Salvadoran and US Activists Protest ICE Raids at US Embassy in El Salvador

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On Tuesday, January 19, Salvadoran social movement groups joined US solidarity organizations at the gates of the US Embassy in San Salvador to demand justice for Central American migrants in the US. In a boisterous demonstration, over 100 protesters stopped traffic and called for an end to the Obama administration’s immigration raids and the US foreign policies that contribute to mass migration from the region.

Members of the Salvadoran Social and Union Front (FSS, in Spanish), which comprises public, private and informal sector unions, federations and confederations, as well as community and religious organizations, blockaded the boulevard with banners, flags and pick-up trucks, as stone-faced heavily-armed police stood guard on the sidewalk. One by one, FSS-affiliated teachers, municipal workers, community organizers, informal vendor leaders and Palestinian solidarity activists took to the microphone to call out the hypocrisy and injustice of US treatment of migrants.  

Holding signs that read, “Justice for Immigrants,” “Justice for Families,” and “End the Deportations,” representatives of US solidarity groups directed their message at Ambassador Mari Carmen Aponte, denouncing US immigration policies as inhumane. CISPES, US-El Salvador Sister Cities, Voices on the Border, the Center for Solidarity and Exchange (CIS), the Share Foundation, and the Joining Hands Network released a joint statement for the rally, demanding, “an immediate end to the raids, that the Central American families receive humanitarian protection, that the rights of migrants and refugees be respected, and that the government of the United States and its embassy in El Salvador cease to promote interventionist neoliberal and militarist policies that contribute to forced displacement and mass migration.”

The US immigration raids come as Congress has conditioned 25% of a new aid package for Central America on improving “border enforcement,” which advocates fear amounts to expanding regional border militarization, as has happened on the Mexico-Guatemala border with devastating results.

Tuesday’s action follows a rally the previous week, when some 75 members of the FSS shut down the street in front of their San Salvador headquarters to “demand a stop to the campaign of terror against our people in the United States and that relief be granted to these families.” It also comes on the heels of a declaration published by CISPES together with other human rights, migrant justice, women’s rights, US policy and Latin America Solidarity organization in response to what the groups deemed “the latest chapter of what can only be described as a prolonged U.S. government war on migrant families, and specifically those coming from the most dangerous and economically deprived parts of Central America.”

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