscal year.
The people detained at ICA-Farmville have been demanding their release since March in response to the threat of a COVID outbreak. Their organizing has repeatedly been met with retaliation, including being put into solitary, shot at, and pepper sprayed, continuing a long and dark pattern of abuse at the facility. Across the country, people protesting police violence and brutality have been met with a similar response, facing heinous acts of violence from multiple policing agencies deployed — including ICE.
“The parallels between the suppression of people organizing within detention centers and out on the streets are undeniable,” said Natacia Knapper, organizer with Stop Police Terror Project DC (she/they). “Now we see that ICE intentionally endangered the lives of hundreds of people, and took the life of one, to escalate this suppression.”
The violence perpetrated by ICE and the police cannot be separated, nor can we separate the links between xenophobic racism and anti-Black racism (and those who live in the intersections). They may target our communities in different ways, but they are borne out of the same institutions of “militarized racial terror.” As the prison population of the US has risen, so has the number of people in migrant detention.
“It doesn’t matter which laws they use to criminalize people because the systems behind them are the same,” said April Goggans, a Core Organizer with Black Lives Matter DC. “We must resist all and every form of state violence. We call for the abolition of ICE, the police, detention centers, and prisons. Free Them All.”
Free Them All VA is an abolitionist coalition centered around amplifying the organizing of those incarcerated in Virginia detention centers, jails, and prisons. Our demand to free them all has no asterisk. All means all. @FreeThemAllVA on all social.
Black Lives Matter DC is a radical collective of Black artists, infrastructure builders, movement healers, and strategists from the future, organizing in the here and now. BLM DC is a member-based abolitionist organization centering Black people most at risk for state violence in DC, creating conditions for Black liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.
Stop Police Terror Project DC is an organization in the Washington D.C. area committed to changing the system of racist, militarized policing in our region.
ICE Out of DC is an intersectional, immigrant-led, pro-Black, pro-Queer abolitionist coalition fighting to ensure that DC lives out its full Sanctuary City values.
