“Bring Daniel home!”
Framingham residents rally in the rain to call for release of man detained by ICE
It was raining Friday evening, but more than 100 people showed up outside Framingham city hall — they showed up for Daniel Orellana.
“Bring Daniel home!” the crowd chanted. “Bring Daniel home!”
Orellana, a 25-year-old man from Guatemala, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the morning of May 5, as first reported by NBC News. Orellana’s family said he has no criminal record and was stopped by ICE agents at a Framingham gas station while on his way to work.
In an interview with WCVB, Orellana’s girlfriend said she believes it was a case of mistaken identity:
His girlfriend, Zulema Alfaro, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had a photo of someone else, but took the 25-year-old into custody.
Orellana’s family did not hear from him until 10 p.m., when he was allowed to make a brief phone call from the Plymouth corrections center.
“They took him, confused him with someone else, they even took a picture and said, ‘Is this you?’ He told me it looked nothing like him, yet they still questioned him,” said Alfaro.
She said Orellana told the ICE agents that he didn’t know the person they were looking for.
“They said, ‘We’re going to take you in anyway,’” Alfaro said.
On Friday, supporters put on their raincoats and spent the evening waving signs and demanding Orellana’s release while drivers honked in support.
Rich Robles, a member of the Framingham School committee, was one of the attendees.
“I’m from Guatemala as well,” he said. “That could have been me. That could have been one of my kids. That could have been anybody here in our community. So we’re all scared. This is the point where we’re like, what can we do to make a difference?”
The protest was organized on short notice by members of the groups Framingham Fights Back and Mass 50501.
“It’s really important to be able to rally people in our local communities,” said Jill Zumbach of Mass 50501. “We need to stand by our immigrant neighbors, all of our neighbors who are under threat.”
Samantha McGarry of Framingham Fights Back said she was happy that so many people showed up despite the rain.
“It just shows that people are … not just going to sit down and sit on their hands and do nothing,” she said.
On a related note, check out this story from Bill Shaner about another ICE detention in Worcester. As Shaner reports, commmunity members showed up to stop ICE from taking away a mother, but local police arrived on scene to assist the agents despite a policy forbidding them from doing so.
An excerpt:
As they’re marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She’s screaming. “You are cowards.” She’s jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. “This is an innocent woman.”
An ICE agent opens the door and the woman’s daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl…it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to. The rules.
he Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter’s baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—“Stop, stop, stop. They’ll explain. They’ll explain.”
Of course they don’t explain.
The woman’s daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.
The crowd chants, “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.
Read the full piece at Mother Jones.
On Friday, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey was asked about the Worcester incident on the GBH program Boston Public Radio. Here’s what she said, according to GBH:
She called the incident “disturbing,” while also saying that it would be best not to rush judgement on the situation.
“There was a big crowd there and eventually Worcester PD was called to it to help address what was going on, and some in the crowd moved on law enforcement,” Healey said. “You cannot move on police.”
Healey said that Massachusetts’ law is clear that police aren’t allowed to assist ICE when it comes to apprehending and detaining people for immigrant enforcement reasons.
But assisting ICE and crowd control are “two different things,” she said. “And what I understand about yesterday is that Worcester PD was called to the scene in response because there was a big crowd and then things went from there.”
The police response “didn’t have anything to do with what ICE was doing,” she added.
This is shocking stuff. Federal agents are abducting people off the streets in her state, and the governor is splitting hairs to explain why the local police collaborating with them aren’t technically helping instead of saying what she plans to do to stop it from happening again.
That same day, Healey issued a statement applauding the judge who ordered the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student who was grabbed by masked, plainclothes ICE agents in March and shipped off to Louisiana.
Healey’s statement says: “This court order confirms what we already knew — Rümeysa Öztürk’s detention was never about public safety. It was part of the Trump Administration’s campaign to silence those who disagree with them.”
It’s hard to take this seriously in light of her comments about what happened in Worcester. I’ve noted before, in the context of Healey’s flip-flopping on public records reform, that her strategy is pretending to support progressive causes in her public statements while never actually doing anything to further them. This is just the latest example.
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