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On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people marched to ICE’s Pittsburgh field office on the South Side to protest recent shootings involving federal immigration agents. The march followed the killing of an American citizen by a federal agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday and, a day later, the shooting of two Venezuelan nationals in Portland.
The shootings spurred a weekend of nationwide protests, including in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the region, against a “pattern of unchecked violence, impunity and abuse” by federal immigration enforcement agencies, according to a statement by organizer Indivisible Pittsburgh.
Nationwide, organizers held protests “to demand accountability, honor the life lost, and make visible the human cost of ICE’s actions,” according to Indivisible Pittsburgh.
Locally, ICE arrests under the second Trump administration through mid-October were more than triple those of the prior year, according to data from the Data Deportation Project and analyzed by Public Source.
The protests have intersected with ongoing debate in the Pittsburgh region over cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Newly inaugurated Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor said a day after the Minneapolis shooting that the City of Pittsburgh will not cooperate with ICE. Several Allegheny County municipalities, though, including Stowe Township and Springdale, have recently signed agreements to partner with ICE on local immigration enforcement.
In a statement, the City of Pittsburgh Republican Committee wrote that local police have a “clear legal duty” to assist federal agencies. “Any attempt by elected officials to blur that obligation undermines the rule of law and places officers — and citizens — in an impossible and potentially dangerous position,” said Todd McCollum, chairman of the City of Pittsburgh Republican Committee and a former Pittsburgh police officer, in a statement.
The surge in local immigration enforcement has led hundreds in the Pittsburgh area to sign up for rapid response teams that deploy to arrests and raids to record ICE actions and accompany vulnerable people to court.
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“Public protest is a constitutional right, but elected officials have an obligation to be absolutely clear that violence, obstruction of law enforcement, and intimidation will not be tolerated,” McCollum said.
Quinn Glabicki is a reporter and photojournalist at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at [email protected]and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
