KEPW News reports from the Tuesday ICE protests

Presenter KEPW’s Curtis Blankinship reports from the Tuesday protests at the Federal Building in downtown Eugene.

Curtis Blankinship All right, so I’m out here on 7th and Pearl, and there’s people standing here with a sign that say, ‘Hey ICE We’re watching you.’ And ‘ICE is the American Gestapo.’ You want to explain why you’re out here? 

Dahlia Yeah, I’m Dahlia with the Lane County Immigrant Defense Network. We’re out here at the last Tuesday of every month. There are usually people here every Tuesday. There’s a variety of groups in coalitional spaces in our city that are devoted to defending our immigrant and undocumented friends and neighbors who are being targeted, right now. 

Curtis Blankinship So, I thought we didn’t do this in the United States. I thought we didn’t just deport people without trial. 

Dahlia Yeah, these programs of deportation are actually, like, a thing that the United States has done and continues to do. It’s done it in the past, targeting both Asian Americans and Latin Americans and people of different groups and cultural identities, or religious backgrounds. 

And the reason that the United States is so interested in divvying up people by protected characteristics in this way, whether it’s undocumented workers or it’s the Trump Muslim ban from the last administration, the real idea is to divide the working class and to reduce our mutual solidarity and it’s a violation, of course, of due process and basic laws in this country. 

But it’s nothing new, also. I mean, this is as American as apple pie as far as I’m concerned. 

Curtis Blankinship But you’re talking about the slippery slope, that first they start with immigrants and then they come for you. 

Dahlia Well, certainly. And we’ve definitely seen repression of like labor movement and queer activism and really any people who are marginalized or oppressed in this country are regularly attacked. I mean, we’ve seen it with, like, the mass surveillance systems like Flock here in Eugene, which was recently shut down.

But, I mean, it is all deeply connected. One oppressed group is not an isolated incident. Like, we can see how their policies and programs are going to be implemented against any marginalized person and indeed against any political dissent. 

We’re seeing regularly our undocumented neighbors having their rights completely ignored, having the right to habeas corpus and some of their just basic civil dignities being completely violated. And these aren’t things that require citizenship. These are things that are guaranteed to all people under our legal structure.

And obviously without due process, you can’t say someone’s a criminal unless you’ve proven that, right? Like, ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is the root of American criminal law. 

They use every dirty trick in the book to try and suppress and terrify our working class communities, whether you’re a marginalized person, a documented or undocumented person, citizen or non-citizen, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to try and do all these dirty tricks to assert their authority everywhere they can. 

I mean, it’s just part of the incredibly racist and incredibly troubling developments in our immigration policy, which were under the previous Trump and Biden administrations, and these kind of programs with ICE have only been expanded in the last year. 

Curtis Blankinship And then the U.S. has a history of destabilizing governments in Central and South America. Venezuela right now—

Dahlia Absolutely. I mean, right now, yeah, we see right now how they’ve sent a massive naval buildup around Venezuela, the ongoing illegal blockade and embargo of Cuba. We see, like, the American dream is to suppress and divide and rule the country and undermine the self-determination of every nation around the globe for, you know, a U.S. hegemony, which I think is, you know, it’s insane.

In a world with so many different people and ideas, it really makes no sense to have one country govern the entire world. And this is the way that the American empire has been presenting itself. Even though it has a great PR team that says it’s a bastion of freedom and democracy, I mean, anybody who’s got eyes that can see will know that the United States is, in fact, one of the greatest threats to human peace and personal human dignity. 

Curtis Blankinship And we’re not ruling the world by creating democracies that are self-sufficient and work with themselves. It’s for corporate resource extraction. 

Dahlia Yeah, I would argue the United States has never installed what I would consider true democracy. They’ve certainly installed people who are deeply loyal to American business interests. 

Machado of Venezuela, who was just recently given the Nobel Peace Prize for actively calling for a U.S. invasion of her home country of Venezuela, I think that’s an excellent example of the bastions of American democracy, and people who represent those interests.

Curtis Blankinship And now we’re seeing a rise of authoritarian governments in Central and South America. Lula da Silva was deposed and then with overwhelming people wanted him back because he he was deposed, because he was taking money from the industrialists and giving it to the people. And just like Venezuela. 

Dahlia Yeah. The United States is terrified of the Bolivarian Revolution because it means that a group of people have decided that they want to use their resources, you know, the people who actually do the work are actually benefiting from the work that they’re doing. And that’s just something that’s completely outside of the American agenda. 

Curtis Blankinship So I used to buy Citgo gas (Sure!) because it was Venezuelan. I didn’t want to support the Middle East. And so then in the first Trump administration, he made that illegal. He made oil imports illegal. (Yeah.) So this is all—. 

Dahlia —which makes no sense. I mean, Trump himself said it would make so much more sense—I mean, he was implying to steal it—but he said it would make a lot more sense to get our fuel from Venezuela. The same is true of sugar. It would make so much more sense to get our sugar from Cuba. We choose not to, because we want to punish people for choosing self-determination over American occupation. 

Venezuela sits on one of the largest oil wells in the world, right? That’s their oil. That is a natural resource. It belongs to the people who live there. And the people who work there should reap the benefits of the resources which they’ve toiled to earn. 

And Venezuela has a wide variety of incredibly rich natural resources. I mean, it’s an incredibly wealthy country when you’re looking at the actual resources there. The only reason that it’s ‘a poor country’ is because they’re being stratified by economic sanctions by the United States, which is using its outsized influence as a global hegemon economically and now militarily under the new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Curtis Blankinship And so most of these people are refugees, but then there’s also really upstanding citizens here in the United States that are being deported. Is that right? 

Dahlia Yeah. I think it’s important to highlight that ICE is not really known for making those kinds of discernments in real time. I mean, they’re making incredibly racist wide-dragnet attempts to attack immigrant communities. I mean, but it’s really just attacking communities of color, particularly Latinx communities. 

And it was opened under Bush in 2004 during the ‘War on Terror’ to punish and terrify Arab Americans and Muslims in the United States. And now it’s being used again, to be weaponized against Hispanic and Latinx people, now, under Obama and Biden as well. 

I mean, it’s one of those things where, like: We as a community are responsible for what goes on here. And if we let ICE do this, we’re not only complicit in a true tragedy of our generation, but we’re also responsible to our community members and neighbors, just as good citizens and as members of these communities. 

The problem, I would say, is that a lot of people consider this a national issue rather than a local one. This is something that’s happening right here in Eugene, right here in this building, and we need to be out here and make it known that this is not a popular policy. This is not something Eugenians and Oregonians or people who live in the United States—this is not something that we want, and this is a wildly unpopular and racist policy, and it’s completely unacceptable in 2026. 

And it makes absolutely no difference whether we’re talking about Trump or Biden. I mean, the deportations are still happening. The policy remains the same. What we really and truly need is an independent movement for the working class to build political power. 

Things are worse now than they’ve been in a really long time, affordability is one of those things that has been a consistent problem and has only gotten worse with regards to income inequality, and the incredible profits of the elite not in any way reflecting the lived conditions of the people who actually work and live here. 

I mean, we can see how in countries like Cuba or Venezuela, how people who’ve taken control of their own resources and their own lives are a massive threat to the billionaire class. And that’s why they’re so commonly, you know, attacked and sanctioned ruthlessly. 

And it’s because if we did that here, we would all benefit. Everyone—whether whether you’re a conservative or liberal or if you’re progressive—I mean, everyone would benefit if we actually used the resources of the wealthiest country on Earth for the people who live here. 

But instead we have crumbling infrastructure, people going hungry, children’s school programs being cut constantly. I mean, the list goes on. and, we don’t have a crisis of lack of money in the wealthiest country in the world.

Curtis Blankinship All right. Anything else you want to say?

Dahlia I do want to talk about our Day Without an Immigrant visibility actions. The next one is going to be Jan. 19, MLK Day. Please go online and sign the pledge: bit.ly/DWOIpledge, please sign the petition.

Presenter   For KEPW News, that’s Curtis Blankinship reporting from downtown Eugene. You can hear Curtis every Saturday at 4 p.m. on KEPW with his show, Talk Is Cheap, here on 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.