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‘Professional’ tutor: ‘Take a stand against this illegal violence, this terrorism against Americans profiling people of color’
This past Tuesday roughly 70 far-left student activists from Emory University took to the streets to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE.
According to The Emory Wheel, the group Emory Students for Socialism organized the demonstration and featured speakers from Sunrise Emory and Atlanta’s Party for Socialism and Liberation.
SFS organizers Tasfia Jahangir and Tony Torres said the Jan. 7 killing of anti-ICE activist Renee Good in Minneapolis and “other recent nationwide events” were the catalysts for the protest.
(The Wheel’s Ellie Fivas, a political science major “on a pre-law track,” uses the term “murder” — “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another” — re: Good even without official legal determination. She may have meant to attribute the term to Jahangir or Torres, but no quotation marks are used.)
Jahangir, a PhD student whose research deals with “structural interventions to eliminate material deprivation and its public health consequences,” claimed Americans are “living through a moment of profound crisis” and that their “fundamental rights are under attack on every front.”
Jahangir said the protesters were fighting the “evils” of capitalism — “racism, war and poverty” — deliberately altering a Martin Luther King Jr. quote which uses “society” instead of “capitalism.”
Sunrise Emory’s Zachary Hammond decried President Trump’s “racist attacks on immigrant communities, aggression and the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, as well as aggression against Greenland and Iran.”
“Professional tutor” Robert Birdwell of Emory’s Writing Center called on university officials and voters to “take a stand against this illegal violence, this terrorism against Americans profiling people of color and dissenters.”
“We’re here to say with one voice that the Emory community, this campus, is our state, our pocket of democracy,” Birdwell said. “And ICE isn’t welcome here.”
Following the protest, attendee Jude Barcik reflected on the monumental nature of the current U.S. political events. She emphasized the importance of being a part of a community that acknowledges current events and will “stand in support” against violence.
“It’s really scary living through a period of history that you know is going to be referenced in textbooks later as a period of terror,” Barcik said.
Cyrus Ebrahimi said he decided to join the protest because of his previous experience volunteering and learning about people’s stories in the immigrant communities. Ebrahimi said he wanted others to recognize the importance of being “united” in the fight against “injustice.”
“All this alienation and hostility against immigrants, against refugees, is just unreasonable,” Ebrahimi said. “It’s really just distracting us from the elites who really run everything.”
Emory student Anayancy Ramos, a DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — recipient also spoke at the rally, saying she’s “scared for her family” and that many people “in detention centers right now are also people that don’t have a voice.”
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