Tom Morello isn't one to mince words and he certainly didn't do so yesterday when he took to the streets of New York with Hands Off NYC protesters for a press conference and performance in Federal Plaza. He denounced the abuses of ICE, the illegal detention of immigrants, and the practices adopted by the White House.
“Many years ago I lived with my mother on 142nd and Riverside,” Morello said, recalling his time living in Upper Manhattan. “Brothers and sisters, if there is one thing I have learned in all these years it is that if it looks like fascism, if it sounds like fascism, if it dresses like fascism, if it talks like fascism, if it kills like fascism, if it lies like fascism, then that is fascism.”
And again: «A dear family friend was recently kidnapped by ICE. A law-abiding, hard-working grandmother returning home one evening from the supermarket was attacked by government thugs in military gear, taken to an anonymous van and deported without the slightest semblance of due process. Trump claims immigrants are criminals and rapists. Well, this immigrant grandmother certainly didn't murder 180 schoolgirls in Iran by bombing them. This immigrant grandmother never sexually abused minors alongside Trump's elite friends on Epstein's island. Already. If you want to arrest murderers and rapists, head to the damn White House.”
Morello, who is touring with Springsteen, encouraged people to stand up to the Trump administration and called for a broader movement of citizens ready to stand up for justice. «In this age where ideas are a crime, where gender is a crime, where skin color is a crime, where truth is a crime, the real criminals toast and dine dreaming of dictatorship and clutching golf clubs. There is a need for a mass movement of peaceful anti-fascist fighters. And that's you, so let's go, let's take back the power and bring down the curtain once and for all on this fucking authoritarian nonsense.” Morello then played on guitar This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie.
Tom Morello outside 26 Federal Plaza in New York. Photo: Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone US
26 Federal Plaza is home to a federal immigration court and has become a protest site for New Yorkers who oppose ICE abuses and the government's targeting of immigrants. The event was organized a week after “Border Czar” Tom Homan threatened to “invade the area” with “more ICE agents than you've ever seen before” in so-called sanctuary cities.
Present at the press conference was Allan Dabrio Marrero, a New Yorker who was detained and transferred to five different ICE facilities over the course of five months. “I constantly think of my brothers and sisters who are still there, whose families have been torn apart by a failing system.”
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, also spoke, underlining that many of the practices reported take place precisely in that place. «We are here at 26 Federal Plaza, where tens of thousands of people show up to follow the path required by law for immigrants. Thousands of New Yorkers are tricked into coming and trapped. It's not respect for immigration law, it's cruelty.”
From Rolling Stone US.
