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.
