Here’s a report from a longtime organizer and Acton resident:
ICE finally made its appearance in my home town of Acton MA yesterday [May 10th].
We mobilized a handful of verifiers, including me, and after a couple of immigrants were picked up at a housing court, enough of us reached the scene to discourage further arrests.
What is remarkable is the push back today [May 11th]. Several organizations ranging from Indivisible through the Democratic town committee sponsored a rally in front of the town hall. A crowd of some 250 persons came together on a few hours’ notice with handmade signs, improvised chants, rousing speakers including our state senator and our state representative (a formerly undocumented Brazilian migrant). We circulated flyers with information on the statewide LUCE hotline [LUCE is a Massachusetts-based immigrant advocacy group] to report ICE raids and train and mobilize verifiers to observe and investigate. The legislators reported on pro-immigrant bills that they were sponsoring.
What I sniffed in the air was the spirit of rebellion against tyranny that invoked the 250th anniversary of the battle of Concord Bridge at which a militia captain from Acton, Isaac Davis, was the first to fall. A commemorative plaque honoring him was right there. All the speakers invoked the spirit of the Minutemen determined to defend their entire community, including undocumented immigrants from Trump’s increasingly deranged assaults. And I felt something move in me and the crowd. We can’t know the outcome, but we know that there is no turning back.
The Acton emergency squad evokes memories not only of the Minutemen, but also of the widespread acts of resistance that occurred in Massachusetts and across Northern states during the 1850s in opposition to the efforts of slave hunters to seize escaped slaves and return them to Southern bondage. With the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850, not just local governmental officials but all citizens of Northern states were legally required to help the hunters forcibly seize and return formerly enslaved Blacks (or free Blacks whom the hunters would mislabel as escapees) to whatever awaited them on the Southern concentration camps known as “plantations.”