Anti-ICE demonstrators gather downtown during snow squall

CLEVELAND — A snow squall didn’t stop anti-ICE protesters from taking to the streets in Cleveland this Tuesday.

“It’s just so in your face,” Mike Bellamy, one of the protest organizers, said. “It makes it hard not to come out here even in weather like this. You just have to speak out.”

Bellamy and others braved the cold to protest President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Tuesday’s demonstration was planned in response to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis over the weekend, but it was just a few weeks ago that Bellamy helped plan another protest after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car.

“They were murdered for serving the people, and everybody here sees that,” he said. “Of course, they’re not the only ones that got murdered. There are dozens others, who have been murdered off camera, in the detention facilities while being arrested.”

Top Trump officials called Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse for a Veterans Affairs hospital, a “domestic terrorist,” saying he brandished a gun and posed a threat to federal agents, but video of the shooting does not appear to show Pretti holding a firearm. 

Faith leaders from across Cleveland are also expressing their support for the Minneapolis community. Representatives from the Fifth Christian Church, Christ Episcopal Church, the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and more held a press conference calling on people to participate in a nationwide strike planned for Friday. They’re asking people to skip class or work and not spend any money.

“We cannot be the people who sit idly by and hope somebody else will do something someday,” Rev. Charles Graves of the Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights said. “If not us, who? If not now, when? How long will you put up with the injustices of our neighbors being kidnapped in the dark of night and in broad daylight?”

President Trump is changing his immigration approach in Minneapolis, pulling Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino out of the city and replacing him with Border Czar Tom Homan, but it’s not enough for organizers, who say they won’t stop until ICE is out of their communities completely.