WASHINGTON, DC
Margarito Esquino and his wife, María, lit a small clay pot of medicinal herbs – sage, mira and copal – and, with a handful of eagle feathers, swept the smoke toward the gleaming office building at 500 SW 12th Street.
The service itself was not so extraordinary. It was a traditional indigenous ceremony – “a cleansing, to take away the bad spirits,” María Esquino told Diverse.
The target, however, was out of the ordinary. The purifying smoke was targeted at the headquarters for ICE, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.
In the wake of the agency’s stepped-up workplace raids and deportations at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration, the Esquinos and about 500 other immigrants and immigrant advocates marched to the ICE headquarters Wednesday to urge Bush’s replacement, President Barack Obama, to put an end to both.
They came to Washington, D.C., from across the nation. Many, like Esquino, the U.S. leader of the National Association of Indigenous Salvadorans, live nearby in Silver Spring, Md. But all in attendance urged Obama to usher in comprehensive immigration reform, something Bush was unable to do.
“We are in front of ICE to cleanse ICE of eight years of repressive, Draconian Bush policies,” said David Thurston, anti-racism organizer and educator with Casa de Maryland, the state’s largest Latino and immigrant group. “This is a new day for America."
Inside the building, people like ICE spokeswoman Pat Riley watched from the windows.
“From where I sit, it looked like many other demonstrations that I’ve seen over the years of people who don’t like what ICE is doing,” she said. “Frankly, what we say to people who object to what we’re doing is we are congressionally mandated to identify and remove, if appropriate, people who are in the United States illegally. But to say that by doing our jobs we have somehow offended U.S. citizenry, we don’t agree with that. We think we do our jobs professionally and humanely. We do what we do.”
