by Freeda Cathcart
Farmville – On Saturday January 12, Fifty people gathered in front of the Farmville Courthouse to protest the Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s escalation of violence in the pouring rain. People were shocked and alarmed by how Renee Good was killed.
2025 was the deadliest year for more than two decades for Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). Some of the people who died came to the US seeking safety through asylum. Some had come as small children and lived peacefully with their families as productive members of the community.
The causes of death ranged from seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide. Some of them hadn’t committed a crime except for being undocumented (a civil offense similar to a traffic ticket) and had been picked up during indiscriminate ICE raids.
Renee Good was a US born citizen and a white woman. An ICE officer murdered her. The Justice Department may be covering up the truth since they are refusing to share crucial information such as the autopsy report with state agencies.
Vice-President Vance has claimed that the ICE officer has absolute authority. Law enforcement and legal experts insist that law enforcement only has qualified authority. People at the protest speculated that maybe the absolute authority is the presidential pardon power.
The first action that President Trump took after he returned to office was to pardon all the January 6 convictions. His Chief of Staff advised him not to pardon the people who beat and killed police officers but he ignored her advice and pardoned them all.
Pamela Hemphill refused to accept the presidential pardon claiming, “It would be a slap in the face to the Capitol police officers, to the rule of law, to our whole nation.” She admitted that she did the crime and paid for it after serving a sixty-day sentence. She said that she didn’t “want to be a part of them trying to rewrite history.”
On the 5th anniversary of January 6, people gathered for their weekly vigil outside the infamous NYC Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) that is now detaining former Venezuelan president Madura and his wife. The organizations that host the weekly vigil know MDC has violated human rights and want congressional oversight inspections.
The NYC organizations support the Dignity Not Detention Act which would put into practice the state’s values of protecting immigrant communities from family separation and its long-term, traumatic impact within New York communities. It would also strengthen New York’s commitment to racial justice. Immigrant detention targets Black and Latiné communities. By ending its contracts with ICE, New York will defend and support Black and Latiné communities who are constantly threatened with anti-Black, anti-immigrant violence perpetuated by right-wing extremists and their enablers.
Jon Stubbs was motivated to attend the first vigil outside of the MDC because he has seen the erosion of people’s rights over the years. His Catholic Christian values sparked him to take action against the creep of fascism. He has become a regular at the weekly Brooklyn vigil because of the poem about how “they” first came for a group of people and no one stood up for them, then when they finally came for me there was no one to stand up for me.
Katt Hancher hadn’t attended a protest since college. Saturday was the first protest that she’s attended since then when she went to the Farmville courthouse. She was motivated to stand up for people’s rights because members of her Russian-Ukrainian Jewish family were killed in German concentration camps. She’s concerned about how immigrants are being treated and wonders if the people in the Farmville detention center are being treated humanely and if their constitutional rights are being protected.
Every person in the U.S. whether they are a citizen, documented or undocumented have rights that are protected by the U.S. Constitution. Our rights of freedom of religion and not to be subjected to unreasonable searches are some of the reasons why people seek asylum here.
Allison Crews helped to organize Saturday’s Farmville event. She’s concerned about the people in the Farmville detention center and volunteers for the Farmville Compassion Coalition to visit detainees. People can contact Elizabeth H. Gay at 434-971-2005 if they want to visit detainees. Many detainees don’t get any visitors because either their families can’t afford to visit them or are scared to.
The Detention Center is owned by CoreCivic and was opened in 2010. The capacity is 736 and it may be full now. The volunteers aren’t allowed to inspect the facility but the contract with the detention center specifies that the Farmville Board of Supervisors can provide oversight inspections. People, at the protest, hope that the Board establishes regular unannounced visits to the facility. They want transparency and accountability.
Last year Congress passed the Laken-Riley Act requiring an increase of $86 billion be spent over three years to pay for the increase of ICE detentions from 41,500 to 110,000. Taxpayers will pay tens of billions of dollars to private prison companies like CoreCivic to house non-violent former healthcare workers and farm laborers waiting to be deported because they are undocumented. The loss of these valuable workers will cause healthcare and food costs to increase.
People at the protest were encouraged to go to https://5calls.org to contact their members of congress to stop ICE from acting aggressively toward immigrants and to stop the politicization of the Justice Department.
