LOS ANGELES – Two blocks from a fundraiser with President Barack Obama, protesters’ shouts echoed in the streets of Los Angeles near Wilshire Boulevard while police in riot gear formed a line blocking the protesters from moving closer.
“Obama, escucha, estamos en la lucha!” or “Listen, Obama, we are in the fight!” was repeated by the protesters denouncing the detainment and deportation of refugees.
In January, the Obama administration began the first of a series of raids targeting Central American immigrants and triggering outrage from human rights advocates.
“We have a hotline where people can report raids and if they’re put in deportation proceedings or they end up in detention centers,” said Marcela Hernandez, a deportation defense coordinator for ICE Out of Los Angeles. “Myself, I’ve been hearing about people being put in detention or deportation proceedings almost on a daily basis.”
ICE refers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Metro buses were used to block streets to prevent protesters from going down them. A common sentiment among the protesters was that “deportation destroys families.”
With signs, megaphones and their voices, protesters started on Wilshire Boulevard and Rossmore Avenue at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, eventually spilling into the street and blocking traffic. Car horns honked and drivers became furious as their evening commute was disrupted.
The signs had phrases such as, “Deporter in Chief” and “Obama deports families to their deaths.”
A Metro bus and police cars blocked Rossmore Avenue, as well as a line of black-clad police in riot gear holding batons and wearing helmets.
“We wanted to make sure that [Obama] didn’t leave L.A. without hearing our outcry,” said Nancy Zuniga, organizer from the Human Rights Alliance. “…We wanted to make sure that he could hear us from the party he was in. We wanted to make sure that he could hear our voices, representing our families, representing the people that are getting detained, the people that are getting raided in their own homes. We wanted to make sure to disturb his party the way that our families and communities are being terrorized.”
Tickets to the the fundraiser ranged in price from $1,000 to $33,400.
Zuniga said she is Salvadorian. Her family came to the United States in the 1980s fleeing a civil war, she said. Her mother had to leave Zuniga’s older brother behind in Salvador.
“I think about this as: this could’ve been my mother,” Zuniga said. “If my mother would’ve crossed in this day and age, she could’ve been one of the mothers to be detained. This is personal to me, even though my family came in a different time, the conditions [in Central America] are the same, they’re war-like.”
The alliance has been protesting and denouncing family detention since the summer of 2014, in response to the child refugee crisis, Zuniga said.
Eventually the police unblocked Rossmore Avenue, and as the protesters marched down the street, approaching the fundraiser where President Obama was supposed to be, the police blocked the intersection of Rossmore Avenue and West Sixth Street.
Police form a line blockade on Wilshire Boulevard in between protesters and traffic as the traffic is diverted elsewhere.
More police arrived on the sides of trucks as bomb-sniffing dogs inspected mailboxes.
“We were making sure the folks were within the sidewalks,” said Kryssia Campos, a volunteer “peacekeeper” from the alliance. “There’s always people from the outside that want to agitate and want to get in conflicts, so we were making sure that our energy was positive. We had a lot of youth that are directly being affected by this … You have to remember that youth have experienced a lot of trauma back in their home countries with the police. So they already feel scared of speaking against the police. But that’s cool that they saw that they have the right to do that.”
Zuniga said that the alliance is speaking to other Central American organizations in the U.S., and they will soon be announcing a national effort.
Protesters marched up Wilshire Boulevard after the “die-in” to Arden Boulevard, where they went down to get as close as they could to President Obama’s fundraiser.
Once the protesters blocked Wilshire Boulevard, they started a “die-in” where they laid on the ground to represent the deaths caused by deportations.
A leader from Homies Unidos, a non-profit gang violence prevention and intervention organization, speaks to the crowd of protesters as they stand and chant as close as they can to where President Obama’s fundraiser was being held about a block away.
The President is merely enforcing Federal law which was promulgated under the authority of Article I, Section VIII of the Constitution.